Avuncular American

Seeing Red, or Finding the Real Sarah Palin

Back in the US for a conference.

Since I can't pass a bookstore without poking my nose around, I looked for that OTHER Sarah Palin opus, the one which was not written by ghosts.  Going Rouge: An American Nightmare, edited by Richard Kim and Betsy Reed, was not on bookshelves next to Going Rogue: An American Life.  Appropriately enough, Rouge was published by the same people who practice "Mischief and Mayhem" against the mainstream publishing world, and is a compilation of Palindromes by a bevy of top-notch writers.

In fact, in the Borders at Washington's Dulles Airport (where presumably there might be a market for a fact-checked book on Palin, the book Going Rouge was nowhere to be seen, though they had plenty of unsold Going Rogue copies.

Actually, anyone who is moved to spend $29.00 for a book ghost written for someone who disdains the written in favor of the "you betcha" spoken word probably is a true believer.  So too for the Going Rouge market.  True disbelievers in Ms. Palin's qualities as a potential leader of the Free World.

Suffering TransAtlantic jet lag, I zapped through multiple TV interviews with the ex-Alaska governor, ex-McCain running mate plugging her book.  As far as I can see, all she has done in the months since losing the election and quitting her job is hone her interviewee skills, and at least now can cite a book that (presumably) she has at least read, if not actually written.  Maybe she should read Going Rouge too.

I won't be buying either.

Our Forbidden Places: Journey Into Moroccans' Hearts

Nos lieux interdits

(2008, Morocco, poster - official site)

Documentary film maker and historian Leila Kilani has given us a unique look into contemporary Morocco, through her award-winning film on the country's Equity and Reconciliation Commission, better known as "l'Instance équité et réconciliation" or IER, set up to help heal the wounds of almost four decades of impunity.   Impunity to disappear, to torture, to execute anyone who was deemed an opponent.

The first remarkable thing about this film is that it happened at all.How many countries have given free rein to a group presided over by a former political prisoner, investigating human rights violations committed by the duly constituted government?

The contrast with neighboring Algeria couldn't be greater.  In 2005, Algerians voted for the Charter for National Peace and Reconciliation.  That the intervening years have yielded neither is in large part due to the Charter's denial of responsibility for human rights abuses by state security forces.

In Morocco, where several attempted military coups and opposition by unions and leftist parties were met with equally brutal repression, especially in the Seventies, the IER has operated under an open government admission of culpability.  However, unlike South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Morocco's IER was not empowered to question the torturers and those behind the dark years of repression.  Kilani's film, made with the full cooperation of the government and the IER, documents this conscious omission, but puts the whole process in the context of a national therapy session.

Her technique is deceptively simple: much like Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, to which Nos lieux interdits has been favorably compared (not to worry, it only lasts 108 minutes, unlike Lanzmann's 9-hour film-fleuve), Kilani simply turned the camera on as families and survivors tell their stories or talk with each other.  It is simple and effective.  As the son of one of the disappeared hears his father's contemporaries describe the conditions of his death, we see him flinch, and that split second on film shows Leila Kilani's sensitivity to her subject - and to the real people she films - better than any film reviewer can describe.

Michel Amarger, RFI film critic, told the audience that Kilani's selection of "little people" instead of representatives of victims' groups may have rattled the latter, but it certainly makes for better cinema.  In other, less sensitive hands, Nos lieux interdits might have been simply what Kilani had originally imagined: a filmed travelogue of desolation, cataloging Morocco's former black sites.

King Mohamed VI, speaking of the IER's work (their site has an English version), said that "the truth uncovered is only relative... and absolute truth is known only to God."   Most of the family members are content with even less: the son who bears up to hearing the conditions under which his father died really only wants to give him a decent Islamic burial.

Kilani's film was shown on the margins of Brussels' 4th annual Arab Film Festival, which partnered the showing with "Le P'tit Ciné," part of their documentary series "Travail de mémoire."  Leila Kilani has mastered her two chosen careers, history and film, and her subjects' memories, though painful, are no doubt cathartic.

Morocco has shown the way.  When do we get to see anything remotely similar in post-Bush USA? 

