Balinko

Cultural Communication In Conflict I: Culture And Conflict Resolution

2011-03-01T04:36:00.004-07:00

The role of culture in many ways can determine the direction of many conflict situations. Errors in attribution, perception, and communication within a cultural context can create major blocks to attempts at negotiation, mediation, or other problem solving activities.(Deutsch, 1991) That it is why in conflict situations, attention to cultural interaction and communication is paramount. This 3 part article will focus on three important aspects of intercultural communication in conflict.
Culture and Conflict Resolution

The base idea of culture in many conflicts is that often culture has very little to do with the actual conflict. Instead, it is made salient as a defensive mechanism or as a rallying point by which a community can become mobilized. Therefore, if intercultural communication can be made and these effects ameliorated, then the overall tensions and barriers to resolution of the conflict can be reduced. The major form of culture that will be examined here is that of cultures role in the creation of identity. When looking at identity in the form of culture, there are a number of issues one must take into consideration when resolving conflicts. The basic assumptions here are that culture creates a unique set of characteristics, meanings, and values that can be used to categorize and inform identity. This can often have the effect of distinguishing one individual or group from others. It is this categorization based on distinguishing characteristics that can enhance the perception of differences between groups. (Tajfel, 1970) This perception of differences can lead to out-group derogation and a reification of in-group superiority often formulated as ethnocentrism. This is further explained by Tajfel’s Social Identity Theory (1981). Within this framework, ethnocentrism is almost inevitable in creation of identity. Recently these propositions have been questioned by scholars such as J. Berry who argue that instead more concrete secure group identity can lead to a more tolerant and open view towards out-group (Berry, 1984). Though the research does provide validation for both theories there is a question of relationship explained by theories such as Realistic Group Conflict Theory(Cambell, 1965) that view the creation of ethnocentrism as a response to a threat to the individual. Therefore, it is possible for a tolerant out-group interaction due to a secure in-group identity to become ethnocentric in response to real threats to that security. The Integrated Threat Theory(Stephan & Stephan, 2000) expands this idea not only to realistic threats but to symbolic threats, anxiety, and negative stereotyping. Ethnocentrism then in regards to cultural differences can play a vital role in the creation and continuation of conflict between different cultural groups. Furthermore, strong ethnocentric beliefs can reduce the likely hood of productive interactions between groups that can lead to successful resolution.(Deutsch, 1991) Therefore, when creating a process of intercultural dialogue or conflict resolution, ethnocentrism must be addressed. Research has found that one of the major effects of ethnocentrism on conflict resolution is in-group bias. Often these biases revolve around moral traits such as trustworthiness, peace loving, and honesty. (Deutsch, 1991) When these traits are limited to only the in-group, out--groups are then often perceived as the opposite.

There is evidence however, that ethnocentrism can be reduced through the institution of intergroup cooperation.(Blake, Shepard, & Mouton, 1964; Brewer, 1986; Sherif, 1966) The most effective types of cooperation often involve situations in which superordinate goals are made salient and the context and duration of the contact is optimized.(Pettigrew, 1998) This idea of optimal situations for contact such as the contact theories of Allport(1954) and Pettigrew(1998) can not only play an important role in reduction of ethnocentrism but also the overall effectiveness at any conflict resolution attempt.

Another important factor in cultural conflict is the issue of communication. Often communication between conflicting groups can be described as “unreliable and impoverished.”(Deutsch, 1991, p. 40) Miscommunication or lack of communication can hamper true dialogue and can help reify the perceptions of untrustworthiness and between group differences that ethnocentrism creates. Communication also plays the role of the gateway to the possibilities of cultural understanding, empathy and perception that are paramount to positive intercultural contact.

The role of culture can in many ways determine the direction of many conflict situations. Errors in attribution, perception, and communication within a cultural context can create major blocks to attempts at negotiation, mediation, or other problem solving activities.(Deutsch, 1991) That it is why in conflict situations in which culture may be a salient construct of identity attention to cultural interaction and communication is paramount.

Part II: The Role of Empathy (available next week)
Read Entire Article HERE

Reference List

Allport, G. W. (1954). The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Batson, C. D. (1991). The altruism question: Toward a social psychological answer. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Batson, C. D., Sager, K., Garst, E., Kang, M., Rubchinsky, K., & Dawson, K. (1997). Is empathy-induced helping due to self-other merging? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 495-509.

Bennett, M. J. (1979). Overcoming the golden rule: Sympathy and empathy. In D. Nimmo (Ed.), Communication Yearbook 3 (pp. 407-422). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Berry, J. W. (1984). Cultural relations in plural societies. In N. Miller & M. B. Brewer (Eds.), Groups in Contact (pp. 11-27). New York: Academic Press.

Blake, R. R., Shepard, H. A., & Mouton, J. S. (1964). Managing intergroup Conflict in Industry. Houston, TX: Gulf.

Brewer, M. B. (1986). The role of ethnocentrism in intergroup contact. In S. Worchel & W. A. Austin (Eds.), Psychology of Intergroup Relations (2nd ed.). Chicago: Nelsen-Hall.

Broome, B. (1991). Building shared meaning: Implications of a relational approach to empathy for teaching intercultural communication. Communication Education, 40, 235-249.

Broome, B. (1993). Managing differences in conflict resolution: The role of relational empathy. In D. Sandole & H. Van Der Merwe (Eds.), Conflict Resolution Theory and Practice: Integration and Application Manchester, England: Manchester University Press.

Cambell, D. T. (1965). Ethnocentrism and other altruistic motives. In D. Levine (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (Vol. 13). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Davis, M. H. (1994). Empathy: A social psychological approach. . Madison, WI: Brown and Benchmark.

Deutsch, M. (1991). Subjective features of conflict resolution: Psychological, Social, and Cultural Influences. In R. Vayrynen (Ed.), New Directions in Conflict Theory: Conflict Resolution and Conflict Transformation. London: Sage.

Duan, C., & Hill, C. E. (1996). The current state of empathy research. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 43, 261-274.

Feshbach, N. D. (1989). Empathy training and prosocial behavior. In J. Groebel & R. A. Hinde (Eds.), Aggression and war: Their biological and social bases (pp. 101-111). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Fisher, R. J. Interactive conflict resolution: A social-psychological approach to resolving violent ethnopolitical conflict. In M. Fitzduff & C. E. Stout (Eds.), The Psychology of Resolving Global Conflicts (Vol. 3). London: Praeger Security International

Fisher, R. J. (1997). Interactive Conflict Resolution. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press.

Fowler, S. M., & Blohm, J. M. (2004). An analysis of methods for intercultural training. In D. Landis, J. M. Bennett & M. J. Bennett (Eds.), Handbook of Intercultural Training. London: Sage.

LeBarron, M. (2003). Bridging Cultural Conflicts: A New Approach for a Changing World. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Oswald, P. A. (1996). The effects of cognitive and effective perspective taking on empathic concern and altruistic helping. Journal of Social Psychology, 136, 613-623.

Pettigrew, T. F. (1998). Intergroup contact theory. Annual Review of Psychology, 49, 65-85.

Pranis, K., Stuart, B., & Wedge, M. (2003). Peacemaking Circles: From Crime to Community. St.Paul, Minnesota: Living Justice Press.

Rothman, J. (1997). Resolving Identity Based Conflicts in Nations, Organizations, and Communities. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Sherif, M. (1966). In Common Predicament: Social Psychology of Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Stephan, W. G., & Finlay, K. (1999). The Role of Empathy in Improving Intergroup Relations. Journal of Social Issues, 55(4), 729-743.

Stephan, W. G., & Stephan, C. W. (2000). An integrated threat theory of prejudice. In S. Oskamp (Ed.), Reducing Prejudice and Discrimination (pp. 23-46). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Tajfel, H. (1970). Experiments in intergroup discrimination. Scientific American, 223, 96-102.

Tajfel, H. (1981). Human Groups and Social Categories. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Ting-Toomy, S. (2004). Translating conflict face-negotiation theory into practice. In D. Landis, J. M. Bennett & M. J. Bennett (Eds.), Handbook of Intercultural Training. London: Sage Publications.

Prejudice, Stereotyping, and Human Unity

2011-02-28T01:47:00.000-07:00

Humankind since its beginnings has tried to make sense of its existence. Since the first realization that the person as an individual is separate from their environment, we have tried to answer the questions of who we are. At first, our instincts and animalistic preconditions tried to answer the question through the templates set up to protect us from our environment. The need to stereotype our world around us in its simplest form is one example of this. Evolutionary and Cognitive psychologists explain this as the theory of psychological load. Simply put, this theory expounds that the multitude of sensory experiences we face every second is overwhelming. In order to cope with this we create shortcuts in our mind to help us make inferences about the world around us. This lessens the amount of mental energy needed to process what we experience. Conditioning then occurs to create stereotypes that become lasting mental templates that allow us to combine sensory clues to predict how an outside actor will act based solely on those clues. However, the very fact that this is a shortcut denotes that the accuracy of such method can be problematic. Add to this the complexities of a more evolved form of rationality, emotion, and social structure that humankind exhibits and the problem becomes more salient. It is this problem of stereotyping that gives rise to what the modern world refers to prejudice. The answer to this problem is a matter of reflection and questioning of just why we are the way we is. One of the main things that se us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, is our belief that there is something more to this life than mere survival. The search for the “purpose of life” is a prime example of this. However, in this search we need to question the very instinct that, within this search to understand the world around us, terminates our own search for self-knowledge before it even begins. The perspective of human unity goes far to address this issue and likewise can be just as incite full in breaking the bonds of prejudice.

Framework of Human Unity

First, let us look at the foundation that makes up the human unity perspective. Human unity itself is a “condition of equality and interdependence”.[1] Equality within this framework is described as the fact that all human beings are equal in their “will or need to know oneself”.[2] Equality in human unity is then not a belief that very human is the same in their physical and social structure but in the fact that they all use these as ways to gain self-understanding. This need for self-knowledge is fulfilled through the process of recognition. Recognition however can not be attained without the input of others. We therefore, gain knowledge about ourselves by placing our ideals on others and receiving feedback about how good those ideals are. The process of recognition does “not happen in a vacuum”.[3] Instead, we create and incorporate social symbols that a community can use to assign particular ideals or values to each member. The symbols that are created “allow the members of each community to identify themselves, and to build a self image’.[4] These symbols give a type of reference point in which an individual can measure the value of their own identity to the community. The symbols that are created however must be constantly questioned as to their true value in defining who the individual and community are. This is referred to as the process of self-fulfillment. Within the process of self-fulfillment, “the symbols of each community are continuously reapropriated by its members, gaining personal value and meaning to the extent that they can express the uniqueness of each persons capacities at the service of each persons fulfillment”.[5]

If the reapropreation of social symbols does not occur, unquestioned symbols become independent of the individual “and survive at the cost of sacrificing the self-knowledge of those who impose or accept them”[6] At this point, the individual is no longer interested in reappropriating the symbols of recognition to better understandings of the self.. Instead, the individual will only seek to reproduce and acquire the social symbols that will validate the symbols they have already acquired. According to the perspective of human unity, this is when self-fulfillment becomes self-satisfaction. Self-satisfaction can be best described as the “reproduction of social symbols with the only purpose of guaranteeing an easy social acceptance”.[7] The decisions of an individual relying of self-satisfaction are based solely on their symbols not the values and meaning the symbols once stood for. A social symbol taken at face value with no real meaning can not be challenged and therefore cannot be reappropriated into a better understanding of the individuals existence. Likewise, an individual who is interested in self-satisfaction is no longer interested in creation of a better social symbol, but instead wishes to preserve the symbols they already have. Any question of the social symbol becomes a threat to the very survival of the individual’s identity instead of a chance to enrich it. This brings us to the second part of the condition of human unity, interdependence.

Our interdependence can be seen in the fact that we need others to tell us about whom we are and they need us to tell them who they are. Together we form a human community interdependent to the extent that as parts of a whole, if one part is denied the capacity for self-understanding of the whole is likewise deprived. Interdependence in this framework then requires that diversity must be allowed to be expressed. If it is not, then each individual has no basis in which to challenge his or her own social symbols. Each community holds within itself symbols that are only half-truths. We are interdependent in as much as we need others half-truths to challenge and fill in the wholes of our own half-truths.

Stereotyping and Identity

Stereotyping and the prejudice and out-group violence that can follow have plagued humankind from the beginning of human history. There are a number of factors in the creation of stereotyping and prejudice that can be directly applied to the perspective of human unity.

The first factor within stereotyping is that of identity. What determines how we react to the world around us is strongly influenced by our concept of who we are. This concept however is not a constant condition given to us at birth. Instead, it is a combination of social and cultural factors that give us a set of guidelines by which to live. This conceptualization of identity then is a dynamic construction between the social and cultural world we inhabit and the already present psyche we posses. We tend to take these conceptualizations and internalize it making it a part of who we are. This is echoed in the Human Unity perspective in the sense that the process of recognition is “mediated by social symbols or symbols of recognition that allows for the differences in the ways we are recognized”.[8] When on self-identifies with a particular characteristic, ideology, or preference it can become reified into our concept of ourselves. If this occurs, we create a type of group identity with those who share the same perceived identities. This group identity is important because as the social identity theory states, “we derive part of our self-esteem from our group memberships”.[9] These group memberships can be official or unofficial and as varied as race or whether you like a particular kind of music. What is important is that the individual has taken the characteristics of the group to define there own identity.

Group Identities role in Prejudice

Prejudice in this argument can be defined as “a positive or negative attitude directed toward people simply because they happen to be members of a specific group”.[10] Using this definition, I will look into the ways in which the creation of a group identity can lead to prejudice or what will be referred to as out-group derogation.

When one identifies with a particular group the characteristics of the group identity become measurements of how well the individual authentically fits into that group. However, the characteristics of any group identity are not universal for that group. They are instead, simply social perceptions or cultural symbols that have a value or truth behind them. Since the identity and consequently, the membership qualifications of any group are not universal, it is often hard to perfectly fit into any group. This creates a process that can often lead an individual to “exaggerate differences between their group and another group in order to strengthen their social identity”.[11] This is where out-group derogation can become salient. The Individual who believes that they have found their identity in these groups fall in to the state that human unity refers to as self-satisfaction. At this point, the individual stops looking for new explanations and instead focuses on protecting their newly formed identities. This includes comparing themselves to their group and trying to reconcile their identity to fit the group. Likewise any attack on what is seen as the group identity is construed as a direct attack on the individuals own identity. There are a number of methods used in authenticating a group identity; however, we will look into some of the major constructs in which prejudice can be created.

One of the major strategies used by an individual, that is important within the human unity perspective, is referred to as the ego defense function.[12] Prejudice under this function can be used to defend against threats to our own personal identity. A member of an out-group can often pose a threat to the in-group member by simply providing another version of the truth. The fact that another person has chosen a different way to lead there life insinuates the possibility that their way of understanding may be better than yours. The threatened individual then devalues the perceived characteristics and symbols of the out-group member in an attempt to prove the inferiority of those symbols.

It is important to reiterate that the groups that we all form are in most cases socially constructed. An example of this can be seen in the Robbers Cave experiment. The experiment conducted at Robbers Cave State Park involved two groups of boys from the same social background, who were sent to the park under the idea they were going for summer camp. The two groups were kept isolated. Soon each group began to create their own norms and values. They soon created names for themselves, the Rattlers and the Eagles. After a few weeks, the experimenters provided little clues that each group was not alone at the camp. Immediately, the boys began to speak “the in-group, out-group language of us and them”.[13] When they were finally introduced in the guise of a multi event tournament, Social groups had already been created. The rest of the summer the boys were brought together to live and eat in the same area. Immediately the boys started stereotyping the opposite group by saying things like the rattlers aren’t as smart as the Eagles, or the Eagles aren’t as clean as the Rattlers. Eventually, the two groups conducted raids on the others cabins and fights, using bats and rocks in socks, routinely broke out. One experimenter even noted that “the Rattlers read on their yellow pencils the hated name Eagle and refused to use that brand”.[14] Eventually, they took all of the boys on a trip in the camps bus. They faked the bus getting stuck and told the kids that if they could not get unstuck they would be stranded in the middle of the forest with no food or water until someone realized they were gone. The boys then actually cooperated in helping to pull the bus out. On the way home, the two groups began talking to each other and actually getting along. By the end of the summer, almost every group barrier had been forgotten and they left as friends. The very fact that group identities could be created in such a short time between two groups very much alike attests the superficiality of group identity.

Group identities which individuals adhere to, are simply symbols representative of deeper values we feel are important. The identity of an Eagle or Rattler simply was used as a symbol for values each group believed to be important. Unfortunately if these identities become reified the meaning behind the group identity is lost to the group identity itself. Even if the perceived similarities of the in-group and the perceived differences of the out-group no longer exist, the individual is unable to tell and they continue the reproduction and protection of a group identity with no real purpose for existence. This is referred to in the perspective of human unity as dependency relationships.[15] These empty symbols of a reified group identity lead to the eventual enslavement of the individual to their own cultural symbols.

The Solution of Dialogue

When looking at the structures of prejudice and stereotyping on finds that in many ways, they mirror the ideas of self-satisfaction within the human unity perspective. Therefore, it is not too far of a jump to suggest that the solution that human unity gives for self-satisfaction can be also used in the problem of prejudice. In fact, one could argue that stereotypes are simply a tool used for better understanding the world and our own identities, just as social symbols are a tool to fulfill our need for recognition and self-understanding. Likewise, the conditions that create self-satisfaction are built around the reification of the self within group identities. If this is true then prejudice is not only a defense mechanism of a reified identity, but also of self-satisfaction. The answer to prejudice then would be the same as one for self-satisfaction; dialogue.

Dialogue must first be understood not as a superficial exchange of ideas or values. This type of dialogue is an ongoing experience in which those involved not only question the values and symbols of the other but also leave their own symbols up for scrutiny. Individuals engaged in this expression must also be willing to validate or invalidate their own symbols by the merits of reason and not by unquestionable traditions. In short, those involved cannot agree to disagree based solely on the need to protect their own understanding of truth. Dialogue in this framework, by creating an environment of constant reapropriation and understanding of social symbols, provides the exact kind of awareness needed to break the bonds of group identity. In the case of prejudice, if one openly questions the identity they have created, then the need for protection of that identity by degrading others is unneeded. Dialogue also can help break down the barriers in communication so that was once a threat to the group identity and by default the individuals identity, is now an opportunity to enrich identity.

The realization of interdependence that comes along with this search also plays a role in controlling the need for prejudice. When one realizes the interdependence they share with all human beings, the dynamics of group identity are completely changed. Instead of an allegiance to one particular group identity, interdependency diverts the allegiance to the human community as a whole. When the experimenters in the Robbers Cave experiment created a problem with the bus, they created a situation that removed the emphasis on individual group survival. In this case, both groups were now threatened as a whole. This allowed the individual group identities of Rattlers and Eagles to be replaced by one group of stranded boys. The realization of their interdependence came when they had to rely on each other in order to get the bus unstuck. This sense of unity, if only to get the bus unstuck was what made it possible for the two groups to communicate. This later lead to questioning and reapropriation of the stereotypes they placed on each other. This in a way describes the process of human unity. Self-understanding and the need for recognition can be scene as the bus that was stuck. Just as each group only had a partial ability to get the buss unstuck, so do separate individuals and communities only have a partial truth to use in their search for self-understanding. The only way get the bus unstuck or gain recognition is to combine the varying understanding and abilities of each group to create one whole united in the same goal.

Human unity goes far in explaining stereotypes and prejudice due to the simple fact that the need for recognition explains both of these phenomenons within itself. Stereotyping is simply one way and individual expresses their need for understanding. Likewise, prejudice is used to protect the symbols of a self-satisfied mind. This points then to the fact that communities that are committed to self-understanding through the realization of human unity then are already free of the threat of prejudice. If every individual is a unique and needed means to self-understanding of the entire human community then any attempt to derogate or subdue another’s understanding would threaten the understanding of all involved. Therefore, in a world of human unity prejudice has no place.

[1] Martha. J. Rabbani. Truth and Power in the Development Debate. Manuscript pg13

[2] Rabbani 13

[3] Rabbani 20

[4] Rabbani 20

[5] Rabbani 24

[6] Rabbani. 21

[7] Rabbani 24

[8] Rabbani 20

[9] Melinda Jones. Social Psychology of Prejudice. (pg 79) Prentice Hall, New Jersey. 2002

[10] Jones 4

[11] Jones 79

[12] Jones 78

[13] Roger Brown. Social Psychology. 2^nd ed. Pg 536. The Free Press. New York. 1986

[14] Brown pg 610

[15] Rabbani 21

Human Unity in World Citizenship

2011-02-27T14:07:00.001-07:00

The concept of world citizenship has been around for hundreds of years. Its history can be traced from the stoics of ancient

Greece

to the discourses of Kant and Thomas Paine to, in the case of this particular paper, Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum in her book Cultivating Humanity, looks at the importance of a liberal education in the cultivation of world citizenship or what Nussbaum refers to as the cultivation of humanity. The focus of this paper is to review what Nussbaum regards as the capacities of world citizenship and what role the perspective of Human Unity can bee seen to play in it.

Nussbaum argues that there are three capacities one must have in order to become a citizen of the world. The first of these is the “capacity for critical examination of oneself and ones traditions”.[1] Simply put, one must be willing and able to question the fundamental structures and symbols that make up one’s individual identity. Under this idea, no explanation of one’s beliefs can be left to the justification of tradition or habit. This parallels the perspective of Human Unity in the sense that in the search for self-understanding one must constantly question the symbols that make up one’s identity. If this does not occur, unquestioned symbols become independent of the individual “and survive at the cost of sacrificing the self-knowledge of those who impose or accept them”.[2] The constant questioning of symbols within the Human Unity standpoint prevents the individual from attaining self-satisfaction and the eventual enslavement of the individual to their own cultural symbols.

The second of Nussbaum’s Capacities is the ability to see oneself not just as a member of a local group but also a human being “bound to all other human beings by ties of recognition and concern”.[3] This allows us to cultivate many prospects of communication and fellowship with distant groups as well as realize the “responsibilities we may have to them”[4] Human unity explains this realization of responsibility to others as simply the realization of our interdependence with all of humanity. Self-understanding, within Human Unity, is only achievable through the mutual recognition the framework of interdependence provides. This common condition of mutual recognition and the need for self-understanding “is only fulfilled as long as all other parts that are sharing this condition are able to fulfill it as well”.[5] True human unity calls for the allowance of all humans to participate in the search because if all humanity is unified then all humanity must have an equal chance at self-realization or all suffer from the deficiency. Therefore our responsibility to the other is to further our search for self-understanding through the other while allowing them to search through ourselves under the restriction that we do so in order to not only add to our own self-understanding but to the self-understanding of all humanity. Likewise, the realization that we all share a common humanity entails, “relating with the diversity of the other as an essential feature in the fulfillment of one’s own singularity”.[6]

The third and final capacity of a world citizen according to Nussbaum is what she calls the narrative imagination. This capacity allows the individual to place him or herself into the role of a distant other. An individual with narrative imagination is able to understand the “emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have”.[7] This allows the individual to interact with the other based on the context of that particular others own personal social world. Human unity also dictates this need by the fact that a unified human condition is not made up of uniform entities but rather of diverse entities working under a common goal. This diversity creates very effective levels of dialogue by causing culture clashes that can result the questioning of both parties identity, however if there is no initial understanding or even a realization of human unity, the dialogue will never happen. This is where the ability to identify with the other is so important. According to Nussbaum however, this is not an uncritical understanding of the other’s position. Nussbaum’s add that it is inevitable that when we look at situations from another person’s point of view we still bring with us some of our previous beliefs. Interestingly, it can be argued that the human unity perspective needs this critical understanding to truly work. When one partakes in the search for true self-understanding it is imperative that the individual engages with the other under the idea of not only gaining better self-understanding but also giving the other person a better understanding of their own identity. In order to do this, the individual must bring their own cultural and societal understanding to the dialogue or the interaction becomes one sided. A one sided dialogue is destructive in the sense that it replaces interdependency with dependency, which can undermine the entire project of human unity.

Nussbaum also deliberates for a short time on the role of liberal education in creating the capacity for world citizenship. She places a great importance on the diverse experiences and points of view a liberal education can offer. I think this is an important with in the human unity perspective as well because again, if students are exposed to a diverse range of beliefs and ideas it makes the type of dialogue needed fro self-understanding to flourish. However, what the human unity argument would warn against are the forms of liberal education that simply hope to create tolerance of other cultures instead of real understanding and dialogue. We can see this in the propagation of value relativism within liberal American institutions, which does more to undermine true self-understanding than foster its growth.

The perspectives of both Nussbaum’s world citizen and the human unity argument have many things in common. The human unity perspective goes into deeper philosophical detail than the arguments Nussbaum’s presented here, however they compliment each other well. Nussbaum’s commentary on how the liberal arts tradition lays the foundations for the world citizen provides a logical bridge between the theory of human unity and the real world application of a world citizen. However, what the human unity perspective advocates that Nussbaum’s argument doe not handle is that the search for self-understanding can never truly end. The very process is the means and the end. If the process of self-understanding does end then the individual simply falls into the vicious cycle of self–satisfaction.

[1] Martha Nussbaum. Cultivating Humanity: a classical defense of reform in liberal education

[2] Martha. J. Rabbani. Truth and Power in the Development Debate. Manuscript pg21

[3] Martha Nussbaum. Cultivating Humanity: a classical defense of reform in liberal education

[4] Martha Nussbaum. Cultivating Humanity: a classical defense of reform in liberal education

[5]Martha. J. Rabbani. Truth and Power in the Development Debate. Manuscript. Pg13

[6] Martha. J. Rabbani. Truth and Power in the Development Debate. Manuscript. pg26

[7]Martha Nussbaum. Cultivating Humanity: a classical defense of reform in liberal education

Army Used Psy-Ops On U.S. Senators

2011-02-24T03:05:00.003-07:00

Rolling Stone has reported that Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, while stationed in Afghanistan, ordered the use of Psy-Ops teams on visiting congressman and dignitaries last year.
The use of propaganda or psy-ops on American citizens is strictly forbidden under U.S. law. However, this did not stop Lt. Gen. Caldwell from ordering Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes, the leader of the IO unit, to provide "deeper analysis of pressure points we could use to leverage the delegation for more funds.". Though the order at first seemed generalized enough to not raise red flags, the intent was made clear when the Lt. Gen. Caldwell's chief of staff reiterated that they needed ways to secretly manipulate the U.S. lawmakers without their knowledge. To make matters worse, when Lt. Colonel Holmes resisted, he and his unit became the subject of retaliation.

Though the list of visitors Lt. Gen. Caldwell wanted to manipulate was long, some notables included Sen. Mccain, Sen. Reed, Sen. Lieberman, Adm. Mike Mullen,The German Minister of the Interior, and various other international visitors. Read the full story at www.rollingstone.com

U.S Faces Government Shutdown As Negotiations Stall

2011-02-24T00:33:00.000-07:00

The plans for a short term stopgap to prevent a government shutdown have once again been stalled in congress. The latest measure proposed by the GOP was refused by Senate Democrats citing that the new proposal is essential the same resolution proposed by the house Republicans earlier.

Inside sources complain of the GOP's unwillingness to compromise and point to the tea party factions within the GOP as the reason. According to Democrat aides, the tea party is hoping to use the threat of government shutdown as leverage to pass their version of the budget. Michael Steel has denied these accusations pointing out that the House republicans have given Sen. Reid an offer of a short term CR and that it is up to him to decide what, if anything, he is willing to cut. In response Reid's office issued the statement that the new GOP plan is just the old extreme measure packaged in a new form. Reid spokesman John Summers continued to say "This isn't a compromise, it's a hardening of their original position."

