Category: Politics

Could the White House have done anything else to draw a more dramatic parallel between its policies and those of Nazi Germany? We have no doubts about at whose behest the image was removed.

NEW YORK.- The “Guernica” work by Pablo Picasso at the entrance of the Security Council of the United Nations has been covered with a curtain. The reason for covering this work is that this is the place where diplomats make statements to the press and have this work as the background. The Picasso work features the horrors of war. On January 27 a large blue curtain was placed to cover the work.
Fred Eckhard, press secretary of the U.N. said: “It is an appropriate background for the cameras.” He was questioned as to why the work had been covered.
A diplomat stated that it would not be an appropriate background if the ambassador of the United States at the U.N. John Negroponte, or Powell, talk about war surrounded with women, children and animals shouting with horror and showing the suffering of the bombings.
This work is a reproduction of the Guernica that was donated by Nelson A. Rockefeller to the U.N. in 1985.

The United Nations is the world body founded 60 years ago precisely to prevent such horrors as that visited upon Guernica in 1937. “Guernica” obviously belongs there, but in 2003 the U.S. is embarassed by Picasso’s iconic image of murderous war, because we are preparing to visit our own horrors on innocent civilians.
The NYTimes now has the story as well.

At the entrance of the United Nations Security Council chamber, a baby blue curtain has been placed over a ruglike copy of “Guernica,” Pablo Picasso’s powerful antiwar painting. Picasso’s depiction of the horrors of war, given by the estate of Nelson A. Rockefeller, who donated the money for the United Nations compound, hung at a site where it often provided a background to televised interviews with ambassadors and other officials. On Jan. 27, when Hans Blix, the chief United Nations chemical and biological weapons inspector, was to appear, microphones were repositioned to accommodate expanded press coverage, diplomats discussing peace were placed in front of Picasso’s image. Speaking of the blue curtain and member flags that now decorate the area, Fred Eckhard, press secretary of the United Nations, said, “It is an appropriate background for the cameras.”

Uh huh.

The hawks are afraid, as their continued fighting delay shows. They aren’t afraid enough however, and in that lies their undoing, even if it may mean they will unleash a holocaust first. Washington is making a very big mistake. We already have a major antiwar movement in place, even before there’s a war, and it’s not going to be limited to just placards and speeches, especially if or when the fighting starts. We can bring down the regime in Washington. The only question is how long it will take.

“The difference between this antiwar protest movement and the Vietnam antiwar movement is that we have a huge grass-roots campaign before the war has even begun,” she said. “Our volunteers on the subway are approached by strangers requesting leaflets.”

Leslie Cagan is talking about the February 15 demonstrations in New York and elsewhere around the world:

“This may be our last chance to stop the war,” she said. “If it starts, it will be much harder to end. If marches do not work, we will escalate. We will have to do things to disrupt the normal flow of life in this country. There will have to be more civil disobedience. If bombs are being dropped on other people in our name and with our tax dollars, we will do what we can to make sure these bombs do not get there.”

Alright, whom am I kidding. We’re all going to be locked up, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens the day the bombs begin.

These are the least diplomatic statements I have ever seen associated with this man who is so extraordinarily popular around the world. Maybe we really are in deep deep trouble.
Nelson Mandela, no friend of current White House policy, yesterday in Johannesburg attacked the Bush administration more forcefully than he had ever done in the past. Maybe the fearless former South African president can shame so many others who could make a difference but have been timid or silent in the face of American power gone insane. Can we and the world still be saved from the sleazy junta in Washington?

“What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight and who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust.
“Why does the US behave so arrogantly? Their friend Israel has got weapons of mass destruction. But because it’s their ally they won’t ask the UN to get rid of them.”

A man who should know racism when he sees it, Mandela asks whether the American president and the British prime minister (to whom he refers, with contempt, as “the foreign minister of the United States”) are behaving as racists in their relationship with the UN.

He said: “Both Bush and Tony Blair are undermining an idea (the UN) sponsored by their predecessors.
“Is this because the Secretary General (Kofi Annan, from Ghana) is now a black man? They never did that when Secretary Generals were white…
“Are they saying this is a lesson that you should follow. Or are they saying we are special, what we do should not be done by anyone?”

