Category: Politics

but AIDS activism threatens governments, including China now.
The news item is now about a week old. A major Chinese AIDS activist, Dr. Wan Yanhai, “disappeared” sometime after August 24. Relatives and human rights groups believe he has been detained by the police.
I delayed posting anything last week, because I was expecting immediate follow-up news or, absent news, a large outcry in the world’s press. But nothing.

The activist, Wan Yanhai, is a former Chinese health official who was fired after he took up the causes of gay rights and AIDS in the mid-1990’s. He has been involved in various small but influential projects in the last few years, including a Web site about H.I.V. and the creation of small support groups for patients.
He has also been instrumental in exposing a devastating AIDS epidemic in central China that is centered on Henan Province, where as many as a million poor farmers were infected through unsanitary blood collection schemes.

We don’t know anything about his whereabouts, or the circumstances of his disapparance, but we do know a lot about him, and it’s awesome. This is just for starters:

A small, soft-spoken man who generally works behind the scenes, Dr. Wan nonetheless absorbed some of the confrontational style of American AIDS activists during a 1997 fellowship in Los Angeles.
At a regional AIDS meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malyasia, two years ago, Dr. Wan rose from the audience to confront China’s vice minister of health, who was at the podium.
More recently he has been involved in creating support and counseling groups for people with AIDS in rural China.
Last week, the Health Ministry received two petitions, which Dr. Wan’s group had helped prepare, from farmers suffering from AIDS.
“We demand that the government provide free medicine, or medicine we can afford, and we demand the government produce copies of Western medicines as quickly as possible,” read one petition, signed by 30 patients from Sui County in Henan.

[I’m excerpting sections from a contributing OP-ED piece by Zbigniew Brzezinski in yesterday’s NYTimes. The complete text fleshes out the skeletal, but succinct, argument posted here.]

Missing from much of the public debate is discussion of the simple fact that lurking behind every terroristic act is a specific political antecedent. That does not justify either the perpetrator or his political cause. Nonetheless, the fact is that almost all terrorist activity originates from some political conflict and is sustained by it as well. That is true of the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, the Basques in Spain, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the Muslims in Kashmir and so forth.
In the case of Sept. 11, it does not require deep analysis to note — given the identity of the perpetrators — that the Middle East’s political history has something to do with the hatred of Middle Eastern terrorists for America. The specifics of the region’s political history need not be dissected too closely because terrorists presumably do not delve deeply into archival research before embarking on a terrorist career. Rather, it is the emotional context of felt, observed or historically recounted political grievances that shapes the fanatical pathology of terrorists and eventually triggers their murderous actions.
….
Yet there has been a remarkable reluctance in America to confront the more complex historical dimensions of this hatred. The inclination instead has been to rely on abstract assertions like terrorists “hate freedom” or that their religious background makes them despise Western culture.
To win the war on terrorism, one must therefore set two goals: first to destroy the terrorists and, second, to begin a political effort that focuses on the conditions that brought about their emergence. That is what the British are doing in Ulster, the Spaniards are doing in Basque country and the Russians are being urged to do in Chechnya. To do so does not imply propitiation of the terrorists, but is a necessary component of a strategy designed to isolate and eliminate the terrorist underworld.
….
A victory in the war against terrorism can never be registered in a formal act of surrender. Instead, it will only be divined from the gradual waning of terrorist acts. Any further strikes against Americans will thus be a painful reminder that the war has not been won. Sadly, a main reason will be America’s reluctance to focus on the political roots of the terrorist atrocity of Sept. 11.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was national security adviser in the Carter administration.

Maybe the biggest downer of this argument for giving Americans the down-time which Europeans, even the Japanese, enjoy in quantities denied us you here is the part about our greed for consumption being the engine of our own social destruction. You mean we can’t just blame it on the bosses, the ones who take as much time off as they please, emulating or being emulated by the august one in the White House, notorious for his commitment as a leisure enthusiast?
But four weeks off in one chunk? Real people have to really struggle to get more than one week at a time, always risking being charged with a different kind of lack of commitment. The French, and most Europeans, routinely claim eight weeks and are now talking about ten.