The GOP 2 week measure would shave 4 billion off Obama's budget and is a pared down version of the original which proposes 100 billion in cuts. The Dem proposal would shave off 40 billion. As both party's leaders continue to leave communication open it is obvious that for now neither side is willing to budge.

More on this story Here

Indiana Official Advocates Use Of Live Ammunition on Wisconsin Protestors

2011-02-23T03:00:00.002-07:00

Indiana Deputy Attorney General Jeff Cox called for the use of "live ammunition" on pro-union protestors in a tweet on February 19th.
The tweet was in response to a Mother Jones report that riot police were ordered to clear protestors in Wisconsin. When contacted, comments saying demonstrators were "political enemies" and "thugs" who were "physically threatening legally elected officials.....your damn right I advocate deadly force".

Cox has been known to be outspoken in the past as well, with such gems as "KILL! KILL! ANNIHILATE!" as a solution for Afghanistan and likening ex-Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Service Employees International Union members to Nazi "brownshirts".

Cox's comments come at a very delicate time, given the rising frustrations on all sides in the Wisconsin Labor dispute, and the possibility of protests in Indiana over the same issues. These factors make Cox's comments not just outspoken, but inflamatory and juvenile at the very least. Read the full story HERE

Gadhafi Orders Sabotage Of Pipelines

2011-02-23T01:02:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately for the people of Libya, Moammar Gadhafi does not plan to go quietly. According to Time columnist Robert Baer, a source close to Gadhafi says that the leader has ordered the sabotage of Libya's pipelines. According to Baer's source Gadhafi plans to turn Libya into another Somalia, rather than surrender power. If these reports are true, and Libya's pipelines were disrupted or destroyed, it could prove even more difficult for any post-Gadhafi government to get Libya back on track. Furthermore, if the pipelines were sabotaged, it could also jeopardize oil supplies in Europe, raising oil prices even higher. Of course much of this could just be the final posturing of a desperate leader, but it is hard to tell with the often quixotic Gadhafi.

Gadhafi Prepares For "Martyrdom"

2011-02-23T00:39:00.004-07:00

In a speech on Tuesday Moammar Gadhafi made it clear that he was not going to yield to the protests and step down. The speech which was held in front of Gadhafi's home, sounded like a call for revolution, almost conceding the fact that Libya was no longer under his control. At one point Gadhafi said:

"I am a fighter, a revolutionary from tents. I will die a martyr at the end"

Gadhafi then called upon his supporters to fight on his behalf:

"Get out of your homes and fill the streets....Leave your homes and attack them in their lairs"

Though many wonder how much support Gadhafi actually still has, it is suspected he only has 5,000 loyal troops, it is apparent that Gadhafi plans to fight his "revolution" until the very end.

International response continues to be cautious, with widespread condemnation but no concrete steps being taken for intervention if Gadhafi results to widespread civil war. There is always the issue of chemical and biological weapons that could be used as well as the possibility of all out attack on the Libyan population. At the moment it is uncertain whether any UN action is possible given the historical backing Gadhafi has from Russia and China in the security council. Many also question whether international governments have a place in intervening in Libya. What do you think? Feel free to leave comments below

Earthquake Rattles New Zealand

2011-02-22T05:29:00.004-07:00

A 6.3 magnitude earthquake hit Christchurch and South Island yesterday at 12:50 pm.The of the damage is still uncertain but 3 News in New Zealand reported that 60% of Lyttelton, the epicenter of the earthquake, is destroyed. As of 1:00 Tuesday the death toll was 65, though emergency responders warn that there could be more to come.

On a related note, hospitals are not only making room for victims but also for an increase in births due to premature labor brought on by the earthquake. Google has set up an information service for those looking for missing loved ones.

Below: Video of earthquake in Christchurch

Libyan Soldiers Burned to death for refusing to fire on Protesters :VIDEO (graphic images)

2011-02-22T01:07:00.002-07:00

via youtube.com

Posted via email from Balinko

Gadhafi On Libya TV: Video

2011-02-22T00:28:00.002-07:00

via edition.cnn.com

Moammar Gadhafi, in an attempt to show that he is still in charge, gave a brief tv interview around 2 am Tuesday. The short interview which showed Gadhafi outside of his residence consisted mainly of Gadhafi stating that he was "in Tripoli, not in Venezuela". He then followed with the warning "Don't believe those dogs in the media". The strange video, that often had visual disruption of some sort of dance performance, seemed to be rather rushed, with Gadhafi sitting halfway outside a car with an umbrella. Although the video is meant to show that Gadhafi is still around, it is hard not to get the feeling from the way the "interview" was set up, that this was a man on the run. Watch the video courtesy of CNN below

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Libya: The Beginning Of The End? UPDATES

2011-02-21T13:04:00.003-07:00

Unrest continues to sweep Libya today with much of the activity focused around the Libyan capital of Tripoli. However, the big news at the moment is who is not in Tripoli.
Along with reports of aircraft attacking protestors (Reuters) there have been reports of Libyan aircraft landing in Malta with Libyan colonels seeking asylum. (The Guardian). However, some army officials have not been so lucky as reports are circulating that much of the remaining army leaders are under house arrest. But what of the big guy, Qaddafi himself? Rumors abound, but one report is that Qaddafi has landed in Venezuela, a report that the Venezuelan government denies. The chaos makes it almost impossible to get all the facts right now, it does appear that Libya will soon be free of Qaddafi's reign. The question now is what Libyans will do with their new Libya.

Updates:

9:00: sources indicate that the Libyan military has given orders for an air bombardment of Benghazi. It these reports are true, many more lives will be lost before this revolution is over.

12:47- Libya's Ambassador to the US resigned from Gadhafi's government but not from his post, calls for Gadhafi to step down

1:56- UN Security council has announced consultations for Libya.
Egypt opens town of Saloum for injured from Libya.
International Coalition Against War Crimes reports 519 deaths in Libya

An oldie but a goodie

2011-02-21T11:51:00.002-07:00

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US department of energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility.
After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US Department of Agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the Food and Drug Administration.
At the appropriate time as regulated by the US Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the US Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issed by the Federal Reserve Bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.
After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to ny house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and fire marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all it’s valuables thanks to the local police department.
I then log on to the internet which was developed by the defense advanced research projects administration and post on freerepublic and Fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.

via whatsthatyousayblog.blogspot.com

Posted via email from Balinko

WikiLeaks: Bahrain as "Irans Fourteenth Providence"

2011-02-19T05:09:00.005-07:00

The Telegraph has posted a Wilileaks cable that was sent to them in regards to Irans claim to Bahrain. Apparently this cable speaks about attempts to shame opposition groups in Bahrain who have voiced support for Iranian struggles. Here is an excerpt:

Header: VZCZCXYZ0015PP RUEHWEBDE RUEHMK #0091 0481355ZNY CCCCC ZZH (CCY ADX2FAB06 MSI6071-623)P 171355Z FEB 09FM AMEMBASSY MANAMATO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC PRIORITY 8448INFO RUCNIRA/IRAN COLLECTIVE PRIORITYRHBVAKS/COMUSNAVCENT PRIORITYRHMFISS/HQ USCENTCOM MACDILL AFB FL PRIORITY
Tags: PREL,PBTS,EG,IR,BA
C O N F I D E N T I A L MANAMA 000091 SIPDIS BAGHDAD FOR AMBASSADOR ERELI C O R R E C T E D C O P Y (GARBLED TEXT) E.O. 12958: DECL: 02/17/2029 TAGS: PREL, PBTS, EG, IR, BA SUBJECT: BAHRAIN AS "IRAN'S FOURTEENTH PROVINCE" REF: MANAMA 57 Classified By: CDA Christopher Henzel for reasons 1.4 (b) and (d)
1. (C) Summary: After an Iranian official spoke of supposed Iranian claims to Bahrain, Egypt's President visited Manama in a demonstration of Arab solidarity. The Iranian statement is being spun to embarrass those - like Qatar and Bahraini oppositionists - who allegedly sympathize with Iran. End summary.
2. (U) Bahrain and other Arab governments pounced on media reports that an Iranian official described Bahrain as "Iran's fourteenth province." International Arabic daily Al Quds al Arabi February 10 attributed the statement to Ali Akbar Nateq-Nuri, described as "inspector general" in the office of Supreme Leader Khamenei. Nateq-Nuri was formerly Interior Minister and speaker of Iran's parliament.
3. (U) Bahrain's MFA told media that foreign minister Khalid bin Ahmad Al Khalifah summoned Iranian Ambassador Hossein Amir-Abdolahian to protest. Amir-Abdolahian separately told the press that Nateq-Nuri's statement did not reflect Iranian government policy.

full cable available Here

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Day Of Protests:Violence In Bahrain,Yemen, and Libya

2011-02-18T11:39:00.001-07:00

Protests continue to rock the middle east with violence in Bahrain, Yemen, and Libya. Protests have also been reported in Jordan and Egypt. Here is a quick rundown of what is happening.

Bahrain: After hundreds of people gathered at Pearl Roundabout, the army has used teargas and gunfire to remove the crowd. The Guardian has reported at least 20 people injured and 1 death. Other reports are saying that the police are preventing emergency vehicles from getting to the Pearl roundabout.

Yemen: On the eighth day of protests, two have been reported killed as protesters clash with the police and other protesters. Pro- and anti-Saleh protesters have clashed in Sana'a as well as Taiz. The latter clash leading to the death of an Anti-Saleh protester when a handgrenade was thrown into the crowd. Protests in Aden have lead to the shooting death of one protester by the police as government buildings were set on fire.

Libya: Up to 50 people have been killed in protests in the eastern part of the country. The majority of protests have been around Benghazi, though some anti-Gaddafi protesters are reporting that the unrest is moving towards the capital.

Mousavi Missing

2011-02-18T10:49:00.000-07:00

On the heels of renewed protests in Iran,the daughters of Mir Hossein Mousavi have reported that the leader and his wife have not been seen since Tuesday.
The New York Times has also reported that the family home is surrounded by security forces. It is still uncertain if Mousavi and his wife are in their home as all communication inside the home has been cut by security forces. Read more HERE

A Trumpet And A Sniper

2011-02-18T08:18:00.001-07:00

WWII vet talks about the night a Nazi sniper surrendered because of a trumpet. A great story about how the enemy is often just like us.

via maniacworld.com

North Korea Fires Rockets at Yeonpyeong Island

2010-11-23T07:22:00.002-07:00

via online.wsj.com

North Korea responded to South Korean military training near disputed maritime border by shelling South Korean Island. At least 2 South Korean soldiers were killed with numerous injuries. Civilian injuries have been reported but the exact number is still unclear. South Korea returned fire and scrambled jets into the area.

World leaders have denounced the North Korean attack. Full Story HERE

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(Un) Covering The Death Squads in El Salvador -Nieman Watchdog

2010-04-16T19:40:00.001-06:00

Embedded with killers: Reporters Craig Pyes, left, and Laurie Becklund with death squad leader D'Aubuisson in 1982.
(Un) Covering The Death Squads in El Salvador
SHOWCASE | March 24, 2010
On the 30th anniversary of the brutal assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, a veteran reporter looks back at some extraordinary and daring close-in coverage that was spurred by personal anger at the murder of the priest.

By Craig Pyes
PyesOnly@yahoo.com

March 24 is the 30th anniversary of the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero. He was shot in the heart by a right wing death squad while saying mass in a small chapel at a cancer hospital in San Salvador.

The archbishop, who started out as a conservative, had become the voice of the poor and disenfranchised, documenting killings and disappearances at the hands of the army and mysterious right-wing death squads during his weekly sermons. Just before his murder, Romero had broadcast an appeal to ordinary soldiers to stop the killing, counseling them that they were not “obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God.”

After the broadcast, Salvadoran rightist leader, former Major Roberto D'Aubuisson, gave the order to members of his security service to assassinate the Archbishop, according to the findings of the United Nations Truth Commission report.

A Salvadoran online newspaper, El Faro, has published (in Spanish with an English subtitled Youtube video) the first public statement of a member of that assassination squad, former Capt. Alvaro Saravia. He confirms that D’Aubuisson masterminded Romero’s murder. The cashiered major later became the leader of El Salvador’s rightwing Arena Party.

In November 2004, a U.S. federal court judge in California ruled in a civil judgment that Saravia took part in the plot to kill Archbishop Romero. It was the first time that any court has found any member of the conspiracy responsible for the assassination, said Carolyn Patty Blum, a Senior Legal Advisor for the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability, which represented the plaintiffs.

She said the judge’s decision declared that the death squad that carried out Romero’s murder “acted as part of a calculated strategy by the military to terrorize the civilian population into submission.” Saravia, who is currently in hiding in a Spanish-speaking country, was ordered to pay $10 million in damages. D’Aubuisson, 47, died in 1992 of esophageal cancer.

For those of us who covered El Salvador during the vicious civil war, the archbishop’s killing was not only a tragic event for the people of that country, but it gave rise to a very personal anger that such actions could go uninvestigated and unpunished.

Two reporters who felt that way were Laurie Becklund, then with The Los Angeles Times, and I, an investigative reporter for the Albquerque Journal. Laurie and I knew each other through reporting on the early stages of the U.S. involvement in Mexico’s drug war, where we had independently searched out the same sources in the mountains of Sinaloa. Now, two years later, we were both in El Salvador, along with scores of other journalists who had come for the 1982 elections. But both of us had come with other ideas: to expose the death squads.

It was a job perfectly suited for a pair of young, ambitious and quixotic journalists. The Reagan Administration continually (and dishonestly) said that the death squads were composed of independent rightists, unknown and unknowable, with no affiliation to government or army. We were to prove differently.

After an award-winning career as a metro reporter at The Times, Laurie today lives in Los Angeles, and is no longer involved with journalism.

Terrorist violence against the Salvadoran people made the first part of the 1980's one of the darkest periods in that country’s history. More than 40,000 were killed or disappeared. Many of the victims were seized by heavily armed men dressed in civilian clothes, who were either assisted by or were members of the nation’s security forces. Powerful members of the country’s small oligarchy financed these death squads.

The reports by Laurie and me were a unique form of primary investigation in a foreign country – a partnership between two reporters from unrelated papers. We also applied domestic reporting techniques to a remote and treacherous investigative challenge that other journalists either did not have the luxury to concentrate on, or had found insoluble. Except for “allegations” implicating D’Aubuisson, few knew the details of El Salvador’s killing machine until our stories appeared.

Our stories laid out, in the Salvadoran rightists’ own words, a vast plan to physically eliminate their political enemies and grass-roots activists based on “dirty war” techniques originally carried out by the governments of Guatemala and Argentina against rebellious segments of their own populations.

Although D’Aubuisson’s role as a leader of the death squads was always reported in the American press as “alleged,” curiously even by our own newspapers, he easily confessed to us that he had participated in death squad activities, and that he had drawn up a secret terror plan (a copy of which we had) that had become the basis of the political-military organization that evolved into the Arena Party. His lieutenants boastfully confessed to manufacturing false propaganda against the “left,” participating in arms smuggling, attacks against Jesuit priests, and assisting the security forces in identifying and killing opponents.

Especially chilling were their revelations about a secret Argentine task force that was part of a military intelligence mission headquartered in Honduras, that tracked down leftists who had fled to Central America, and whose members also assisted the intelligence unit of the Salvadoran National Guard in setting up safe houses where they tortured and then murdered those they considered “subversives.” Their idea was to cleanse the country of hundreds of thousands of people. Later, some of the advisers went on to help set up the Nicaraguan Contras.

When the stories appeared, they laid out for the first time a comprehensive, inside view of what had been one of El Salvador's deepest secrets.
New Mexico’s Republican Senator Pete Domenici hailed the reporting as “an outstanding example of investigative journalism…that described for the first time the rationale and actual operating procedures behind ‘death squad’ killing in El Salvador.”

Robert E. White, who was the U.S. Ambassador in El Salvador when Archbishop Romero was killed, and who considered D’Aubuisson a “psychopathic killer,” told the House Subcommittees on Human Rights and International Organizations that the reporting was an a “brilliant” explication of the politics of murder.

A cross-border newspaper investigation such as this – it took more than a year – is as scarce today as it was 28 years ago. But that wasn’t the only novelty.

In essence, Laurie and I made a decision to “embed” with the killers and their supporters, although not to the point of having advanced knowledge of, or participation in, actual operations. We were able to gather first-hand information, which we added to a database of hundreds of names and dates from open and confidential sources. I still work the same way today – but with the modern aid of a laptop. Once we completed our fieldwork and returned home, we learned of a marvelous new technology called the fax.

Would I recommend doing an investigation this dangerous to other reporters today? Only for those with few next of kin. At that time, the death squads were still operating openly, and more than a dozen journalists’ deaths had been blamed on them. Without claiming any false heroics, our lives were threatened by people we knew to have either financed, assisted or directly participated in the murders of other people as a form of political action. We were trying to navigate as close to the center of the storm as possible. Near the end of our reporting, one of our sources spooked, and pointedly told us, “In El Salvador, you don’t get killed for what you do, you get killed for what you know.” He then indicated that we knew a lot.

We were constantly balancing confidentiality with personal safety. Laurie and I would leave notes about our whereabouts with Raymond Bonner of The New York Times in case we disappeared. We had no competitive worries about Ray because our sources considered his paper to be “Communist” and would not talk to him.

And I faced some unusual ethical choices.

At one point, a bleeding and battered Richard Boyle, who co-wrote the script for the Academy Award-nominated Oliver Stone movie Salvador, showed up at my hotel asking for help because he said he’d been beaten and threatened by rightist thugs. Even though I knew Boyle, I could not endanger my own security or the success of the investigation by being associated with someone the right had set its sights on, so I painfully declined. I gave Boyle a contact in another news agency.

For the final interview with D’Aubuisson, I rented two rooms in the Camino Real, under my name and under an assumed name, and slept in the room not registered to me. Julia Preston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, was then a not-very-highly-paid correspondent for NPR and asked if she could use my “extra” room. I did not want to reveal what I was working on, or seem stingy, and only struggled through this ethical dilemma by saying that I had a “very, very good reason” not to stay in a room registered to me. She was unimpressed, and set-up shop, not knowing that she had become the canary in the mine. I did inform her of the danger – 20 years later.

Oddly, some of the most difficult parts of our reporting turned out to be not the dangers of El Salvador, but in dealing with our respective papers, neither of which was experienced in international investigative reporting.

Laurie and I had agreed to take the time necessary to crack the story, and not publish it piecemeal. It was a journalistic choice, but also a matter of personal safety – to avoid alerting any of our dangerous sources of our intentions. We would each write our own independent stories, but we also agreed to share notes and get our editors to agree to a joint release date. The L.A. Times editors saw no precedent for such an arrangement. “What?” I was told one Times editor exclaimed. “We don’t even own the Albuquerque Journal.”

The Times foreign desk was run by an old school foreign editor with almost no investigative experience. The gulf between foreign investigation and foreign “correspondence” was, and still is, one of the widest in journalism.

While the Albuquerque Journal ran a week of detailed investigative articles, The Times published only a few stories. My editor at The Journal, the late Gerald Crawford, when he heard what stories The Times was excluding, shook his head and said, ‘They’re cracked.”

Since then, there have been many other investigations, and many other “cracked” editors, and El Salvador has been far from my mind – until the other day when I received an email from a young Salvadoran woman. She had read a book based on our reporting, along with the works of Chris Dickey, Alan Nairn, and Douglas Farah, that had been reprinted in El Salvador under the title, “The Death Squads in El Salvador.” Published in Spanish, it gave Salvadorans their first glimpse inside the organized killing that had terrorized the populace for so long.

The young woman wrote that she had been considering a career in architecture, but instead had become a journalist, due in part to what we had written so long ago. She said in her email that she had assisted in putting together El Faro's story of Saravia’s confession in the archbishop's assassination.

"I hope you read this and like what you read,” her email said. “I have been wanting to write for a long time now because I think your articles about the death squads really made an impact on me and made me begin to like journalism and now after a year of working on a newspaper I believe that this is what I want to do and I believe in what I'm doing now and who and where I'm learning to do it."

I’ve never met this young woman. But in addition to whatever positive political and social change reporting can engender, the story behind this email is what makes it all worth doing.

via niemanwatchdog.org

Posted via web from Balinko

Census Nonsense

2010-04-16T19:39:00.004-06:00

Browse > Home / Ask FactCheck / Census Nonsense
Census Nonsense
March 18, 2010

Q: Do I have to answer Census questions? Isn’t this an invasion of privacy and a violation of the Fourth Amendment?
A: A widely circulated anti-Census commentary makes several false claims. The law requires truthful answers and states that they will be kept confidential. Courts have upheld its constitutionality.
FULL QUESTION
I have received the following spam e-mail re 2010 Census takers, and it states that they are asking questions regarding one’s feelings about the Fourth Amendment (i.e. search and seizure). A Jerry Day has produced a video on YouTube stating this as fact.
I did a search of Goggle and came up with the 10 questions asked on the 2010 form and replied to my sender! Replied to my sender with a stongly worded "not to believe everything they receive in e-mail."
Below is what was forwarded to me.
At our house, the census takers will get only how many people live here, which is all that is required by law to tell them……………….
Looks like ‘Big Brother’ is getting nosy and personal………
They can only ask how many people live in the house.. nothing else… look at all the information they are trying to gather.
⬐ Click to expand/collapse the full text ⬏
FULL ANSWER
With Census questionnaires hitting America’s mailboxes this week, we thought it would be timely to respond to questions that we’ve been getting about claims made in chain e-mails, on anti-government Web sites and particularly in an anti-Census editorial posted on the Internet by a Burbank, Calif.-based TV camera operator and video producer named Jerry Day.
Day’s video had received more than 1.6 million viewings on YouTube.com as of March 18, and it has received considerable attention on conservative and anti-government blogs and Web sites. Day bears an uncanny resemblance to the late Harry Reasoner of ABC News, which may give him an undeserved air of authority in some eyes. In fact, Day’s denunciation of the Census is full of misinformation and false claims.
Day says that the Census Bureau will be asking intrusive, personal questions of all Americans, suggests that these violate the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search, and claims that information given to Census is "presumably" subject to subpoena and could be used in court by prosecutors. He also claims that citizens are not required to cooperate with Census takers. He’s wrong on all counts.
The Questions
Day claims that Census will be "asking you things that you would not tell a stranger."
Day: They will be asking you about your disabilities, how much income you receive, where you get your income from, your housing costs, how many cars you own, how much you pay for insurance, if you receive food stamps, how much you pay for utilities. They’ll be asking you things that you would not tell a stranger.
In fact, the 2010 Census form asks for none of that. It asks only how many people live at the address, whether the home is rented or owned and whether it has a mortgage, and the telephone number of the residence. It asks seven additional questions about each individual at the address, including name, sex, age and date of birth, race and whether the person is of Hispanic origin or not, and whether that person sometimes lives or stays at another address.
Census does ask the sort of questions Day refers to — but only of a relatively few Americans. The American Community Survey sends around a questionnaire with 40 different items, asking such things as whether a person is receiving disability benefits (number 16) and how many vehicles are kept at home for use by persons in the household (number 9). But the ACS questionnaire goes only to about 250,000 addresses each month, according to Census spokeswoman Shelly Lowe. That’s a total of 3 million over the course of the year, while the 2010 Census form goes to all 134 million addresses. So only a little more than 2 percent of all homes will be getting the sort of questions Day complains about.
Answers Required
Day claims that citizens don’t have to answer Census questions: "Unless the Census Bureau can show you their Constitutional authority, you don’t even have to open the door for them." In fact, refusing to answer either the brief 2010 Census form or the longer ACS form is a violation of federal law (Title 13, United States Code, Section 221). Refusing to answer is punishable by a fine of $100, while giving false answers carries a fine of up to $500. (As a practical matter, Census says fines of up to $5,000 can be imposed under Title 18, Section 3571.)
Constitutional Authority
Day claims that the Census is exceeding its Constitutional authority by doing more than merely count noses.
Day: You may know that the Constitution allows the government to count us once every 10 years. For some reason, the Census Bureau has recently started counting us, and collecting information about us, every year, all year around. I’m not sure why, because the Constitution does not authorize them to do that. … They are not authorized to demand our cooperation in the contrived schemes they come up with for information gathering.
The Constitution (in Article 1, Section 2) does more than merely "allow" the government to count the population every 10 years — it requires that an "enumeration" be done "in such manner as they [Congress] shall by law direct." Congress started with a simple count in 1790 — asking only for the numbers of free white males and females, slaves and other persons. But by 1820 it was also asking how many in each household were "engaged in agriculture, commerce, and manufactures." In 1830 it asked how many were deaf, dumb or blind. The questions directed by Congress grew increasingly detailed through the remainder of the 19th century, and in 1902 Congress established the Census Bureau as a permanent agency.
"Recently Started?"
Day is incorrect when he claims that the Census Bureau "recently started" asking questions annually. In fact, the Census Bureau was collecting monthly data on employment as early as 1943, through what is now known as the Current Population Survey. It began an annual housing survey in 1973, which is now conducted every other year. What Day may be complaining about is the survey we mentioned earlier — the American Community Survey — which began in 2005.
The ACS is the reason that the 2010 Census is only using a "short form." Previous decennial censuses used a "long form" to gather the same sort of detailed social and economic information. But the "long form" used to be required of one household in six, while the ACS questionnaire goes to just one in 46 this year.
Privacy
Day is off base again when he says that "presumably Census data may be subpoenaed by law enforcement" and used in court. Quite the contrary, the law says clearly that individual Census reports are "immune from legal process" including subpoenas.
U.S. Code, Title 13, Section 9: Copies of census reports … shall be immune from legal process, and shall not, without the consent of the individual or establishment concerned, be admitted as evidence or used for any purpose in any action, suit, or other judicial or administrative proceeding.
The law also forbids the sharing of individual Census reports with any other "department, bureau, agency, officer, or employee of the Government" (including the CIA and FBI) and prohibits release of anything but statistical information that does not identify individuals or businesses. Furthermore, the law makes it a crime punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $5,000 for any Census official to make unauthorized release of information. (Census says the fine can be up to $250,000 under Title 18.)
Would a Census official violate that strict privacy law? Historians are still debating what happened during World War II, when Census officials gave the military detailed, block-by-block counts of the numbers of Americans of Japanese descent, who were then rounded up and held in internment camps. Such finely detailed geographic statistics weren’t routine in 1941, as they are now. Census officials may even have been willing to release names and addresses. Census Director J.C. Capt is quoted in the record of a 1942 meeting as saying that — if the military wanted names and addresses of Japanese Americans — "I would give them further means of checking individuals." But despite various rumors and claims, there’s no record of that happening. Two university scholars, William Seltzer of Fordham University and Margo Anderson of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, concluded in a research paper released in 2000 that "the archival record does not establish that unauthorized disclosure of microdata [names and addresses] took place."
Fourth Amendment
Day asks rhetorically, “Do current levels of data collection violate the Fourth Amendment?” The answer given by the federal courts is that they do not. The Fourth Amendment prohibits "unreasonable searches" and requires that search warrants be based on probable cause. But as long ago as 1870 the U.S. Supreme Court wrote in passing that the government had unquestioned authority to ask for more than a mere head count.
U.S. Supreme Court, Legal Tender Cases, 79 U.S. 457 (1870): The Constitution orders an enumeration of free persons in the different states every ten years. The direction extends no further Yet Congress has repeatedly directed an enumeration not only of free persons in the States but of free persons in the Territories, and not only an enumertion of persons but the collection of statistics respecting age, sex, and production. Who questions the power to do this?
And as recently as 2000, a federal judge in Houston, Texas, held that Census questions don’t violate the Constitution. U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon dismissed the complaint of five plaintiffs who claimed that the Census violated their Constitutional rights. Regarding the Fourth Amendment specifically, she noted that the Census questions didn’t involve uninvited entry into anyone’s home, and that the information was being sought for reasonable and legitimate government purposes.
Judge Harmon: it is clear that the degree to which these questions intrude upon an individual’s privacy is limited, given the methods used to collect the census data and the statutory assurance that the answers and attribution to an individual will remain confidential. The degree to which the information is needed for the promotion of legitimate governmental interests has been found to be significant. … The Court finds that there is no basis for holding Census 2000 unconstitutional.
That opinion was later upheld by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. The judges wrote simply that "we find no error in the district court’s judgment nor in its stated reasons for its judgment." The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear any further appeal in 2002.
So — like it or not — the law requires truthful answers to the 10 questions on the 2010 Census form (and to the 40 questions on the American Community Survey form, for the 3 million households that receive it). And the courts have consistently upheld the government’s right to require answers to those questions.
–Brooks Jackson
Sources
Day, Jerry. "The Census is Getting Personal." Video posted on YouTube.com. 11 Feb 2010.
Jerry Day Productions, Burbank, CA. "Some highlights from our experience . . . " Web site accessed 18 March 2010.
US Census Bureau. "The Qustions on the Form." Web site accessed 18 March 2010.
US Census Bureau. "American Community Survey." Web site accessed 18 March 2010.
US Census Bureau. "The 2010 American Community Survey Questionnaire." downloaded 18 March 2010.
13 USC Sec. 221. 2009.
US Const. art. 1 sec. 2.
US Census Bureau. "History: Index of Questions; 1790." Web page accessed 18 March 2010.
US Census Bureau. "History: Index of Questions; 1820." Web page accessed 18 March 2010.
US Census Bureau. "History: Index of Questions; 1830." Web page accessed 18 March 2010.
US Census Bureau. "History: Legislation 1902 - 1941." Web page accessed 18 March 2010.
US Census Bureau "History: Developing Sampling Techniques " Web page accessed 18 March 2010.
US Census Bureau. "History: The American Housing Survey. " Web page accessed 18 March 2010.
US Census Bureau. "History: The American Community Survey. " Web page accessed 18 March 2010.
13 USC Sec. 9. 2009.
13 USC Sec. 214. 2009.
Holmes, Steven. "Census blamed in internment of Japanese; Scholars study wartime bureau." New York Times. 17 March 2000.
Seltzer, William and Margo Anderson. "After Pearl Harbor: The Proper Role of Population Data Systems in Time of War." 20 March 2000. Accessed from University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee Web site 18 March 2010.
US Const. amendment IV.
Legal Tender Cases (79 US 457) Supreme Ct. of the US 1830.
Morales v. Daley, 116 F. Supp. 2d 801, 820 S.D. Tex. 2000.
Morales v. Evans unpublished opinion 275 F.3d 45 10 Oct 2001.
US Census Bureau. "Census in the Constitution." Web page accessed 18 March 2010.

