Remembering 9/11

Yesterday was the anniversary of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, surely worth remembering.  But as fellow anthropologist Mark Moberg (University of South Alabama) reminds us, there was another 9/11 back in 1973:

Long before 9/11/2001, September 11 was a day of mourning for South Americans. The region's longest-lasting democracy ended with the military coup that overthrew democratically elected President Salvador Allende, replacing him with the junta of Augusto Pinochet that ruled that country for nearly 20 years. After Allende was killed in the coup, Pinochet suspended Congress, banned the opposition press, outlawed all political parties, directed the murder of an estimated 10,000 Chileans, oversaw the torture of many thousands more, and exiled more than a hundred thousand. Allende's crime? He had nationalized US copper corporations that had held Chile's economy in thrall -- the coup was directed, funded, and supported by the Nixon administration under "Operation Make the Economy Scream." In the words of Nixon's National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, "We will not allow Chile to go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people."

Big news!

Today President Obama announced the start of more normal relations with Cuba. This, after over 50 years of treating Cuba and its people really badly.  There's been the embargo, immoral and condemned by pretty much the entire civilized world.  Perhaps more egregious has been the US's support for terrorist activities against Cuba originating in Miami, and in some cases perpetrated by people who actually brag about what they do.

There's a lot to say, but for now I'll point to some photos I took during a visit to Cuba in 2002. I was attending a conference on education and language at the Universidad de Pinar del Río, which is out at the western end of the island.  They're on Facebook, but they're set to "public" so if you have an FB account you should be able to view them.  Here's a teaser:

Remembering the Grenada affair

(It's now 30 years since the end of the Grenada Revolution and the subsequent US invasion. For the 20th anniversary, I wrote the following essay, which appeared as the “backpage editorial” in Folio Weekly, November 25, 2003, p. 79. The magazine has a print run of 46,000 and is read by 143,500 people in Northeast Florida.)

THE CURRENT CAMPAIGN IN IRAQ MIRRORS A U.S. INVASION OF 20 YEARS AGO

October 26 [2003] marked the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. military invasion of the Caribbean nation of Grenada, a three-island Caribbean nation composed of Grenada, Carriacou, and Petit Martinique. As a witness to that event, I find it instructive — and disturbing — to reflect on this event in light of what is happening in Iraq today.

The principal rationale for the Grenada invasion or intervention (some Grenadians call it the “intervasion”) was the “rescue” of U.S. citizens who were studying medicine at St. Georges University. Then-president Ronald Reagan expressed fear that these students might be taken hostage or otherwise harmed in the wake of an October 19 coup. The coup brought a disturbing end to Grenada’s mildly socialist 1979 Revolution and installed what appeared to be a more severely left-fascist group of leaders. There were other justifications given for the invasion, centering on the idea that Grenada would become a Caribbean military outpost for the Soviet Union and Cuba.

At the time, I was a graduate student doing doctoral research on Carriacou. The Marines reached Carriacou on Nov. 1, after spending a week on the main island of Grenada. When they found out that I was a US citizen, the first question they asked me was about the location of the “battalion of North Korean soldiers.” Now, Carriacou is a twelve-square-mile island inhabited by several thousand people, nearly all of African descent, living in a society where everyone knows everything that’s going on. The idea of a battalion of Koreans hiding there was simply ludicrous. As we see now with Iraq, strange ideas about the “enemy” are nothing new.

And why was Grenada an “enemy”? The inflated threat that Grenada provided in the Cold War environment of Reagan’s presidency included more than these phantom North Korean troops. The Grenada Revolution focused for the most part on social, educational, and health issues, extending for example free education and health care to residents (with help from Cuban doctors). Perhaps these were underlying annoyances for a government that has never been willing to come fully to grips with the health, education, and welfare of its own people, but the Reagan administration found other things to rant about in public. Reagan claimed that a new airport with a runway capable of handling jet planes could only be intended for military use. In fact, Grenadians had been working for a new airport for years, because the old one was dangerously close to the mountains and could handle only smaller prop planes (meaning that Grenadians going abroad or tourists flying into Grenada nearly always had expensive layovers in Barbados or Trinidad). The Reagan administration was also upset by the Cuban presence, even though the Cuban “force” consisted mostly of teachers, doctors, and middle-aged construction workers helping build the new airport (of the 784 Cubans on the island, about 40 were members of the Cuban armed forces).

