ZIZEK ON ANTI-SMOKING CAMPAIGN IN USA, Source: Doug Henwood Interviews Slavoj Zizek , (Excerpt), Oct 31, 2009

Anti-Smoking Zealots in America













"Let's take the campaign against smoking in the U.S. I think this is a much more suspicious phenomenon than it appears to be. First, deeply inscribed into it is an idea of absolute narcissism, that whenever you are in contact with another person, somehow he or she can infect you. Second, there is an envy of the intense enjoyment of smoking. There is a certain vision of subjectivity, a certain falseness in liberalism, that comes down to "I want to be left alone by others; I don't want to get too close to the others." Also, in this fight against the tobacco companies, you have a certain kind of politically correct yuppie who is doing very well financially, but who wants to retain a certain anti-capitalist aura. What better way to focus on the obvious bad guy, Big Tobacco? It functions as an ersatz enemy. You can still claim your stock market gains, but you can say, "I'm against tobacco companies." Now I should make it clear that I don't smoke. And I don't like tobacco companies..."

The growth of the extreme right in Hungary, Source: Hungarian Spectrum, October 29, 2009

http://esbalogh.typepad.com/hungarianspectrum/2009/10/the-growth-of-the-extreme-right-in-hungary.html


There is no question that the most burning issue in current Hungarian political life is the spectacular growth of the extreme right. Political Capital, one of those "independent" think-tanks József Debreczeni wrote about the other day, published a study in Hírszerző dealing with the "causes of the growth of the extreme right."

The authors mention five possible causes: (1) strengthening of a critical attitude toward the regime itself, (2) a shift toward the right in general, (3) growth of belief in a more authoritarian regime, (4) lack of trust in politicians, and (5) growth of societal antagonism.

As usual these categories are nebulous at best. What does "shift toward the right in general" actually mean? This to my mind is not a cause but the result of certain political and social changes. Or, what does "societal antagonism" mean? Perhaps it would have been better to dispense with this list and instead move straight to the details. They make more sense.

There is nothing new in the statement that Hungarian society expected too much from the change of regime. Most people believed that with the introduction of a "market economy" (they judiciously avoided the term "capitalism") Hungary would be an earthly paradise overnight. Just the opposite happened. About 1.5 million pople lost their jobs, inflation set in, and interest rates were sky high. The government tried to tell people that eventually everything would be better, but five years after the change of regime came the "Bokros package" that meant a 17% drop in real wages. Yet it did the trick and eventually life was getting better although living standards were still somewhat below the 1989 level. Between 2002 and 2006 living standards soared, but not because of the simultaneous growth of the Hungarian economy. Most of the goodies the government provided came from foreign loans. The country's financial situation became dire and something had to be done. A new austerity program had to be introduced just at the time that people were expecting further improvements in their lives. As soon as it became clear that people's expectations couldn't be fulfilled, the socialist-liberal coalition's popularity dropped precipitously. Way before the the leaked speech of Ferenc Gyurcsány in which he tried to convince the socialist parliamentary members that their old ways of "economic management," if you can call it that, couldn't be continued. No more raising living standards from borrowed money.

The beginning of real dissatisfaction can be dated to the summer of 2006 when it became clear that another round of austerity measures would be introduced. Admittedly not as stringent as those of Lajos Bokros but even a drop of a few percentage points set off the Hungarian publict hat was accustomed to economic benefits from the state. Their dissatisfaction with the austerity program was translated into disappointment with the democratic regime itself. According to data gathered by the European Social Survey, out of twenty-one European countries only in Bulgaria is dissatisfaction greater than in Hungary. With this general dissatisfaction came discontent with the institutions, the political parties, the politicians, the European Union. In turn there was an increased responsiveness to radical messages. What is especially worrisome is that young people are leery about the benefits of democracy. According to a survey, "Ifjúság 2008," less than fifty percent of young people (between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine) think that "democracy is superior to any other regime."

The extreme right began to flourish in this environment of discontent. While in 2004 perhaps 6% of the adult population belonged to the group, today, according to Political Capital, the extreme right has about a 13% "market share". This growth has a lot to do with the weakness of civic society. Again, according to the World Value Survey, Hungary and Bulgaria are at the bottom of the list as far as the activity of civic organizations is concerned. There is also a general suspicion about the democratic institutions, and one cannot even blame the Hungarians. It is enough to see the work of the prosecutor's office or the activities of the courts. One can hear constant complaints about the lack of law and order, often due to endless legal wranglings over the letter of the law. The police accordingly don't quite know what is lawful and what is not.