Posted by Brooks Jackson on Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 6:01 pm
Filed under Ask FactCheck · Tagged with Census, chain e-mail, Jerry Day, social issues, viral videos
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Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge-Horace Mann

2010-04-16T19:39:00.001-06:00

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Officials worry anger at D.C. is behind low Texas census response | Houston Chronicle

2010-04-16T19:38:00.005-06:00

WASHINGTON — Texas is counting on the 2010 Census to deliver four new congressional districts, four new Electoral College votes in presidential elections, and millions of dollars in additional federal aid. But, as some elected officials are starting to worry, Uncle Sam can't deliver anything to the rapidly growing Sun Belt state unless Texas residents deliver their forms back to the government.
As of Friday afternoon, only 27 percent of Texas households had filled in and returned their census forms — well below the national average of 34 percent — according to computer data from the U.S. Census Bureau. In Harris County, the response rate is 23 percent. Houston's returns are running at 21 percent.
Contrary to historical trends, some of the toughest challenges facing the agency responsible for measuring the nation's population are not from counting the traditionally undercounted groups such as African-Americans and Latinos. Instead, a new and growing threat to an accurate national head count is coming from anti-government conservatives who may not fill out their forms to protest against “Big Brother” in Washington.
“There's a general distrust of the federal government at every level, starting with Congress and the president, all the way down to executive branch agencies,” says Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Midland.
Low return rates
Polling by the Pew Research Center finds Democrats are more likely than other Americans to view the census as “very important” to the country. Seventy-six percent of Democrats call this year's count very important, compared with 61 percent of Republicans and independents.
In Texas, some of the counties with the lowest census return rates are among the state's most Republican, including Briscoe County in the Panhandle, 8 percent; King County, near Lubbock, 5 percent; Culberson County, near El Paso, 11 percent; and Newton County, in deep East Texas, 18 percent. Most other counties near the bottom of the list are heavily Hispanic counties along the Texas-Mexico border.
There is a reason for the enthusiasm gap on the census: A number of prominent conservative and libertarian Republicans have been blasting the census for months.
Criticism from Ron Paul
Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., began the barrage last year when she asserted — incorrectly — that the information reported by Americans could be used for nefarious governmental ends, such as imprisonment in internment camps.
Earlier this month, Texas Rep. Ron Paul voted against a congressional resolution asking Americans to participate in the census.
“The invasive nature of the current census raises serious questions about how and why government will use the collected information,” the Lake Jackson Republican recently said. “It also demonstrates how the federal bureaucracy consistently encourages citizens to think of themselves in terms of groups, rather than as individual Americans. ”
Houston-area GOP lawmakers say anti-census feelings run deep among their constituents.
“People are concerned about the apparent intrusive nature of the census,” said Rep. Ted Poe, R-Humble. “People are very concerned that the government is going too far.”
Still, Poe said, he tells his concerned constituents that they should answer the census because “it's the law.”
What's more, he added, “it's very important for people to fill out the census because of reapportionment and redistricting — and Texas stands to gain four (House) seats.”
But Texas can only get those seats, and the congressional clout that comes with it, if Texans stand up to be counted. Any conservative revolt would only reduce the representation in conservative areas of the state, such as rural Texas and the outer rings of suburbs surrounding its largest cities.
Loss of seats and money
What's more, an under-count in Texas could cost the state more than just representation.
For every Texan missed, the state will lose an estimated $12,000 over the next decade in federal funding for transportation, agriculture, health, education, and housing, said Frances Deviney, director of Texas Kids Count, a nonpartisan group in Austin.
Deviney says Texas could lose “hundreds of millions of dollars in lost opportunities” because of uncounted residents.
“We've got that hard-to-count element, along with these fringe (anti-government) groups that are advocating resistance,” she said. “They think they are hurting the government. They are really hurting themselves and their communities.”
richard.dunham@chron.com
meredith.simons@chron.com

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Health Care Reform a Crucial Issue for Coffee Community, Nation | Coffee Party

2010-04-16T19:38:00.004-06:00

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For Rwandans, the pope's apology must be unbearable | The Guardian

2010-04-16T19:37:00.002-06:00

by Martin Kimani

If sexual abuse in Ireland warrants his contrition, what contempt is shown by the Vatican's silence over its role in genocide?

If you are an Irish Catholic, and have suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a priest, you were recently read a letter from Pope Benedict that tells you: "You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry. I know that nothing can undo the wrong you have endured. Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has been violated."
For any practising Catholic in Rwanda, this letter must be unbearable. For it tells you how little you mean to the Vatican. Fifteen years ago, tens of thousands of Catholics were hacked to death inside churches. Sometimes priests and nuns led the slaughter. Sometimes they did nothing while it progressed. The incidents were not isolated. Nyamata, Ntarama, Nyarubuye, Cyahinda, Nyange, and Saint Famille were just a few of the churches that were sites of massacres.
To you, Catholic survivor of genocide in Rwanda, the Vatican says that those priests, those bishops, those nuns, those archbishops who planned and killed were not acting under the instruction of the church. But moral responsibility changes dramatically if you are a European or US Catholic. To the priests of the Irish church who abused children, the pope has this to say: "You must answer for it before almighty God and before properly constituted tribunals. You have forfeited the esteem of the people of Ireland and brought shame and dishonour upon your confreres."
The losses of Rwanda had received no such consideration. Some of the nuns and priests who have been convicted by Belgian courts and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, respectively, enjoyed refuge in Catholic churches in Europe while on the run from prosecutors. One such is Father Athanase Seromba, who led the Nyange parish massacre and was sentenced to 15 years in jail by the tribunal. In April 1994, Seromba helped lure over 2,000 desperate men, women and children to his church, where they expected safety. But their shepherd turned out to be their hunter.
One evening Seromba entered the church and carried away the chalices of communion and other clerical vestments. When a refugee begged that they be left the Eucharist to enable them to at least hold a (final) mass, the priest refused and told them that the building was no longer a church. A witness at the ICTR trial remembered an exchange in which the priest's mindset was revealed.
One of the refugees asked: "Father, can't you pray for us?" Seromba replied: "Is the God of the Tutsis still alive?" Later, he would order a bulldozer to push down the church walls on those inside and then urge militias to invade the building and finish off the survivors.
At his trial, Seromba said: "A priest I am and a priest I will remain." This, apparently, is the truth, since the Vatican has never taken back its statements defending him before his conviction.
In the last century, Catholic bishops have been deeply mired in Rwandan politics with the full knowledge of the Vatican. Take Archbishop Vincent Nsengiyumva. Until 1990, he had served as the chairman of the ruling party's central committee for almost 15 years, championing the authoritarian government of Juvenal Habyarimana, which orchestrated the murder of almost a million people. Or Archbishop André Perraudin, the most senior representative of Rome in 1950s Rwanda. It was with his collusion and mentorship that the hateful, racist ideology known as Hutu Power was launched – often by priests and seminarians in good standing with the church. One such was Rwanda's first president, Grégoire Kayibanda, a private secretary and protege of Perraudin, whose political power was unrivalled.
The support for Hutu Power was therefore not unknowing or naive. It was a strategy to maintain the church's powerful political position in a decolonising Rwanda. The violence of the 1960s led inexorably to the 1994 attempt to exterminate Tutsis. These were violent expressions of a political sphere dominated by contentions that Hutu and Tutsi were separate and opposed racial categories. This, too, is one of the legacies of the Catholic missionary, whose schools and pulpits for decades kept up a drumbeat of false race theories.
This turning away from the Rwandan victims of genocide comes at a time when the Catholic church is increasingly peopled by black and brown believers. It is difficult not to conclude the church's upper reaches are desperately holding on to a fast-vanishing racial patrimony.
Perhaps it is time Catholics forced the leaders of their church to deal with a history of institutional racism that endures, if the church is truly to live up to its fine words. Apologies are not sufficient, no matter how abject. What is demanded is an acknowledgment of the church's political power and moral culpability, with all the material and legal implications that come with it.
The silence of the Vatican is contempt. Its failure to fully examine its central place in Rwandan genocide can only mean that it is fully aware that it will not be threatened if it buries its head in the sand. While it knows if it ignores the sexual abuse of European parishioners it will not survive the next few years, it can let those African bodies remain buried, dehumanised and unexamined.
This is a good political strategy. And a moral position whose duplicity and evil has been witnessed and documented. For, it turns out, many people, scholars, governments and institutions inside and outside Rwanda are excavating their own roles in the genocide. The Vatican stands as an exception, its moral place now even lower than that of the government of France for its enduring friendship with genocidaires.

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Oklahoma Tea Party Plans To Form Armed Militia

2010-04-13T11:45:00.003-06:00

Supporters say this militia won't be like those other "militias". However, if this is enacted will the militia answer to the state or to the tea partiers? If this militia is commanded by the state then the Tea Partiers face the same State opposition they face now and the militia is a redundancy. If the Milita answers to only the tea Party groups then they are like those other "militias": nothing more than an armed insurgency group.

OKLAHOMA CITY — Frustrated by recent political setbacks, tea party leaders and some conservative members of the Oklahoma Legislature say they would like to create a new volunteer militia to help defend against what they believe are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty.

Full Story Here

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And So The Battle Still Rages

2010-04-13T11:07:00.001-06:00

The Ghost of Bobby Lee

Apr 13 2010, 9:46 AM ET

Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus
--Ralph Wiley
Ken Burns' Civil War documentary makes note of the fact that General Lee was opposed to slavery. I basically took that as true, until--in all honesty--some of my commenters informed me that it, in fact, was not. One of the saddest, and yet telling, aspects of the War, for me personally, is that on the two occasions when Confederate troops headed North, they kidnapped free blacks and sold them into slavery. Ditto for black soldiers who were captured and "lucky" enough not to be killed. Anyway, if you have a moment check out this lecture a reader was kind enough to send to me. At about the 55:00 mark, Elizabeth Brown Pryor talks about Lee's relationship to slavery, and more interestingly, how the myth that he was somehow anti-slavery came to be.

Full Story Here

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EXCLUSIVE: President Obama Slaps Sarah Palin as 'Not Much of an Expert' on Nukes - ABC News

2010-04-11T09:13:00.000-06:00

Still not sure why Sarah continues to criticize others for lack of experience in areas she has no experience in as well.

-Obama brushed off criticisms from former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin of his administration's recently announced nuclear policy by noting her lack of experience on the subject.

"I really have no response. Because last I checked, Sarah Palin's not much of an expert on nuclear issues," he said in an exclusive interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos.

EXCLUSIVE: President Obama Slaps Sarah Palin as 'Not Much of an Expert' on Nukes - ABC News

Iran Vows to Seek Nuclear Free World | Middle East | English

2010-04-11T08:51:00.002-06:00

Forgive me if I have trouble taking you seriously Mr.Ahmadinejad. Unless of course you mean a nuclear free world EXCEPT for Iran, then I get it.

FROM: Voice Of America

Iran's Foreign Ministry says Tehran will seek a world free of nuclear weapons when it holds an international nuclear summit next Saturday.

Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehman-Parast, said Wednesday he also doubts that countries participating in a nuclear summit in Washington truly intend to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

The United States will host leaders from 47 nations during a two-day nuclear summit scheduled to begin on Monday.

The following Saturday, Iran says it will host representatives from 60 countries during a two-day nuclear disarmament conference.

Friday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unveiled a new generation of domestically-built centrifuges that can enrich uranium six times faster than its older ones.

In Washington, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the United States has to conclude that Iran has "nefarious intentions" in its nuclear activities, because a peaceful nuclear program would have no need for faster centrifuges.

International leaders believe Iran is trying to secretly develop nuclear weapons. Tehran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.

This week, six world powers began negotiations on a possible new round of U.N. Security Council sanctions against Tehran for its nuclear activities. Those nations include Germany and the five permanent council members - the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China.

Iran announced its nuclear disarmament summit on April 4.

Iran Vows to Seek Nuclear Free World | Middle East | English

Tea party-backed flag won’t fly at Connecticut Capitol - BostonHerald.com

2010-04-11T08:39:00.001-06:00

So I guess a symbolic overthrow of a state government is the way the "democratic process" works for "real patriots". Honestly I did not know that you could just ask to put a flag atop a state captial. I will have to try that with a pirate flag sometime.

HARTFORD, Conn. - Police at Connecticut’s state Capitol have decided not to allow a flag adopted by tea party activists to be flown over the building.

Acting state Capitol police Chief Walter Lee says the planned Friday flag-raising ceremony had turned into a political event to promote candidates for elected office.

Tea Party activists had asked for permission to fly the Gadsden Flag atop the Capitol. Dating back to before the Revolutionary War, the flag is well known for its serpent and its warning of "Don’t Tread on Me."

Tea party-backed flag won’t fly at Connecticut Capitol - BostonHerald.com

Wait....What? McCain: "I never considered myself a maverick"

2010-04-05T14:20:00.002-06:00

A Newsweek interview quoted John McCain as saying that he never thought he was a maverick.

read full story HERE

Well at least its good to know that even John didn't believe in his own campaign hype...............

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Iran Recieved Nuclear Tech From China?

2010-04-03T22:36:00.001-06:00

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Western authorities are investigating whether an Iranian firm acquired valves and vacuum gauges used to enrich uranium through the representative of a Chinese firm, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.

Full ArticleHERE

"Beaner-Hopping," Hate, and Murder: Not In Our Town

2010-04-03T09:43:00.001-06:00

by Alex DiBranco April 02, 2010 01:26 PM (PT)

On Monday, a teenager from Long Island testified that he and a group of friends decided to go "beaner-hopping" in November 2008. “It’s when you go out and you look for a Hispanic to beat up,” Nicholas Hausch reported bluntly, as though explaining the rules for a game. They shot at one Hispanic man on his porch with a BB gun; punched, kicked, and shouted racial slurs at another man; and then attacked and stabbed to death Marcelo Lucero, a 37-year-old immigrant from Ecuador.

Full Story Here

Remembering An Inspiration

2010-04-03T09:14:00.005-06:00

Thanks tohellocitizens
for this post

OBITUARY

Jaime Escalante dies at 79; math teacher who challenged East L.A. students to 'Stand and Deliver'

He became America's most famous teacher after a 1988 movie portrayed his success at mentoring working-class pupils at Garfield High to pass a rigorous national calculus exam. He died of cancer.

Jaime Escalante "didn't just teach math. Like all great teachers, he changed lives," said actor Edward James Olmos, who portrayed Escalante in the 1988 film "Stand and Deliver." (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times / November 14, 1998)

Jaime Escalante, the charismatic former East Los Angeles high school teacher who taught the nation that inner-city students could master subjects as demanding as calculus, died Tuesday. He was 79.The subject of the 1988 film "Stand and Deliver," Escalante died at his son's home in Roseville, Calif., said actor Edward James Olmos, who portrayed the teacher in the film. Escalante had bladder cancer. "Jaime didn't just teach math. Like all great teachers, he changed lives," Olmos said earlier this month when he organized an appeal for funds to help pay Escalante's mounting medical bills.Escalante gained national prominence in the aftermath of a 1982 scandal surrounding 14 of his Garfield High School students who passed the Advanced Placement calculus exam only to be accused later of cheating. The story of their eventual triumph -- and of Escalante's battle to raise standards at a struggling campus of working-class, largely Mexican American students -- became the subject of the movie, which turned the balding, middle-aged Bolivian immigrant into the most famous teacher in America. Passionate teacherEscalante was a maverick who did not get along with many of his public school colleagues, but he mesmerized students with his entertaining style and deep understanding of math. Educators came from around the country to observe him at Garfield, which built one of the largest and most successful Advanced Placement programs in the nation. "Jaime Escalante has left a deep and enduring legacy in the struggle for academic equity in American education," said Gaston Caperton, former West Virginia governor and president of the College Board, which sponsors the Scholastic Assessment Test and the Advanced Placement exams. "His passionate belief [was] that all students, when properly prepared and motivated, can succeed at academically demanding course work, no matter what their racial, social or economic background. Because of him, educators everywhere have been forced to revise long-held notions of who can succeed." Escalante's rise came during an era decried by experts as one of alarming mediocrity in the nation's schools. He pushed for tougher standards and accountability for students and educators, often irritating colleagues and parents along the way with his brusque manner and uncompromising stands. He was called a traitor for his opposition to bilingual education. He said the hate mail he received for championing Proposition 227, the successful 1998 ballot measure to dismantle bilingual programs in California, was a factor in his decision to retire that year after leaving Garfield and teaching at Hiram Johnson High School in Sacramento for seven years. He moved back to Bolivia, where he propelled himself into a classroom again, apparently intent on fulfilling a vow to die doing what he knew best -- teach. But he returned frequently to the United States to speak to education groups and continued to ally himself with conservative politics. He considered becoming an education advisor to President George W. Bush, and in 2003 signed on as an education consultant for Arnold Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial campaign in California. Escalante was born Dec. 31, 1930, in La Paz, Bolivia, and was raised by his mother after his parents, both schoolteachers, split when he was about 9. He attended a well-regarded Jesuit high school, San Calixto, where his quick mind and penchant for mischief often got him into trouble. After high school, he served in the army during a short-lived Bolivian rebellion. Although he had toyed with the idea of attending engineering school in Argentina, he wound up enrolling at the Bolivian state teachers college, Normal Superior. Before he graduated, he was teaching at three top-rated Bolivian schools. He also married Fabiola Tapia, a fellow student at the college. At his wife's urging, Escalante gave up his teaching posts for the promise of a brighter future in the United States for their firstborn, Jaime Jr. (A second son, Fernando, would follow.) With $3,000 in his pocket and little more than "yes" and "no" in his English vocabulary, Escalante flew alone to Los Angeles on Christmas Eve 1963. He was 33. His wife and son later joined him in Pasadena, where his first job was mopping floors in a coffee shop across the street from Pasadena City College, where he enrolled in English classes. Within a few months, he was promoted to cook, slinging burgers by day and studying for an associate's degree in math and physics by night. That led to a better-paying job as a technician at a Pasadena electronics company, where he became a prized employee. But the classroom still beckoned to the teacher inside him. He earned a scholarship to Cal State Los Angeles to pursue a teaching credential. In the fall of 1974, when he was 43, he took a pay cut to begin teaching at Garfield High at a salary of $13,000. "My friends said, 'Jaime, you're crazy.' But I wanted to work with young people," he told The Times. "That's more rewarding for me than the money."When he arrived at the school, he was dismayed to learn he had been assigned to teach the lowest level of math. He grew unhappier still when he discovered how watered-down the math textbooks were -- on a par with fifth-grade work in Bolivia. Faced with unruly students, he began to wish for his old job back. Motivating studentsBut Escalante stayed, soon developing a reputation for turning around hard-to-motivate students. By 1978, he had 14 students enrolled in his first AP calculus class. Of the five who survived his stiff homework and attendance demands, only two earned passing scores on the exam. But in 1980, seven of nine students passed the exam; in 1981, 14 of 15 passed.In 1982, he had 18 students to prepare for the academic challenge of their young lives.At his insistence, they studied before school, after school and on Saturdays, with Escalante as coach and cheerleader. Some of them lacked supportive parents, who needed their teenagers to work to help pay bills. Other students had to be persuaded to spend less time on the school band or in athletics. Yet all gradually formed an attachment to calculus and to "Kimo," their nickname for Escalante, inspired by Tonto's nickname for the Lone Ranger, Kemo Sabe. Escalante was hospitalized twice in the months leading up to the AP exam. He had a heart attack while teaching night school but ignored doctors' orders to rest and was back at Garfield the next day.Then he disappeared one weekend to have his gallbladder removed. As Washington Post reporter Jay Mathews recounted in his 1988 book, "Escalante: The Best Teacher in America," the hard-driving teacher turned the health problem into another weapon in his bag of tricks. "You burros give me a heart attack," he repeatedly told his students when he returned. "But I come back! I'm still the champ." The guilt-making mantra was effective. One student said, "If Kimo can do it, we can do it. If he wants to teach us that bad, we can learn."The Advanced Placement program qualifies students for college credit if they pass the exam with a score of 3 or higher. For many years it was a tool of the elite; the calculus exam, for example, was taken by only about 3% of American high school math students when Escalante revived the program at Garfield in the late 1970s. In 1982, a record 69 Garfield students were taking AP exams in various subjects, including Spanish and history. Escalante's calculus students took their exam in May under the watchful eye of the school's head counselor. The results, released over the summer, were stunning: All 18 of his students passed, with seven earning the highest score of 5. But the good news quickly turned bad.Testing controversyThe Educational Testing Service, which administers the exam, said it had found suspicious similarities in the solutions given on 14 exams. It invalidated those scores. The action angered the students, who thought the service would not have questioned their scores if they were white. But this was Garfield, a school made up primarily of lower-income Mexican Americans that only a few years earlier had nearly lost its accreditation. "There's a tremendous amount of feeling that the Hispanic is incapable of handling higher math and science," Escalante reflected later in an interview with Newsday. He, like many in the Garfield community, feared the students were victims of a racist attack, a charge that Educational Testing Service strongly denied. Two of the students told Mathews of the Washington Post that some cheating had occurred, but they later recanted their confessions. Vindication came in a retest. Of the 14 accused of wrongdoing, 12 took the exam again and passed.After that, the numbers of Garfield students taking calculus and other Advanced Placement classes soared. By 1987, only four high schools in the country had more students taking and passing the AP calculus exam than Garfield. Escalante's dramatic success raised public consciousness of what it took to be not just a good teacher but a great one. One of the most astute analyses of his classroom style came from the actor who shadowed him for days before portraying him in "Stand and Deliver." "He's the most stylized man I've ever come across," Olmos, who received an Oscar nomination for his performance, told the New York Times in 1988. "He had three basic personalities -- teacher, father-friend and street-gang equal -- and he would juggle them, shift in an instant. . . . He's one of the greatest calculated entertainers." Ultimate performerEscalante was the ultimate performer in class, cracking jokes, rendering impressions and using all sorts of props -- from basketballs and wind-up toys to meat cleavers and space-alien dolls -- to explain complex mathematical concepts. Sports analogies abounded. A perfect parabola, for instance, was like a sky-hook by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. "Calculus Does Not Have To Be Made Easy -- It Is Easy Already," read a banner Escalante kept in his classroom. In 1991, he packed up his bag of tricks and quit Garfield, saying he was fed up with faculty politics and petty jealousies.He headed to Hiram Johnson High with the intention of testing his methods in a new environment. But in seven years there, he never had more than about 14 calculus students a year and a 75% pass rate, a record he blamed on administrative turnover and cultural differences.At Garfield, where the pass rate was above 90% when he left, his success was aided by a supportive principal, Henry Gradillas, and talented colleagues, including award-winning calculus teacher Ben Jimenez. Return to BoliviaThirty-five years after leaving Bolivia for his journey into teaching fame, Escalante went home.He settled with his wife in her hometown of Cochabamba and became a part-time mathematics professor at the Universidad del Valle, and was still teaching calculus in Bolivia in 2008. He returned to the United States frequently to visit his son and give motivational speeches.He made his last trip to the U.S. to seek treatment for the cancer that had left him unable to walk or speak above a whisper. This month, as he gave himself over to a Reno clinic's regimen of pills, teas and ointments, many of his former students gathered at Garfield to raise money. Unpopular with fellow teachers, he won few major teaching awards in the United States. He liked to be judged by his results, a concept still resisted by the majority of his profession.As he faced death, it was still the results that mattered to him -- the young minds he held captive three decades ago who today are engineers, lawyers, doctors, teachers and administrators. "I had many opportunities in this country, but the best I found in East L.A.," he said in one of his last interviews. "I am proudest of my brilliant students."Escalante is survived by his wife, his sons and six grandchildren. elaine.woo@latimes.comTimes staff writer Robert J. Lopez contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

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We want freedom of speech But we all talkin' at the same time We say we want peace But nobody wants to change their own mind. -Michael Franti

2010-04-03T09:01:00.001-06:00

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Extremist group demands governors resign, FBI says

2010-04-02T22:06:00.002-06:00

SO after months of inflammatory remarks it appears that the chickens have come home to roost. Except now republicans and (in Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbonsow case) tea party republicans are no longer immune.

By the CNN Wires Staff

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

* NEW: Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Texas among state receiving letters

* Domestic extremist group demands 30-plus governors resign in letters, authorities say

* Letters reportedly tell governors to vacate posts within three days

* Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons' office increases security measures at Capitol after receiving letters

Full Story

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Officials worry anger at D.C. is behind low Texas census response | Houston Chronicle

2010-04-02T11:43:00.001-06:00

WASHINGTON — Texas is counting on the 2010 Census to deliver four new congressional districts, four new Electoral College votes in presidential elections, and millions of dollars in additional federal aid. But, as some elected officials are starting to worry, Uncle Sam can't deliver anything to the rapidly growing Sun Belt state unless Texas residents deliver their forms back to the government.

As of Friday afternoon, only 27 percent of Texas households had filled in and returned their census forms — well below the national average of 34 percent — according to computer data from the U.S. Census Bureau. In Harris County, the response rate is 23 percent. Houston's returns are running at 21 percent.

Contrary to historical trends, some of the toughest challenges facing the agency responsible for measuring the nation's population are not from counting the traditionally undercounted groups such as African-Americans and Latinos. Instead, a new and growing threat to an accurate national head count is coming from anti-government conservatives who may not fill out their forms to protest against “Big Brother” in Washington.