Un-American: Hunger Up, Health Down

A good friend has flagged a New York Times article by Jason DeParle, "Hunger in U.S. at a 14-Year High."

The number of Americans who lived in households that lacked consistent access to adequate food soared last year, to 49 million, the highest since the government began tracking what it calls “food insecurity” 14 years ago, the Department of Agriculture reported Monday.

49 million people... sounds awfully close to the 47 to 52 million people who lack health insurance.  Might there be some overlap in the hungry and unhealthy populations?  I bet there is.

And the reactions might be similar too.  DeParle writes that "lack of money forced members [of households] to skip meals, cut portions or otherwise forgo food."  Or eat fast - and cheap - food (clip art above thanks to AppleWorks).

But don't you think that the same 50 million people skip doctor's visits, forgo medicine, or consume junk remedies?  The same dynamic applies.  Just wait until - I fervently hope - the United States passes some manner of health care reform.  It will unearth millions of under-treated cases, and not just from among the undernourished.

If you doubt that, listen to the BBC World Service "Witness" podcast on the origins of the British National Health Service, the NHS.  People who had previously no or spotty access to doctors or hospitals started to show up in large numbers, sporting every sort of malady - treatable - known to man, and probably a few more medical mysteries to boot.

Republican Senators who belatedly fret about health care reform's impact on the deficit (after feeding that deficit when they spent away the Clinton budget surplus) and who say that recession-wracked America cannot "afford" wider health care should remember this: Britain adopted the NHS in the immediate post-war years, when the sun was not only setting on the Empire, but the country's coffers were emptied by war spending.  And yet they embarked on a major program that dwarfs the current proposals that are so controversial in the US.

I submit that Americans who think they know about the faults of the NHS know nothing about either health care in Britain or what it means to be sick without coverage in the US.  Whatever you hear about rationing, waiting lists, and "death panels" needs a serious fact check, like CNN did last night with Sarah Palin's new book.  The fact is, if you get sick in Britain, they won't refuse treatment because you don't have money.  That is the unalterable reality of "rationing" in the US, however.

"Food insecurity" might mean you forgo a meal, and you might thereby put another nail in your coffin.  Forgo an appendectomy because you have no insurance or disposable income might take you directly to that coffin.  Neither situation should be acceptable in 21st century America.

From Insecurity To Interdependence

"... from insecurity, to interdependence."

So ends the brief but eloquent "Declaration of Interdependence," written by Dr. David Suzuki and colleagues for the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit.

In the lead up to the 2009 Copenhagen summit, scientists, political leaders, and pundits are feverishly trying to set the stage, respectively issuing dire warnings of climactic disaster, or "managing expectations," shorthand for lowering hopes for definitive action.  Exhibit One: this weekend's APEC Summit.

Like the United States' own "Founding Fathers" seminal document, the Declaration of Independence, Suzuki's declaration tries to distill self-evident truths into language that Everyman and Everywoman can grasp - "This We Know" ("we are interconnected -- using, cleansing, sharing and replenishing the fundamental elements of life").  Or, looking at the glass half full, abusing, polluting, expropriating, and wasting the fundamental elements of life.

Thankfully, the eminent Canadian scientist labors from the optimistic premise of "a new politics of hope."  Remember, he wrote the Declaration of Interdependence in 1992, when even a President like George H.W. Bush could utter these words when signing the Framework Convention on Climate Change: " to sustain development, we must protect the environment; and to protect the environment, we must sustain development."

A decade after father Bush worried about leaving a legacy for his children, son George W. was castigated by environmental groups for not only ignoring Rio's 10th anniversary, but for actively siding with the polluters.  Bush Jr. is back in Texas, where his air conditioner is presumably turned down to an Arctic low, shutting out all evidence of rapidly rising temperatures.  Once in a bubble, always in a bubble.  Until it bursts.

Independence and Interdependence need not be mutually exclusive options.  When I see a country like Denmark, in the wake of the '70s oil crises, make a concerted effort toward energy independence through use of wind, solar, and other alternative resources, I see it as helping the rest of us.  One less EU country that has to face a cold sweat as Russia threatens another natural gas valve malfunction and plunges parts of Europe into a winter deep freeze.