Intolerance has become stronger in the last few years than ever before. Or, it is also possible that while a few years ago people didn't think that it was acceptable behavior to make anti-Gypsy or anti-Semitic remarks in public, today there are no such compunctions. I found a chart in the study comparing political anti-Semitism in seven countries especially interesting. Participants were asked to agree or disagree with two statements. The first was that Jews have too much power in the business world; the second, that Jews are responsible for the recent global economic crisis.Political antisemitism The brownish colored column shows the percent of positive responses to the first question, and the grey measures positive responses to the second. Hungary has the highest values, followed by Spain, Poland, Austria, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Finally, one mustn't forget about Jobbik's "genius" in building a mass movement. Surely, Vona and his friends hit the jackpot when they decided to make the Gypsy question the central theme of their propaganda. Anti-Gypsy feelings are strong and widespread. According to some studies perhaps 85% of Hungarians find the Gypsies an undesirable ethnic group. In addition to adopting a successful central theme, Jobbik also managed to create an institutional network. A great help in this regard was another of their brainstorms: the Hungarian Guard. With the help of the Guard Jobbik could pose as not so much a party but as a civic, grass roots movement. Before August 2007, that is before the establishment of the Hungarian Guard, Jobbik had practically no local chapters. As soon as the Hungarian Guard appeared on the scene Jobbik spread like wildfire, and by now it can boast almost 180 local chapters. In its membership three groups are overrepresented: young people, villagers, and inhabitants of the northeastern counties of Hungary.

The authors of the study do not predict long-term success for Jobbik. Once an extremist movement becomes a party and participates in the political processes its weaknesses are exposed. Soon enough it becomes obvious that it doesn't have instant remedies. That the movement's simplistic answers to complicated issues don't work. And then comes the disappointment of their followers and a waning of their popularity. This was the case with the Arrow Cross Party after 1939 and MIÉP after 2002. It may also be the fate of both Jobbik and Fidesz.

NOT ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME, by Andy Newman, in: socialistunity.com/, 30 October, 2009

The invitation by his Holiness Pope Benedict XVI for Anglicans to join the Church of Rome is not the sort of topic that the political left tends to find very interesting. So I was very pleased to see Splintered Sunrise tackling the issue. Although Splinty’s understandable irritation with the National Secular Society gives those numbskulls more significance than they really have.

The importance of the issue is recognising that any multicultural and pluralistic society will include within it individuals and faith communities who take their moral and ethical guidance from their religion.

Splintered Sunrise is particularly strong in recognising that debate among religious communities must be accepted in their own terms. Atheist liberals simply have no business in telling Christians what they should or should not believe; and Christians are as entitled as anyone else to participate in the wider democratic debate in our society, to seek to bring society closer to their own moral and ethical codes.

There is a naïve form of progressive politics that seeks to polemicise in favour of atheism and secularism. The assumption that a religious authority should not prevail over people who do not accept its values is a fundamental one for secularists. But conversely why should the authority of a secular society prevail over people who do choose to self-identify with a religious faith, and its entailed values? Secularists who are also atheists even argue that both the secular and the religious laws are both the product of human thought, so why should one be privileged over the other?

It is worth remembering Dr Rowan Williams’s controversial and misunderstood lecture on Sharia law in February 2008. Fundamental to Dr Williams’s argument is the importance of collective identities: in a multi-cultural society people who are all equally law abiding can have more than one sense of identity or allegiance. What is more, for the religious believer, the core teachings of their faith are Divinely inspired, and as such are typically non-negotiable. What we need to do is avoid a false polarisation that regards religious belief as inherently conservative, and which creates a mythology of progressive and universal humanist values – a “universalism” that by happy coincidence just happens to coincide with the preferred lifestyle choices of the metropolitan middle classes in our very own society.