“There's a general distrust of the federal government at every level, starting with Congress and the president, all the way down to executive branch agencies,” says Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Midland.

Low return rates

Polling by the Pew Research Center finds Democrats are more likely than other Americans to view the census as “very important” to the country. Seventy-six percent of Democrats call this year's count very important, compared with 61 percent of Republicans and independents.

In Texas, some of the counties with the lowest census return rates are among the state's most Republican, including Briscoe County in the Panhandle, 8 percent; King County, near Lubbock, 5 percent; Culberson County, near El Paso, 11 percent; and Newton County, in deep East Texas, 18 percent. Most other counties near the bottom of the list are heavily Hispanic counties along the Texas-Mexico border.

There is a reason for the enthusiasm gap on the census: A number of prominent conservative and libertarian Republicans have been blasting the census for months.

Criticism from Ron Paul

Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., began the barrage last year when she asserted — incorrectly — that the information reported by Americans could be used for nefarious governmental ends, such as imprisonment in internment camps.

Earlier this month, Texas Rep. Ron Paul voted against a congressional resolution asking Americans to participate in the census.

“The invasive nature of the current census raises serious questions about how and why government will use the collected information,” the Lake Jackson Republican recently said. “It also demonstrates how the federal bureaucracy consistently encourages citizens to think of themselves in terms of groups, rather than as individual Americans. ”

Houston-area GOP lawmakers say anti-census feelings run deep among their constituents.

“People are concerned about the apparent intrusive nature of the census,” said Rep. Ted Poe, R-Humble. “People are very concerned that the government is going too far.”

Still, Poe said, he tells his concerned constituents that they should answer the census because “it's the law.”

What's more, he added, “it's very important for people to fill out the census because of reapportionment and redistricting — and Texas stands to gain four (House) seats.”

But Texas can only get those seats, and the congressional clout that comes with it, if Texans stand up to be counted. Any conservative revolt would only reduce the representation in conservative areas of the state, such as rural Texas and the outer rings of suburbs surrounding its largest cities.

Loss of seats and money

What's more, an under-count in Texas could cost the state more than just representation.

For every Texan missed, the state will lose an estimated $12,000 over the next decade in federal funding for transportation, agriculture, health, education, and housing, said Frances Deviney, director of Texas Kids Count, a nonpartisan group in Austin.

Deviney says Texas could lose “hundreds of millions of dollars in lost opportunities” because of uncounted residents.

“We've got that hard-to-count element, along with these fringe (anti-government) groups that are advocating resistance,” she said. “They think they are hurting the government. They are really hurting themselves and their communities.”

richard.dunham@chron.com
meredith.simons@chron.com

via chron.com

Florida doctor tells Obama health care supporters to go elsewhere

2010-04-02T11:33:00.000-06:00

By Stephen Hudak, Orlando Sentinel
8:22 a.m. EDT, April 2, 2010

MOUNT DORA — A doctor who considers the national health-care overhaul to be bad medicine for the country posted a sign on his office door telling patients who voted for President Barack Obama to seek care "elsewhere."
"I'm not turning anybody away — that would be unethical," Dr. Jack Cassell, 56, a Mount Dora urologist and a registered Republican opposed to the health plan, told the Orlando Sentinel on Thursday. "But if they read the sign and turn the other way, so be it."

The sign reads: "If you voted for Obama … seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your healthcare begin right now, not in four years."

Estella Chatman, 67, of Eustis, whose daughter snapped a photo of the typewritten sign, sent the picture to U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, the Orlando Democrat who riled Republicans last year when he characterized the GOP's idea of health care as, "If you get sick, America … Die quickly."

Chatman said she heard about the sign from a friend referred to Cassell after his physician recently died. She said her friend did not want to speak to a reporter but was dismayed by Cassell's sign.

"He's going to find another doctor," she said.

Cassell may be walking a thin line between his right to free speech and his professional obligation, said William Allen, professor of bioethics, law and medical professionalism at the University of Florida's College of Medicine.

Allen said doctors cannot refuse patients on the basis of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation or disability, but political preference is not one of the legally protected categories specified in civil-rights law. By insisting he does not quiz his patients about their politics and has not turned away patients based on their vote, the doctor is "trying to hold onto the nub of his ethical obligation," Allen said.

"But this is pushing the limit," he said.

Cassell, who has practiced medicine in GOP-dominated Lake County since 1988, said he doesn't quiz his patients about their politics, but he also won't hide his disdain for the bill Obama signed and the lawmakers who passed it.

In his waiting room, Cassell also has provided his patients with photocopies of a health-care timeline produced by Republican leaders that outlines "major provisions" in the health-care package. The doctor put a sign above the stack of copies that reads: "This is what the morons in Washington have done to your health care. Take one, read it and vote out anyone who voted for it."

Cassell, whose lawyer wife, Leslie Campione, has declared herself a Republican candidate for Lake County commissioner, said three patients have complained, but most have been "overwhelmingly supportive" of his position.

"They know it's not good for them," he said.

Cassell, who previously served as chief of surgery at Florida Hospital Waterman in Tavares, said a patient's politics would not affect his care for them, although he said he would prefer not to treat people who support the president.

"I can at least make a point," he said.

The notice on Cassell's office door could cause some patients to question his judgment or fret about the care they might receive if they don't share his political views, Allen said. He said doctors are wise to avoid public expressions that can affect the physician-patient relationship.

Erin VanSickle, spokeswoman for the Florida Medical Association, would not comment specifically.

But she noted in an e-mail to the Sentinel that "physicians are extended the same rights to free speech as every other citizen in the United States."

The outspoken Grayson described Cassell's sign as "ridiculous."

"I'm disgusted," he said. "Maybe he thinks the Hippocratic Oath says, ‘Do no good.' If this is the face of the right wing in America, it's the face of cruelty. … Why don't they change the name of the Republican Party to the Sore Loser Party?"

Stephen Hudak can be reached at shudak@orlandosentinel.com or 352-742-5930.

via orlandosentinel.com

Quote of the week

2007-05-01T18:14:00.000-06:00

"There was not anybody that I can remember that was black," she said. "The white people have theirs, and the black people have theirs. It's nothing racial at all."

This is a quote from a student at Turner County High School about the tradition of holding seperate proms for black and white students. The students just voted to have an integrated prom at the school. The entire article can be found at http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/23/turner.prom/index.html

HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION: PROS AND CONS

2007-04-19T18:36:00.004-06:00

Image via WikipediaHumanitarian intervention is a label that has been used to describe everything from simple economic aid to military intervention. Just as there are a myriad of ways to intervene, there is also a myriad of actors who do the intervening. However, the question remains; is humanitarian intervention a good idea? Moreover, if so, what are the right ways of doing it?

First, when discussing humanitarian intervention, it is important to delineate between the very different types of humanitarian intervention. The major types include diplomatic, economic relief/sanction, reconstruction/development, and military intervention. These can break down into a number of categories based on the nature of the support (negative or positive) and the type of actor involved (outside governments, IGOs, NGOs, and outside military forces). America has in one way or another been involved in all of these types of intervention in some degree.
Humanitarian intervention, just as any form of intervention, often brings with it many pros and cons. There are questions of intent, cost, and the ever-present issue of sovereignty. Despite these, there is a very basic ideal that creates the basis for humanitarian efforts, the belief that life should be respected and protected. This belief is not always in the more upfront calculations of when and how an intervention should take place, but nonetheless it is still there in an underlying form.

THE PROS
Obviously, the major positive aspect to humanitarian intervention is that it provides protection and support to those in dire need. The military roles of peacekeeper, enforcer, or protector are the most obvious examples of this. Military intervention in this form is often the most salient in continued conflict because it provides a way to immediately stop hostility and start the de-escalation process. However, there is also the issue of economic aid and structural support that cannot be overlooked. These efforts can provide much needed necessities to war torn areas as well as help rebuild the communities and institutions destroyed by conflict. This type of support is also paramount when dealing with natural disasters and other emergency situations that do not necessarily involve conflict such as epidemics, famines, and extreme poverty. Finally, the use of economic threats such as sanctions can help move conflicting parties to settlement or force parties to honor preexisting agreements.

THE CONS
Though the “good” intentions of humanitarian intervention cannot be denied, there are problems that arise, especially when you look at how decisions to intervene are made, and the end effectiveness of the intervention. First, politics cannot be ignored even in noble actions. Governments especially do not and cannot “just do the right thing”. The obvious discrepancies in when and where interventions take place is a perfect example. More often than not, the entire question of humanitarian intervention by actors such as governments or IGOs is based on a very basic principle: the cost benefit analysis. If the costs are too high, be it internationally, domestically, economically, or diplomatically, then many actors will not get involved. Conversely, if there is some benefit other than simple morality, then actors especially governments, are more likely to get involved. This creates a system in which your right to live or your right to deny another’s right to live is based on who your friends are and what you have to offer. The current U.S. war on terrorism is a good example of this. Often in the name of keeping good relations with countries who support our effort against terrorism the United States ignores those countries violations of human rights and in the case of Sudan, state sponsored genocide.
Another important factor revolves around both the effectiveness of the ways and means of intervention and the discrepancy between the intent and outcome. The use of sticks such as sanctions or embargos can often have reverse consequences in the overall situation. Often, in cases of violent regimes, sanctions only help fortify the regimes hold on the country and cause more suffering to those in need. One example is that of Iraq. The sanctions placed on Iraq did not substantially weaken Saddam Hussein, but instead made resources much more scarce for the common people. Conversely, blind economic aid can often end up in the wrong hands or help to destabilize the internal economies that are needed for stabilization or reconstruction. Military intervention can also fall into this category as well. Often the factor of whose military is involved can determine the effectiveness of outcome. If the wrong military actor intervenes (e.g. one who is not trusted by either side), the military can be drawn into the conflict as a participant and not an intervener. Though the true reasons behind it are questionable, the current United States intervention in Iraq can be used as an example. The Iraq example also brings up another problem that has recently come to the forefront: invasion and military regime change as intervention. One of the labels put on the second Iraq war was that of liberation. The argument holds that the invasion was meant to topple a vicious oppressive dictator and bring democracy to Iraq. The failure to create a better outcome for the Iraqi people however leaves questions of whether this could be called humanitarian or not. If the intent was truly noble, again that is a big “if”, then this is a perfect example of the means and the outcome of intervention not matching the intent. Instead of liberation, the country became destabilized to the point of civil war.
The intricacy of factors in humanitarian intervention creates a situation that should not be taken lightly. Often even the best of intentions and lead to the worst of consequences. The history of the United States involvement or non-involvement in humanitarian interventions runs the entire gamut of possible interactions. The U.S. has been involved in both successful as well as disastrous situations. The U.S. has also failed to intervene when it should have. The question is not whether the U.S. should get involved but why and how they do get involved. Humanitarian intervention is messy. It can lead to many unforeseen consequences but it can also make a positive contribution to the international community. Furthermore, as the world becomes interdependent, it becomes even more important for the international community to support each other if only for the cause of self-preservation. However, if we are to truly base it in the ideal of the “sanctity of life” or “doing the right thing” humanitarian intervention must be undertaken with the understanding that the how and when should not be based on expediency or cost. Often the right thing to do is costly and undesirable, but if intervention is to be truly humanitarian, then it must be done. Furthermore, intervention must not come from the position of an older, wiser, benefactor, but instead a neighbor who helps to create a basis in which those in crises can find their own way out. The essence of humanitarian intervention is best expressed in an ancient saying “always strive to do good but if you can’t do good, at least do no harm”. It remains to be seen if we as an international community are up to the task.

The Inconvenient Tree-Huggers are our Friends

2007-02-22T13:26:00.000-07:00

Why is it that whenever arguments are made for global warming the person making the argument is labeled as some radical left-wing tree-hugger? Its because they are talking from a perspective that is totally foriegn to most right-wingers. Well, in response to this, I would like to put the issues in a frame in which right-wingers can understand.
First, its a matter of being patriotic. Cutting our gasoline dependancy through alternative fuels, reduction of consumption, or renewable energy not only makes the owls happy (see George Bush Sr.) it makes the terrorists unhappy. Cutting oil dependancy is a direct jab at Osama Bin Laden and all those other terrorists who hate us for our freedom.
Second, if the enviroment in the arctic north continues to deteriorate, then there won't be much habitat left for the baby seals we all love to club. That would be a travesty in an of itself.
Third, if arctic and antarctic glaciers melt, sea levels will rise dramatically. This would leave much of Florida underwater, which could cause so many problems for ol' Jeb that he might not have time to fix the next election. That would definetely be bad. Furthermore, and perhaps even more frightening, San Francisco would also be flooded. This means that middle America (the home of the Patriotic and God Fearing), may potentially see a refugee influx of those frisbee-golf playing hippies and those family destroying gay folk. These people could infect the youth of the Mid-West with immorality and free-thinking even faster than Will and Grace reruns.
And finally, the premature thawing of the permafrost in Alaska, due to global warming, makes trucking routes only passable for about 75 days a year. Now if thats the case and its getting worse every year, how are we going to get enough trucks through to build and sustain that whole arctic drilling project we all know will save us from the terrorists?
So you see, this really is a Bi-partisan matter. One of those rare moments were both sides can get something they want. So next time you go to Wal-Mart to get some more rifle rounds, be sure to pick up some energy saving light bulbs. If you don't the terrorists will win, gay immorality will run rampant, and the baby seals will all be gone.

Self Evident

2007-01-24T05:34:00.000-07:00

As we come closer to another invasion of yet another country in the "war on terrorism", a poem by Ani Difranco comes to mind. It was written in 2001 after/about September 11th. I think it still holds true today.

Self Evident

by: Ani Difranco

yes,
us people are just poems
we're 90% metaphor
with a leanness of meaning
approaching hyper-distillation
and once upon a time
we were moonshine
rushing down the throat of a giraffe
yes, rushing down the long hallway
despite what the p.a. announcement says
yes, rushing down the long stairs
with the whiskey of eternity
fermented and distilled
to eighteen minutes
burning down our throats
down the hall
down the stairs
in a building so tall
that it will always be there
yes, it's part of a pair
there on the bow of noah's ark
the most prestigious couple
just kickin back parked
against a perfectly blue sky
on a morning beatific
in its indian summer breeze
on the day that america fell to its knees
after strutting around for a century
without saying thank you
or please
and the shock was subsonic
and the smoke was deafening
between the setup and the punch line
cuz we were all on time for work that day
we all boarded that plane for to fly
and then while the fires were raging
we all climbed up on the windowsill
and then we all held hands
and jumped into the sky
and every borough looked up when it heard the first blast
and then every dumb action movie was summarily surpassed
and the exodus uptown by foot and motorcar
looked more like war than anything i've seen so far
so far
so far
so fierce and ingenious
a poetic specter so far gone
that every jackass newscaster was struck dumb and stumbling
over 'oh my god' and 'this is unbelievable' and on and on
and i'll tell you what, while we're at it
you can keep the pentagon
keep the propaganda
keep each and every tv
that's been trying to convince me
to participate
in some prep school punk's plan to perpetuate retribution
perpetuate retribution
even as the blue toxic smoke of our lesson in retribution
is still hanging in the air
and there's ash on our shoes
and there's ash in our hair
and there's a fine silt on every mantle
from hell's kitchen to brooklyn
and the streets are full of stories
sudden twists and near misses
and soon every open bar is crammed to the rafters
with tales of narrowly averted disasters
and the whiskey is flowin
like never before
as all over the country folks just shake their heads
and pour

so here's a toast to all the folks who live in palestine
afghanistan
iraq
el salvador
here's a toast to the folks living on the pine ridge reservation
under the stone cold gaze of mt. rushmore
here's a toast to all those nurses and doctors
who daily provide women with a choice
who stand down a threat the size of oklahoma city
just to listen to a young woman's voice
here's a toast to all the folks on death row right now
awaiting the executioner's guillotine
who are shackled there with dread and can only escape into their heads
to find peace in the form of a dream
cuz take away our playstations
and we are a third world nation
under the thumb of some blue blood royal son
who stole the oval office and that phony election
i mean
it don't take a weatherman
to look around and see the weather
jeb said he'd deliver florida, folks
and boy did he ever
and we hold these truths to be self evident:
#1 george w. bush is not president
#2 america is not a true democracy
#3 the media is not fooling me

cuz i am a poem heeding hyper-distillation
i've got no room for a lie so verbose
i'm looking out over my whole human family
and i'm raising my glass in a toast
here's to our last drink of fossil fuels
let us vow to get off of this sauce
shoo away the swarms of commuter planes
and find that train ticket we lost
cuz once upon a time the line followed the river
and peeked into all the backyards
and the laundry was waving
the graffiti was teasing us from brick walls and bridges
we were rolling over ridges
through valleys
under stars
i dream of touring like duke ellington
in my own railroad car
i dream of waiting on the tall blonde wooden benches
in a grand station aglow with grace
and then standing out on the platform
and feeling the air on my face
give back the night its distant whistle
give the darkness back its soul
give the big oil companies the finger finally
and relearn how to rock-n-roll
yes,
the lessons are all around us
and a change is waiting there
so it's time to pick through the rubble,
clean the streets
and clear the air
get our government to pull its big dick out of the sand
of someone else's desert
put it back in its pants
and quit the hypocritical chants
of freedom forever
cuz when one lone phone rang
in two thousand and one
at ten after nine
on nine one one
which is the number we all called
when that lone phone rang right off the wall
right off our desk
and down the long hall
down the long stairs
in a building so tall
that the whole world turned
just to watch it fall
and while we're at it
remember the first time around?
the bomb?
the ryder truck?
the parking garage?
the princess that didn't even feel the pea?
remember joking around in our apartment on avenue D?
can you imagine how many paper coffee cups would have to change their design
following a fantastical reversal of the new york skyline?!
it was a joke, of course
it was a joke
at the time
and that was just a few years ago
so let the record show
that the FBI was all over that case
that the plot was obvious
and in everybody's face
and scoping that scene
religiously
the CIA
or is it KGB?
committing countless crimes against humanity
with this kind of eventuality
as its excuse for abuse after expensive abuse
and it didn't have a clue
look, another window to see through
way up here on the 104th floor
look another key
another door
10% literal 90% metaphor
3000 some poems disguised as people
on an almost too perfect day
should be more than pawns in some asshole's passion play
so now it's your job
and it's my job
to make it that way
to make sure they didn't die in vain
sshhhhhh....
baby listen

hear the train?

MLK and the Iraq War

2007-01-15T08:29:00.000-07:00

For Martin Luther King Jr's birthday, I have posted a part of Dr. King's speach at the APA's Annual Convention in Washington, D.C. in 1967. Though it is about the Vietnam War, try replacing "Vietnam" with "Iraq" as well as "Taiwan, Thailand and South Korea" with "England" as you read and you can see how things haven't changed much.

On Vietnam

Here again, we are dealing with a controversial issue. But I am convinced that the war in Vietnam has played havoc with our domestic destinies. The bombs that fall in Vietnam explode at home. It does not take much to see what great damage this war has done to the image of our nation. It has left our country politically and morally isolated in the world, where our only friends happen to be puppet nations like Taiwan, Thailand and South Korea. The major allies in the world that have been with us in war and peace are not with us in this war. As a result we find ourselves socially and politically isolated.

The war in Vietnam has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has seriously impaired the United Nations. It has exacerbated the hatreds between continents, and worse still, between races. It has frustrated our development at home by telling our underprivileged citizens that we place insatiable military demands above their most critical needs. It has greatly contributed to the forces of reaction in America, and strengthened the military-industrial complex, against which even President Eisenhower solemnly warned us. It has practically destroyed Vietnam, and left thousands of American and Vietnamese youth maimed and mutilated. And it has exposed the whole world to the risk of nuclear warfare.

As I looked at what this war was doing to our nation, and to the domestic situation and to the Civil Rights movement, I found it necessary to speak vigorously out against it. My speaking out against the war has not gone without criticisms. There are those who tell me that I should stick with civil rights, and stay in my place. I can only respond that I have fought too hard and long to end segregated public accommodations to segregate my own moral concerns. It is my deep conviction that justice is indivisible, that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. For those who tell me I am hurting the Civil Rights movement, and ask, "Don't you think that in order to be respected, and in order to regain support, you must stop talking against the war?" I can only say that I am not a consensus leader. I do not seek to determine what is right and wrong by taking a Gallop Poll to determine majority opinion. And it is again my deep conviction that ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher of consensus, but a molder of consensus. On some positions cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe?!" Expediency asks the question, "Is it politic?" Vanity asks the question, "Is it popular?" But conscience must ask the question, "Is it right?!" And there comes a time when one must take a stand that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular. But one must take it because it is right. And that is where I find myself today.

Enemies

2006-12-09T12:29:00.000-07:00

"Your Enemy is your best friend, only an enemy truly gives you the chance to become a better human being." This is very insightfull if you think about it. Only an enemy can give you an opportunity to act in a truly compassionate, patient, and understanding way. Its easy to be nice to friends because well, they're your friends. It is only interaction with an enemy that allows you to act in a totally selfless way. A way that is void of any sentimentality, dependance, or fond emotional ties. It is easier to forgive a friend or family member than someone you truly dislike or fear. Enemies give us a chance to truly test our mettle as human beings. Therefore thank your enemies, they can give you the key to growing into the person you want to be.

New hope in the Middle East?

2006-11-02T12:32:00.000-07:00

November 1st Ahmed Yousef, an advisor to the Hamas Palestinian Prime minister, submitted a statement in the New York Times proposing a Hudna between the Palestinians and Israel.
(http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/opinion/01yousef.html)

Traditionally, Hudnas are a type of ten year cease fire in which both sides are obliged to negotiate peace. The article is very straight forward and seems to be sincere, as Yousef says, "When Hamas gives its word to an international agreement, it does so in the name of God and will therefore keep its word. Hamas has honored its previous cease-fires, as Israelis grudgingly note with the oft-heard words, “At least with Hamas they mean what they say.” Is Hamas sincere? Will Israel accept? Only time will tell.

Violence in the Modern Moral Order

2006-10-19T00:10:00.002-06:00

by Dennis Barbour

The question of violence in our modern moral order is a complicated one. We live in a society in which at the societal level, abhors violence in some cases but at the same time allows for and to some extent requires violence in others. This double standard can also be seen in the type of violence that our society hopes to confront. Physical violence, at least within the society, is considered unlawful yet when questions of structural violence are raised, a deaf ear is often turned to it. It is this type of mentality that has created a situation where violence in all its forms has become a kind of trade off. We have created structures and ideology meant to curb certain types of violence while simply ignoring the other types of violence they may incur. In the search for security from physical violence, we have ignored the fact that by doing so we have perpetuated the structural violence that often creates physical violence. A disconnection from those ideals that inform our modern moral order has occurred in which the ideal is replaced by an imperfect expression of it. This leads to a modern order that does not succeed in providing solace from a violent world.

Charles Taylor has shown in the history that has led up to this modern moral order, that it was created out of a need to stop physical violence. At the time, this took the form of the wars of religion and the wars of feudal nobility. The people saw the doctrine of force that informed peoples and nations on how to interact, as a threat to the existence of all involved. This laid the groundwork for the emergence of courtesy, civility and a weakened form of hierarchy that could to some extent, be malleable enough to confine conflict to the level of diplomacy and debate, at least most of the time. These new ideas however, where mainly left within the sphere of nobility, leaving the plight of the common people, and the structural violence they experienced, untouched. Later, during the enlightenment, these issues would be addressed but in such a way that ignored the real problem. The hierarchy, which was seen as the cause of oppression and violence, was replaced by a society of ‘equals” who no longer sought to fulfill their purpose through normative service to their society, but through profitable exchange. This was believed to help restrain violence by elevating the need to sustain an individual’s level in society by force, because each persons worth to society was the same. In essence, the individual no longer needed to define themselves by their service to society or common good; therefore, they did not have to conform to the oppression of the existing structure of society. Society was then no longer the master of the individual; instead, society was the slave to the individual. This can be seen in the evolution of the social contract which is based on the idea that individuals only participate in society to the extent that it can benefit there own ends as an individual.
This type of understanding however required that the social imaginary must be removed from the preexisting ideology. This involved removing the individual from nature. The hierarchical structure was validated by the belief that it was part of a natural order of things that involved not only humankind but all life. Therefore the first way to rebuke the hierarchies claim to rule would be by showing the individual to be outside the natural order or nature. The growing influence of technology and science was a perfect tool for this because they are both based on understanding the natural world and subduing it to the will of humankind. This can bee seen even today in “modern science and technology’s domination and objectification of nature as the “other””. Though this view worked very well in challenging the power of the hierarchy, it attacked something that in itself was not the problem. Nature is an important part of our human existence. We are symbiotically tied to natural order. Unfortunately, this order was perverted to protect a particular ideology, and when this ideology was perceived as dangerous, so was nature. Likewise, to make what Taylor calls the “disembedding" possible, the good that the hierarchy was perceived to provide must be discredited. The particular good that was targeted was the idea of virtue.

The pre-modern order revolved around society providing the means for the individual to strive for a common good or truth. This truth or virtue was something that was not naturally bestowed on individuals but must instead be attained. The hierarchy set itself in the position as the ones who could inform the people how this was possible. How the hierarchy instigated this was the true problem, however, it again was not truly confronted. As with the case of nature, this idea of a common good was attacked instead of the hierarchy’s ability to provide it. This involved the lowering of what is to be striven for to that which all individuals already inherently have and understand, namely the need for survival. This again can be seen in our modern order by the common good being based on the procurement of the means for survival.The force that influenced violence and war in the past was based on competition for respect and power. This was ignored in the changes that occurred in the time of courtesy and later during the enlightenment. Instead, what was created was a system that kept the underlying structure and simply converted it to a less outwardly violent form. This form was found in the idea of economy.
The idea of economy made it possible to suggest a model of society based on mutual exchange rather than a hierarchical order. Economic activity was seen as a productive, ordered, and peaceful activity, therefore, a society based on economic exchange would adhere to these same principles. The individual under this idea was seen as responsible for providing mutual benefit for the others in society. Later, in the eighteenth century these ideas would modify to provide for a whole framework of how human life was designed for mutual benefit. This came in the form of what Taylor calls “invisible hand” factors . These factors can be described as inherent modes of living that automatically provides for mutual benefit in a society that uses them. Adam Smith provides one of the most famous examples of these mechanisms, “whereby our search for our own individual prosperity redounds to the general welfare”. The major idea however is that the moral order is one of “good engineering design in which efficient causation plays the crucial role”. The role to be played then in the modern idea of mutual exchange became that of self-preservation. As long as you provided for your own existence, then this would provide the resources for all to provide for their own existence. The problem is that this idea removed the individual away from society even further. A member of society, in order to be a member of society, does not need to interact with other members at any level except to that which would secure their own ends. Furthermore, this mechanism of the “invisible hand” did not appear to work to the extent needed to provide for all of society. What has been painfully realized in our modern era is that what was considered the mode of self-preservation could not truly provide for complete security. There always seems to be more that can be done to secure ones survival because total escape from death is impossible. This then leads to a constant need for progress and consumption. The resources for this however are limited and in a society that calls for each to provide for themselves, this means there will be conflict. The original ideals of mutual exchange that this structure was formed on are forgotten and instead are replaced and an almost Hobbesian state of nature takes its place. The outward expression (self-preservation) of an ideal (mutual exchange) replaces the ideal, and leads to structural an overt violence not social harmony.