It was obvious well before the events of late 1983 that the collapse of Grenada’s social experiment was helped along (to put it charitably) by the behavior of the Carter and Reagan administrations. President Carter refused to provide hurricane relief aid to Grenada in August 1980. And in early 1983 Reagan refused to meet with Prime Minister Bishop, who would later be killed in the coup — a move that certainly enhanced the opposition’s ability to portray Bishop as an ineffective leader.

The full extent of U.S. involvement in Grenada will become apparent as documents become available, as they have for US operations in Guatemala, Chile, and other places. As William Blum writes in Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Common Courage, 2000): “Reagan administration destabilization tactics against the Bishop government began soon after the [1979] coup, featuring outrageous disinformation and deception.” The similarities to Iraq are hard to ignore. In both Grenada and Iraq, the U.S. has sent its military into a country after an extensive campaign of disinformation and deliberate inflation of the threat they posed. There are parallels in the aftermath as well. For example, just as American soldiers seem to be in more danger after the Bush administration declared the “mission accomplished,” some medical students in Grenada felt more vulnerable after U.S. efforts to “rescue” them than they did before the attack began. Bush II’s premature aircraft carrier celebration of victory echoed Reagan’s public announcement that the medical students had been rescued, although at the time military personnel were still trying to figure out where all the students were.

On November 5, 2003 another parallel between the two campaigns surfaced as the result of an ABC News investigation. In the days between the 1983 Grenada coup and the subsequent invasion, Reagan's State Department rejected attempts by the part of the now-famous medical school to facilitate communication, via their headquarters in New Jersey, between U.S. officials and the leaders of the coup. I believe the State Department's response was, loosely: "Thanks anyway, but we have our own sources of information."

It now appears that the Iraqi leadership was trying to negotiate a deal to avoid war using a Lebanese politician/businessperson as go-between. According to ABC News (November 5, 2003): “A possible negotiated peace deal was laid out in a heavily guarded compound in Baghdad in the days before the war, ABCNEWS has been told, but a top former Pentagon adviser says he was ordered not to pursue the deal.”

The parallels, and the mind-set that produced them, are not coincidence: Some of the same people who guided Reagan/Bush I (Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Abrams, etc.) are enjoying a homecoming of sorts as members of the Bush II administration. Although most of them never actually served in combat, they apparently really enjoy sending U.S. citizens into harm's way, even when it could be avoided.

In June 2003, I revisited Carriacou and Grenada to conduct linguistic research. I flew into the new airport, landing on the long runway that Reagan claimed Grenada didn’t need but which the U.S. helped complete after the invasion. Perhaps we did some other things for Grenada. We did not, as far as I know, help replace the Cuban doctors and teachers who had made such a profound impact during the revolution. We did not repair the old mental health hospital, “accidentally” bombed by the U.S. during the invasion; it is still in ruins.

As US citizens, we enjoy unprecedented freedom and liberty, along with unprecedented power. The question is: How will we use it? The neoconservative answer: Dominate the world militarily with “preventive” strikes, not excluding the use of nuclear weapons if necessary, as part of a perpetual war — something neocons consider the natural state of humankind. But is this what we, the people, really want?

The US can offer positive things to the world (the Peace Corps, for example, which first took me to Grenada in 1971). To make the positive dominant, we need to rededicate ourselves to preventive good will, such as helping so-called “third-world” countries like Grenada with schools, hospitals and roads, even when they choose slightly different development paths. Of course, to accomplish this we have to lose the “preventive war” ideology — along with the ideologues that have imposed it on us. 