As Dr Williams ably argued last year:

There is a bit of a risk here in the way we sometimes talk about the universal vision of post-Enlightenment politics. The great protest of the Enlightenment was against authority that appealed only to tradition and refused to justify itself by other criteria – by open reasoned argument or by standards of successful provision of goods and liberties for the greatest number. Its claim to override traditional forms of governance and custom by looking towards a universal tribunal was entirely intelligible against the background of despotism and uncritical inherited privilege which prevailed in so much of early modern Europe. The most positive aspect of this moment in our cultural history was its focus on equal levels of accountability for all and equal levels of access for all to legal process.

So “Universality” is itself a socially created myth. The universality of the human values of the Enlightmenment was no more than the particularity of the specific form of the French Revolution, (and the preceding reformism of the absolutist monarchy) to seek to establish a single collective and communal identity through promoting ubiquity of the French language and a single political authority and legal system around allegedly universal values. This was a political project of nation building. The limits of such universality could never extend beyond the protection of the bayonets of the Grand Armee, and couldn’t really be universal even within France for those who chose a different allegiance. We should not regard this enlightenment project as any more “universally” valid and rationalist than any other historically contingent ideology.

We must recognise that people who choose to self-identify with a religious community, and its associated laws and ethics have a right to do so. The actual, and so far relatively successful, experience of multi-culturalism and convergence towards consensual tolerant values in British society has not been on the basis of any campaign for secularism, but has succeeded by offering choice and empowerment.

The media discussion of the Pope’s offer to conservative clergy in the Anglican communion has been met with some alarmism, for example the front page article in the Times effectively predicting the end of the Anglican church, the discussion has also revealed some lazy thinking.

The final form of the deal is not yet clear, although it may involve “a church within a church”. Deacon Greg Kandra, in his blog, quotes two well connected Italian newspapers. According to

“Il Giornale and Il Foglio, canon lawyers are continuing to define what has been a particularly unclear aspect of the new provision: whether married Anglicans could train as seminarians. Andrea Tornielli of Il Giornale reports that over the last few days, the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts has been working to clarify this point. He writes that “everything suggests” seminarians in these future Anglo-Catholic communities “will have to be celibate like all their colleagues in the Latin Catholic Church.”

This would not apply to the converting clergy, but would reduce the distinctively Anglican flavour of the proposed “Personal Ordinariate” if new clergy could not marry; a question that might be of more concern to the laity is whether or not the “Personal Ordinariate” would be expected to rule against the use of contraception for heterosexual, married couples.

Despite the hype, there is not exactly a stampede for people to convert. For example Anglican Mainstream reports

The former Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, a long-term mem­ber of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) and the International Anglican- Roman Catholic Commis­sion for Unity and Mission (IARCCUM), who was the subject of press speculation that he could accept the offer, said on Tuesday that he was not going to become a Roman Catholic. … The Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, the Most Revd Fred Hiltz, said that he did not expect “a groundswell of response” to the papal decree. Even among those who have separated themselves from the Angli­can Church of Canada, there is an abiding desire to remain in commu­nion with the Archbishop of Canter­bury.”

The lazy thinking revolves around stereotypes that Catholics are en bloc more conservative that Anglicans; and that the most conservative parts of the Anglican communion tilt towards Rome. Neither of these suppositions are necessarily true.

Not all Anglo-Catholics are conservative; and many of the conservatives in the church are evangelicals. For example, two Anglican bodies, the Society of Catholic Priests and Affirming Catholicism issued a joint press release pointing out that:

The majority of catholics within the church are in favour of women’s ministry and wish to remain loyal to the Anglican tradition within the Anglican Communion.
The Society of Catholic Priests, which has over 500 members in this country and is about to establish chapters in the American Episcopal Church and in Australia, and Affirming Catholicism which draws together clergy and laity in this country and throughout the Anglican Communion, are committed to the catholic nature and teaching of the Church of England. We are actively working to see women ordained to the episcopate and hold that this is entirely consistent with the teaching of the church and the historic nature of our orders. We are also convinced that the issues of human sexuality should not be ones that divide the church.

On the other hand, it is conservative evangelicals not Catholics who have been stirring up bigotry against gay people in Uganda; and the Anglican Church of Uganda has so far been silent about the proposed draconian anti-gay laws in that country, despite the ruling of the 1998 Lambeth conference that committed the whole Communion to “listen pastorally to the experience of homosexual persons and … to assure them that they are loved by God…” and to “minister pastorally and sensitively to all irrespective of sexual orientation and to condemn the irrational fear of homosexuals…”.