The structure of the modern industrial society as a model of constant growth is a perfect example. This model is based on the “assumption that there are no limits to our planets resources, no limits to technological progress, no limits to space, to growth”. The truth is that resources are limited so what then occurs is the exploitation and oppression of others for their resources. This cannot only be applied to corporate entities but also to the sphere of the individual. Economic exchange also provided the standpoint in which the new ideology of freedom from nature and common good based on survival could be realized. However, because these new ideas villanized nature and the search for a virtuous life, they completely disregard the true problem. Connection to nature and a striving for a common good outside the individual are not the problem. They are in fact ideals that are paramount to human unity. The problem is the inefficiencies of a society as a human institution to provide for them. Therefore, a system that concentrates its efforts in the subjugation of theses ideals simply recreates the mistakes of the previous moral order under a different set of rules. This is exactly why the new moral order does not succeed in providing a more peaceful life. Instead, it incurs the same violence in which it sought to eradicate. It has proven to not reduce the physical violence of war, just relocate it to the sphere of the individual and the nations they create. Likewise, structural violence has not been reduced, just simply moved from the oppression of hierarchical rule to the oppression of the economic policies of those in power.

The ideals of freedom, equality, and self-determination that lie in our social imaginaries have the capability of uplifting our society. However when these are based on western ideas of Industrial and economic modernization they simply further the goals of a new hierarchy of power. This is exemplified in the remarks of Maria Meis:“Freedom is the freedom of those who posses money. Equality is the equality of money. Self-determination is the freedom of choice in the supermarket. This freedom, equality, self-determination is always dependant on those who control the money/property”. The naturally ordained supremacy and virtuous system of living based on this supremacy of the pre-modern hierarchy has not been removed. The only thing that has changed is that where before those in power enacted the divine will of god or the laws of nature, now they use the will of the individual right to survive and the laws of capitalism to further their own agendas.
This is not to say that the moral order is completely immoral. The ideals held within in it can be insightful and beneficial. It is simply our misappropriation of these ideologies that have led us to perpetuate violence in all its forms. Mutual exchange, freedom, and equality are good ideas, however, the constructions we use to fulfill them (industrial modernization) leave us unfulfilled and longing for that which we have destroyed. A peaceful society revolves around a fulfilling of the needs and requirements of human existence. However, the project of modernization can only resolve the need for survival. The search for self-understanding involves much more than simply sustaining life and therefore we become restless. We yearn for human relationships and for relationships with nature, but are left with a structure that is based on the destruction of those relationships. We want to give value to our lives but are left with a structure that reduces this worth to an abstract monetary value. We feel there is something more to life but are left in a society that cannot help us in this endeavor and seeks only to distract us from it. This search for happiness then becomes a search for distraction, which fuels the consumer appetite. This in turn fuels the economy, which then fuels the structures of power that perpetuate a doctrine of violence and manifest destiny towards the natural world, other societies, and on its own marginalized citizens.
The modern industrial society is simply a misrepresentation of the modern moral order. Instead of a order based on peace and social harmony, it in many ways encourages and needs violence to survive. The amount of consumption this society needs to survive can only lead to the violence and oppression of those who have resources but lack the power to protect them. This ideology can be seen at the individual level as well, encouraging competition for resources and power that can only lead to the destruction of social harmony. Structural and overt violence towards those within society who cannot protect their own resources in order to provide a constant source of growth for those who can becomes the norm. Finally, the modern industrial society has perpetrated violence on the self-understanding of its members. The modernity project has relegated truth, wisdom, and goodness to the arena of values. This leaves the individual no real way to express the need for self-understanding except in the form of needless consumption. The modern industrial society therefore has not become less violent than its pre-modern counterparts. It in some ways could bee seen as more violent considering that with science and technology we have become more efficient in all arenas including the art of subjugation and war.

1 Maria Miens and V. Shiva. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books, 1997 pg 144

2 Charles Taylor. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004 pg 70

3 Charles Taylor. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004 pg 70

4 Charles Taylor. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004 pg 70

5 Maria Mies and V. Shiva. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books, 1997 pg 58

6 Maria Mies and V. Shiva. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books, 1997 pg 58

7 Maria Mies and V. Shiva. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books, 1997 pg 66

8Maria Mies and V. Shiva. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books, 1997 Pg 57-58

© 2005

And now from the "we are all going to hell" file........

2006-10-17T14:10:00.000-06:00

Bumfight' Videos Inspired Joy-Killing

Sept. 27, 2006 (CBS) He is now a repentant inmate serving 35 years, but 19-year-old Jeffrey Spurgeon looks back on the night he and friends beat a homeless man to death in Holly Hill, Fla., and says they did it "for fun" as they emulated scenes from "bum-rushing videos" like "Bumfights," a commercial video of homeless men performing degrading acts.

Spurgeon says he is haunted by the voice of the victim, Michael Roberts. "The main thing…I keep thinking about 24/7 is Michael…screaming for help," he tells Bradley.

He and three other teens, including Chris Scamahorn, ran across Roberts in the woods where they were smoking pot. "Chris woke the guy up and started hitting him with a stick. So we all rushed in on him and then I hit him with the stick," Spurgeon recalls. "And the third time when we come back, that's when Chris had brought a two-by-four with a nail through it and hit the guy on top of the head with it," he tells Bradley. "Why did you do all this?" asks Bradley. "I guess for fun," responds Spurgeon.

"We were just…trying to mock a show," he says. One of the "shows" Spurgeon refers to is "Bumfights," a series of videos in which homeless men, given a few dollars or some alcohol, fight each other or are subjected to degrading acts. The videos have sold 300,000 copies. "That was [his friends'] favorite thing to do, was watch those videos and mock whatever was on it," says Spurgeon. "How is that fun?" asks Bradley. Says Spurgeon, "I don't know, just exciting, I guess."

A deeply remorseful Spurgeon has a message for teens who would find fun in assaulting the homeless. "Look at me now, though. You still have a chance. Look at me," he says.

The National Coalition for the Homeless says 182 homeless people have been killed and more than 500 attacked since 1999, victims of random violence that includes beatings, stabbings, shootings and even victims being set on fire. Brian Levin, a criminologist at California State University and an expert on hate crimes says, "Most hate offenses are not committed by hard-core hate mongers. They're often associations of young males…looking for some thrill…and a target they think is vulnerable," says Levin. He believes the trend is being fueled by the "Bumfights" videos. "Most recently there have been a series of films, horrible, horrible, brutal films that dehumanize and degrade the homeless," he tells Bradley. "It is really hard to overstate the kind of terrible influence this has on young people," says Levin.

Some of the attackers have even videotaped themselves assaulting homeless people; some actually say the words "Bumfights" on their tapes.

Ryan McPherson, who created "Bumfights" and who, with two partners, sold its rights for $1.5 million, sees the connection from his work to the criminal acts, but he fails to acknowledge any responsibility. He blames the drugs the perpetrators often are on when they commit their crimes. "I'm not hopped up on drugs. I'm a kid with a video camera, just shooting stuff," he tells Bradley.

©MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved...

Urban Youth, Gangs and the Role of Recognition

2006-10-01T14:44:00.001-06:00

By D. Barbour

A place where death doesn't reside, just thugs who collide
Not to start beef but spark trees, no cops rollin by
No policemen, no homicide, no chalk on the streets
No reason, for nobody's momma to cry
-Nas (Thugs Mansion)

The epidemic of gang violence has become a problem that has captured the minds of most Americans. Whether it is the stylized depictions on TV or movies or the real life scenario urban youth face, it is a problem that threatens to overtake the urban community in the United States. Many have attempted to quell these problems through simply “getting tough on crime”; however just as one gang is stopped there are many more waiting to replace it. This type of gang intervention does not work because it only deals with the most obvious symptoms of the problem, while ignoring the root causes. Gangs do not form just because a couple of bad seeds want to cause trouble. Instead, urban youth form gangs as a response to the structural violence they face on an everyday basis. The system of rights that we all are guaranteed provide but a reminder to these youth that sometimes equality means something different depending on what side of the street you live on. The double standards that feed this idea can be seen in every aspect of the urban core, from failing schools, to gutted out neighborhoods with nothing left but liquor and convenience stores. Though the problem can be manifested in numerous ways, there is at the heart of it one simple cause: the denial of recognition of minorities in America. This denial creates a system in which the public and private autonomy of minority individuals is denied leading to structural violence in the form of physical, mental, and economic oppression. In the face of this, youth form gangs in which they seek to regain this recognition. Unfortunately, the structure that this often creates only perpetrates more violence. However, there are basic concepts in the gang structure that can provide a basis for a system of recognition that can work as a positive force to confront the oppression of the modern ghetto.

MISRECOGNITION AS A MEANS OF OPPRESSION

First, let us look further into how the denial of recognition can become such a destructive force. The majority of inhabitants in the inner city are comprised of minority populations, so to begin this discourse we must deal with the problem of racism. The basis of racism can be seen in what can be considered misrecognition. Misrecognition implies that an individual in a search for self-understanding is given, by the society around them, a false or misconstrued feedback. Misrecognition can be anything from basic characteristics to an all out denial of humanity. This can be seen in the early European conceptions of Africans as “subhuman” or native peoples as “savages”. These identities were placed on these groups not because that is what they were but because the Europeans could not or would not engage in true communication. Furthermore, with the movement of the European moral order from pre-modern to modern, the removal of the hierarchical system of separation left a void that was soon filled with cultural and racial separations. Therefore, for the status of the Europeans to remain intact it was imperative that they create a lower class through misrecognition of that class’s identity. Though the civil rights movement of the 1960’s removed much of the legal racism that existed in this country it failed to remove the more subtle structural violence that remains in many ways to this day. This is possible because though law now guaranteed equality it granted “freedom of choice and action that can be used differently and thus does not promote actual equality in life circumstances or positions of power.” [1]

THE ROLE OF TOLERANCE

Under the doctrine of equality, there has also been a recent emphasis put on tolerance. However, this concept as it is realized in America can do more harm than good. Under the influence of a theory of individual rights, tolerance is reduced to a kind of insincere respect based on the legal requirement. This respect is not based on understanding or the wish to understand the other. It is instead based on the “reason of the strongest”, [2] in which the welcome offered to the other is structured around retaining and protecting individual sovereignty. [3]
The doctrine of tolerance becomes hypocritical when placed within the concept of equality and the American dream. On one hand, the citizen is to respect the rights of another to have their own beliefs and culture, however, on the other hand this must be done through the lens of traditional American values, which in actuality could be considered European values. This immediately puts any person who has not grown up in these conditions or those who do not necessarily come to agreement with the majority on what these values are, in a situation of coerced conformity. Coerced conformity entails a communication in which one side is weaker than the other, which makes the individuals involved unequal. With out an opportunity for mutual recognition, the weaker party risks being misrecognized or not recognized at all. The minority is then relegated to a system of structural violence, in which equality and freedom is legally afforded, but the means to realize these rights are withheld. Furthermore, tolerance fuels the misrecognition by alleviating the majority of the need to understand the other. If under the auspice of tolerance another’s beliefs cannot be questioned, then the dialogue needed to understand those beliefs cannot be created. This allows any misconceptions or judgments made about the other to continue because there is no opportunity for them to be rebuked.

MODERN RACISM IN THE URBAN COMMUNITY

Modern racism can take the form of various latent forms of oppression including: biased hiring practices, lower wage rates for those who are hired, and the removal of municipal funding for predominantly Latino or African-American communities. This type of racism creates an economic disparity between minority individuals and the mainstream society. Coupled with the outsourcing of jobs within the inner city the individual is left with no choice but to find other forms of economic sustenance that due to the lack of opportunity, often leads to illegal activity. This illegal activity then reaffirms the stereotypes of those in power, leading to a never-ending cycle of prejudice and misrecognition.
Economic oppression, however, is not the only way in which racism affects the urban community. The process of recognition entails a social exchange in which the one being recognized receives feedback from another on their identity. Misrecognition then can cause stereotypes to be formed not only in the one recognizing the individual, but also in the individual themselves. In this respect, the individual takes this false recognition as being a legitimate communication about their identity. This leads to an internalization of the stereotype. In this situation, “self-depreciation becomes one of the most potent forms of oppression” [4], inasmuch as it destroys the potential for true self-understanding.
Since the coming of the industrial age, the inner city has been the gathering point for immigrants and migrants seeking jobs. These workers, many who were coming from rural or foreign backgrounds faced a way of life in the city that was in stark contrast to their own. A process of acculturation then had to be undergone in order to live in these new urban areas. This becomes particularly salient when these workers are of a different ethnic or cultural background. In these cases the type of acculturation is one sided in which the immigrant or migrant is forced to communicate on the terms of the values and ideals of the majority. The communication does not allow the individual to express their own unique identity in a framework of mutual recognition and therefore denies the person public autonomy. [5] Along with the denial of public autonomy, “socialization routines are definitely transformed when immigrants or migrants of low socioeconomic status must adapt to a place in the city.” [6] This is especially true in the case of social control institutions such as the family and schools. [7] In these situations, the family undergoes tremendous stress as the culturally prescribed roles and rules threatened or removed by the majority culture. This leads to a weakening of the family, and a further loss of a base for recognition. This continues when the children go to school. Schools are often set up to accommodate the majority culture without exceptions. This leaves the minority child at a disadvantage where learning is furthered hampered through a cultural barrier. In many cases, this leads to the child simply being left behind. This lack of two major social control mechanisms leaves the child helpless to create any type of real identity through recognition.

GANGS AS A RESPONSE TO OPPRESSION

One response to the denial of recognition was the creation of small autonomous groups that we now call gangs. The creation of these groups allowed urban youth to address many of the problems they faced. First, the withdrawal of the society at large from the Ghetto meant that the municipal needs of the ghettos were often ignored. The police rarely intervened to stop crime in these neighborhoods and when they did, they often caused more harm than good. Gangs addressed this problem as serving as a kind of community police that protected their respective neighborhoods. This is exemplified in the history of the Crips street gang in L.A., which was started initially as a community protection group. “Many of the young people of South Central Los Angeles were involved with small gangs. Those gang members roamed South Central taking property from anyone who feared them, including women and children. To protect the community, Tookie and Raymond organized the Crips.” [8]
Second, gangs provided a platform in which community concerns could be voiced. This purpose was also displayed in the Crips determination to be “A voice that would not only be heard by all but also felt by the white oppressor.” [9] This type of political awareness underscores many gang members’ views even today. This can be seen in the idolization of revolutionaries such as Che Guevara and Malcolm X.
Thirdly, in the midst of a society that ignored these groups, the gang provided a support system that fostered solidarity and a sense of connectedness to the individual’s culture. The first Pachucos in L.A. are a prime example of this. These individuals were second and third generation Latinos, who neither fit into the identity of mainstream America nor the identity of the countries they came from. In response to this, they started a “cultural rebellion” [10] by creating a new kind of style and identity within a structure that was the basis for the modern gang structure. This has also been marked as the beginning of the Chicano culture in America. In an environment that denied their recognition the Pachucos as well as modern gangs, create their own environment that could foster their demand for recognition.
Finally, the structural oppression that urban communities face often tears the family structure apart. As James Vigil comments, “in the face of job discrimination both parents may have to work. In the absence of affordable childcare, without close friends or relatives to care for them, children become latch-keyed and have to fend for themselves.” [11] Gangs provided a home for these children in which they could feel safe as well as loved. This familial relationship can be seen in everything from protection of ones home, to monetary and emotional support after a gang member gets out of jail.

THE PROBLEMS OF GANGS

Gangs however, have over time become increasingly violent, in which what was once a structure based on gaining recognition and support became a structure that perpetrated further violence on its members. This change can be seen as a function of the structural violence caused by the denial of true equality, and the modern moral order. In America, the prevailing theme in American values is the acquisition of status. The consumerist underpinnings of capitalism then merge this idea with material or monetary wealth. This value system penetrates the social imaginary of every individual including the otherwise closed off urban community. The problem arises in the fact that though urban youth receive these values they do not receive the means to attain them. Diego Muiro-Ramirez explains this in the terms of relative deprivation. This is defined in psychosocial terms as a “perceived discrepancy between men’s value expectations and their value capabilities.” [12} Add this to a doctrine of professed equal rights, and you create the mindset of injustice in those in question. This allows for the legitimization of illegal activity because it is the only perceivable method of gaining the rights urban youth are taught they have. Therefore, as the acculturation to a system of status through wealth increases, so does the level of perceived injustice and in turn the level of violence permissible. This creates a rift in the community, as competition for status becomes the sole motivator. This alternative method for survival through violence can be seen in the use of the “business” [13] of the gang as a form of economic sustenance.
Misrecognition, as mentioned earlier, can also lead to self-depreciation in which one comes to devalue ones own group. When this happens, self-hatred is projected onto others in which “the rage turns inward: the gang kind blows away his mirror image, another gang kid” [14]
Along with this violence comes a situation in which the individual becomes even more withdrawn into a smaller circle of possible actors in which to be recognized. The further withdrawal then provides even fewer opportunities to identify with non-violent or non-gang forms of recognition. Additionally, once a person joins a gang, their range of movement is often limited to their neighborhood. This affects the mobility of the gang member’s family as well, because if given the chance to move the family cannot for fear of possible violence against their children by gangs in the new neighborhood. The strict codes of gangs do not often let members communicate with other gang or with those associated with other gangs, which limits the opportunities for further recognition. Furthermore, the recognition that is received is just as misconstrued and misunderstood. The reason for this can be again found in the absence of mutual recognition within the acculturation process. The miscommunication between competing identities and realities, leads to confusion and frustrates any attempt to realize self-understanding. This plays an important role in misrecognition “in that fragmented family values and beliefs, uneven schooling and Anglization, and culture contact and conflict changes, lead many youth to identify with the streets.” [15] These street realities, expressed by the gang as well as formulated by them create a subculture based on survival and security though violence. The demand for respect becomes a will to power in which a failure to live up to violent standards leads to a loss of honor, which in part defines identity.

THE POSITIVE ROLE OF GANGS

There is however, a basis in the gang that allows for positive social action. It is simply a matter of removing the violence as the sole alternative to survival. This is not easy but examples of this spontaneous change have appeared.
Urban Courage is a network of gangs within Mexico that have denounced the use of violence and instead work for non-violent social change. It began with one gang that “realized it wasn't normal for kids to be killing other kids we didn't even know, over petty turf wars, especially since the streets don't belong to gangs. Streets belong to all of society.” [16] Soon after, other gangs independently followed suit and they eventually came together to form the coalition Urban Courage.
Another example would be the Latin Kings and Queens of New York. The two gangs are present in almost every major city in the U.S. However, this particular chapter decided to convert the gang from its pre-existing form into a group based on non-violence and community service. The still retained the symbols and rituals of the Latin Kings and Queens but simply refuse to take part in the cycle of violence they can create.
Finally, one of the most striking examples of non-violent gang intervention can be seen in the case of Stanley “Tookie” Williams. Williams was a co-founder of the Crips and is currently on death row. While in prison, Williams began a program to keep kids out of gangs. He also facilitated via prison, the truce between the long time rival gangs the Bloods and the Crips. His work has earned him nominations for both the Nobel Peace and Literature prizes.
It can be argued that the type of mentality found in gangs is the perfect one for non-violent work. Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan was able to convert the Pathans, one of the world’s most ruthless warrior tribes, into the first and only nonviolent army that helped Gandhi remove the British from India. Khan was able to do this by appealing to the solemn sense of honor and dignity in the Pathans as well as their fearlessness in the face of death, to create an army that were disciplined enough to stand the British violence without fighting back. Gandhi himself often remarked that for Satyagraha to work it must be performed by those who are not afraid to fight. Gandhi even goes to the extent saying, “Where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.” [17] The code of the gang is based on many of the same characteristics as the Pathans, namely honor, courage, and loyalty. Furthermore, the problem that faced the Pathans is very much the same as urban youth. The Pathans were always unorganized because their code of honor often led them to fight amongst themselves. Likewise, the British held economic policies that often left the Pathans always fighting for resources. This parallels the usual structural oppression that forms in the ghetto as well as the violence community members perpetrate on themselves.
Nonviolence is important to this idea because it creates a situation in which dialogue can be created. Martin Luther King Jr. was able to create a dialogue with the American people simply because he did not result to violence. Instead, King appealed to the truth that all humanity was considered to share. Likewise, if gangs are going to provide the positive influence that they are often first created for, they must not appeal to violence but appeal to the truth. The only way to truly do this is through dialogue, and the only way to true dialogue is refusing a will to power. Gangs already have the ability to provide support as well as harness the vitality of the youth. What they lack is the ability to provide true recognition to their members. This discrepancy follows from the misperception that respect must be gained through physical violence, both within and outside the group.
Another important role gangs can play is by changing the mainstream culture as a whole. When any culture encounters another, regardless of the type of contact, each is changed. In the case of the urban community, and the larger majority, this culminates in a dynamic construction of cultural reality. The urban child wishes to be recognized in mainstream society so he or she tries to acquire its symbols of status (luxury items, money, power). At the same time however, the often-exaggerated attempts of urban communities to mimic the mainstream leads to a new set of symbols and practices. These new practices and symbols are then transmitted to the white suburbs where they become a part of the mainstream culture. This is what Ruben Martinez calls cultural dialogue. [18] Martinez elaborates on this when he says:
“Black rap is more popular with white suburban teens than with black kids; the vapid culture of the suburb leads them to desire their inner-city other. Middle-class kids talk the talk (black), wear baggies and Pendleton shirts (Chicano), turn their baseball caps backward, play out gangsta’ fantasies.” [19]
If the urban community has so much power in changing the cultural proclivities of mainstream society, then they have a very powerful mouthpiece in which to promote social change. If street gangs where based on community uplift and social change without violence, they could have a very effective means to assert their claims to the truth. Likewise, this could also uplift their assertion for recognition outside of the ghetto and into the mainstream public sphere. This however, is not a quick fix solution. It is not even the entire solution. It is instead a part of a wider change that must take place in not only the structures that perpetrate violence but also the underlying imaginaries that legitimize them. Gangs through social protest can also influence this change. The social awareness of the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and Brown Berets in the 60’s and 70’s is a perfect example. Though these groups at times perpetrated violence, the underlying structure helped renew their respective communities as well as give them a voice in the public area. It is also interesting to note that during these times of political awareness, “if you look at the neighborhoods... gang violence was at its lowest.” [20] This points to the effectiveness of simply giving a voice to inner-city minorities in dealing with gang violence. Social protest allows grievances to be heard, and in essence for those who are in marginalized groups a chance to exercise their autonomy. This is an important action, which not only betters the marginalized but also is necessary for the consistent actualization of rights in which social movements are key. [21]
The culture of violence that gangs often promote however must be halted. This is the key point and the one that is most problematic. This is not only because of the ingrained doctrine of violence of the street, but also because of the engrained doctrine of violence of our entire social imaginary. The entire American conscience is enveloped in a never ending mantra of might makes right. Our history books are a constant parade of war and violence, in which every turning point is based around a timeline of war. Our heroes are those who are willing to kill for land, property and freedom. It is little wonder why urban youth so easily embrace violence. What is needed is a movement that can reverse this cycle of violence. The struggle for civil rights in the 60’s changed the legal structure of America forever. However, what it failed to do is change the hearts and minds of every American. This left a system in which a true discoursive communication is not possible for minorities in America. The modern reaction to this is the creation of gangs that can either provide for the uplift of the community or allow for its demise. If fostered correctly, gangs can provide the vitality, courage, honor and solidarity that can create an effective social movement to counter the violence of the urban community

AN AMERICAN PROBLEM

The question of gang violence is not one that only affects those in the ghetto. The struggle for recognition, the violence, and the suffering of the ghetto is in many ways a barometer for the state of affairs in America as a whole. Regardless of their situation, “the ‘burb kid and the inner-city cholo or gangsta’ share the same existential void, and both fill it with the same violent aesthetic.” [22] This void is that which is created by the denial of a truly fulfilled life. As a society, we sell happiness as a commodity, wrapped up in pretty little packages or penthouse apartments. Our worth as a human has been reduced to an assessment of liquid assets and stock portfolios. This however does not provide the means to which we may infuse our existence with meaning, but instead leaves us feeling empty and denied. IN this way the suburban and urban child are both denied because they both adhere to the same unfulfilling doctrines of self-satisfaction. It is this doctrine, which, in the name of expedience, legitimizes violence as the sufficient means to the ends of self-understanding. No other alternative is offered, and in the terms of the majority who hold the power, none is needed. What follows from this is a culture of violence in which a will to power is the only goal. The violence of the inner city then is a wake up call to us all. We do not live in a vacuum. Instead, our identities are formed through a web of interconnected realities that can only bear fruit in a framework of mutual recognition. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” [23] The struggles of the inner city then are the struggles of every American.

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[1] Jurgen Habermas. “Struggle for recognition in the Denocratic Constitutional State”. In Multiculturalism: Examingin the Politics of Recognition . Ed. Amy Gutman. Princeton University Press. New Jersey. 1992. pg114

[2] Derrida. Deconstructing Terrorism pg161

[3] Derrida. Deconstructing Terrorism pg 161

[4] Charles Taylor “Politics of Recognition”, In Multiculturalism: Examingin the Politics of Recognition . Ed. Amy Gutman. Princeton University Press. New Jersey. 1992.

[5] Jurgen Habermas. “Struggle for recognition in the Denocratic Constitutional State”. In Multiculturalism: Examingin the Politics of Recognition . Ed. Amy Gutman. Princeton University Press. New Jersey. 1992.

[6] James Diego Vigil. Urban Violence and Street Gangs, Annual Review of Anthropology.Vol. 32 2003. pg 234

[7] James Diego Vigil. Urban Violence and Street Gangs, Annual Review of Anthropology.Vol. 32 2003. pg 234

[8] Stanley Tookie Williams. “About Tookie”. www.tookie.com pg 1

[9] Beth Dyer, Sara White, Eliticia Vieyra. “The Crips” unpublished manuscript 2005 pg 3

[10] Ruben Martinez. East Side Stories. Powerhouse Books. New York. 2000 pg 4

[11] James Diego Vigil. Urban Violence and Street Gangs, Annual Review of Anthropology.Vol. 32 2003 pg 235

[12] Ruben Martinez. East Side Stories. Powerhouse Books. New York. 2000

[13] This refers to the illegal procurements of capital such as theft, robbery, or drug dealing.

[14] Ruben Martinez. East Side Stories. Powerhouse Books. New York. 2000 pg 10

[15] James Diego Vigil. Urban Violence and Street Gangs, Annual Review of Anthropology.Vol. 32 2003 pg 235

[16] Gary Gach. “Part Four of Peacemaking: The Power of Nonviolence”., American Reporter June 17, 1997. pg 1

[17] Mahatma Gandhi. “Nonviolence”. In The Essential Gandhi. Ed. Luis Fischer Vintage Books, New York. 2002 pg 137

[18] Ruben Martinez. East Side Stories. Powerhouse Books. New York. 2000 pg 19

[19] Ruben Martinez. East Side Stories. Powerhouse Books. New York. 2000 pg 19

[20] Luis Rodriguez. “La Vida Loca: Joseph Rodriguez and Luis Rodriguez on the “crazy life”. Eastside Stories . Powerhouse Books. New York. 2000 pg 178
[21] Jurgen Habermas. “Struggle for recognition in the Denocratic Constitutional State”. In Multiculturalism: Examingin the Politics of Recognition . Ed. Amy Gutman. Princeton University Press. New Jersey. 1992 pg 113

[22] Ruben Martinez. East Side Stories. Powerhouse Books. New York. 2000 pg 19

[23] Martin Luther King Jr. Why We Can’t Wait Penguin Putnum inc. New York, 2000.pg 65

© 2005

What is Peace?

2006-03-26T19:15:00.000-07:00

By Dennis B.