Like many of those who oppose this war and see it as part of a much larger record of violence, Mandela addresses the world’s historical experience with the nation which threatens another conflagration. The article in London’s Mirror continues:

The world statesman went on to launch a withering attack on America’s human rights record.
Referring to the US wartime atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagaski, he said: “Because they decided to kill innocent people in Japan, who are they now to pretend they’re the policeman of the world?
“lf there is a country which has committed unspeakable atrocities, it is the US…they don’t care for human beings.”
He went on to appeal to the American people to vote Mr Bush out of office and protest at his policies.

John Pilger is writing from and for readers in the U.K., so his title suggests a much more parochial statement than what you will actually find in its text. The first part of the essay is an extraordinary attack on the American and British governments; the second lines up the argument in horible detail. The combined effect is devastating, just about the last word on the subject of this mad war and the system which is planning it. Don’t read it before dinner.

To call Blair a mere “poodle” is to allow him distance from the killing of innocent Iraqi men, women and children for which he will share responsibility.
He is the embodiment of the most dangerous appeasement humanity has known since the 1930s. The current American elite is the Third Reich of our times, although this distinction ought not to let us forget that they have merely accelerated more than half a century of unrelenting American state terrorism: from the atomic bombs dropped cynically on Japan as a signal of their new power to the dozens of countries invaded, directly or by proxy, to destroy democracy wherever it collided with American “interests”, such as a voracious appetite for the world’s resources, like oil.

[If the Common Dreams link doesn’t show the picture, try the Mirror site.]

So reads the actual lead headline this afternoon on the Reuters site–cross my heart and hope to die if I’m lying!
How can these guys live with themselves?

Breslin says it’s in the faces of the people. But, no, it’s not a reflection of memories of the the Trade Center destruction. It’s the consciousness of the destruction yet to come.

On the streets yesterday, when greeting each other, people did it with no expression. Certainly, the cold had much to do with that, but this is a time when people do not smile anywhere.
You study the faces on television. I would not hire the press guy for the president, Ari Fleischer, for a job in a funeral parlor because he is too somber. I single him out because he is on TV a lot at this time.
Death.
But when you study faces anywhere, you can’t find a smile.
The faces tell you the time in which you’re living. The government is talking about a war with Iraq as if discussing a commuter train home. When we have the war, when we get the 101st Airborne in place, when the carrier group arrives, when the war starts at the end of February. The 8:42 to Long Beach.
The government talks about a war in terms of personal insults, deliberately keeping us waiting, by Saddam Hussein, of whom we’re all sick and tired.
No one so far has talked about the number of people who will be killed in Iraq. We will lose great young people. Oh, there has to be tens of thousands of Iraq civilians killed. How can they bomb and invade without killing tens of thousands? Particularly those school children whose mothers dress them for the day and send them off to be blown apart by a smart bomb that turns dumb on the way down and hits a schoolhouse.

But death will not visit Iraq alone.

Of course, people display gloom. When you’re in something this lousy it tells on everybody. The soul shows.
Bush talks about this war as if he is driving us to it on a one-way street. We bomb them. We flatten them under tank treads. What happens then? Why, America wins again! The Bush people want the thrill of the invasion news without having to read the casualty lists on the following days.
Neither he, nor anybody else, mentions the obvious fact that an attack on Iraq will cause a response someday. Maybe a month, a year, five years. They will come. And the only place they will attack is New York.
That came to mind naturally yesterday during a walk along the fence of the old World Trade Center site.
No suicide bomber wants to go Waco, Texas.
Nobody tries poison gas on Denver.
They can’t wait to hit New York again.
And if there is one sure thing, this Bush and his southern Republicans will simply shuck off the news of anything happening to New York.

Thanks, Jimmy.

This blog is directed to the world outside of New York. Its message is hardly necessary for those who have lived in the Gotham City for the last ten years.
An opinion piece in Newsday today, from an author who once saw the former prosecutor as a hero, and who co-authored a book describing him as such, reminds us of the truth about the the man who later became an unpopular mayor. Giuliani had a 32 percent approval rating in 1999 and throughout his second term, until the destruction of the World Trade Center, he remained unable to claim any real popularity in the city itself.

