Thursday, August 28, 2003
Different Rules Different Game
During a conference on female circumcision a French theorist stood up and questioned the very validity of the conference. I can not remember exactly what he said, but he was a moral relativist and what he said went something like this: Who are we to tell them that female circumcision is wrong? There are no absolute criteria by which they can be judged.
Now, typically moral relativists buttress their arguments by employing concepts like "language games" and "incommensurability". However, I have not come across someone who has employed concepts such as those against moral relativism. This, though, is what I will attempt to do.
"Who are we tell them that a rook can not move diagonally?" What makes this sentence seem perfectly odd and "Who are we to tell them that female circumcision is wrong?" common place? Are we right to treat the two differently?
With regard to the first of these questions, there is, of course, nothing wrong of a conceiving of a game in which the “rook” can move differently. It is just that that this game would not be chess. The pieces might be the same and the board might be the same and the other pieces might move in identical manner. However, the game of chess is, by and large, no more then the sum of the rules that make up the game and moving a “rook” thus would violate those rules. (It should be pointed out that a chess piece, such as a rook, is a chess peace by virtue of the rules of the game not by virtue of what it is called or how it is shaped. For this and other reasons, a move is only a move in a game.) Different rules different game. (To be sure, it is possible to conceive of chess as being played in alternative manner. Imagine for example that in the Western world the pawn can be moved two spaces forward on its first move, like it is now, but that the Chinese forbid it. My playing partner and I could then ponder whether we wanted to play by Western rules or by Chinese. However, there would be no non question begging why of determining what was the right way to play chess, the Chinese way or the Western way. Minor differences do not always add up to a difference in kind.)
Now, there are societies in which female circumcision is consistent with “moral” teachings of those societies. That is not in dispute, nor is the notion that female circumcision violates “western” ideas of what is right. What I think should be disputed is the notion that we can not condemn the practice because other people “conceive” of “morality” differently. The problem for the moral relativist is not that, dammit, female circumcision is just wrong. His problem is it is not enough to say that Westerners engage in particular language games and that the rest of the world plays in some cases altogether different games. What he needs to do is akin to explaining how a game of chess is more than just the sum of the rules of the game. He needs to show that the game westerners play is the same game that other people play, only it is played according to entirely different rules. Only then will he be able to say in the case of female circumcision that for one group the move is legitimate and for the other group illegitimate.
The problem is, though, that failing to condemn female circumcision would send logical tremors that could threaten to break apart the series of interlocking language games we call morality. We can no more recognize an alternative account arising from a different set of moral precepts than we can recognize a game in which a “rook” moves differently as chess.
All told, if we conceive of morality as simply a bunch of interlocking language games, what we end up with is remarkably similar to the static universal morality that the moral relativists dismiss. The moral relativist is right about the very human origin of morality and chess. However, what makes, say, a game of chess a game of chess is simply that the game is played in accordance with the rules that make up the game. As such, there are limits to the extent we can change the rules of the game and have it still have it remain the same game.
(0) comments
During a conference on female circumcision a French theorist stood up and questioned the very validity of the conference. I can not remember exactly what he said, but he was a moral relativist and what he said went something like this: Who are we to tell them that female circumcision is wrong? There are no absolute criteria by which they can be judged.
Now, typically moral relativists buttress their arguments by employing concepts like "language games" and "incommensurability". However, I have not come across someone who has employed concepts such as those against moral relativism. This, though, is what I will attempt to do.
"Who are we tell them that a rook can not move diagonally?" What makes this sentence seem perfectly odd and "Who are we to tell them that female circumcision is wrong?" common place? Are we right to treat the two differently?
With regard to the first of these questions, there is, of course, nothing wrong of a conceiving of a game in which the “rook” can move differently. It is just that that this game would not be chess. The pieces might be the same and the board might be the same and the other pieces might move in identical manner. However, the game of chess is, by and large, no more then the sum of the rules that make up the game and moving a “rook” thus would violate those rules. (It should be pointed out that a chess piece, such as a rook, is a chess peace by virtue of the rules of the game not by virtue of what it is called or how it is shaped. For this and other reasons, a move is only a move in a game.) Different rules different game. (To be sure, it is possible to conceive of chess as being played in alternative manner. Imagine for example that in the Western world the pawn can be moved two spaces forward on its first move, like it is now, but that the Chinese forbid it. My playing partner and I could then ponder whether we wanted to play by Western rules or by Chinese. However, there would be no non question begging why of determining what was the right way to play chess, the Chinese way or the Western way. Minor differences do not always add up to a difference in kind.)