What is Peace? This question has echoed through the hallowed halls of human imagination for as long as beings had the faculties to conceive it. Through all of this, peace has eluded our full understanding, basking in the light of realization just long enough to abscond back into the darkness. What is proposed here is that peace, perfectly realized, is impossible. Peace in all of its infinite and universal understanding will always prove to be a Goliath that our slings and pebbles of finite understanding can never conquer. This however, does not mean that peace should be abandoned. The very thing that prevents our species from realizing perfect peace is the very thing that makes it accessible to us all. Perfect peace is not achievable because its very realization is not based on one concrete and immutable doctrine. Instead, it is a concept in constant motion and reinvention. In this way, when the process of peace stops, the realization of peace ceases to exist. This can be likened to our own human bodies. At any given moment, our bodies are in constant motion. Our hearts beat, lungs inflate and deflate, and our neurons fire. When these processes cease to happen, what we consider a biologically alive human being becomes a non-living mass of organic matter. There is not a time in our biological life that upon the ceasing of these vital processes we can say that we are at the pinnacle of living. Instead, the process of living defines biological life. Likewise, peace is not defined by a final state of being, but through the process that it entails. In this way, the process of peace comes to full fruition in the process of its realization instead in any possible finite realization. The moment one stops to say “I have found peace” is the very moment peace is lost. So how is this process realizable in our modern world or in our own societies? What first must be done is to look at some of the major features within society that can either cultivate or hamper the process of peace. Then, these features will be evaluated in the context of the United States.

FEATURES OF A PEACEFUL SOCIETY.

A question that must be asked when talking about peace as a process is what exactly are these processes of peace? The answer given by modern philosophers like Habermas would be the process that allows for the uncoerced search for ones self-understanding. According to the modern moral order, this must be through the realization of freedom and equality of all individuals through individual rights and the institution of democracy. At the heart of this for Habermas, is a type of discoursive communication within the public sphere. Discoursive communication in this sense is a dialogue in which all parties can fairly and reasonably communicate their needs in this public sphere. It is important to note that “fair” in this communication means that the communication is held between individuals are equals. If this condition is not met, the communication becomes a miscommunication and perpetrates structural violence upon the weaker party. Habermas also refers to the process as the goal, when prescribes that true discoursive communication must be marked with a “consistent actualization of the system of rights”(1), that requires, “a politics of recognition that protects the integrity of the individual in the life contexts in which his or her identity is formed”. (2) These life contexts refer to not only an identity that is built from the internal contexts of self but also the external contexts of ones cultural heritage or understanding. In this way the normative aspects of a set of legal rights is canceled out by the ascription to “the bearers of individual rights an identity that is conceived intersubjectivley”. (3) Therefore, a peaceful society under the conceptions given earlier can best be described as a society that allows for the peaceful cultivation of self-understanding, through mutual recognition, of all who take part in that particular society.

The ideas put forward by Habermas gives us a good structure in which self-understanding and ultimately peace can be established in a constitutional democracy. There remains the question of what in this process of peace through self-understanding can be used to validate the specific actions of a society as peaceful instead of violent. If peace is an infinite and perfect ideal in which perfect realization of it is impossible, how can a peaceful society be measured? Derrida provides an argument for this through his method of evaluating the levels of violence in a society in the terms of degrees of perfectibility. The three major measuring points for Derrida are justice, unconditional hospitality, and unconditional forgiveness. All of these points are seen as having two different registers, the conditional and unconditional. What Derrida calls the conditional register is the realization of the ideal within a finite conception. Justice in this conditional framework can be seen as social law that is at one point informed by the absolute ideal of justice but is constrained by “social and political dynamics”. (4) Perfect justice on the other hand, is not restrained by these dynamics so it is able to move beyond the conceptions of law. This is important because the perfect ideal of justice, because of its infinite and absolute characteristics, provides an inexhaustible demand for which law must answer by constantly challenging its own limits. This dynamic is the same for both hospitality and forgiveness. The degree then to which a social structure attempts to appraise its own limits and act upon these appraisals to more closely lend itself to the unattainable and perfect ideal, determines its level of violence.

Now that these principles for a peaceful society have been laid out, they can now be applied to the social structures of the United States. In order to do this the major features of American society that can be either legitimized or illegitimated by the aforementioned ideals will be explored.

THE U.S. AS A PEACEFUL SOCIETY

The United States is set up as a constitutional democracy and therefore should be to some extent based on the ideals in which Habermas created his framework. This can be seen in the fundamental presuppositions of freedom and equality in its democratic communications. However, multiculturalism has become a major challenge to the key concepts in the American public sphere. What can be seen as the prevailing response to this challenge is the application of a doctrine of tolerance. Under the influence of a theory of individual rights, tolerance is reduced to a kind of insincere respect based on the legal requirement. This respect is not based on understanding or the wish to understand the other. It is instead based on the “reason of the strongest”, (5) in which the welcome offered to the other is structured around retaining and protecting individual sovereignty.(6) Because of this Derrida considers tolerance as a rather imperfect realization of the absolute of unconditional hospitality. Likewise, this refusal to understand the other hampers mutual recognition that in turn threatens true discoursive communication in the public sphere. As mentioned earlier, if communication is not truly discoursive it threatens to revert to a distorted communication that reverts to structural violence.

This can be seen most prominently in the treatment of minorities in America. The doctrine of tolerance becomes hypocritical when placed within the concept of equality and the American dream. On one hand, the citizen is to respect the rights of another to have their own beliefs and culture, however, on the other hand this must be done through the lens of traditional American values, which in actuality could be considered European values. This immediately puts any person who has not grown up in these conditions or those who do not necessarily come to agreement with the majority on what these values are, in a situation of coerced conformity. Coerced conformity entails a communication in which one side is weaker than the other, which makes the individuals involved unequal. With out an opportunity for mutual recognition, the weaker party risks being misrecognized or not recognized at all. The minority is then relegated to a system of structural violence, in which equality and freedom is legally afforded, but the means to realize these rights are withheld. Furthermore, tolerance fuels the misrecognition by alleviating the majority of the need to understand the other.

What appears to be the biggest roadblock to changing the idea of tolerance is also a symptom of a problem that seems to hit the American concept of freedom and equality at its core. This can best be described as a kind of stagnation of appraisal of traditional lines of values and ideas. Habermas refers to this as a paternalistic system of rights that “ignores half of the concept of autonomy.” (7) The system of rights that dominate the public sphere are based on the historical and traditional conceptions that have been simply handed down to today’s citizen. There is no room left for any real reconceptualization or discoursive legitimization to the extent to which things are to be seen as equal or fair. This stunts the exercise of autonomy by the modern citizen by removing them from the process. Without this, the vital connection between the individual rights of persons and the public autonomy of the citizen is severed, leaving nothing but a normative unchanging system of rights. This can be seen in the apathetical attitude of many that there is no longer a need to fight for anything because the pinnacle of freedom and equality was reached years ago. The only thing left to do is adjust a few things under the existing order and then spread it around the world. This leads not only to structural violence of weaker groups internally, but the violence of forced conversion of these imperfectly realized ideals abroad.

The United States in respect to its policies on international relations has simply continued the problems found in the public sphere. When the U.S. deals with another country, they often employ what Kant considered the right of invitation. (8) It is not however the rights of invitation that causes the problem. Instead, it is the use of this conditional hospitality as the means and the ideal. It is true that in the concept of sovereignty, “unconditional hospitality cannot have a political or juridical status.” (9) However, unconditional hospitality must not be completely ignored. When the U.S. deals with another country, they do so under the assumption that American ideals must not be compromised. This creates a situation in which there is no real chance for dialogue because the U.S. identity cannot be challenged. An example of this can be seen at the United Nations conference on Environment and Development that was held in 1992. When developing nations asked to include in the legislation the “Over-Consumption of resources by developed countries”, George Bush Sr. objected by stating that, “the American lifestyle is not up for negotiation.” (10) In this scenario, the willingness to open up the American value system to challenge is non-existent. There is no concept of unconditional hospitality that allows the rights of invitation to be pushed to their limits. Because of this, the United States falls into an almost xenophobic state, which does not allow for dialogue with the international other. The dynamic of international relations is then reduced to a will to power. Those countries that cannot bolster or provide the resources to continue the American identity, have no worth and therefore their claims for recognition can be ignored. The only times that communication is needed is to challenge the other to conform. This is especially prominent in the project of modernity, in which the unique and insightful perspectives of other countries are not considered. This kind of communication can lead to disastrous consequences both in the U.S. and abroad in which September 11 and the resulting “War on Terrorism” is an example.

There seems to be at the heart of many of these problems a misperception that can be seen in the creation of our modern social imaginaries. The main component of this could be seen as a loss of universal ideals, at least in the terms laid out by Derrida. We believe in a doctrine that espouses that freedom and equality are inherent to each person. One does not have to search for these rights, they are simply given. However, they are placed in a context in which they reside completely in the finite realm. The essence of this can be seen in our almost blind reliance on socially constructed laws. By the enactment of these laws, we seek to secure the inherent rights we already have. Any changes to these laws are done in the belief that perfect realizations of these rights are possible because there perfection is already within us. This can lead to a stagnation in which once a system of laws is considered as perfect as possible they are left unquestioned. Unfortunately, as laws are socially constructed, this leads to a normative set of values that no longer attempt to reach a higher understanding and instead, seek only to protect its own system. This then leads to violence as the laws become unable to change with the conceptions of equality and freedom of the citizens it governs. The only way to remedy this is to constantly reevaluate the system, so that it may mirror those it governs. Unfortunately, what is often needed to create the impetus to evolve is a belief in an unattainable perfection that historically has been connected to the hierarchy and violence of the pre-modern order. Because of this historical connection, we are often wary of making use of unrealizable perfection now. However, as Derrida believes, we must make that connection because in positing that there is a higher ideal that cannot be reached it also means that we could never become satisfied with one single imperfect realization of it. This would force a mentality of constant reappraisal, dialogue, and change. This is where our modern concepts on the right to security can play a detrimental role.

The need for security can become misleading, especially if it is done so in the terms of survival. It seems reasonable that every individual has a right to be secure. However, in terms of the search for self-understanding, there must also be the impetus to sacrifice some of that security in order to grow. Change can be very intimidating but it is a necessary component of self-realization. This is often lost in the American identity because we feel much safer if our own identities are kept safely at arms length from others. Therefore, in an attempt to realize this we constitute a kind of legal equality, which allows each of us the protection to freely express our identities in a type of social vacuum. Unfortunately, individual identity requires social recognition so this new concept only provides the basis for self-satisfaction not self-understanding. This in many ways describes the attitudes taken in reference to the American duties of citizens. We are afraid to truly engage the modern American government, because in doing so we open our own identities to scrutiny. We withdraw from the public sphere in order to protect our identity just as the American government withdraws from international dialogue to protect its own identity.

1 Jurgen Habermas. “Struggle for recognition in the Denocratic Constitutional State”. In Multiculturalism: Examingin the Politics of Recognition . Ed. Amy Gutman. Princeton University Press. New Jersey. 1992. pg 113

2 Jurgen Habermas pg 113

3 Jurgen Habermas pg 113

4 Jurgen Habermas pg 164

5 Derrida. Deconstructing Terrorism pg161

6 Derrida. Deconstructing Terrorism pg 161

7 Habermas pg 112

8 Derrida. Deconstructing Terrorism pg 162

9 Derrida. Deconstructing Terrorism pg 163

10 Peter Singer One World: The Ethics of Globalization. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002

11 Voltaire. Candide. Dover publications, New York.1991 pg 3

© 2005

Community Organization

2006-03-22T14:29:00.001-07:00

By: Eliticia Vieyra

Community Organizing is essential to any population or community seeking change. The key in community organizing is locating the method that work’s best in not only soliciting participation but also conveying the message of the community. The models of both Alinsky and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. discuss the importance of communication, forging alliances, and the selection of organizers regardless of age, race, sex and physical ability. Although Alinsky and Dr. King are similar in principles surrounding their theories, they differ in their definitions of community involvement, the use of stereotypes, and religious incorporation. Further explanation concerning the use of Dr. King’s model, the direct nonviolent approach, will be given later in the paper. The example of undocumented Latino immigrants will clearly illustrate both the use and success of the direct nonviolent approach when working with minority populations; however, it is also important to note that this could perhaps be seen as a limitation to this particular approach.

Introduction

Today, the level of community involvement has decreased dramatically from that of the past. This is particularly due to the ever-changing political climate as well as the perceived level of progress, which has been attained throughout history. The process of change continues to occur at a rather slow and sometimes even nonexistent pace. This reason in particular has led many young adults to question the importance of both their voice and involvement in movements designed to empower specific populations of individuals. Both Alinsky and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. argue that feelings such as these are essential in creating movements that will ultimately affect and in some cases inspire the public as well as the oppressed. Thus, feelings such as these should not be ignored but rather utilized in such a way that they create a framework for an organization that can advocate on behalf of those who are oppressed. Both authors agree that the acknowledgement of such feelings as hopelessness and despair are essential to creating a movement that advocates for change. Although both authors argue on behalf of change, they differ significantly in their definitions of the type of involvement needed to create such change. While Alinsky argues on behalf of direct participation by all members of the movement, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. counters by stating that direct participation does not constitute one’s involvement in a particular movement; thus, it is irrelevant in determining one’s level of support.

The Alinsky Model
Reminiscent of Dr. King, Alinsky believes that revolutionary change occurs due to reoccurring feelings of hopelessness and defeat by the oppressed. Although feelings such as these are crucial to creating change, they do not provide the continued momentum and support needed to advance the movement. Hence, one must remember to channel such feelings into other areas that would ultimately strengthen rather than weaken the movement. The movement should serve as a way in which to embrace all members of a society rather than a source of exclusion; thus, all members of a community should be involved regardless of age or class. Furthermore, all members must also be informed of the expected sacrifices to be made on behalf of the movement. Each member must be willing to sacrifice both themselves and their interests for the freedom of others. Sacrifices (i.e. jail, abuse, loss, etc.) such as these demonstrate an individual’s level of commitment to both the movement and the general well-being of society. Prior to making such sacrifices, each individual must question his or her involvement in both the movement and in society to determine whether the movement is necessary in creating change. If the movement proves to be necessary, each individual must not only be capable of communicating the issues at hand but also the belief in the movement’s ability to create change. Alinsky reiterates the importance of communication by stating that one must be able to communicate the experience of his or her community to both them and the outside world. Members must not only communicate the experiences of their community but also remain active in fighting the perceived injustices. Alinsky is quick to point out that although remaining active is important; one must always have a reason for any activity that occurs within the movement. The movement’s ability to provide an explanation will not only solidify the movement but also give meaning to those involved.

King’s Direct Nonviolent Movement
The principles of the direct nonviolent movement led by Dr. King are similar to those presented by Alinsky. Like Alinsky, Dr. King proposes the inclusion of all individuals regardless of age, class, race and physical ability. Dr. King argues that by seeking unity with others in similar situations, it not only increases the level of community involvement but also gives a voice to the movement. The voice of an entire community is often more difficult to ignore as opposed to one that is specific to a designated population; thus, the voice of poor, disadvantaged Whites is just as important and in some cases more essential than the one being heard by the African-American community. The voice of poor, disadvantaged Whites not only demonstrates the inequalities present in White society but also in other communities as well; thus, creating a network of support willing to fight on behalf of all humanity rather than a specific population. Hence, the focus of any movement should not be on one injustice but rather a combination of injustices occurring within a given society. For all injustices are interconnected and should be dealt with accordingly.
Dr. King also argues on behalf of utilizing the available resources within a community to forge both alliances and trust with community members. The example provided by Dr. King was that of the church. Due to Dr. King’s religious background as well as the significance of the church in the African-American community, the church played a crucial role in defining the theories and practices of the direct nonviolent movement. Prior to joining the movement, all participants had to agree to the following criteria: to incorporate and think about the teachings and life of Jesus on a daily basis, remember that the movement seeks justice and reconciliation not victory, to talk and walk in the manner of love, to be a soldier of God, must be willing to sacrifice oneself and wishes for the freedom of all men, observe the rules of courtesy, must continually locate ways to help others and the world, refrain from all forms of violence (i.e. verbal, physical and mental), maintain one’s physical and spiritual health, and finally each participant must follow the directions of the movement and its leaders (King, 1963, p. 51). These examples clearly illustrate the expected behavior of all participants based on the church and its scriptures. Christianity undoubtedly played a key role in both the creation and functioning of the movement.

Comparison of Community Organizations
Although both movements are similar in many aspects, there are also some significant differences. Unlike the model provided by Alinsky, the direct nonviolent movement incorporates both the church and its religious text in defining and molding its concept of peace. Though the incorporation of the church was beneficial to the African American movement, one must not forget that it also excluded those who were not tied to a particular religious affiliation. Unfortunately, the inability to succumb to the basic principles of the church further alienated and in some cases perpetuated, the oppression of those not religiously affiliated. It could then be argued that such alienation based on religious affiliation was comparable to the segregation laws of the south; therefore, decreasing the credibility of the movement’s slogan of equality. Another area in which the two theories differ is that of individual participation. Alinsky (1971) argues, “Change means movement” (p. 221); thus, those who do not actively participate in the movement are allowing for the continued existence of oppression. Conversely, the direct nonviolent movement states, “one need not directly participate in order to be involved” (King, 1963, p. 27). Rather than direct involvement, an individual simply needs to identify with the movement, have pride in the movement and support the movement either financially or spiritually. Therefore, the direct nonviolent movement provides more wiggle room for those who have little time or the ability to directly participate in the movement. Furthermore, it also allows for an increased chance of possible participant recruitment, which would then provide more reliability to the concerns and social issues being voiced. Alinsky also differs from King in that he believes that the negative stereotypes of a particular group can be seen as a tool of enlightenment rather than oppression. Alinsky (1971) states that the use of stereotypes and humor in direct action often allows the majority to “recognize at last the absurdity of their stereotypes” (p. 145). The direct nonviolent movement however would argue against such displays by stating that such actions only perpetuate the existing stereotypes. This type of action would then only serve as a reminder of the participant’s inferiority to the dominant group rather than a source of empowerment.

Undocumented Latino Immigrants
Today, Latinos like African Americans of the past are being confronted with issues of discrimination and oppression. It is important to state that by no means am I arguing that the problems of the past no longer affect African Americans. I am simply arguing that the level at which African Americans are being oppressed and marginalized within our society has shifted dramatically over the past few decades. Furthermore, the possibility of oppression is significantly greater for Latinos who are classified as undocumented; thus, placing them in a similar situation to the African Americans (i.e. slaves) of the past. The focus of undocumented immigrants and their current situations leads me to select the direct nonviolent movement as a way in which to organize this particular population. Prior to creating a nonviolent movement, one must be able to communicate the issues as well as inspire those involved in the movement. Thus, mutual communication is important in not only understanding the issues affecting undocumented immigrants but also inspiring them in the ability to create change. Furthermore, one must be able to communicate the experiences of undocumented immigrants to the public in order to educate them as well as solicit support from a variety of individuals regardless of age, class, race, citizenship and physical ability. The next step in organizing this particular community would be to seek unity with others in similar situations. Undocumented Latino and Asian immigrants could unite in order to combat the existing inequalities in housing, job opportunities, education and immigration. Additionally, these two populations could then utilize the existing resources available within their communities to forge both alliances and trust with community members. Like the African American communities of the past, resources such as churches, community agencies serving undocumented immigrants, race-specific organizations, politicians as well as elite community members could be solicited in hopes of building useful relationships and alliances. Relationships such as these will not only increase support for undocumented rights but also increase media coverage, which will serve as an educational tool for the public. However, one must also be aware of the possible dangers that could occur due to such coverage. The fact that undocumented immigrants are such a vulnerable population adds a considerable amount of pressure to the movement. Thus, the amount of direct involvement (sit-ins, marches or demonstrations) would either have to be carefully planned or eliminated from the movement’s agenda because of possible deportation; therefore, severely limiting the type of direct action taken.

Conclusion
As one can see, community organizing is essential to creating change. Both authors have clearly demonstrated that in order to create such change, one must be able to communicate a community’s experiences to not only the community but also the public. Each community is unique thus not all theories or standards will apply in every respect and must be adjusted according to the community at hand. In doing so, this will not only secure the possibility of creating change but also guarantee it.

Bibliography

Alinsky, S. (1971). Rules for Radicals. New York: Vintage Books.

King, M. (1963). Why We Can’t Wait. New York: Signet Classic.