In modern British society organised religion is not a structurally conservative social force, although it can be conservative it can also be progressive, - for example those Catholics who are both conservatively opposed to abortion, and yet deeply opposed to nuclear weapons and social injustice. Such people are not simply “bigots” even if they do take illiberal positions on some social issues. The task is to work with them on the political issues we agree with them over, and via the democratic process we seek to minimise their influence over those issues we disagree with them.

Churches provide institutional continuity and expression for religious faith. There will always therefore be a tension between an evolving and changing society and the what believers hold to be eternal truth embodied in the faith. Father Ivan Aquilina, the Anglo-Catholic priest of St John the Baptist in Sevenoaks, expresses how this affects the divergence between Rome and Canterbury like this:

“The fact is that what happened in that process is that the two communions entrusted God to lead them on, if they have not arrived where they had hoped to then it is a question of seeking what the Spirit is saying to the Churches. However some Churches are happier to listen to the spirit of this world than the Spirit of the living God.”

But the question is, for religious believers, how do you know what is the spirit of the world, and what is the spirit of God? The conservative evangelical, Revd John Richardson, poses a very good defence of Anglicanism on his blog

the Church of England is not a Church which operates by ‘Scripture alone’ in the sense that it gives people the Bible and nothing else to represent its core beliefs. Rather, there are many points of potential theological controversy where the formularies of the Church of England take a settled view —on infant baptism, for example, or on the nature of bread and wine at Communion.

The Church of England has therefore set itself under the authority of Scripture, but via its formularies it also offers at certain critical points an interpretation of Scripture. And this allows it to be a dynamic, rather than a static body. In particular, it does not require us to be committed to the formularies as if they were infallible and beyond criticism.

We may compare this with the way that most Christians still use the Apostolic and Nicene Creeds. There are indeed those who are willing to question even these, but there are far more who regard them as, in some sense, having settled certain theological disputes, if not beyond question, at least in a way that means questioners must acknowledge they are departing from certain historical ‘norms’

In other words Scripture needs human interpretation, and the human interpretation is fallible and open to modification.

This is of course a workable dividing line between what is human and what is Divine in the church’s teaching. But moving the goal posts has not solved the problem. This is because the scriptures are themselves the work of human beings, and indeed with regard to the New Testament, the books included and the books rejected from the years of the early Church were clearly a human decision.

So reference to scripture requires not only interpretation of how the Bible applies to novel situations, but also human interpretation of what parts of the Bible merely reflect the social norms of the Judaic and early Christian societies who created it. Unless you believe that God himself directly wrote the Bible, then it was open to the authors of the Gospels to misinterpret the spirit of God’s law in light of their own fallible, human, and socially contextualised experience.

How that question is resolved one for religious individuals and communities to decide for themselves; and non religious people should have no voice in the matter; which is why the bleetings of the National Secular Society, and the Richard Dawkins’s of this world are so annoying.

We should accept that in reality the content of religions and religious observance is not static, but changes with time as influenced by the changing values of society and by political pressure, so the political battles should not be between secularism and religion, but to shape the values of both wider society and the religious communities.

As society moves in a more liberal direction, then there will be those within religious communities who resist that change, and there will also be those who believe that the liberalisation of social attitudes is also the working of God’s love. For the former, the word of scripture acts as authority, for the latter the spirit of scripture needs to be reaffirmed in the light of the changing values of society.

Of course, life is never even that simple, and there will be those who are conservative on what they see as moral issues, and yet who are strong believers in social justice and equality; and there will be those who are liberal on social issues, and yet have conservative politics on economic justice.

What the left needs to do is understand that the past traditions of militant atheism, telling religious people that they are wrong, stupid or bigoted, are indefensible and counter-productive. Many people with liberal, socialist or emancipatory politics are inspired by their religious faith.