And if countries as different as Nigeria and Vietnam can adopt sound agricultural practices that lead to greater food security, then the rest of the world also reaps the benefit.

The US Declaration of Independence referred to "the Laws of Nature" in its preamble, though we had to wait more than two centuries before Dr. David Suzuki enumerated how those same Laws militated for our global Interdependence.  The bubble that we live in, that little crust surrounded by a vulnerable atmosphere, is our shared environment.  If you live by zero sum arithmetic, then you might look at the drought-stricken starving East Africans and say "there but for the grace of God...".

But today's starving nomads are tomorrow's boat people refugees, or next year's terrorists.  Interdependence is not idealistic gibberish: at its very root is self-interest, where the self-interest is mutual.  John Dunne said it best:

No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

If that was a self-evident truth in the 17th century, when most people never traveled beyond their village, how much truer is that in our interconnected world of today?

America Viewed: Our Own Private Beltways

Re-expatriated after my temporary repatriation, my lofty goal of testing the pulse of my countrymen was limited by my circles of friends and family.  In Washington, though I stayed "inside the Beltway," no one should get the impression that "la crise," as they call it here in the francophone world, has not touched the District of Columbia.  Meeting a university professor friend for lunch near a Metro stop, he pointed out the proliferation of "for rent" signs on storefronts, and said that landlords would like nothing more than to sell out to developers who apparently have never tired of putting up ever more condominiums.

The prof also said that his students are increasingly facing dim employment prospects as they approach the end of what for many are upwards of two decades of education.  Down in Florida and thanks to my gregarious host Dick, I met the likes of Gloria and Charlie, respectively 60-something barmaids and checkout ladies, who hold down multiple minimum-wage jobs, but who remain friendly and stoically persevering.  What else can they do?  Go out on the streets?

On the other side of Florida, I see that the people of MoveOn.org (photo) have organized a little protest for later today (for those who can make it, it's at the Unitarian church of Boca Raton at 12:00 PM).  I guess this answers my question as to why there hasn't been a massive pro-health care reform rally in Washington: the people of Move On and other activists and Democratic party strategists want to garner support locally, where they can put constituent pressure on Blue Dog Democrats, Know-Nothing Republicans, and other species of politician who live in a world where everything is fine as it is.

That ideal world may only exist within the confines of the Senators' own circle, where they and other Federal employees (and retirees, including yours truly) enjoy a kind of "public option" health insurance already.  It's employer subsidized, though we all do pay monthly premiums.

For those politicians whose wives develop breast cancer or whose husbands contract prostate cancer, there's no question of their being dropped from the rolls for the sin of having a pre-existing condition, that chilling term which strikes fear into the hearts of normal Americans.  And, once a Congressman, always a Congressman: even if Representative Smith (R - Podunk USA) fails in his re-election bid and gets sent back home, he (and his family) take their nice Federal health insurance system with them, as opposed to the Glorias and the Charlies of the world, who sometimes take on second and third jobs if they carry with them the precious entree into employer-provided health insurance.

Comparing notes with my sister, a nurse who trains trainers in the use of specialized hospital equipment and travels the length and breadth of the country, I learn of innovative health care practices, like performing "outpatient" surgery that goes way beyond removing that pesky mole on your face.  How about outpatient spinal surgery, where a disk operation that releases you back home after 23 hours or less is now commonplace?  I knew of the practice in the US - already dating back years - where childbirth (even cesarean sections) gets mothers and their newborns booted out after a day or so.  But spinal surgery?  What's next, outpatient brain surgery?  Apparently yes.

Now that I'm back in Europe, where health care, if not a human right, is viewed as a hard-won achievement of a civilized society, it will be a challenge to explain what Bob Herbert called the "frightening passivity" of Americans in the face of the health care sub prime unemployment crises.