© 2005

The Multiplicity of Meanings Associated with Veiling in Egypt

2006-03-22T14:02:00.001-07:00

By: Eliticia Vieyra

Throughout history, a number of questions have surfaced among activists in Egypt concerning the veil’s true meaning. Thus, a number of activists have explored the true meaning of the veil by asking such questions as when and why do women in Egypt choose to veil. This can be seen by reviewing the literature on the subject of veiling written throughout the 20th century. Early 20th century literature regarded veiling as a symbol of elite status, whereas literature written in the latter part of the 20th century viewed veiling as a form of expression. A way in which women could not only maintain their personal identity but their cultural identity as well. Therefore, the veil no longer represented those of elite status but all women. In reviewing all that has been written on the topic of veiling in Egypt, one can see the multiplicity of meanings that have come about historically concerning the veil. Thus, the veil has transformed from a symbol of oppression and class, to one of fashion, piety, and Western resistance. This idea will be explained in more detail throughout the paper.
In his book, The Liberation of Women, published in 1899, the Egyptian scholar, Qasim Amin calls for a reconceptualization of the veil among early 20th century Egyptian societies, specifically, those containing individuals of elite status. Amin argues that the use of the veil must be confronted on both religious and social realms. He begins by arguing that the use of the veil has and continues to be exaggerated by Islamic fundamentalists, who call for the complete veiling of the body. He states that it has been the exaggeration of veiling by Islamic fundamentalists that has led many to view the practice of veiling as a form of oppression brought forth by the Islamic religion. The Liberation of Women was originally written in response to the West’s perception of Islam. However, in doing research, Amin discovered that there were in fact particular aspects of Islam that were backwards. One aspect in particular was the low status of women within the Egyptian society. Amin felt that by improving the status of women, this would in turn improve the status of Egypt globally. Hence, Egypt would be a forerunner in women’s rights rather than the epitome of inferiority and oppression. Therefore, Amin calls for the elimination of such ancient traditions as veiling and seclusion in order to improve the status of women. Amin, on the other hand, argues for veiling as the Shari’a and the Quran define it. Both the Shari’a and Quran state that although a woman must veil, her face, hands, and feet may be unveiled. He continues by arguing, “the veil is not part of the Shari’a in terms of either piety or morality” despite the fact that many Islamic fundamentalists view the veil in this form (Amin 43).
Qasim Amin then discusses a number of social implications that are brought forth by the Islamic fundamentalist’s definition of veiling. This can be seen in the following quote in which Amin states “that depriving our society of the contribution of women is a major weakness, and that the upbringing of children will be ineffectual unless we provide their mothers with a proper upbringing first” (Amin 47). Hence, Amin calls for the education of women in academic institutions and the real world rather than the seclusion of women. Amin argues that by limiting the education of women, this not only hinders women’s ability to learn but that of their children as well. This then leads to the question, how can a woman properly educate her children on issues that she has no prior knowledge? Amin would argue that she could not. Therefore, it is crucial that women receive an education in order to provide the proper upbringing for their children. Furthermore, Amin suggests that by following the Shari’a’s definition of veiling the possibilities of advancement for women and Egypt are endless. He forms this argument solely on the education of women, which he believes will ultimately lead to the “independence of women and the belief that chastity is an inner spiritual quality, not the result of a garment which hides the body” (Amin 60).
The importance of veiling is a key issue in Arlene MacLeod’s book, Accommodating Protest, which was published in 1991. MacLeod, an American scholar, argues that “the new veils can protest, and perhaps ameliorate women’s situation in at least three dimensions of inequality-in relations of gender, of class, and of global position” (131). She states that based on gender, the veil serves as an ultimate symbol of womanhood. MacLeod argues this stance by focusing on the Islamic cultures interpretation of the veil, which is believed to convey such ideas as chastity, modesty, and honor. Hence, it is believed that “the veil, above all, demands respect for the wearer” (MacLeod 133). MacLeod also argues that the veil represents social mobility in Egypt. Thus, the veil no longer represents those of the elite class but also the rising middle class. Therefore, the veil represents the middle classes ability to attain consumer goods that were previously available to only those of elite status. MacLeod continues by stating that although “lower-middle-class women seek to emulate upper-middle-class women, they are also uncomfortable about some of the customs they see or hear about” (135). These customs are often attributed to Egypt’s surge in development and modernization. Egypt’s constant development has led many Egyptian women to don the veil in protest of the economic crisis that ensued. Unfortunately, this economic crisis led to a “loss of tradition” (MacLeod 136). MacLeod then states that the veil is simply a protest of accommodation rather than equality. She forms this argument solely on the basis that the veil “expresses compliance and the desire to be obliging, accepting, and grateful for concessions granted” (MacLeod 138). Hence, MacLeod believes that the rise in veiling is due to Egyptian women’s willingness to accommodate to a male dominated society and culture.
In her book, Revealing Reveiling, published in 1992, Sherifa Zuhur argues, “the voluntary adoption of the veil represents much more to women than a badge of an activist” (104). Zuhur, an Egyptian scholar, argues that often times the true nature of the veil is misunderstood by the West. Zuhur reinforces this idea by stating “to the Western eye, the wearing of the veil may signify an allegiance to a political idea or a commitment to a societal change” (104). However, Zuhur argues that the up rise in veiling among Egyptian women can be attributed to a decision based on morals rather than politics. She continues by stating that many Egyptian women have decided to reveil based on cultural, religious, and psychological explanations. Zuhur posits this by relying on the categories created by Yvonne Haddad in 1984, which classify women’s reasons for veiling. Hence, Haddad notes chastity and modesty as cultural explanations for veiling. Furthermore, Haddad classified the act of veiling brought forth out of one’s obedience to God as religious. Lastly, Haddad defined the psychological explanation as “an affirmation of authenticity, a return to the roots, and a rejection of Western norms” (qtd in Zuhur 104). It is important to understand Haddad’s explanations for veiling because of Zuhur’s use of these categories in order to explain the reveiling movement in Egypt according to Egyptian women.
In December of 2000, the Asian Journal of Women Studies published Eum Ikran’s article, “Discourses on (Un)Veiling in Egypt”, which focuses on the ongoing debate among both supporters and opponents of the veil. Ikran, a Muslim scholar, begins by stating that one must have an understanding of both the social and political circumstances of Egyptian society in order to properly understand the practice of veiling (1). Similarly, Ikran states that the practice of veiling must be examined in regards to its cultural meaning within Islamic societies rather than based on a Western ideology. Ikran reiterates this idea by stating, “the veiling tradition should be viewed in the context of contemporary Muslim society as an instrument of freedom rather than the subjugation of women” (9). To support this argument, Ikran notes the veil’s symbolic meaning in modern day Egypt. Ikran states that modern day Egyptian women don the veil as a form of expression rather than oppression. Furthermore, Ikran argues that the veil expresses one’s cultural identity, morality, modesty, independence from the West as well as freedom of behavior.
The veil continues to be a source of debate for both the West and Middle East. This is due to West’s constant portrayal of the veil as a tool of oppression. Hence, the following pages will allow one to see that the practice of veiling in Egypt symbolizes a form of expression rather than oppression. Therefore, in order to truly understand the multiplicity of meanings concerning the veil, one must understand the symbolic meaning of the veil according to both the West and Egypt.
Many Egyptian women today have decided to don the veil as a form of fashion rather than religious piety. Hence, “the veil has become a means of expressing a woman’s individual character through multiple colors and styles” (Ikran 7). The veil as a symbol of fashion can be seen in the various designer labels that are now available to women. Similarly, “matching bags and shoes and elaborate jewelry complete the outfit which conforms with the custom of covering the hair and body but is clearly focused on being fashionable and alluring as well” (MacLeod 106). Egyptian women have not only turned to the veil as a form of fashion but a cheaper alternative to Western attire. With its many variations, the veil has also become a vehicle of personal identity. MacLeod reinforces this idea by stating “clothes, of course, do communicate-defining the image the wearer would like to present, making a statement about mood and personality, and revealing social class, occupation, or family status” (128). Consequently, the veil’s symbolic nature of expressing one’s identity has led to an increase in veiling and employment among Egyptian women.
Although many Egyptian women have turned to the veil as a source of fashion, others have done so for religious purposes. For many, the veil is a form of religious dress, which communicates a woman’s identity to society. Hence, the veil serves as a tool in which women can reclaim their Muslim identity of piety, modesty, and morality. However, many Egyptian women do not attribute the veil to religion but rather fundamentalism. Qasim Amin also argues that Islamic fundamentalists “were attracted to the use of the veil, approved it, exaggerated its use, and dressed it up in religious raiment, just as other harmful customs have become firmly established in the name of religion, but of which religion is innocent” (37). Hence, Amin argues for the reconceptualization of the veil based on Islamic law. Although Amin argues against the religious implications of the veil, he does “consider it to be one of the permanent cornerstones of morality” (35). Yet, many religious Egyptian women argue that the veil must be “understood in the context of solidarity of the community and an exhibition of piety” (Zuhur 78). Thus, the debate concerning the veil’s religious meaning continues among both Egyptian scholars and women. This is just another example of the multiplicity of meanings that has come about regarding the practice of veiling.
The rise of fundamentalism in 1970 led many students to don the veil in protest of the West. Particularly, Western influences which were perceived as “undermining the Muslim family and Muslim society as a whole” (Ikran 3). Thus, the veil became a tool in which Egyptian women could not only free themselves from Western constraints but also reclaim their traditional roles within Islamic society. This was based on the veil’s symbolic meaning of modesty, morality, protection, and respect. As a result of veiling, Muslim women began challenging the western trend of viewing the female body in commercial terms (Ikran 4). Hence, Egyptian women began to argue that it was not Muslim women who were oppressed but Western women. This argument was formed exclusively due to Western media’s portrayal of women as sexual beings. El Guindi furthers this argument by stating that the veil symbolizes “a new public appearance and demeanor that reaffirms an Islamic identity and morality and rejects Western materialism, consumerism, commercialism, and values” (145).
Throughout the early 19th century, there was a drastic change amongst those who veiled and those who did not. In his book, The Liberation of Women, Qasim Amin argues that this drastic change occurred out of necessity by the lower classes. Hence, the veil became a symbol of elite status. This is because of the lower classes need to unveil in order to properly meet the demands expected of them. Unlike elite women, lower class women were thrust into strenuous forms of work in order to help support their families. Today, the veil symbolizes the rising middle class. This is based on the premise that the majority of women taking part in the reveiling movement are young college students. Leila Ahmed argues that the majority of these students come from either “lower middle class families or rural families that have recently migrated to urban centers” (222). Consequently, “by adopting the veil women can demonstrate their middle class position and evade the revelations Western dress would inevitable make about their exact position within the middle-class hierarchy” (MacLeod 135). In her book, Accommodating Protest, MacLeod argues that although there are certain facets of upper-middle-class life that lower-middle-class women care to emulate, there are others that lower-middle-class women would rather disregard. This idea points to Westernized values, which are often attributed to upper-middle-class women. Consequently, MacLeod concludes that the veil “signals women’s resistance to the economic pressures of their class inequality, and expresses their attempt to rise in the social hierarchy while retaining their subcultural identity” (135).
In order to properly understand the multiplicity of meanings associated with the veil, one must understand the debate presented by the West. Unlike Egyptian women, the West perceives the veil as a marker of gender inequality and oppression. Ikran argues that “the western images of the veil not only encapsulated women’s oppression, their inferiority to men, feminine passiveness, and their ignorance and seclusion, but also the inferiority of Islam to Christianity” (4). Ahmed, an Egyptian scholar, supports this argument by focusing on the historical interpretations of the veil throughout the 19th century by Western colonizers. Hence, Ahmed states:
Veiling-to Western eyes, the most visible maker of the differentness and inferiority of Islamic societies-became the symbol now of both the oppression of women (or, in the language of the day, Islam’s degradation of women) and the backwardness of Islam, and it became the open target of colonial attack and the spearhead of assault on Muslim societies. (152)
Thus, Western colonizers called for the elimination of such practices as veiling and seclusion in order to advance Muslim societies into a more Western way of living. Likewise, Christian missionaries argued for the need to rescue Muslim women from the “ignorance and degradation in which they existed” in the 19th century (Ahmed 154). Although the symbolic meaning of the veil has changed historically within Egyptian societies, the Western interpretation of the veil remains the same. This can be seen in a Western feminist argument, which states that Egyptian women should not view the veil as form of liberation but rather inequality. However, many argue that it is not the veil that is oppressive but Western feminists continuous representation of Third World women as undifferentiated, backwards, and inferior (Urban 12). Nonetheless, other facets of Western society completely disregard the veil as a women’s issue. Urban argues this point by stating, “in both Western media discourse and the arguments of many scholars, veiling becomes an issue revolving around the mandates of Islam as well as those of Muslim men” ( 21).
Originally, Egyptian women donned the veil as a way in which to express one’s religious piety. However, in reviewing all that has been written on the topic of veiling, one can see the multiplicity of meanings that have come about historically concerning the veil. Yet, the question of why this has occurred remains unanswered. Hence, the following pages will focus primarily on what has led to the multiplicity of meanings concerning the veil.
In the 1920’s, “with the growing influence of western liberalism in Egypt and the negative western image of the veil as a symbol and function of sexual segregation, women in Egypt started to remove their veil as a sign of emancipation” (Ikran 3). Women unveiled not to just free themselves from the veil’s constraints but as a form of civil disobedience towards the state of women’s affairs in every aspect of Egyptian life. Hence, several women’s organizations were formed in order to eliminate such practices as sexual segregation and seclusion. The struggle for women’s rights continued into the 50’s; however, with the Nasser government in place the need to fight for women’s rights was eliminated. This sudden change in women’s status was due to Nasser’s “attempt to construct a new society and to aid in its development; the country needed women to participate in social activities” (Ikran 3). Similar to Qasim Amin, the Nasser government believed that by improving the status of women, this would in turn improve the status of Egypt. This belief then led the Nasser government to create a number of jobs for women. Thus, a number of Egyptian women entered the labor market as a way of expressing their independence. However, the rise in Islamic fundamentalism in the 70’s called for “a return to traditional values and the elimination of western influences” (Ikran 3). Consequently, a number of young Egyptian women began to don the veil as a symbol of independence and protection. Furthermore, the veil was symbolic of Egyptian women’s Islamic identity thereby, eliminating the need to unveil based on the previous notion of liberation. However, Ahmed argues against Egyptian women’s adoption of fundamentalist standards by stating:
Yet without their particularly intending to, their affiliation with a cultural and ethical Islam lends support and strength to Islamist political forces which, if successful in realizing their objectives, would institute authoritarian theocratic states that would undoubtedly have a devastatingly negative impact on women. (230)
Women against Fundamentalism argue that this is due to fundamentalist’s perception of women “embodying the morals and traditional values of the family and the whole community and the struggle to control women’s bodies and minds” (qtd. in Al-Ali 133). Hence, the reveiling movement completely disregards the women’s movement of the 1920’s, which called for the elimination of sexual segregation and seclusion. This in turn leads to the regression of the women’s movement rather than its intensification. Therefore, leading to the formation of a male dominated society in which women remain silent.
With the rise of fundamentalism, many young Egyptian women began to don the veil in protest to the West. Consequently, Ikran argues:
In the course of trying to find an independent identity, amidst the flood of western tradition and culture, nationalist feelings among the Egyptians intensified. Therefore, the veiling trend period was a continuation of the former period, wherein the veil was seen as a symbol of sexual independence from men and social independence from the West. (4)
“In other words the veil today is often seen as a symbol of resistance in the face of a perceived loss of cultural purity because of western power and influence” (Ikran 7). Thus, Egyptian women have turned to veiling in order to express one’s cultural and religious identity. Furthermore, this has led many Egyptian women to refute the West’s interpretation of the veil as a form of oppression. In addition, Egyptian activists challenge Western feminists to seek out other avenues of thought. It is believed that through education, Western feminists can eliminate fixed notions of third world women. Hence rather than viewing third world women as victims, one should understand the diversity that exists within feminism. Thus, Egyptian women view the practice of veiling as a form of independence rather than oppression. Therefore, it is important to note here that one should not measure the circumstances of others with the Western ruler. In doing so, this eliminates any possibility of unity amongst the two feminisms.
The primary goal of this paper was to determine whether Egyptian women viewed the veil in the same context of oppression as the West. However, in reviewing all that has been written on the topic of veiling by both Egyptian and American scholars, one can see the multiplicity of meanings that have come about historically concerning the veil. During the latter part of the 19th century, the veil was a way in which to determine those of the elite class. However, the symbolic meaning of the veil changed between 1920 and 1950. It was no longer representative of the elite class but the overall struggles of Egyptian women. Thus, a number of women’s organizations were formed in order to eliminate such practices as seclusion and sexual segregation. Therefore, many Egyptian women viewed the practice of unveiling as a sign of emancipation and liberation. Nevertheless, the rise of fundamentalism in the 70’s called for the elimination of Western influences and a return to traditional values. With the rise of fundamentalism, a number of young Egyptian women turned to the veil in order to reclaim their Islamic identity. “As a result, the veil became a popular fashion item among Egyptian women” (Ikran 4). The veil as a fashion can now be found in a number of designer styles. Aside from expressing one’s fashion sense, the veil is also worn to express one’s religious piety. Thus, some Egyptian women don the veil in order to express their morality, modesty, and chastity. However, younger Egyptian women don the veil in order to express their rising social status. Hence, the veil is now representative of the rising middle class in Egypt. Consequently, one can see that the veil is a way in which Egyptian women can freely express themselves without any constraints. However, the West continues to perceive the veil as a form of oppression rather than expression. This is especially true among Western feminists.
The number of meanings associated with the veil then posed an additional question. Historically, what has led to the multiplicity of meanings concerning the veil? In reviewing the literature, one can see that the rise in fundamentalism during the 70’s had a huge impact on the veil’s meaning. Hence, the veil’s meaning changed from one of oppression to one of independence. Specifically, women’s independence from the West and men. Thus, increased resistance to the West also led to a shift in the veil’s meaning. Egyptian women now embraced their Muslim identity by eliminating all Western influences and traditions. Furthermore, Egyptian women argued for the education of Westerners in order to eradicate preconceived notions concerning the veil. In addition, Egyptian activists urge Western feminists to take note of the diversity that exists within feminism. In doing so, this eliminates the need to measure the circumstances of others with the Western ruler. Thus, creating a sense of unity amongst feminists around the world.

Selected Bibliography
Primary Sources:

Amin, Qasim. The New Woman. Cairo, American University Press, 1900.

Amin, Qasim. The Liberation of Women. Cairo, American University Press, 1899.

Brown, Sarah. “Feminism in Egypt: A Conversation with Nawal Sadawi.” Women and Work in the Middle East 95 (1981): 24-27.

“8/11, from a different perspective: interview with Nawal El Saadawi and Sherif Hatata.” Women in Action 19 Apr. 2002: 1+.

Secondary Sources:

Afary, Janet. “Steering between Scylla and Charybdis: Shifting Gender Roles in Twentieth Century Iran: [Part 1 of 3].” NWSW Journal 8 (1996): 28.

Ahmed, Leila. Woman and Gender in Islam. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Ahmed, Leila. A Border Passage. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.

Al-Ali, Nadje. Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East The Egyptian Women’s Movement. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Azar, Tabari. “The Enigma of the Veiled Iranian Woman.” Online: JSTOR 103 (1982): 22-27.

Badran, Margaret. “Feminists, Islam & Nation: gender & the making of modern Egypt.” Resources for Feminist Research 24 (1995): 35-38.

Bauer, Janet. “Ma’ssoum’s Tale: The Personal and Political Transformations Of A Young Iranian “Feminist” Her Ethnographer.” Feminist Studies 19 (1993): 519.

Botman, Selma. “Engendering Citizenship in Egypt.” Rev. of Engendering Citizenship in Egypt, by Leila Hessini. Middle East Women Studies Review Summer 2001: 1.

El Guindi, Fadwa. Veil Modesty, Privacy and Resistance. New York: Oxford International Publishers Ltd., 1999.

Eum, Ikran. “Discourses on (Un)Veiling in Egypt.” AJWS 6 (2000): 102.
“Iranian women see Nobel laureate as force for new reforms.” The Associated Press 11 October 2003.

MacLeod, Arlene. Accommodating Protest. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Moghadam, Valentine. “Revolution, Religion, and Gender Politics: Iran and Afghanistan Compared: [Part 3 of 4].” Journal of Women’s History 10 (1999): 182.

Tohidi, Nayereh. “Modernity, Islamization, and Women in Iran.” Women in Action 1 (1997): 38.

Urban, Jessica. “Unveiling Human Rights: A Postcolonial Feminist Analysis of Women, Veiling, Human Rights and Western Geopolitical Discourse.” Working Papers (1999): 1-38.

“Women and Clandestine Politics in Iran, 1970-1985: [Part 4 of 4].” Feminist Studies Spring 1997: 38+.

Zuhur, Sherifa. Revealing Reveiling. New York: State University of New York Press, 1992.

© 2003

Are Muslims from Mars and Europeans from Venus?

2006-02-23T15:34:00.000-07:00

by David Wearing
February 20, 2006

The row over a set of cartoons published in a Danish newspaper that mocked the Muslim prophet Muhammad, and their republication elsewhere in the European press, has raised some interesting questions; albeit not the ones that have been discussed in the Western media. We have been told by several commentators that a choice is to be made between freedom of speech and offending the religious sensibilities of others, and that this choice forms part of a broad, historic clash between two distinct and competing systems of values. In reality, both of these propositions are false. Freedom of expression and respect for people of different beliefs are not mutually exclusive, nor are the respective value systems of the West and the Islamic world. However, by acknowledging the inadequacy of the “clash of civilisations” narrative, dispensing with these simplistic dichotomies and investigating the truths they have obscured thus far, we can escape the din created by belligerents on all sides and discover the real possibilities that exist for positive engagement between Islam and the West. Moreover, given the likely human costs arising from a continued absence of dialogue, this is not just an opportunity but an obligation.

Shortly before the row over the Danish caricatures began to grip the headlines, a public lecture was given by Tariq Ramadan at the London School of Economics. Ramadan is a Swiss national of Egyptian background, and a world renowned scholar of Islamic and European thought. He has spoken and written a great deal on the relationship between the West and the Muslim world: in terms both of international relations and of social relations in Western countries. Ramadan strongly advocates a constructive dialogue between the two cultures and enthuses about the substantial common ground in which such a dialogue could take place. As a scholar of both Western and Eastern philosophy, he sees a plethora of common principles and values shared by Islam and the West. For those of us schooled primarily in Western thought, Ramadan not only exhibits what we can instantly recognise as a deep intellectual immersion in the principles and values of the Enlightenment (not least the free exchange of reasoned ideas), but also gives us an insight into how those intrinsically human values have manifested themselves in the Islamic world throughout its history.

The notion that certain values are not exclusive to either West or East can be illustrated by considering the question of religious tolerance. Is religious tolerance an intrinsically Western value absent from Islamic culture? One might well take that impression from much of the recent media commentary in the West. But in fact, understanding and indeed celebration of other religions - far beyond mere tolerance – has manifested itself prominently in Islam, which the prophet Muhammad saw as completing a trinity of religions alongside Christianity and Judaism. The Qur’an explicitly demands respect for Jews and Christians (“the People of the Book”), and though one may well find contradictions of this principle elsewhere in Islamic scripture, one will also find much religious intolerance (putting it mildly) in the scriptures of those other two religions, particularly in the Old Testament.

Moving from principles to practice, Islamic history overall compares very favourably to that of the West. Examples such as the Inquisition and the semi-religious justifications used for various Western colonial genocides and acts of repression (including the wholesale extermination of indigenous societies throughout the Western hemisphere from 1492 onwards) run counter to the notion that the tolerance of dissenting beliefs is intrinsic to Western culture (1). Over the course of history, both Jews in the Islamic Middle East and Hindus in Mughal India, for example, were treated comparatively favourably, as against say the Jewish experience in Europe. The point is here not to prove the reverse of the liberal-West / dogmatic-East equation, but to illustrate its fundamental deficiency as an assumption underpinning much of the current debate.

However, in spite its deficiencies, this assumption is nevertheless deeply ingrained across the political spectrum. In Britain, The Observer published a “history of free speech” accompanying its coverage of the cartoons row, listing an almost exclusively Western chronology: from Socrates through the Magna Carta to the US Bill of Rights. Islam was permitted to appear in the story twice: firstly in 1989 when “[the] Ayatollah Khomeini issue[d] a fatwa against Salman Rushdie over the 'blasphemous' content of his novel, The Satanic Verses”, and secondly in 2002 where “Nigerian journalist Isioma Daniel incense[d] Muslims by writing about the Prophet Mohammed and Miss World, provoking riots which [left] more than 200 dead”. In the same issue, the paper’s leader article had stated firmly that “this is not a clash of civilisations”. Yet its writers could have done little more to espouse the view expressed by Samuel Huntingdon in his book “The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order” that the “sense of individualism and … tradition of individual rights and liberties” to be found in the West are “unique among civilised societies”.

In their acts of cultural self-love, neither Huntingdon nor The Observer writers allow the facts to spoil the romantic mood as they gaze doe-eyed into the mirror. But in truth there are plenty of other examples of the principle of free expression asserting itself in history; even outside of the western tradition helpfully outlined for us by Britain’s leading liberal Sunday newspaper.

For example, at a time when Jews and heretics were being burned at the stake in Europe, the belief that “the pursuit of reason” should reign over “blind faith” was flourishing in India under the Muslim Emperor Akbar, who demonstrated his commitment to the principle by arranging public dialogues between people of all faiths, including atheists. Displaying the religious tolerance of Mughal India described above, Akbar issued a legal order stating that "no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him", or to choose to have no religion at all. In taking these measures, Akbar was laying the formal foundations of a secular state in the 16th Century, two hundred years before secularism gained the ascendancy in France and the United States.

Though keeping to the cultures of the West and the Muslim world for the purposes of this discussion, we might also allow ourselves a brief detour to note in passing some other occurrences of free expression flourishing beyond the European canon. For example, nearly two millennia before Akbar’s reign, in the 3rd century BC, the Indian Buddhist Emperor Ashoka proclaimed edicts promoting the human rights of people, at a time when the Greek philosopher Aristotle was excluding women and slaves from his writings on freedom, an exception that Ashoka did not make. One might also recall any number of indigenous societies in what is now the third world where pre-democratic forms of governance were evolving, giving ordinary people a say in public affairs, long before many of those societies were either reordered or swept away completely by the tide of European expansion. These examples, and countless others too numerous to list, demonstrate that the free flow and expression of ideas is by no means an invention of the West or its own Enlightenment tradition. Liberalism, both of thought and of belief, has been valued by various cultures throughout human history, and contrary to Huntingdon’s assertion, has never been the sole preserve of one (2).

Whether the omissions from The Observer’s chronology were accidental or deliberate their effect on the current debate will be the same. Whilst miming respect for Muslims and mumbling polite refutations of any civilisational clash, The Observer has strongly reinforced the erroneous belief that the story of freedom of speech is all but exclusively a Western story; with the East allowed to appear only fleetingly and in direct opposition to enlightened European values. Thus the ideological premise of the “clash of civilisations” narrative, whilst superficially rejected by polite liberalism, is further ingrained even on the left-hand side of the political spectrum. By putting aside such conceits and examining history, we have seen that liberalism is no more intrinsically Western than dogmatism is written in the DNA of any Muslim majority society. We can now therefore move to consider how those liberal values claimed as the West’s gift to humanity manifest themselves in the present day.

In his LSE lecture, Ramadan expressed the view that in a dialogue of civilisations principles could be usefully compared with principles and (social and political) practices compared with practices, but that difficulties will arise when one party compares its principles with the other's practices. This creates a flawed dialogue, not least because it causes the former party to flatter itself and to antagonise the other unnecessarily. So in this case, people on the European side compare “Western values” of free speech and tolerance with the angry demands emanating from the Islamic world that the offensive depictions of the Prophet are banned. Meanwhile aggrieved Muslims compare the piety of Islam with the disrespectful behaviour of the Western press.

But as Ramadan says, comparing our principles with our own practices and satisfying ourselves that they are consistent should be our first priority, before the denouncement of others. Self-examination is always productive, hypocrisy never so. For our part as Westerners, to compare our principles with our own practices, we might examine our true position on political freedom as it stands today. Are our collective practices consistent with our purported liberal values? To answer this question, it may be particularly beneficial to examine those relevant practices of ours that have been most visible to the world’s Muslims. The additional benefit here will be to gain insight into how our actual record on democracy and freedom of speech might be perceived by those who dwell, we are told, on the opposite side of the cultural schism. Empathy is, after all, an essential component of meaningful dialogue.

Currently there is much enthusiastic talk in the West of our mission to spread democracy in the Middle East, with the occupation of Iraq held up as an example. But the assertion that “democratising” the Muslim world is a Western foreign policy goal raises a number of questions which, though obvious, are conspicuous by their absence from mainstream political debate. For instance, in the case of Iraq, why were popular demands for free elections resisted so fiercely by the occupiers for several months after the invasion, and agreed to only after Iraqis took to the streets in their thousands to demonstrate for democracy? Since there is no question that the Iraqi public want the occupying troops to leave, as poll after poll has shown, and since the entire Iraqi political class united in calling for a timetable for the withdrawal of occupying troops at two national conferences late last year, why do Western political leaders continue to reject talk of any such timetable out of hand? And why do Western media commentators continue to debate the merits of withdrawal as though the Iraqi public had expressed no preference on the issue? Must freedom of speech for non-westerners be balanced with the freedom of the colonial master to ignore his subjects should they express the wrong views?

US-UK attempts to prevent democracy emerging in Iraq are consistent with long-established policy, and the views of the victims of those policies are not new either. Half a century ago, President Eisenhower asked the US National Security Council to look into the animosity felt by the people of the Middle East towards his government’s policies (which animosity he described as a "campaign of hatred against us"). The Council reported that the hostility stemmed from a widespread perception that the US was supporting oppressive regimes in the region in order to help it secure access to and control over oil reserves. The council went on to say that it would be difficult for the US to counter the perception, largely because it was accurate.

In 1953, the accuracy of that perception had been demonstrated in no uncertain terms as Britain and the US conspired to topple Iran's parliamentary government and install the dictatorship of the Shah. Tehran had upset the British by nationalising its oil industry, having taken the view that the Iranian public, not the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP), should be the main beneficiaries of the national wealth. Winston Churchill's government continued covert operations begun by the previous Labour administration to organise a coup with the help of the CIA. The coup was a success for Western elite interests, if not for Western democratic values, as the US-UK installed a client dictatorship that spent the next 25 years cultivating a reputation for astonishing brutality. Amnesty International reported in 1976 that under the Shah, Iran had the "highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture" which was "beyond belief". "The entire population” said the human rights group “was subjected to a constant, all-pervasive terror" by internal security forces armed and trained by the West.

The conventional strategic model wherein the West maintains effective power but the duties of day-to-day governance are delegated to local elites was described by Lord Curzon in the days of the British Empire. It is preferable, said Curzon, to rule behind an "Arab façade," with "absorption" of the quasi-colonies "veiled by constitutional fictions as a protectorate, a sphere of influence, a buffer State, and so on" (3). The Persian façade provided by the Shah in Iran until 1979 is mirrored today by Arab regimes across the region whose role is to ensure that those countries are governed in the interests, not of their populations (as in a democracy), but of the West and its client elites. The UK maintains close military ties with Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, whilst the US provides enormous financial, military and diplomatic support most prominently to Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. None of these countries can exactly be described as democracies but all are close allies of the freedom loving West. (The case of Israel, where non-Israelis living under illegal occupation are systematically denied their most basic human rights with the full complicity of the US, the UK and other Western countries merits a separate discussion altogether)

The example of Saudi Arabia bears closer examination. The Saudi government prohibits political opposition, has no independent media and - perhaps unsurprisingly given its record of public beheadings, torture and other abuses - bars human rights organisations like Amnesty International from entering the country. Yet, whilst Western politicians and commentators queue up to condemn the repressive theocracy of Iran, a somewhat different approach is taken to the Saudi regime; a theocracy every bit as tyrannical. Tony Blair has found time away from spearheading the drive to democratise the Middle East to praise Saudi Arabia as “a good friend in the international coalition against terrorism”, expressing “no doubt at all that in the future those ties and that relationship will become even stronger still”. The strength of the relationship the Prime Minister refers to is illustrated by the fact that the Saudi government not only provides Britain with its “largest defence sales markets in the world” (quoting the MoD) but has also, for decades, had its internal security forces trained by the UK, sometimes at the British government’s expense.

Returning briefly to the Observer’s chronology of free speech, we might suggest a new entry in the timeline to be inserted just before the Ayatollah Khomeinei’s 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie. In 1988, a religious body appointed by our Saudi allies issued a fatwa of its own sanctioning the execution of members of opposition political parties; surely something of relevance to us given our material contribution to the good fortunes of the Saudi elites responsible. Indeed, in the interests of comparing our principles with our own practices, the Observer might also have mentioned the praising of one of the world’s most notoriously anti-democratic regimes as “a good friend” of the British government by no less a figure than the Prime Minister. Are these not notable episodes, from a British perspective, in the history of free speech? (4)

Contraventions of that “tradition of individual rights and liberties” which is “unique” to the West are by no means limited to our policies towards the Middle East. In Indonesia, the most populous Muslim majority nation in the world, the West backed the dictator Suharto enthusiastically for more than three decades as he slaughtered his political opponents and their supporters by the hundreds of thousands. One might well ask why the love of freedom apparently intrinsic to our civilisational values did not intrude upon the policies of countless democratically elected Western governments throughout that time?

As mentioned above, comparing our purported principles with our actual practices in this way serves two important functions: firstly, in highlighting instances where we fall well short of our own self-professed standards and where corrective action can be taken; and secondly, in illuminating the current debate by allowing us an insight into how our really-existing position on democracy and freedom of speech might be viewed in the Islamic world. It can hardly have escaped the attention of many people in the global Islamic community that the freedom of expression that is said to be “non-negotiable” when caricaturing the prophet Muhammad has proved, along with countless other freedoms, to be eminently negotiable, if not entirely dispensable, when backing a host of authoritarian regimes sponsored to uphold Western interests from North Africa to South East Asia. Having demonstrated the basic speciousness of the liberal-West / dogmatic-East dichotomy, we can now conclude by examining the debate over the Danish caricatures in their socio-political context, armed also with a new insight into possible Muslim perspectives on the issue.

A crucial yet overlooked aspect of the current debate is the balance of power between the offended Muslim communities and the media that have published the cartoons (and the socio-political elites that those media represent). In Denmark, where the row originated, Muslims largely inhabit a social underclass, experiencing real difficulties accessing employment and a stake in the economy more generally. In a country where an anti-immigrant right-wing is in the political ascendancy, bigotry plays no small part in determining the social status of Danish Muslims (for instance, it seems that one Danish MP described the Muslim presence in Denmark as a "cancer"). To many of them, the issue has as much to do with politics as it has to do with religion. The cartoons are an overt expression of the bigotry that has a material effect on their daily lives, and this experience is a common one in ghettos all across Europe. Add this to the historical record of Western foreign policy towards Muslim majority countries, up to and including the serious crises of the present day (Palestine, Iraq, Iran), and the context in which the cartoons are likely to appear from a Muslim perspective is hard to miss. The cartoons themselves figure next to nowhere on the scale of crimes committed by Western governments against the Islamic world, but they are, in the context, a puerile and gratuitous jab in the eye - the needless addition of another insult to a thousand injuries.