Majority of Eastern Germans Believe that 'Life was better" in the German Democratic Republic,Der Spiegel, By Julia Bonstein, Saturday, October 31, 09

Andrew's blog note: This article is from Der Spiegel, an anti-marxist newspaper in western Germany. Nevertheless, despite its obviously anti-socialist tilt, this article shows the many advantages and social solidarity available to citizens of the former German Democratic Republic
************************************************************

Glorification of the German Democratic Republic is on the rise two decades after the Berlin Wall fell. Young people and the better off are among those rebuffing criticism of East Germany as an "illegitimate state." In a new poll, more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR.
The life of Birger, a native of the state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania in northeastern Germany, could read as an all-German success story. The Berlin Wall came down when he was 10. After graduating from high school, he studied economics and business administration in Hamburg, lived in India and South Africa, and eventually got a job with a company in the western German city of Duisburg. Today Birger, 30, is planning a sailing trip in the Mediterranean. He isn't using his real name for this story, because he doesn't want it to be associated with the former East Germany, which he sees as "a label with negative connotations."
And yet Birger is sitting in a Hamburg cafe, defending the former communist country. "Most East German citizens had a nice life," he says. "I certainly don't think that it's better here." By "here," he means reunified Germany, which he subjects to questionable comparisons. "In the past there was the Stasi, and today (German Interior Minister Wolfgang) Schäuble -- or the GEZ (the fee collection center of Germany's public broadcasting institutions) -- are collecting information about us." In Birger's opinion, there is no fundamental difference between dictatorship and freedom. "The people who live on the poverty line today also lack the freedom to travel."
Birger is by no means an uneducated young man. He is aware of the spying and repression that went on in the former East Germany, and, as he says, it was "not a good thing that people couldn't leave the country and many were oppressed." He is no fan of what he characterizes as contemptible nostalgia for the former East Germany. "I haven't erected a shrine to Spreewald pickles in my house," he says, referring to a snack that was part of a the East German identity. Nevertheless, he is quick to argue with those who would criticize the place his parents called home: "You can't say that the GDR was an illegitimate state, and that everything is fine today."
As an apologist for the former East German dictatorship, the young Mecklenburg native shares a majority view of people from eastern Germany. Today, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, 57 percent, or an absolute majority, of eastern Germans defend the former East Germany. "The GDR had more good sides than bad sides. There were some problems, but life was good there," say 49 percent of those polled. Eight percent of eastern Germans flatly oppose all criticism of their former home and agree with the statement: "The GDR had, for the most part, good sides. Life there was happier and better than in reunified Germany today."
These poll results, released last Friday in Berlin, reveal that glorification of the former East Germany has reached the center of society. Today, it is no longer merely the eternally nostalgic who mourn the loss of the GDR. "A new form of Ostalgie (nostalgia for the former GDR) has taken shape," says historian Stefan Wolle. "The yearning for the ideal world of the dictatorship goes well beyond former government officials." Even young people who had almost no experiences with the GDR are idealizing it today. "The value of their own history is at stake," says Wolle.
People are whitewashing the dictatorship, as if reproaching the state meant calling their own past into question. "Many eastern Germans perceive all criticism of the system as a personal attack," says political scientist Klaus Schroeder, 59, director of an institute at Berlin's Free University that studies the former communist state. He warns against efforts to downplay the SED dictatorship by young people whose knowledge about the GDR is derived mainly from family conversations, and not as much from what they have learned in school. "Not even half of young people in eastern Germany describe the GDR as a dictatorship, and a majority believe the Stasi was a normal intelligence service," Schroeder concluded in a 2008 study of school students. "These young people cannot, and in fact have no desire to, recognize the dark sides of the GDR."
"Driven Out of Paradise"
Schroeder has made enemies with statements like these. He received more than 4,000 letters, some of them furious, in reaction to reporting on his study. The 30-year-old Birger also sent an e-mail to Schroeder. The political scientist has now compiled a selection of typical letters to document the climate of opinion in which the GDR and unified Germany are discussed in eastern Germany. Some of the material gives a shocking insight into the thoughts of disappointed and angry citizens. "From today's perspective, I believe that we were driven out of paradise when the Wall came down," one person writes, and a 38-year-old man "thanks God" that he was able to experience living in the GDR, noting that it wasn't until after German reunification that he witnessed people who feared for their existence, beggars and homeless people.