Maybe Americans have their own private Beltways, where they can zip by neighborhoods blighted by "for sale" signs on the way to their favorite shopping center.  As long as they don't take the exit, they are spared the inconvenience of seeing the devastation in person.  But the United States is Too Big To Fail, that overused expression that justified handouts to the very capitalist institutions that decry helping hardscrabble individuals like Charlie or Gloria.  Their "pre-existing condition" is being born into the American working class.

But if that working class ceases to find work, the effects will be felt in the factories of China too.  Someone used the term "symbiotic" to describe the US-China relationship.  Maybe the Chinese should pull aside a couple of recalcitrant Senators and explain to them why they should want to vote to allow Americans to get health insurance, one sure way of helping the country get back on its feet.  It's in the Chinese interest.

Veterans Day: Easy On the Onion Rings

When you are on a US military installation, whether soldier or civilian, you're supposed to stop out of respect if you're walking outside when the bugler plays taps at the end of the day.

Yesterday, a day ahead of Veterans Day, as the November 11 Armistice Day ending World War I has been known in the United States for more than fifty years, President Obama observed that respect in the Fort Hood ceremony.  Dignified - the proper stance for a Veterans Day that is as delicate a moment as any in recent years.  For once, a President and his advisers are doing war planning that will strive to end our two ongoing wars/occupations, deliberating in a way that apparently was not done when President Bush - with typically undeliberative speed - got the US into those wars.

Dignity doesn't always come naturally to Americans wanting to profit from identification with patriotism.  "Free onion rings for men and women in uniform" promises a fast food outlet, its way of "investing" a few scraps in the war effort.  Well, I suppose that if you're a private or airman risking your life on what approaches minimum wage, anything that comes free is welcome.

But don't ask the fast food magnate to sacrifice his son or daughter to the defense of the realm - that's for people who eat onion rings in greasy spoons.

Travels Through the Green Heart of Florida

Back roads in central Florida are a nice alternative to risking life and limb on the Interstate.  You can drive almost as fast, but the two opposing lanes impose a certain discipline, and there's no comparison in traffic congestion.  After a family reunion on the margins of Disney World, I headed back to the Gulf coast through the orange groves of "Frostfree" and other colorfully-named places.  Passing over Troublesome Creek, I wasn't far from Soggy Bottom.  Had the Coen brothers (of O Brother, Where Art Thou? fame) been inspired or was this an echo of the 2000 hit comedy?  In any case, a road works sign informed me that "State Prisoners at Work" were up ahead, but I detected no chain gangs.

My genial host in Sarasota marveled at my wanting to drive through what he called "cracker country," but it's all part of my "cultural learnings," as Borat would say.  At least this rather pretty swath of the state has a real economy - though apparently based on a citrus monoculture - compared to the Florida coastline, where the part of the population not earning its living from tourism sells life's necessities (and a lot of dross too) to the other part that is dependent on the "snowbirds," that quaint expression describing the Northerners (American and Canadian) who migrate south for the winter.  There were even rolling hills and lakes that didn't appear to be glorified swamps.

As with other parts of rural - especially Southern - states, there are lots of churches, some part of larger denominations like the First Baptists, others of various pentecostal evangelical fundamental persuasions.  The percentage of "manufactured homes" (mobile homes to you and me) is very high, and the contrast with the faux-Spanish stuccoed condominiums and villas of urban Florida couldn't be more striking.

Borrowed CDs and NPR (for non-US readers, National Public Radio, the news, music, and culture network) provided aural diversion from the monotony of the orange groves, and no Deliverance moments were had, though I did see a few ramshackle dwellings with anti-social warnings about dogs.  Urban or rural, Florida abounds in gun shops, and American flags.  To the foreign visitor: the largest American flags fluttering in the breeze are not indicative of a government installation, but show you the way to a car dealership.  You can still buy a little plastic gizmo to attach a flag to your rear passenger window, though there are far fewer of these than after the post-9/11 patriotic fervor.

My rambles have gone on long enough.  Next: political learnings on things like the health care situation.