The posture struck by many in the European media has been one of brave defiance against the threat of religious dogma (though such bravery was in short supply three years ago when the Danish paper that published the caricatures of Muhammad refused to publish satirical depictions of Christ on the grounds that they might “provoke an outcry”). Given the balance of power between the media and the Muslim communities in Western countries, and between the West and the Islamic world internationally, the courageous pose is a hard one to take seriously. If the European media had a strong record in (a) documenting the relationships between their governments and autocratic regimes abroad, and (b) reporting on the lack of economic opportunity and consequent restriction of social freedom experienced by the domestic underclass, including Muslim first and second generation immigrants, then the current principled stand for freedom might deserve some credit. Again, the balance-of-power element of the issue, presented inversely by the newspaper editors who chose to publish the caricatures, is unavoidable. One can think of few less impressive sights than that of social elites affecting airs of heroism by valiantly standing up to the fearsome tyranny of those who reside under their boot.

But perhaps the most significant aspect both of the publication of the cartoons and of the subsequent reinforcing of the dichotomies discussed here is the effect they will have on the prevailing political discourse in the West and the government policies that emerge from or acquire legitimacy through the terms of that discourse. It is no coincidence that those who most enthusiastically peddle the fiction of a “clash of civilisations” also portray the opposing “other” as a force that seriously threatens to destroy “our way of life”, and therefore advocate an aggressive US-led military strategy across the Islamic world. Manichean rhetoric eulogizing the liberal idealism of “our values” and the necessity of defending them against those who “hate our freedoms” has been the very essence of Western pro-war advocacy in recent years. Observing essentially imperial foreign policies being depicted as altruistic endeavours aimed at bringing enlightenment to backward, inferior (if exotic) cultures, or at least at defending us against them, hardly places us in unfamiliar territory. Indeed, subjugation almost invariably goes hand in hand with the deliberate dehumanisation of those who are being subjugated by those responsible for or whose acquiescence is essential to the act of subjugation (5). And in terms of domestic social relations, the direct contribution made by stereotypical depictions of certain social groups as in some way inferior to the mistreatment of those groups by the majority is again a dynamic that's hardly unfamiliar, not least in Europe.

As Tariq Ramadan stressed in his LSE lecture, meaningful dialogue between Muslims and Westerners is eminently possible. History shows that the common human values of freedom of expression, worship and conscience have emerged in both cultures at various points in time, to greater or lesser extents. The barrier to dialogue is not the necessary antagonism of two diametrically opposed value systems. Nor is the real question at hand one of whether freedom of speech should be curtailed by the demands of religious dogma. Rather, for us as Westerners, the question is whether we will continue to be complicit or to acquiesce in the denial of freedom to others. Declining to publish the caricatures, in light of the political context in which this issue has arisen, would not be a compromise but an affirmation of the values we in Europe purport to uphold.

David Wearing is a regular contributor to UK Watch, the British arm of ZNet. He is also author of the website The Democrat’s Diary

Notes

(1) See “American Holocaust“ by David E. Stannard

(2) For the Huntingdon quote, Akbar and Ashoka see “The Argumentative Indian” by Amartya Sen. For Islamic history see “Islam: A Short History” by Karen Armstrong. For the liberal, arguably pre-democratic aspects of indigenous culture in the Americas and Africa see Stannard and “The Good Empire” by Vivek Chibber, Boston Review February/March 2005

(3) “Year 501: the Conquest Continues” by Noam Chomsky

(4) For British relations with Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern autocracies, and for Western ties to the Iranian Shah’s infamous SAVAK secret police and more on the Iranian coup, see “Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World” by Mark Curtis.

(5) See Stannard for a thorough discussion of the dehumanisation of non-Christian indigenous societies in the Americas and the central role this played in their eradication by European colonial forces from 1492 onwards.

Courtesy of www.zmag.org

White Whine: Reflections on the Brain-Rotting Properties of Privilege

2006-02-23T15:24:00.000-07:00

By Tim Wise

To truly understand a nation, a culture, or its people, it helps to know what they take for granted.

After all, sometimes the things that go unspoken are more powerful than the spoken word, if for no other reason than the tendency of unspoken assumptions to reinforce core ways of thinking, feeling and acting, without ever having to be verbalized (and thus subjected to challenge) at all.

What's more, when people take certain things for granted, anything that goes against the grain of what they perceive as "normal" will tend to stand out like a sore thumb, and invite a hostility that seems reasonable, at least to those dispensing it, precisely because their unspoken assumptions have gone uninterrogated for so long.

Thus, every February I encounter people who are apoplectic at the thought of Black History Month, and who insist with no sense of irony or misgiving that there should be no such thing, since, after all, there is no White History Month--a position to which they can only adhere because they have taken for granted that "American history" as told to them previously was comprehensive and accurate, as opposed to being largely the particular history of the dominant group.

In other words, the normalcy of the white narrative, which has rendered every month since they popped out of their momma's wombs White History Month, escapes them, and makes the efforts of multiculturalists seem to be the unique break with an otherwise neutral color-blindness.

Sorta' like those who e-mail me on a semi-regular basis to insist, as if they have just stumbled upon a truth of unparalleled profundity, that there should be an Ivory Magazine to balance out Ebony, or that we need a White Entertainment Television network to balance out BET, or a NAAWP to balance out the NAACP.

Again, these dear souls ignore what is obvious to virtually all persons of color but which remains unseen by those whose reality gets to be viewed as the norm: namely, that there are already two Ivory Magazines--Vogue and Cosmopolitan; that there are several WETs, which just so happen to go by the names of CBS, NBC and ABC; and that the Fortune 500, U.S. Congress and Fraternal Orders of Police are all doing a pretty good job holding it down for us white folks on the organizational front. Just because the norm is not racially-named, doesn't mean it isn't racialized.

Likewise the ongoing backlash against affirmative action, by those who seem to believe that opportunity would truly be equal in the absence of these presumably unjust efforts to ensure access to jobs and higher education for persons of color.

We are to believe that before affirmative action things were fine, and that were such efforts abolished now, things would return to this utopic state of affairs: to hell with the persistent evidence that people of color continue to face discrimination in employment, housing, education and all other institutional settings in the U.S.

So if the University of Michigan gives applicants of color twenty points on a 150-point admission scale, so as to promote racial diversity and balance out the disadvantages to which such students are often subjected in their K-12 schooling experience, that is seen as unfair racial preference.

But when the same school gives out 16 points to kids from the lily-white Upper Peninsula, or four points for children of overwhelmingly white alumni, or ten points for students who went to the state's "top" schools (who will be disproportionately white), or 8 points for those who took a full slate of Advanced Placement classes in high schools (which classes are far less available in schools serving students of color), this is seen as perfectly fair, and not at all racially preferential.

What's more, the whites who received all those bonus points due to their racial and class position will not be thought of by anyone as having received unearned advantages, in spite of the almost entirely ascriptive nature of the categories into which they fell that qualified them for such bonuses. No matter their "qualifications," it will be taken for granted that any white student at a college or University belongs there.

This is why Jennifer Gratz, the lead plaintiff in the successful "reverse discrimination" suit against Michigan's undergraduate affirmative action policy, found it a supreme injustice that a few dozen black, Latino and American Indian students were admitted ahead of her, despite having lower SATs and grades; but she thought nothing of the fact that more than 1400 other white students also were admitted ahead of her and her co-plaintiffs, despite having lower scores and grades.

"Lesser qualified" whites are acceptable, you see, while "lesser qualified" people of color must be eliminated from their unearned perches of opportunity. This is the kind of racist logic that people like Gratz, who now heads up the state?s anti-affirmative action initiative with the financial backing of Ward Connerly, find acceptable.

This kind of logic also explains the effort of whites at Roger Williams University to start a "white scholarship fund," on the pretense that scholarships for students of color are unfair and place whites at a disadvantage.

This, despite the unmentioned fact that about 93 percent of all college scholarship money goes to whites; despite the fact that students of color at elite and expensive colleges come from families with about half the average income of whites; despite the fact that there are scholarships for pretty much every kind of student under the sun, including children of Tupperware dealers, kids whose parents raise horses, kids who are left-handed, kids whose families descend from the founding fathers: you name it, and there's money available for it.

While there are plenty of whites unable to afford college, the fault for this unhappy reality lies not with minority scholarships, but rather with the decisions of almost exclusively white University elites to raise the price of higher education into the stratosphere, to the detriment of most everyone.

But to place blame where it really belongs, on rich white people, would be illogical. After all, we take it for granted that one day we too might be wealthy, and we wouldn?t want others to question our decisions and prerogatives come that day either.

Better to blame the dark-skinned for our hardship, since we can take it for granted that they're powerless to do anything about it.

Whites, as it turns out, take most everything for granted in this country; which makes perfect sense, because dominant groups usually have that privilege.

We take for granted that we won't be racially profiled even when members of our group engage in criminality at a disproportionate rate, whether the crime is corporate fraud, serial killing, child molestation, abortion clinic bombings or drunk driving. And indeed we won't be.

We take it for granted that our terrorism won't result in whites as a group being viewed with generalized suspicion. So Tim McVeigh represents only Tim McVeigh, while Mohammed Atta gets to serve as a proxy for every other person who either has his name or follows a prophet of that name.

We take it for granted that our dishonesty will be viewed in purely individualistic terms, while the dishonesty of others will result in aspersions being cast upon the entire group from which they come.

Thus, Jayson Blair's deceptions at the New York Times provoke howls of indignation at any effort to provide opportunity to journalists of color--because after all, diversity and quality are proven by this one man's exploits to be incompatible--but Jack Kelley's equally egregious fabrications and fraud at USA Today fails to prompt calls for an end to hiring white guys as reporters, or for scrutinizing them more carefully, or for closing down whatever avenues of opportunity have helped keep the profession so white for so long.

We take it for granted that we will never be viewed as one of those dreaded "special interest" groups, precisely because whatever serves our interests is presumed universal.

So, for example, while politicians who pursue the support of black, Latino, gay or other "minority" voters are said to be pandering to special interests, those who bend over backwards to secure the backing of NASCAR dads and soccer moms, whose racial composition is as self-evident as it is unmentioned, are said to be politically savvy and merely trying to connect with "normal folks."

We take it for granted that "classical music" is a perfectly legitimate term for what really amounts to one particular classical form (mostly European orchestral and piano concerto music), ignoring that there are, indeed, classical forms of all musical styles, as well as their more contemporary versions.

We take it for granted that the only controversy regarding Jesus is whether or not he was killed by Jews or Romans; or whether the depiction of his execution by Mel Gibson is too violent for children, all the while ignoring a much larger issue, which is why does Gibson (and for that matter every other white filmmaker or artist in the history of the faith) feel the need to make Jesus white: something he surely could not have been and was not, with all due apology to Michelangelo, Constantine, Pat Robertson, and the producers of "Jesus Christ Superstar."

That the only physical descriptions of Jesus in the Bible indicate that he had feet the color of burnt brass, and hair like wool, poses a slight problem for Gibson and other followers of the white Jesus hanging in their churches, adorning their crucifixes (if Catholic), and gracing the Christmas cards they send each December.

It is the same problem posed by the anthropological evidence concerning the physical appearance of first century Jews from that part of Northern Africa we prefer to call the "Middle East" (and why is that I wonder?). Namely, Jesus did not look like a long-haired version of my Ashkenazi Jewish, Eastern European great-grandfather in his prime.

But to even bring this up is to send most white Christians (and sadly, even many of color) into fits, replete with assurances that "it doesn't matter what Jesus looked like, it only matters what he did."

Which is all fine and good, until you realize that indeed it must matter to them what Jesus looked like; otherwise, they wouldn't be so averse to presenting him as the man of color he most assuredly was: a man dark enough to guarantee that were he to come back tomorrow, and find himself on the wrong side of New York City at the wrong time of night, reaching for his keys or his wallet in the presence of the Street Crimes Unit, he'd be dispatched far more expeditiously than was done at Golgotha 2000 years ago.

But never fear: we needn?t grapple with that because we can merely take it for granted that Jesus had to look like us, as did Adam and Eve, and as does God himself. And indeed, most whites believe this to be true, as proven by every single picture Bible for kids made by a white person, all of which present these figures in such a way.

Consider the classic and widely distributed Robert Maxwell Bible Series for children, popularly known as the "blue books," which are found in virtually every pediatrician and OBGYN's office in the U.S. In Volume I, readers learn (at least visually speaking) that the Garden of Eden was in Oslo: a little-known fact that will stun Biblical scholars to be sure.

It would all be quite funny were it not so incontestably insane, so pathological in terms of the scope of our nuttiness. What else, after all, can explain the fact that when a New Jersey theatre company put on a passion play a few years ago with a black actor in the lead role, they received hundreds of hateful phone calls and even death threats for daring to portray Jesus as anyone darker than, say, Shaun Cassidy?

What else but a tenuous (at best) grip on reality can explain the quickness with which many white Americans ran around after 9/11 saying truly stupid shit like "now we know what it means to be attacked for who we are?"

Now we know? Hell, some folks always knew what that was like, though their pain and suffering never counted for much in the eyes of the majority.

What else but delusion on a scale necessitating medication could lead one to say--as two whites did on CNN in the wake of the first O.J. Simpson verdict--that they now realized everything they had been told about the American justice system being fair was a lie? Now they realized it! See the theme here?

That's what privilege is, for all those who constantly ask me what I mean when I speak of white privilege. It's the ability to presume that your reality is the reality; that your experiences, if white, are universal, and not particular to your racial identity.

It's the ability to assume that you belong and that others will presume that too; the ability to define reality for others, and expect that definition to stick (because you have the power to ensure that it becomes the dominant narrative).

And it's the ability to ignore all evidence to the contrary, claim that you yourself are the victim, and get everyone from the President to the Supreme Court to the average white guy on the street to believe it.

It is Times New Roman font, one inch margins, left hand justified. In other words, it is the default position on the computer of American life. And it has rendered vast numbers of its recipients utterly incapable of critical thought.

Only by rebelling against it, and insisting on our own freedom from the mental straightjacket into which we have been placed as whites by this system, can we hope to regain our full humanity, and be of any use as allies to people of color in their struggle against racism

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tim Wise is an antiracist activist, essayist and father. He can be reached at timjwise@msn.com. Death threats, while neither appreciated nor desired, will be graded for form, content and originality.

A CENTURY OF U.S. MILITARY INTERVENTIONS: A LIST

2006-02-23T14:02:00.000-07:00

Compiled by Zoltan Grossman
(revised 09/20/01)

Grossman: Killing Civilians
The List (Printing)

U.S. military spending ($343 billion in the year 2000) is 69 percent greater than that of the next five highest nations combined. Russia, which has the second largest military budget, spends less than one-sixth what the United States does. Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Cuba, Sudan, Iran, and Syria spend $14.4 billion combined; Iran accounts for 52 percent of this total.

The following is a partial list of U.S. military interventions from 1890 to 1999. This guide does NOT include demonstration duty by military police, mobilizations of the National Guard, offshore shows of naval strength, reinforcements of embassy personnel, the use of non-Defense Department personnel (such as the Drug Enforcement Agency), military exercises, non-combat mobilizations (such as replacing postal strikers), the permanent stationing of armed forces, covert actions where the U.S. did not play a command and control role, the use of small hostage rescue units, most uses of proxy troops, U.S. piloting of foreign warplanes, foreign disaster assistance, military training and advisory programs not involving direct combat, civic action programs, and many other military activities. <

Among sources used, besides news reports, are the Congressional Record (23 June 1969), 180 Landings by the U.S. Marine Corps History Division, Ege & Makhijani in Counterspy (July-Aug. 1982), and Daniel Ellsberg in Protest & Survive. "Instances of Use of United States Forces Abroad, 1798-1993" by Ellen C. Collier of the Library of Congress Congressional Research Service.

SOUTH DAKOTA
1890 (-?)
Troops
300 Lakota Indians massacred at Wounded
Knee.

ARGENTINA
1890
Troops
Buenos Aires interests protected.

CHILE
1891
Troops
Marines clash with nationalist rebels.

HAITI
1891
Troops
Black workers revolt on U.S.-claimed Navassa Island defeated.

IDAHO
1892
Troops
Army suppresses silver miners' strike.

HAWAII
1893 (-?)
Naval, troops
Independent kingdom overthrown, annexed.

CHICAGO
1894
Troops
Breaking of rail strike, 34 killed.

NICARAGUA
1894
Troops
Month-long occupation of Bluefields.

CHINA
1894-95
Naval, troops
Marines land in Sino-Japanese War.

KOREA
1894-96
Troops
Marines kept in Seoul during war.

PANAMA
1895
Troops, naval
Marines land in Colombian province.

NICARAGUA
1896
Troops
Marines land in port of Corinto.

CHINA
1898-1900
Troops
Boxer Rebellion fought by foreign armies.

PHILIPPINES
1898-1910(-?)
Naval, troops
Seized from Spain, killed
600,000 Filipinos.

CUBA
1898-1902(-?)
Naval, troops
Seized from Spain, still hold Navy
base.

PUERTO RICO
1898(-?)
Naval, troops
Seized from Spain, occupation
continues.

GUAM
1898(-?)
Naval, troops
Seized from Spain, still use as base.

MINNESOTA
1898(-?)
Troops
Army battles Chippewa at Leech Lake.

NICARAGUA
1898
Troops
Marines land at port of San Juan del Sur.

SAMOA
1899(-?)
Troops
Battle over succession to throne.

NICARAGUA
1899
Troops
Marines land at port of Bluefields.

IDAHO
1899-1901
Troops
Army occupies Coeur d'Alene mining region.

OKLAHOMA
1901
Troops
Army battles Creek Indian revolt.

PANAMA
1901-14
Naval, troops
Broke off from Colombia 1903, annexed Canal Zone 1914-99.

HONDURAS
1903
Troops
Marines intervene in revolution.

DOMINICAN REP.
1903-04
Troops
U.S. interests protected in Revolution.

KOREA
1904-05
Troops
Marines land in Russo-Japanese War.

CUBA
1906-09
Troops
Marines land in democratic election.

NICARAGUA
1907
Troops
"Dollar Diplomacy" protectorate set up.

HONDURAS
1907
Troops
Marines land during war with Nicaragua.

PANAMA
1908
Troops
Marines intervene in election contest.

NICARAGUA
1910
Troops
Marines land in Bluefields and Corinto.

HONDURAS
1911
Troops
U.S. interests protected in civil war.

CHINA
1911-41
Naval, troops
Continuous occupation with flare-ups.

CUBA
1912
Troops
U.S. interests protected in Havana.

PANAMA
19l2
Troops
Marines land during heated election.

HONDURAS
19l2
Troops
Marines protect U.S. economic interests.

NICARAGUA
1912-33
Troops, bombing
20-year occupation, fought guerrillas.

MEXICO
19l3
Naval
Americans evacuated during revolution.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
1914
Naval
Fight with rebels over Santo Domingo.

COLORADO
1914
Troops
Breaking of miners' strike by Army.

MEXICO
1914-18
Naval, troops
Series of interventions against
nationalists.

HAITI
1914-34
Troops, bombing
19-year occupation after revolts.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
1916-24
Troops
8-year Marine occupation.

CUBA
1917-33
Troops
Military occupation, economic protectorate.

WORLD WAR I
19l7-18
Naval, troops
Ships sunk, fought Germany

RUSSIA
1918-22
Naval, troops
Five landings to fight Bolsheviks.

PANAMA
1918-20
Troops
"Police duty" during unrest after elections.

YUGOSLAVIA
1919
Troops
Marines intervene for Italy against Serbs in Dalmatia.

HONDURAS
1919
Troops
Marines land during election campaign.

GUATEMALA
1920
Troops
2-week intervention against unionists.

WEST VIRGINIA
1920-21
Troops, bombing
Army intervenes against
mineworkers.

TURKEY
1922
Troops
Fought nationalists in Smyrna (Izmir).

CHINA
1922-27
Naval, troops
Deployment during nationalist revolt.

HONDURAS
1924-25
Troops
Landed twice during election strife.

PANAMA
1925
Troops
Marines suppress general strike.

CHINA
1927-34
Troops
Marines stationed throughout the country.

EL SALVADOR
1932
Naval
Warships sent during Faribundo Marti revolt.

WASHINGTON DC
1932
Troops
Army stops WWI vet bonus protest.

WORLD WAR II
1941-45
Naval,troops, bombing, nuclear
Fought Axis for 3
years; 1st nuclear war.

DETROIT
1943
Troops
Army puts down Black rebellion.

IRAN
1946
Nuclear threat
Soviet troops told to leave north (Iranian
Azerbaijan).

YUGOSLAVIA
1946
Naval
Response to shooting-down of U.S. plane.

URUGUAY
1947
Nuclear threat
Bombers deployed as show of strength.

GREECE
1947-49
Command operation
U.S. directs extreme-right in civil
war.

CHINA
1948-49
Troops
Marines evacuate Americans before Communist victory.

GERMANY
1948
Nuclear threat
Atomic-capable bombers guard Berlin Airlift.

PHILIPPINES
1948-54
Command operation
CIA directs war against Huk
Rebellion.

PUERTO RICO
1950
Command operation
Independence rebellion crushed in
Ponce.

KOREA
1950-53
Troops, naval, bombing, nuclear threats
U.S.&
South Korea fight China & North Korea to stalemate; A-bomb threat in 1950, & vs. China in 1953. Still have bases.

IRAN
1953
Command operation
CIA overthrows democracy, installs Shah.

VIETNAM
1954
Nuclear threat
Bombs offered to French to use against
siege.

GUATEMALA
1954
Command operation, bombing, nuclear threat CIA directs exile invasion after new gov't nationalizes U.S. company lands; bombers based in Nicaragua.

EGYPT
1956
Nuclear threat, troops
Soviets told to keep out of Suez crisis; MArines evacuate foreigners

LEBANON
1958
Troops, naval
Marine occupation against rebels.

IRAQ
1958
Nuclear threat
Iraq warned against invading Kuwait.

CHINA
1958
Nuclear threat
China told not to move on Taiwan isles.

PANAMA
1958
Troops
Flag protests erupt into confrontation.

VIETNAM
1960-75
Troops, naval, bombing, nuclear threats Fought South Vietnam revolt & North Vietnam; 1-2 million killed in longest U.S. war; atomic bomb threats in 1968 and 1969.

CUBA
1961
Command operation CIA-directed exile invasion fails.

GERMANY
1961
Nuclear threat Alert during Berlin Wall crisis.

CUBA
1962
Nuclear threat
Naval
Blockade during missile crisis; near-war with USSR.

LAOS
1962
Command operation
Military buildup during guerrilla war.

PANAMA
1964
Troops
Panamanians shot for urging canal's return.

INDONESIA
1965
Command operation Million killed in CIA-assisted army coup.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
1965-66
Troops, bombing Marines land during election campaign.

GUATEMALA
1966-67
Command operation Green Berets intervene against rebels.

DETROIT
1967
Troops
Army battles Blacks, 43 killed.

UNITED STATES
1968
Troops
After King is shot; over 21,000 soldiers in cities.

CAMBODIA
1969-75
Bombing, troops, naval Up to 2 million killed in decade of bombing, starvation, and political chaos.

OMAN
1970
Command operation U.S. directs Iranian marine invasion.

LAOS
1971-73
Command operation, bombing U.S. directs South Vietnamese invasion; "carpet-bombs" countryside.

SOUTH DAKOTA
1973
Command operation Army directs Wounded Knee siege of Lakotas.

MIDEAST
1973
Nuclear threat World-wide alert during Mideast War.

CHILE
1973
Command operation CIA-backed coup ousts elected marxist president.

CAMBODIA
1975
Troops, bombing Gas captured ship, 28 die in copter crash.

ANGOLA
1976-92
Command operation CIA assists South African-backed rebels.

IRAN
1980
Troops, nuclear threat, aborted bombing Raid to rescue Embassy hostages; 8 troops die in copter-plane crash. Soviets warned not to get involved in revolution.

LIBYA
1981
Naval jets Two Libyan jets shot down in maneuvers.

EL SALVADOR
1981-92
Command operation, troops Advisors, overflights aid anti-rebel war, soldiers briefly involved in hostage clash.

NICARAGUA
1981-90
Command operation, naval CIA directs exile (Contra) invasions, plants harbor mines against revolution.

LEBANON
1982-84
Naval, bombing, troops Marines expel PLO and back Phalangists, Navy bombs and shells Muslim and Syrian positions.

HONDURAS
1983-89
Troops
Maneuvers help build bases near borders.

GRENADA
1983-84
Troops, bombing Invasion four years after revolution.

IRAN
1984
Jets
Two Iranian jets shot down over Persian Gulf.

LIBYA
1986
Bombing, naval Air strikes to topple nationalist gov't.

BOLIVIA
1986
Troops Army assists raids on cocaine region.

IRAN
1987-88
Naval, bombing US intervenes on side of Iraq in war.

LIBYA
1989
Naval jets Two Libyan jets shot down.

VIRGIN ISLANDS
1989
Troops
St. Croix Black unrest after storm.

PHILIPPINES
1989
Jets
Air cover provided for government against coup.

PANAMA
1989-90
Troops, bombing
Nationalist government ousted by 27,000 soldiers, leaders arrested, 2000+ killed.

LIBERIA
1990
Troops
Foreigners evacuated during civil war.

SAUDI ARABIA
1990-91
Troops, jets Iraq countered after invading Kuwait; 540,000 troops also stationed in Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Israel.

IRAQ
1990-?
Bombing, troops, naval Blockade of Iraqi and Jordanian ports, air strikes; 200,000+ killed in invasion of Iraq and Kuwait; no-fly zone over Kurdish north, Shiite south, large-scale destruction of Iraqi military.

KUWAIT
1991
Naval, bombing, troops Kuwait royal family returned to throne.

LOS ANGELES
1992
Troops
Army, Marines deployed against anti-police uprising.

SOMALIA
1992-94
Troops, naval, bombing U.S.-led United Nations occupation during civil war; raids against one Mogadishu faction.

YUGOSLAVIA
1992-94
Naval
Nato blockade of Serbia and Montenegro.

BOSNIA
1993-95
Jets, bombing No-fly zone patrolled in civil war; downed jets, bombed Serbs.

HAITI
1994-96
Troops, naval
Blockade against military government; troops restore President Aristide to office three years after coup.

CROATIA
1995
Bombing
Krajina Serb airfields attacked before Croatian offensive.

ZAIRE (CONGO)
1996-97
Troops
Marines at Rwandan Hutu refuge camps, in area where Congo revolution begins.

LIBERIA
1997
Troops
Soldiers under fire during evacuation of foreigners.

ALBANIA
1997
Troops
Soldiers under fire during evacuation of foreigners.

SUDAN
1998
Missiles
Attack on pharmaceutical plant alleged to be "terrorist" nerve gas plant.

AFGHANISTAN
1998
Missiles
Attack on former CIA training camps used by Islamic fundamentalist groups alleged to have attacked embassies.

IRAQ
1998-?
Bombing, Missiles
Four days of intensive air strikes after weapons inspectors allege Iraqi obstructions.

YUGOSLAVIA
1999-?
Bombing, Missiles
Heavy NATO air strikes after Serbia declines to withdraw from Kosovo.

YEMEN
2000
Naval
Suicide bomb attack on USS Cole.

MACEDONIA
2001
Troops
NATO troops shift and partially disarm Albanian rebels.

UNITED STATES
2001
Jets, naval
Response to hijacking attacks.

AFGHANISTAN
2001
Massive U.S. mobilization to attack Taliban, Bin Laden. War could expand to Iraq, Sudan, and beyond.

__________________________________________
For more information or with comments and additions please contact:
Zoltan Grossman, 1705 Rutledge, Madison, WI 53704 Phone Fax
(608)246-2256. mtn@igc.apc.org
Permission to reproduce this list in its entirety
is granted by the author, please send any published copy to the above
address.

Balinko

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