October

October marks the 30th anniversary of the US intervention/invasion (sometimes called "intervasion") of Grenada.  I am starting to write some about this, but for now, this teaser:

September 11, again

OK, for the past two years I wrote posts on this date referring to various dissatisfactions, frustrations, etc. that have developed since the original September 11, 2001.  I'm pretty much doing the same thing this year.  Please go and have a look at the previous ones:

September 11, 2011.

September 11, 2012.

So, what's new this time?  Yet again we are debating the idea of bombing Middle Eastern people.  Except, this time we are thinking of bombing Syrians as punishment for Syrians bombing Syrians.  Yeah, it doesn't make sense to me either.  Just the same old same old.  Fortunately, there appears to be a semi-plan in the works that might allow us to avert what will almost certainly be a disaster if the strikes our leaders are planning are carried out.  We just have to wait and see.

The most disturbing part of this is that there is floating around out there a whisper of a suggestion that the chemical weapons attack we are justifiably worked up about might- just might- not have been carried out as an attack by the Syrian regime, but rather an accident of sorts caused by the incompetence of people handling these weapons.  Again, we have to wait and see.  But the apparent absence of discussion of this possibility brings to mind...

• The Gulf of Tonkin "incident" used as justification for our involvement in Vietnam, later turning out to be a fabrication;
• The fabricated "danger" to American medical students posed by the coup in Grenada in late 1983, which provided justification for the US invasion of that country;
• The fabricated "evidence" of WMD in Iraq, which provided justification for the invasion of that country.

I can't speak to the Tonkin thing, but in the case of both Grenada and Iraq, US officials had made up their minds to do what they were going to do, and they were explicitly unwilling to "hear" any evidence that might have derailed their plans, even when such evidence was offered to them.

And now, we have Syria.  Are we absolutely, positively, 100% certain that our leaders' claims about the cause of those deaths from chemical agents, which clearly did happen, are accurate?  Accurate enough to warrant killing Syrians to teach Assad a "lesson?"

I don't know.

"Isn't US foreign policy typically and historically made up of about the worst possible crap anyone could imagine?"

The title of this brief post comes from a friend and anthropology colleague, and the answer to his question is "Yes."

The latest evidence of this comes from a Wikileaks release of documents related to the US's dealings with Haiti in general and, more specifically, former Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide.  As reported in The Nation:

The secret cables, made available to the Haitian weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté by WikiLeaks, show how the political defeat of Aristide and his Lavalas movement has been the central pillar of US policy toward the Caribbean nation over the last two US administrations, even though—or perhaps because—US officials understood that he was the most popular political figure in Haiti.

The friend and colleague, by the way, is someone who has researched and written about Haiti from an anthropological perspective for many years.  He adds that "US foreign policy is eventually deleterious both to US foreign relations and US domestic tranquility. In other words, it is completely stupid and self-defeating."

A couple more things about Haiti

In an article on Common Dreams, David Lindorf tells us that FOX "News," that continually self-exploding piñata filled with whatever its denizens can dream up to support their fantasy world, has done it again. According to Lindorf, FOX had reported that nearby Cuba is doing nothing to help the Haitians in the aftermath of the earthquake. And of course, as with most things FOX-related, it was not true.
There were 300-400 Cuban doctors and other health workers in Haiti, doing the job the US is mostly AWOL from of providing ongoing health care to Haitian people. Another article, this time on Granma Digital, puts the count at 344 while yet another at Granma lets us know that there were only two injured, none seriously.

From what I can garner by checking out Foxs News online, they are now reporting more accurately and even mentioning the Cuban medical teams that were already working in Haiti. But now I have to go take a shower... 

Meanwhile, in "Haitian Earthquake: Made in the USA," Ted Rall makes the important point that while the earthquake itself was a natural disaster, the devastation, injury, and death it caused in Haiti were not. Instead:

Earthquakes are random events. How many people they kill is predetermined. In Haiti this week, don't blame tectonic plates. Ninety-nine percent of the death toll is attributable to poverty.