As long as we’re scrutinizing the relationship between companies and their shareholders and pensioners [this year], how about looking at the inflexible work norms imposed on workers?
During the last six months, a national “Take Back Your Time Day” movement has gained momentum, urging Americans to take the day off on Oct. 24, 2003. The date, coming nine weeks before the end of the year, symbolizes the additional nine weeks Americans work in comparison to Continental Western Europeans.
In the end, even more than work schedules, incomes and employment are at stake: our choices affect the rest of the world. For the last half century, America’s tendency has been to consume more, rather than work less. This propensity to work is central to why the United States is among the world’s wealthiest nations as well as the unrivaled leader in resource depletion, carbon-dioxide emissions and environmental impact. By next Labor Day, perhaps, the message will be that we’re slowing down, sharing the work and consuming a little less.

Are we better off knowing that they don’t know what they are doing, or does that make them more dangerous?

Already under fire from abroad, the Bush administration was criticized across the political spectrum at home on Sunday for an Iraq policy in disarray, with top advisers seemingly at odds.

Some of the evidence includes:

Twice last week, Cheney took the lead in making the case for a pre-emptive military strike, arguing that the return of weapons inspectors should not be the key objective.
[On the other hand de facto secretary of state Colin] Powell said in a BBC interview released on Sunday that getting U.N. inspectors into Iraq “as a first step” was a priority, stating, “The president has been clear that he believes weapons inspectors should return.”

Once more on top of things, their party chief explains everything.

Republican National Committee Chairman Marc Racicot said differing views were the result of open debate.
“There’s no mystery here,” Racicot said. “It’s just exactly what it appears to be.”

Live shell loose on deck!

The other, little-guy countries on the planet may still make a difference after all!

Germany has told the United States it will withhold evidence against Sept. 11 conspiracy defendant Zacarias Moussaoui unless it receives assurances that the material won’t be used to secure a death penalty against him, Germany’s justice minister said in remarks released Saturday.
….
A spokesman for the U.S. Justice Department said he had no immediate comment.
Outlawing the death penalty is a requirement for membership of the 15-member European Union.

Courage, mes amis! [ok, almost nobody knows the German equivalent]

Tony Blair says that the world cannot stand by while Iraq is in “flagrant breach” of United Nations resolutions.

“Doing nothing about Iraq’s breach of these UN resolutions is not an option.
“That’s the only decision that’s been taken so far. What we do about that is an open question.”

If the issue is that of the violation of UN resolutions, we should have attacked Israel and removed the current regime a long time ago.
Obviously the real issue is not the one presented to us, by London or Washington.
We’re still waiting them to stop lying.

It is not necessary to have illusions about the liberality of the Palestinian Authority, or Palestinian society as a whole in order to oppose what is being done to the Palestinian people by Israel, a government and a society fundamentally so much more liberal. Still, some people are clearly impacted far more than others by the violence of a society–any society.
The agony of gay Palestinians is a part of the current horror in the middle east, but it did not begin in 1948, nor even with the Occupation or the Intifada, and it won’t end when the fighting ends.

With bombs once again exploding all over Israel, and the Palestinian territories under seemingly permanent curfew, the woes of Palestinian homosexuals haven’t exactly grabbed international attention. But after spending two days with gay Palestinian refugees in Israel, I began to wonder why the liberal world has never taken interest in their plight.
Perhaps it’s because that might mean acknowledging that the pathology of the nascent Palestinian polity extends well beyond Yasir Arafat and won’t be uprooted by one free election. Indeed, the torment of gays is very nearly official Palestinian policy. “The persecution of gays in the Palestinian Authority [P.A.] doesn’t just come from the families or the Islamic groups but from the P.A. itself,” says Shaul Ganon of the Tel Aviv-based Agudah-Association of Gay Men, Lesbians, Bisexuals and Transgender in Israel. “The P.A.’s usual excuse for persecuting gays is to label them collaborators–though I know of two cases in the last three years where people were tried explicitly for being homosexuals.” Since the intifada, Ganon tells me, Palestinian police have increasingly enforced Islamic law: “It’s now impossible to be an open gay in the P.A.”
[Descriptions of what should be unspeakable tortures follow in the text.]