From Dirty Dick's Christian Spa and Good Eats

My friend Dick, happily retired in Florida's Gulf coast, does provide the Good Eats (although you might have to cook some yourself), but the Christian part is definitely tongue in cheek.  He's one of the tidiest bachelors around, so the "Dirty Dick" part is there just for color, though it does sound properly rakish and piratical.   He was a Navy man before he became a diplomat and eventually my first boss in the Foreign Service.

Those days are past, and we spend much of our time applying our honed analytical skills - sorry, but Evaluation Report language always manages to creep in... trying to get our heads around the matter of the State of the United States.  It's a lifelong task.

We were blissfully enjoying a beer and Cheap Eeetz alongside the marina when a wide screen TV on the wall announced the mass killing at Fort Hood ("the largest active duty armored post in the United States Armed Services") Texas.  When we read the caption naming the alleged shooter, we knew it boded ill for a whole host of reasons.  Yet another "senseless killing" as they say, the work of a possibly deranged individual.  A Lone Star Shooter.  But because the suspect has a name that resonates from here to the Middle East, and because his victims were soldiers in a place where they shouldn't have been under fire, he won't be "just another" mass murderer.

Nidal Malik Hasan's apparent infiltration of personal weapons onto the base has to cause concern for the hundreds of other military installations scattered across the country, and across the world.  "We will increase our security presence here in the coming days" said base commander Lieutenant General Robert Cone.  Well, of course they will, but the deed is done, and no amount of posting Humvees with 50 caliber machine guns trained at the gates will screen murderous intent in the minds of soldiers who might "go Postal."

Do you know how many private cars pass through the gates of just this one base - population 50,000 or so - daily?  Sure, they can double and triple check ID, pull some suspicious sergeants and potentially mad majors over and have them open up the trunk, but a determined killer will easily stow a few handguns and plenty of ammunition wherever he pleases.  It's what's in the mind, not what's under the hood.

Read today's Bob Herbert, himself a Vietnam era vet and consistent in his recognition of the extreme stress that upwards of a decade of wars has put on the US military.  Herbert reminds us that stress is not just a minor irritant in the context of repeated exposure to war zones.  There is not one iota of an excuse for this insane act's perpetrator, but Herbert reminds us that "we haven’t heard a lot about the scores of suicides at that same base — the highest of any U.S. military installation — since the invasion of Iraq in 2003."

This mass murder, like the many before it, unleashes the perennial battle over gun control, or rather the lack thereof, in the United States.  The same arguments for and against will be trotted out with numbing effect.  It's unfortunate that there are ultra-stressed out individuals, whether soldiers or civilians, but why oh why do we make it so easy for them to act out their impulses?  "Guns Don't Kill People; People Kill People" read the NRA bumper stickers.  Perhaps, but a potential mass murderer armed with, say, a kitchen knife he just grabbed on impulse might be a tad less lethal than one armed with an automatic weapon and endless ammo clips.

But at Dirty Dick's Christian Spa and Fine Foods, we don't indulge in pie-in-the-sky.  Just add Fort Hood to the list - Columbine, University of Texas, Virginia Tech - shake your head, and hit the remote control.  There are, apparently, other priorities.  To be continued...

In Washington, With All Its Denizens

Denizen-in-Chief, Barack Obama, is on the cover of maps sold to tourists.  I can't tell you what it means to pass by Pennsylvania Avenue and know that a good man, a smart man is in residence there.  That said, as I was contemplating the change since I last set foot in this city (circa November 2006) and looking at the American flag fluttering in the floodlights, I almost tripped over a rather fat rat, scurrying across the sidewalk.  Oh well, not everything has changed. 

The panhandlers are still here, though they don't seem any more numerous in these straitened times.  They've always been a feature of Washington, ever since Reagan-era closings of places like mental institutions simply put people out on the street who had nowhere else to go.

No, the rat was not a squirrel - I saw plenty of them in today's daylight.  The autumn colors were lovely as the plane swooped down to Dulles.  It's nice to be back, and next time I'll report on what the locals tell me.