Today's Germany is described as a "slave state" and a "dictatorship of capital," and some letter writers reject Germany for being, in their opinion, too capitalist or dictatorial, and certainly not democratic. Schroeder finds such statements alarming. "I am afraid that a majority of eastern Germans do not identify with the current sociopolitical system."
Many of the letter writers are either people who did not benefit from German reunification or those who prefer to live in the past. But they also include people like Thorsten Schön.
After 1989 Schön, a master craftsman from Stralsund, a city on the Baltic Sea, initially racked up one success after the next. Although he no longer owns the Porsche he bought after reunification, the lion skin rug he bought on a vacation trip to South Africa -- one of many overseas trips he has made in the past 20 years -- is still lying on his living room floor. "There's no doubt it: I've been fortunate," says the 51-year-old today. A major contract he scored during the period following reunification made it easier for Schön to start his own business. Today he has a clear view of the Strelasund sound from the window of his terraced house.
'People Lie and Cheat Everywhere Today'
Wall decorations from Bali decorate his living room, and a miniature version of the Statue of Liberty stands next to the DVD player. All the same, Schön sits on his sofa and rhapsodizes about the good old days in East Germany. "In the past, a campground was a place where people enjoyed their freedom together," he says. What he misses most today is "that feeling of companionship and solidarity." The economy of scarcity, complete with barter transactions, was "more like a hobby." Does he have a Stasi file? "I'm not interested in that," says Schön. "Besides, it would be too disappointing."
His verdict on the GDR is clear: "As far as I'm concerned, what we had in those days was less of a dictatorship than what we have today." He wants to see equal wages and equal pensions for residents of the former East Germany. And when Schön starts to complain about unified Germany, his voice contains an element of self-satisfaction. People lie and cheat everywhere today, he says, and today's injustices are simply perpetrated in a more cunning way than in the GDR, where starvation wages and slashed car tires were unheard of. Schön cannot offer any accounts of his own bad experiences in present-day Germany. "I'm better off today than I was before," he says, "but I am not more satisfied."
Schön's reasoning is less about cool logic than it is about settling scores. What makes him particularly dissatisfied is "the false picture of the East that the West is painting today." The GDR, he says, was "not an unjust state," but "my home, where my achievements were recognized." Schön doggedly repeats the story of how it took him years of hard work before starting his own business in 1989 -- before reunification, he is quick to add. "Those who worked hard were also able to do well for themselves in the GDR." This, he says, is one of the truths that are persistently denied on talk shows, when western Germans act "as if eastern Germans were all a little stupid and should still be falling to their knees today in gratitude for reunification." What exactly is there to celebrate, Schön asks himself?
"Rose-tinted memories are stronger than the statistics about people trying to escape and applications for exit visas, and even stronger than the files about killings at the Wall and unjust political sentences," says historian Wolle.
These are memories of people whose families were not persecuted and victimized in East Germany, of people like 30-year-old Birger, who says today: "If reunification hadn't happened, I would also have had a good life."
Life as a GDR Citizen
After completing his university degree, he says, he would undoubtedly have accepted a "management position in some business enterprise," perhaps not unlike his father, who was the chairman of a farmers' collective. "The GDR played no role in the life of a GDR citizen," Birger concludes. This view is shared by his friends, all of them college-educated children of the former East Germany who were born in 1978. "Reunification or not," the group of friends recently concluded, it really makes no difference to them. Without reunification, their travel destinations simply would have been Moscow and Prague, instead of London and Brussels. And the friend who is a government official in Mecklenburg today would probably have been a loyal party official in the GDR.
The young man expresses his views levelheadedly and with few words, although he looks slightly defiant at times, like when he says: "I know, what I'm telling you isn't all that interesting. The stories of victims are easier to tell."
Birger doesn't usually mention his origins. In Duisburg, where he works, hardly anyone knows that he is originally from East Germany. But on this afternoon, Birger is adamant about contradicting the "victors' writing of history." "In the public's perception, there are only victims and perpetrators. But the masses fall by the wayside."
This is someone who feels personally affected when Stasi terror and repression are mentioned. He is an academic who knows "that one cannot sanction the killings at the Berlin Wall." However, when it comes to the border guards' orders to shoot would-be escapees, he says: "If there is a big sign there, you shouldn't go there. It was completely negligent."
This brings up an old question once again: Did a real life exist in the midst of a sham? Downplaying the dictatorship is seen as the price people pay to preserve their self-respect. "People are defending their own lives," writes political scientist Schroeder, describing the tragedy of a divided country.

[Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.]

Afghanistan sacrifices may have been in vain, Toronto Star, October 31, 2009,Thomas Walkom

Where does the war in Afghanistan go? My sense is that it is finally beginning the long and drawn-out process toward an inglorious end.

For Canada, this would mark the finish of the longest – and the least considered – war that this country has ever fought.

The latest hint comes from the New York Times, which has been following the intricate debates over war strategy within U.S. President Barack Obama's administration.

This week, the Times reported that Obama now seems to favour a compromise between those in the military who want to send at least 40,000 more troops to a conflict that could last another decade and those, like Vice-president Joe Biden, who want to scale back the anti-Taliban ground war in order to concentrate on Al Qaeda terrorists.

The reported compromise would involve NATO forces – beefed-up by a few thousand new U.S. troops – withdrawing from much of the countryside to focus on a handful of Afghan cities and areas.

Although administration officials deny it, most of the country would effectively be ceded to the Taliban.

Not that this would make much practical difference to Afghans. According to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Obama's man in charge of the war, the Taliban already act as the real government in much of the south and east, levying taxes, operating courts and even appointing ombudsmen empowered to hear citizen complaints.

But a retreat to the cities would signal that America was readying itself for the last act in the tragedy that has been the Afghan war.

In the end, this may not be the exact strategy that emerges once Obama announces his revamped plans. But that it is even being considered speaks volumes.

It's clear that America is losing its stomach for this war. Public opinion polls point to this, as does the president's decision to revisit and revise war plans that he announced just seven months ago.

Still, don't expect a dramatic about-face. Obama is not likely to announce that he has begun a process of ignominious retreat. That would be too embarrassing.

Instead, the war is sure to drag on – as it did in Vietnam five years after then president Richard Nixon promised an end to the conflict.

More civilians and soldiers (including Canadians) are likely to die in the name of preserving what the politicians like to call Western credibility.

But, as in Vietnam, the stages of withdrawal have been put inexorably into motion. Already, NATO and the U.S. are talking of training Afghan troops to do the fighting (40 years ago, this was called Vietnamizing the war).

Surrendering large chunks of the countryside would be the final stage before the inevitable denouement.

Yet, realistically, pulling out is the only viable option. The only possible way for the U.S. and its allies to win this war would be to adopt McChrystal's strategy of occupying the country village by village – and staying for years.

Even that would involve an impossibly high risk of failure. McChrystal's counter-insurgency vision depends upon American and NATO troops exercising a degree of restraint and cultural sensitivity during their occupation that is unreasonable to expect from any foreign fighting force.

(It's worth noting here, as journalist Robert Fisk points out in his book, The Great War for Civilization, that the former Soviet Union attempted its own version of cultural sensitivity by using Muslim troops to invade Afghanistan in 1979. That quickly broke down once Afghan insurgents began to literally crucify and display captured Soviet soldiers).

More to the point, however, the McChrystal strategy is politically impossible. Americans are sick of this war. They will not accept the cost in soldiers and money that the escalation he wants would require.

For NATO countries like Canada, this has not been a glorious time. They joined the conflict in 2001 because, as military allies of a country that claimed to be under attack from Afghanistan (even though, in any real sense, this wasn't true), they had little choice.

Yet this ill-thought-out war quickly became an opportunity.

Bureaucrats at Brussels' NATO headquarters saw Afghanistan as a war that could make the old anti-Communist alliance, largely meaningless since the Soviet collapse, relevant again.

In Canada, then prime minister Paul Martin's Liberal government viewed robust Canadian participation in this war as a chance to mend fences with a U.S. administration still angered by Ottawa's earlier decision to avoid the Iraq conflict.

As well, Ottawa hoped that its decision to play a serious military role in Afghanistan's dangerous south would convince security-conscious Washington to keep the Canada-U.S. border wide open for trade.

For Canada's generals, the war was a chance to winkle more money and equipment from their tight-fisted political masters – as well as an opportunity to burnish the image of the military.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives, who inherited the war, saw it as a chance to further their overall strategy of shifting the federal government away from social policy toward more traditional 19th-century functions like defence.

And the media saw it as a chance to reinvent the simple but powerful narrative of heroes (us) and villains (them). Indeed, at times the glee with which the media embraced the war bordered on the unwholesome.

Yet in the end, Canadians – with the notable exception of those whose friends and family were soldiers – paid little attention to the war.