Poverty caused, as Rall points out and as any scholar of Caribbean history can verify, by decades, even centuries, of abusive treatment on the part of imperial powers, in particular France and the US. France began it in 1825 by extorting what today would be 21.7 billion dollars ransom from Haiti in return for normalized relations, a sum the Haitians needed nearly a century to pay off.  The US picked up the torch and carried it farther than any nation based on humanitarian, moral values could have:

The story begins in 1910, when a U.S. State Department-National City Bank of New York (now called Citibank) consortium bought the Banque National d'Haïti--Haiti's only commercial bank and its national treasury--in effect transferring Haiti's debts to the Americans. Five years later, President Woodrow Wilson ordered troops to occupy the country in order to keep tabs on "our" investment.

From 1915 to 1934, the U.S. Marines imposed harsh military occupation, murdered Haitians patriots and diverted 40 percent of Haiti's gross domestic product to U.S. bankers. Haitians were banned from government jobs. Ambitious Haitians were shunted into the puppet military, setting the stage for a half-century of U.S.-backed military dictatorship.

The U.S. kept control of Haiti's finances until 1947.

Of course, it didn't end there. The US has continued to treat Haiti as, essentially, a stockyard for cheap labor for factories where people work, for less than a dollar an hour, assembling baseballs, brassieres, and so on (how earthquake-proof can you build your house when you're making less than a dollar an hour?).  And, to ensure the docility of the workforce, a parade of dictators pledged to keep their people in line and out of unions is supported by the CIA. When Haitians finally elect a leader who tries to stand up to Big Brother, the CIA has him removed. He is returned under international pressure, but then removed again, this time literally taken from his home in the middle of the night by US Marines and flown out of the country.

The Most Important Lesson: Haiti is not a natural disaster. It is, and has been, exactly what the US corporate elite have wanted all along, ever since 1910.  And it's what Cuba would have been, if the US had had its way.

M pa pi mal

Haitians, especially rural, traditional Haitians, tend to answer the question "how are you" (ki jan ou ye?) with one of several one might say guardedly pessimistic responses. One is m la, literally 'I am present.' Another is m ap kenbe, "I'm hanging on." Still another is m pa pi mal, 'I'm no worse.' Answering too positively by saying, for example, m byen (I'm well) might be tempting fate; better to stay below the radar.

Haitians have good reason to prefer guarded pessimism. Their society was founded as a French exploitation colony dedicated to producing wealth for France with the use of involuntary migrant labor from Africa- slaves. And produce they did. In 1789, just before the Revolution, Haiti accounted for one-third of France's overseas trade and two-thirds of France's tropical produce. And then, inspired, ironically enough, by the American and French revolutions, and led by military geniuses like Tousent Louvèti, the African slaves overthrew their masters, defeated Napoleon's army, and took over their country. They returned to it the name its Amerindian inhabitants had called it: Ayiti. They ripped the white stripe from the French tricolor to create a new flag, and set about building a new nation.

But then, things pretty much started going south. The US declined to recognize the new republic, fearing that their own slaves might get ideas (the US did finally recognize Haiti during Lincoln's administration). The French demanded reparations for their losses in exchange for recognition and the Haitians, backs against the wall, agreed: a bizarre case of the defeated side dictating the terms of disengagement. Haiti took almost a century to comply with this extortion, handing over to France a total of over 20 billion dollars in today's money, 20 billion dollars that France has been asked to return, but, well, you know...

The list goes depressingly on and on: 19 years (1915-1934) of occupation by virulently racist US military personnel; years of abuse under the kleptocratic regime of "Papa Doc" Duvalier and later his son, "Baby Doc"; the US-supported removal, not once but twice, of elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the second removal actually carried out by US Marines; more kleptocrats; the US-ordered slaughter of all Haitian pigs; the ongoing dysfunction of an educational system reluctant to allow Kreyòl, the language of everybody, as a medium for teaching; and so, and on.

And these are the human-caused disasters. Let's not forget the malaria, the hurricanes (a word that comes to us from Haiti's original inhabitants), and now, the Earthquake.