A Temporarily Repatriated View of America

In November I'll be blogging from the US, a novelty for this expat.  From Washington and then from Florida, testing Bob Herbert's view (10/27 NYT) of the zeitgeist:

Americans have tended to watch with a remarkable (I think frightening) degree of passivity as crises of all sorts have gripped the country and sent millions of lives into tailspins. Where people once might have deluged their elected representatives with complaints, joined unions, resisted mass firings, confronted their employers with serious demands, marched for social justice and created brand new civic organizations to fight for the things they believed in, the tendency now is to assume that there is little or nothing ordinary individuals can do about the conditions that plague them.

How come the "tea party" fringe, gathering thousands of people calling President Obama everything from a fascist to the Anti-Christ, but no "million sick-person march" storming the Senate over health care reform?  Why?

Thus we begin Year 3 of Avuncular American.  [note: the "Repatriated View" series of posts ran November 1 - 13].

Paying Them To Be Pals

Do you remember the scene in David Lean's epic film, Lawrence of Arabia, where Colonel TE Lawrence, to shouts of "Aurens! Aurens!" rides back to his Bedouin allies in the company of... mercenaries?  "Killers, cutthroats," say the disgusted princes and tribal leaders.  Lawrence has bought himself some protection, but at the cost of the respect of those who are fighting with him for a cause.

A century later, we have lots of modern-day Lawrences in Army and Marine camouflage BDUs, mingling in the Middle East and hiking the Hindu Kush, alternately fighting and tea-drinking with the various bands that make up Iraq and Afghanistan's warring factions.  In Lean's film, it was Ottoman gold that inspired some of Lawrence's Arab allies.  Nowadays, it's more likely to be the shrinking US dollar, shrink-wrapped in bricks of $100 bills.

When I read that the Pentagon's budget is now to include CERP ("Commander's Emergency Response Program") money to woo the Taliban over to "our side," that image of Lawrence's mercenaries looms up.  The $1.3 billion allotted to CERP in Afghanistan may be a drop in the bucket, but as with all such things, has there been much thought given to what happens when the former baddies stop getting money?

Read Shane Bauer's great expose in the September Mother Jones, "The Sheikh Down," for a look at what your money buys in Iraq, where CERP payments created the "Awakening Councils" out of former enemies among the Sunni population.  It's an entertaining read, except the part about the shaking down of the American taxpayer, who gets to pay for "reconstruction" projects at many times their justified price, all in the name of keeping the peace.  Getting a piece, for the sheikhs profiled, is more like it.

But what happens when the money stops?  Surely even Pentagon planners can harbor hopes of a rosy future of declining budget lines when the CERP program "sunsets," to use a term from accounting-speak?  But will the Sunni fighters in Iraq and the ex-Taliban pocketing the payments understand it when the CERP paymasters say "Thanks guys, but our funding has zeroed-out."  Their guns and bombs, bought and paid for by American largess - who will they point them at now?

How about allegations that Italian payments to the Taliban for peace in their sector, when stopped and not communicated to French forces that inherited their zone, subsequently brought the Taliban's wrath on the unsuspecting French?  According to the Times of London, even the US Embassy in Rome protested to the Italian government about such practices.  But now the same thing is in the Pentagon budget?

Tom Engelhardt's "Tomgram" put it squarely: "Will Today's US-Armed Ally Be Tomorrow's Enemy?"  We've been there before, in the self-same Afghanistan:

Let me suggest just one lesson that seems to be on no one else's mind at a moment when a key "option" being offered in Washington -- especially by Democrats not eager to see tens of thousands more U.S. troops heading Afghanistan-wards -- is to arm and "train" ever more thousands of Afghans into a vast army and police security force for a government that hardly exists. Based on the last three decades in the region, don't you think that we should pause and consider who exactly we may be arming and who exactly we may be supporting, and whether, given those 30 years of history, we have the slightest idea what we're doing?

Americans with amnesia should go out and rent Charlie Wilson's War, a slick rendition of how we "bought" the Mujahideen those thirty years ago, who then became the Taliban, who then started getting CERP payments...

Israel's Long Straw, Palestine's Trickle

The Biblical "land of milk and honey" and the "wilderness" of the holy book are one and the same.  There's the freshwater Sea of Galilee, the saltwater Dead Sea (getting deader by the minute), and the Jordan River in between.  There is rocky desert, chaparral, and the occasional verdant spring.