It is an exhilarating experience to publish a book critical of a pop culture icon like Giuliani, who enjoys an 80-percent approval rating nationally, is routinely called “America’s Mayor,” and will be the subject of a made-for-television docu-drama in March. Friends think I am committing career suicide by deflating a political diety. TV talk-show bookers say Giuliani is too popular to dispute.
But there is a case against canonization. Something bogus is going on here. One day has become a career.

Jack Newfield hardly misses a beat in his account of Giuliani’s failings. Even crime reduction, for which he boasts credit, was hardly accomplished by the mayor in a vacuum. The list of Newfields’s indictments includes the mayor’s pervasive racist policy, education system disasters, union antagonisms, violations of major constitution rights, the undermining even of existing programs for the poor and, most damaging from the point of view of the constituency which most enthusiastically supported him, fiscal irresponsibility.

Just now I made the mistake of turning on the television for the first time in months. I wanted to see if there were millions, shivering, standing in support of reason outside the United Nations Security Council, and I was properly feeling very guilty for not being there myself
I didn’t really find out anything, because all I saw and heard on each network were the usual, now iconic, talking shirts (and blouses), describing a world and representing a logic totally alien to me.
The world is the one created by this White House and the media which represents it, to the exclusion of any alternative. The logic, I believe, at the moment goes something like this: Ok, we just may give Iraq a tiny bit more time, but if then the inspectors still don’t find weapons of mass destruction, it will mean Hussein is hiding them. At that point the Europeans and any others who oppose a war won’t have a leg to stand on, and we can go in and nuke the people responsible for September 11, making us all feel both virtuous and safe.
I don’t have to comment any further right now. I’m just going to sign off and weep–for reason, logic, sanity, history, the present, for any future, but above all for the millions of people who will be caught up in this evil.
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Not In Our Name has two full pages in today’s NYTimes. The statement is excellent, and it properly references more than just this war. Sign it.
For a visible image of resistance to this war and the new foreign and domestic order, see the Blue Button Project.

James Wentzy’s film documentary, “Fight Back, Fight AIDS – 15 Years of ACT UP,” has been accepted for screening next month by the 53rd Berlin International Film Festival.
Fight Back, Fight AIDS – 15 Years of ACT UP von James Wentzy (USA)
From the Festival site [my translation from the German]:

Absent for years from the Berlinale, AIDS appears again as a topic of feature films in the Festival’s Competition and Panorama theaters. Two documentary films examine socio-political issues [the second, also an American film, is Louise Hogarth’s The Gift]: As gays began to die like flies in the 80’s, the world looked away. ACT UP became, for the media, the voice of AIDS: And the world was shocked that this the most easy-going of minorities was able to apply itself to deal with the crisis, to ACT UP, to shout back. This film shows how the media-savy actions of this loose organization came about and how AIDS politicized the gay world and moved it to assume real responsibility: Ashes are thrown onto the lawn of the White House of an ignorant President Bush senior, corpses are laid out in front of the two-faced Clinton–and the film historian Vito Russo (who was at the Panorama theatre in 1983 with his lecture, “The Celluloid Closet”) is shown delivering his last great speech.

In November I announced the screening of the film here in New York, and after seeing it, wrote:

The ACT UP documentary was beautiful, but for all the evidence of the success of the activism it records, the reminders of how little has changed in the world in fifteen years is a horrible concomitance. Bush, war in the middle east, health care, drug company profiteering, oil, greed and stupidity. There were also the images of so many activists whose lives were destroyed at the height of their beauty and their powers. I would not have missed this screening for anything, but it was a melancholy, if not terrifying, experience, and one which an intelligent and generous world could have prevented.

I hate to take the narrow view, to personalize the big issues, but as someone who lives in New York, and is absolutely mad about its people and its beauty, I see this news first as the death knell for the vulnerable, very open city I love. Still with my initial reaction, no, I don’t give a fuck for what happens to anyone elsewhere in the country who hasn’t been screaming at the top of their lungs all along about the insane regime which has highjacked the nation.

WASHINGTON — One year after President Bush labeled Iraq, Iran and North Korea the “axis of evil,” the United States is thinking about the unthinkable: It is preparing for the possible use of nuclear weapons against Iraq.
At the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) in Omaha and inside planning cells of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, target lists are being scrutinized, options are being pondered and procedures are being tested to give nuclear armaments a role in the new U.S. doctrine of “preemption.”