And on top of all of this, Haitians have to endure commentary by abysmally ignorant, racist loons like Pat Robertson:

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. Napoleon the Third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil...But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.

And from Rush Limbaugh, this:

Yes, I think in the Haiti earthquake, ladies and gentlemen -- in the words of Rahm Emanuel -- we have another crisis simply too good to waste. This will play right into Obama's hands. He's humanitarian, compassionate. They'll use this to burnish their, shall we say, 'credibility' with the black community -- in the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country. It's made-to-order for them. That's why he couldn't wait to get out there, could not wait to get out there.

Limbaugh, of course, is just an idiot. Robertson is worse, perhaps: a mendacious kleptomaniac fraud who extracts money from easily-manipulated people who think they're buying their way into heaven. His remark reflects the racist, ethnocentric attitudes those occupying US forces brought back from Haiti in the 1920s and 30s. If he were a functioning human being, he would be ashamed of himself.

M pa pi mal, indeed.

'Tis the season to be cranky...

It's another holiday season, and I have many things to be happy about: a loving wife of 35 years, a son back safely from Iraq, a daughter with my love of animals, and lots of good friends, a reasonably satisfying career. But there is something that's been bothering me the last few Decembers, and Tom Englehart of TomDispatch has posted an year-end essay that fleshes out my vague and somewhat diffuse unease.
My unease is rooted in our (and by "our" I mean the US's) apparent state of perpetual war. Every holiday season, especially around Christmas time, I am reminded of this by the seemingly countless stories about families here at home coping while a mother, father, sister, brother, daughter, or son is "on duty" somewhere. The most poignant of these stories involves the family at home having the chance to communicate, perhaps over tv or videophone, or some other way, with their far-off military relative, while the country looks on. We forget for a moment that in almost every case, the far-off soldier, sailor, or Marine is not in fact "defending our freedoms," but instead providing a raison d'etre for the bloated, greedy, and insatiable Military Industrial Complex.

Or, we try to forget. My problem is that I am getting the impression these feel-good moments are designed to distract us from the enormity of our addiction to sending our people into harm's way in far-off places. I even wonder, at times, whether the wars themselves are intended to provide a reason for providing these moments. So what if thousands have to die so we can have a few special moments, moments that, I suspect, are manufactured for the purpose of damping down whatever dissent might be mustered against our addiction to war.

Too cynical? Maybe. Near the end of his essay Englehart offers this:

None of what’s happening in the world of American war may make much sense any more, not even in terms Washington’s foreign policy power brokers understand, but no matter.  They -- and so all of us -- are already in the grip of a nightmare, and nothing, it seems, can wake us.  So, for the last days of this year, as for the days that preceded them, as for all the days of next year, it’s full drone ahead and damn the torpedoes.  That’s our American world, and Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you.   

So, I will enjoy the holidays, but I will also remain somewhat cranky, and I will continue to sign petitions and write letters urging an end to our national addiction. I hope you will join me.

Message to Obama: No, we shouldn't

If all goes as pre-reported, President Obama will announce tonight that he is recommending an increase of US troops in Afghanistan, a "surge" that supposedly will put an end to Al Qaida and the Taliban in that country. In what can only be described as a surfeit of symbolism, the announcement will be made at the US Military Academy at West Point.

If this happens, Obama will become, in effect, an accomplice after the fact in the war crimes and crimes against humanity initiated by the Cheney/Bush regime before him. And in doing so, he will have made the wrong choice in what might have been the transformational moment of his presidency. He could have turned the US away from its historical path of military interventionism and American exceptionalism. Instead, he will join the ranks of US presidents who, all else being equal, should have been tried at The Hague–that is, pretty much all of them beginning with Truman.

Some will argue that he has to do this to clean up the mess left by Cheney, Bush, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, and the rest; that to stop a forest fire, you sometimes have to light some fires. The analogy is not compelling for me. I still think that our response to 9/11 was, and continues to be, immoral as well as illegal, and I maintain that the best response would have been, should have been, one made through the courts, not by treating it as a "war" to be engaged in by armies.