Until the rampant development of urban Israel, suburban Israeli settlements on occupied Arab land, and the increasing gerrymandering, walling off, and bypass-roading of what is left of "Palestine" thanks to the Oslo Accords, there was basically enough water.  Enough even to build a swimming pool in the then sleepy West Bank town of Ramallah, where I went in 1972 to dig its foundations out of solid rock.  Even during those early years of The Occupation, Israelis and Palestinians managed to share the region's precious water resources.

"Share" is a word that would be difficult to justify in the current circumstances.  Today's release by Amnesty International of its damning "Troubled Waters" report elicited a predictable official Israeli response, essentially saying "Water? ...what water problem?"  After denying there is a problem, the Israeli MFA, in a reaction that is remarkable for its brevity and chutzpah, goes on to say that if there is a problem, it's the Palestinians own fault.  For a more realistic account, see the BBC's report from Gaza.

Better yet, watch "Drying Up Palestine," the short documentary film on how Israel has been sucking on a long straw, digging deep under future Palestinian independent territory and depriving currently-occupied Palestinians and future "independent" Palestinians of one of the very requisites of statehood: water resources.  Maybe Peter Snowdon and Rima Essa's film (you can see a clip here) should be up on the Amnesty site.

Image: AppleWorks clip art.

The White Ribbon... of Innocence, Lost

Das Weiße Band (image from official website)

"Strange events happen in a small village in northern Germany..." as one capsule review has it, would make you think that Michael Haneke's Das Weiße Band (The White Ribbon in international release) is another M. Night Shyamalan clone.  No disrespect to Mr. S., but this is anything but a German-language "The Village."  Haneke, you see, has won the Cannes Golden Palm for his efforts.

And those efforts are considerable.  Haneke, talking to Le Soir's Fabienne Bradfer, said that he's wanted to make this film for the last ten years, but he's never had enough money until his 2005 French suspense hit Caché.  Think of Caché and its atmosphere of intermittent tension, unexplained incidents, and moments of high emotion and you will get a sense of The White Ribbon's Weltanschauung.

The pre-World War I setting, rendered in a black-and-white that is stunning for its clarity even when illuminated by a candle, is lovingly rendered, though this is not, repeat not, a period costume drama.  The choice of B&W seems natural, for it helps, along with all those females with their hair pulled back in tight buns, seemingly from the age of five, to recreate the atmosphere of a society living the last months of an era that we know now only from rare documentary footage.  Just as the (controversial) use of color in the recent WW II French documentary series Apocalypse made 70 year old footage of people come alive, the use of B&W in Das Weiße Band "helps the viewer enter the film" as Haneke says.

I won't go into those "strange events" since I hate it when reviewers tell you the plot line.  But I will say this: whoever still harbors illusions of rural society as an idyllic haven from the violence of the city may find The White Ribbon a disturbing revelation.  But if Haneke's film is a metaphor for the latent violence in humanity - even amongst its youngest members - then there are plenty of harbingers of the horrors to come when the little terrors grow up to be the adults of the Third Reich.

An American GI performing occupation/de-Nazification duties in postwar Germany once said that he used to be incapable of looking at people without his first thought being "I wonder what s/he did during the war."  As you watch Haneke's film, you know that the 20th century's World Wars (separated by barely a generation) are looming ahead, and you find yourself wondering "what will little Martin be up to 20 years hence?"

This is what Haneke wants us to do: "I ask questions... [and I ask myself] what can I do to give the greatest freedom to the audience?"  Part of that freedom is not being given tidy endings, or explanations for what we have just watched for the last 144 minutes, riveted to our seats.  But that's the way the villagers would want it too.  The omerta that reigns over the pristine square and well-tended fields hides many secrets, and the onset of the war that ended the barony, toppled the Kaiser, and set the seeds for the even greater slaughter of World War II comes - I almost hate to say it - as a relief.

The villagers might just say that it allowed them to change the subject, away from their obsessions over those "strange events."  Those of us who see The White Ribbon might not shake its effect so easily.