Life is only marginally better as a refugee in Israel, subsisting on the margins.

[In Tel Aviv, a group of teenage prostitutes,] refugees from the West Bank, live in an abandoned building. They tell me that sometimes a client will offer them a meal and a shower instead of payment; sometimes a client will simply refuse to pay in any form, taunting them to complain to police. And sometimes police will beat them before releasing them back to the streets.
A 17-year-old refugee from Nablus named Salah (a pseudonym), who spent months in a P.A. prison where interrogators cut him with glass and poured toilet cleaner into his wounds, tells Ganon that he has been stopped by Israeli police no fewer than four times that day. He recites the names of the different police units who stopped him by their acronyms. “Try not to do anything stupid,” Ganon says.
“I’ve tried to kill myself six times already,” says Salah. “Each time the ambulance came too quickly. But now I think I know how to do it. Next time, with God’s help, it will work before the ambulance comes.”

I’ve finally realized where I’ve been for almost the last two years. I’m in the midst of a really stupid comic book, but it’s not made of paper, and it’s not comic, and it’s not ending!
If you still have to be convinced you’re in it with me, but only if you can stand the pain, go back over the past quotes of any of the current gang in the White House. Bush’s best can be found here. He has not monopolized the class by any means, but his seem to be the only ones with something like their own website–and a book.
Barry has already posted this rather fresh Dubya doozy tonight, but it’s just so comically horrible I feel compelled to do what I can to broadcast it farther.

“There’s no cave deep enough for America, or dark enough to hide.”—George W. Bush, Oklahoma City, Okla., Aug. 29, 2002

One can only weep.

For the crew in Washington, war is the end, not the means, according to an argument which would have been familiar to Thomas Merton.

They want war. It’s not that they want peace and a better way of life for the Iraqi people blah, blah. It’s not that they want security and freedom for us. They want the war. As if they have a chip, not on their shoulder but in their brains and it is programmed for war.
Thomas Merton believed what the rest of the world is trying to tell Bush, Cheney and their tapestry of advisers: war will exacerbate all problems – it will bury the chip deeper in some and release it in others but war will only make more war – more violence – more anger – and more of what war has always given us.
War is not, as Rumsfeld told a sea of soldiers in camouflage, a difficult means to a positive end. Thomas Merton believed that for the likes of Rumsfeld, war is the end.
….
A clueless cabal agitates and sells their nobility as they lay the groundwork for war and tolerate the objections. They “understand” the natural apprehensions of informed and learned people of good will but they are further along in the decision-making and they may or may not wait for the rest of the world to “catch up.”

The question is for America only, for Europe and the remainder of the world have maintained their responsibilities, in many cases with very advanced systems. Americans however have so confounded their own real interests that here virtually any form of public transportation is looked upon as something only the poorest of the poor have to resort to.
Actually, we was robbed.

The major answer to this question is the long-standing opposition of The Highway Lobby — the auto, oil, tire and cement industries. You don’t hear much these days about “The Highway Lobby” as such. The reason is that it has done its destructive job which is to make America an occasion for ribbons of crowded highways carrying millions of motor vehicles as the only “practical and direct” way to get around on the ground.
At times the lobby has to resort to crime to achieve its assaults on public transit, while at other periods, it just used its money, muscle and propaganda with state and Washington lawmakers. Twenty eight crimes were committed by General Motors and its oil and tire company co-conspirators in the Thirties and Forties leading to their convictions in federal district court in Chicago during the late Forties. The U.S. Justice Department’s charge, upheld in court, was that these large companies, inorder to eliminate their major rivals — the trolley industry — bought up these firms, tore up the tracks in and around 28 major cities in the U.S., including the biggest one in Los Angeles, and lobbied legislators to build more and more highways to sell more and more vehicles, gasoline and tires. Earlier, GM tried to pressure banks to reduce credit to these trolley companies and when that did not succeed sufficiently, the conspiracy to buy out their competitors and shut them down was hatched.
This is more than corporate crime history. Everyday, today, tomorrow and the next day, millions of Americans find themselves on clogged, bumper to bumper commutes because there is no convenient mass transit or no mass transit at all where they live and work.