Maybe Obama will surprise us, or maybe he can make us feel better about this action. But I don't think so.

US: Thumbs down on Honduran democracy

The US State Department has abandoned any pretense of supporting the return of elected Honduran president Manuel Zelaya to office. Recall that Zelaya was removed from office and flown out of the country in June. His crime: attempting to find out whether the Honduran people supported the idea of overhauling their country's constitution.

A good summary of US involvement in and encouragement of the coup and Zelaya's exile is told in this article at Foreign Policy in Focus.

What's especially disturbing is that this behavior on the part of the US seems to have a life of its own, independent of particular administrations. After Grenada's revolution in 1979, both the Carter and then the Reagan administrations worked to destabilize the new Grenadian government, ultimately hastening its self-implosion in late 1983 and paving the way for the US invasion, which I wrote about here.

Historically, any time a Latin American or Caribbean government, be it Bolivia, Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, or Venezuela, tries to implement policies that shift the wealth of the country away from the usual tiny elite class and into the hands of peasant farmers, indigenous peoples, former slaves, and others with a history of abuse and exploitation, the US has interceded in favor of the elites. These elites are typically hyper-conservative, actual or ideological descendants of the founding European landowners. They tend to be either members of or tightly tied to a military whose leaders are routinely trained in methods of terror and torture at the US's Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly the School of the Americas) at Fort Benning, Georgia. They are, to put it bluntly, fascists. And now, fans of fascism in the US have once again handed a people clamoring for democracy over to thugs.

But we don't have to leave the US to see these people in action. As I write, senators and congressional representatives trying to discuss health care reform in town hall meetings with their constituents are being terrorized by wandering gangs of the same sort of thugs, almost certainly some of the same people who were allowed to disrupt vote counting here in Florida during the 2000 election. And we all know how that turned out.

The only thing these troglodytes need to complete their ensemble is brown shirts.

A little more on Honduras

The more I learn about what's going down in Honduras, and the way in which the US is implicated, the less optimistic I am that anything good is going to come out of this. And by "anything good" I mean progressive policies that might potentially benefit regular Hondurans, as opposed to the maintenance of a neo-colonial power structure that favors members of the oligarchy and the military elite.

Honduras is a classic example of what anthropologists sometimes call internal colonialism: one segment of a society treats the rest of the society in much the same way that the former colonial powers (in this case, Spain) treated their colonies, as places and people to exploit and extract as much wealth from as possible. It is this internal colonialism that the "new leftist" leaders in Latin America, from Cuba to Bolivia, have tried to address, always with overwhelming support from the people targeted to benefit, always with resistance from the people fearful of losing their ill-gotten wealth and power who, in turn, are nearly always supported by the US.

Anyway, Nikolas Kozloff has an article posted today that does a disturblingly good job of focusing on the US role in Honduras. We learn of the involvement of US Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens, a hold-over from the Bush regime and ideological, if not actual, member of the anti-Castro Miami Mafia. We also learn of the tangled web that connects the Honduran right-fascist elite to the US; I reproduce the concluding paragraphs here:

What is the connection between U.S. interests and [Honduran] constitutional reform? If you had any doubt about Washington's true intentions in Honduras consider the following AP Report for July 8 about diplomatic negotiations between the coup regime and ousted president Zelaya: "Clinton would not discuss specifics of the mediation process, which she said would begin soon, but a senior U.S. official said one option being considered would be to forge a compromise under which Zelaya would be allowed to return and serve out his remaining six months in office with limited powers [italics added]. Zelaya, in return, would pledge to drop his aspirations for a constitutional change."

It's the State Department then under Hillary Clinton, allied in spirit to figures from the old Bush establishment, which is seeking to cut off constitutional reform in Honduras --- reform which could lead to popular mobilization as we've seen in Ecuador and Venezuela. Obama meanwhile has condemned the coup but his failure to rein in either Llorens or Clinton suggests that he too believes that Zelaya's proposal for a constitutional reform is dangerous and needs to be halted.

Read the whole article.