Kafka, Or the Half-Life of Black Lists

Brussels was the venue for a very important human rights conference this past week, but it took place in an academic setting, out of the spotlight but hopefully not entirely unnoticed.

ULB’s October 20 conference, “Terrorism Lists, Executive Powers, and Human Rights,” organized by the European Centre for Constitutional & Human Rights” (ECCHR), aimed very high. It gathered internationally-known jurists from academia and the human rights community, but also “practitioners” from both sides of the bar.

The day-long program started with a debate, Gilles de Kerchove, the EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator versus Mark Muller QC, Chair of the prestigious UK-based Bar Human Rights Committee (BHRC). De Kerchove garnered general admiration for his willingness to appear before a generally critical audience, before which speaker after speaker denounced the politicization of justice represented by the widespread creation, post 9/11, of no-fly lists. Muller stressed the disproportionate impact on open exile groups, whose freedom of expression has been hard hit by the blacklisting by EU member states, often simply copying each other’s lists, or worse, taking verbatim “toxic” lists coming out of the crusading Bush White House.

Kafka in Canada

“Kafkaesque” was used more than once to describe travesties, not of justice, but of what de Kerchove called “administrative procedure.” Those two chilling words have condemned people to much more than getting bumped from flights. In the case of Sudanese-Canadian Abousfian Adelrazik, it resulted in exile, torture, and brushes with death, before concerted legal, civil disobedience, press, and ultimately domestic political pressure shamed the Canadian government into granting a passport to one of its own citizens. “A black man, in a black site, on a black list,” is how Professor Amir Attaran of the University of Ottawa described Abdelrazik, who only escaped death because his case went beyond the courts. He had fallen into the black hole of the black list: “too innocent to charge, too guilty to fly.”

Such a gathering of legal brainpower would not be so rash as to condone terrorism, indeed one speaker denounced terrorism as one of the worst crimes against human rights. But the “craven arbitrariness,” as Attaran called blacklisting, risks subverting separation of powers and the rule of law, through extending and generalizing states of emergency.

“Proscription regimes,” as they are referred to in legal circles - black lists or no-fly lists if you will - give inordinate power to intelligence agencies, and have led to mistakes, misinformation, and deliberate disinformation changing (and ending) lives of sometimes innocent people. Blacklisted people wind up living a sort of non-life, deprived of means of earning a living, or even conducting basic economic activities (ever try to live without money?). Remember, we are sometimes talking about people whose only crime was to oppose dictators in their home countries, often quite peacefully. And once on Country A’s blacklist, it is extremely difficult - even when “cleared” - to be removed from those of Countries B through Z.

How Terrorism Ends (hint: not through war)

One of the most potent arguments opposing the wholesale, and sometimes unquestioning, inclusion of individuals and movements on blacklists came from Oliver Wils, the Director of Berlin-based NGO Berghof Peace Support, active in conflict resolution. Wils cited (as did the US Congress) a 2008 RAND Corporation study How Terrorist Groups End:

The evidence since 1968 indicates that most groups have not ended due to military pressure but because (1) they joined the political process or (2) local police and intelligence agencies arrested or killed key members and that few groups achieved victory within this timeframe.

The ending of most terrorist groups requires a range of policy instruments, such as careful police and intelligence work, military force, political negotiations, and economic sanctions. Yet policymakers need to understand where to prioritize their efforts with limited resources and attention.

The RAND study, noted Wils, shows that only 7% of terrorist groups that operated in the last four decades were put out of action by military force.

The Obama Administration wants to apply “smart power” solutions to problems exacerbated by the Bush Administration’s kinetic “War on Terror.” This week’s conference on the dangers of blacklists highlighted a number of key issues which should be of interest to smart American negotiators, and to European policy makers. With increasing focus on diplomatic solutions, will the Obama Administration pause before acceding to some dictator’s demand to put a legitimate opposition movement - even a liberation movement - on a black list? How many “peace processes” have come to a screeching halt, because one of the parties - The Outs - are declared “terrorists” by The Ins?

This post first appeared in Blogactiv.eu.