It was not an issue in the federal election of 2006. Nor, thanks in part to a conspiracy of silence on the part of the Liberals and Conservatives, was it an issue in the next election two years later.

Soldiers continued to die, usually in ones and twos. But, with the on-again-off-again exception of the New Democrats and a handful of media gadflies, there was no national debate as to what, if anything, these deaths accomplished.

The answer, it now seems, is very little. Canadian soldiers acted professionally; they did what they had contracted to do. They risked life and health and, in too many cases, lost the bet.

But as the long countdown to final withdrawal begins, we now know that their deaths were pointless. The terrorists that the West was supposed to capture have moved on to Pakistan. The xenophobic and misogynistic Taliban that ran most of Afghanistan in 2001, run most of it again.

The war we never should have waged is effectively lost. We have only to admit it.

Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday and Saturday.

I am from workers, fishers, swilers, a poem by Andrew Taylor

Mary Ann Ford Taylor













"I am from workers, fishers, swilers", a poem by Andrew Taylor

The assault of two ind. journalists in Tunisia and the arrest of a third in the wake of last week's elections must be punished, Amnesty, 30 Oct 09

Assaults on journalists in Tunisia must be punished
Slim Boukhdir was stopped in the street and forced into a car on the evening of 21 October, by five men in plain clothes


30 October 2009
The assault of two independent journalists in Tunisia and the arrest of a third in the wake of last week's elections must be punished, Amnesty International said on Friday.

"It appears that these three journalists were targeted because they have criticized the government and opposed the re-election, for a fifth term, of President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali," said Malcolm Smart, Amnesty International's director for the Middle East and North Africa Programme.

"This is an extremely worrying development, indicating that there is likely to be no let-up in the Tunisian government's repression of dissent."

Slim Boukhdhir, an independent journalist who has previously been jailed for writing articles critical of the government, was stopped in the street and forced into a car on the evening of 21 October, by five men in plain clothes, all believed to be police or security officials.

They forced him to close his eyes, beat and insulted him as they drove away, then stopped the car, threw him out and kicked and punched him until he lost consciousness.

Before he did so, one of the assailants brandished a knife and threatened to stab him.

He was stripped of his clothes and his mobile phone, identity documents, money and house keys were taken, apparently to give the impression that he was the victim of an ordinary criminal mugging, and he was dumped in Belvédère Park in north Tunis.

A passer-by helped him to get a taxi and a friend then took him to hospital where he learnt that he had sustained a broken nose and damage to his left eye, in addition to multiple bruising to his face and chest pain.

Two hours before his abduction and assault, Slim Boukhdhir had given an interview to the BBC in which he criticized the lack of press freedom in Tunisia.

On Thursday, another journalist and well-known government critic, Taoufik Ben Brik was arrested when he went to a police station in response to a summons he had received in connection with an alleged assault on a woman near his daughter's school on 22 October.

He appeared before an investigating judge in the absence of his lawyers and charged with "assault, breaching pubic morality and damage to property" according to an official statement. He is currently being detained in Mornaguia Prison and is due to stand trial on 19 November.

Before the election, he wrote several articles criticizing President Ben Ali's government.

Later on Thursday, Lotfi Hajji, local correspondent for the Al Jazeera satellite TV channel, was subjected to a sustained verbal assault when he arrived at Tunis Carthage Airport after returning on a flight from Qatar.

His unknown assailant, who is suspected of being a member of the security forces or someone acting on their behalf, shouted and insulted him in a highly intimidating manner, accusing him of opposing the government. In his reporting for Al Jazeera, Lotfi Hajji, had criticized aspects of the recent presidential and legislative elections.

Amnesty International said that the targeting of these journalists, all known critics of the Ben Ali's government, reflects a wider and long standing pattern in which critics of the government, and human rights activists, are routinely subjected to oppressive police surveillance, threats and intimidation by security officials or people in plain clothes believed to be acting on their behalf.

"It is high time that the Tunisian government put its house in order and lived up to its obligations under international human rights law," said Malcolm Smart.

"The government portrays itself internationally as one committed to human rights and good governance but this, sadly, is far from the truth. In practice, the government is intolerant of criticism and allows its security forces and strong arm men to assault and intimidate critics with impunity."