Now, there are societies in which female circumcision is consistent with “moral” teachings of those societies. That is not in dispute, nor is the notion that female circumcision violates “western” ideas of what is right. What I think should be disputed is the notion that we can not condemn the practice because other people “conceive” of “morality” differently. The problem for the moral relativist is not that, dammit, female circumcision is just wrong. His problem is it is not enough to say that Westerners engage in particular language games and that the rest of the world plays in some cases altogether different games. What he needs to do is akin to explaining how a game of chess is more than just the sum of the rules of the game. He needs to show that the game westerners play is the same game that other people play, only it is played according to entirely different rules. Only then will he be able to say in the case of female circumcision that for one group the move is legitimate and for the other group illegitimate.
The problem is, though, that failing to condemn female circumcision would send logical tremors that could threaten to break apart the series of interlocking language games we call morality. We can no more recognize an alternative account arising from a different set of moral precepts than we can recognize a game in which a “rook” moves differently as chess.
All told, if we conceive of morality as simply a bunch of interlocking language games, what we end up with is remarkably similar to the static universal morality that the moral relativists dismiss. The moral relativist is right about the very human origin of morality and chess. However, what makes, say, a game of chess a game of chess is simply that the game is played in accordance with the rules that make up the game. As such, there are limits to the extent we can change the rules of the game and have it still have it remain the same game.
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
Tuition Hikes
I am puzzled as to why I keep coming across the following rather stupid argument for hiking tuition fees in Canada. The argument goes something like this. There is a wide income gap between people with university degrees and those without degrees. Clearly, obtaining a university degree leads to better things and given that gap seems to be ever widening, having a degree will probably be even more valuable in the future than it is now. That being the case, it is only right that those that who benefit from obtaining a degree pay more towards what it costs to educate them.
Now, leaving aside the problems associated with drawing a causal relation from a correlation, problems associated with projecting data well into the future and whole host of other missing caveats, let us just assume that they have hit the nail on the head. Obtaining a university degree is well worth it.
Does it follow from this that the only way of having students give back to society is by having them pay higher tuition fees? Of course, it does not. As a population, those with degrees earn more than the rest of the population and so pay more taxes. Once more, the way the system is currently set up the more you benefit from your degree the more you pay.
I dare say, the tax route is a much more attractive option for other reasons too. People are not burdened with the expense of having to pay for their education at a time when they can least afford it (when they first step into the working world), but will instead be able to pay for it at a time that they can most afford it. What is more, this way the person that benefits from the having a degree is more likely to assume more of the financial burden. After all, in many cases a student’s family fits all or part of the cost associated with obtaining a degree.
The real beauty of this argument, though, is that it can be employed against those who object to tax option on the grounds that a degree holder pays the same tax rate as a non degree holder in the same tax bracket. Tongue firmly in cheek, simply agree that, alas, this is true. Despite the fact past graduates had their education supplemented by tax payers to a much larger degree then is the case now, university graduates pay no more than non degree holders in the same tax bracket. Having said so, ask the following question: If current students, who have yet to benefit from their education, should be made to pay for a larger chunk of what it costs to educate them, should those who are currently benefiting from having a degree also be made to pay retroactively for a greater chunk of what it cost to educate them?
(0) comments
I am puzzled as to why I keep coming across the following rather stupid argument for hiking tuition fees in Canada. The argument goes something like this. There is a wide income gap between people with university degrees and those without degrees. Clearly, obtaining a university degree leads to better things and given that gap seems to be ever widening, having a degree will probably be even more valuable in the future than it is now. That being the case, it is only right that those that who benefit from obtaining a degree pay more towards what it costs to educate them.
Now, leaving aside the problems associated with drawing a causal relation from a correlation, problems associated with projecting data well into the future and whole host of other missing caveats, let us just assume that they have hit the nail on the head. Obtaining a university degree is well worth it.
Does it follow from this that the only way of having students give back to society is by having them pay higher tuition fees? Of course, it does not. As a population, those with degrees earn more than the rest of the population and so pay more taxes. Once more, the way the system is currently set up the more you benefit from your degree the more you pay.
I dare say, the tax route is a much more attractive option for other reasons too. People are not burdened with the expense of having to pay for their education at a time when they can least afford it (when they first step into the working world), but will instead be able to pay for it at a time that they can most afford it. What is more, this way the person that benefits from the having a degree is more likely to assume more of the financial burden. After all, in many cases a student’s family fits all or part of the cost associated with obtaining a degree.
The real beauty of this argument, though, is that it can be employed against those who object to tax option on the grounds that a degree holder pays the same tax rate as a non degree holder in the same tax bracket. Tongue firmly in cheek, simply agree that, alas, this is true. Despite the fact past graduates had their education supplemented by tax payers to a much larger degree then is the case now, university graduates pay no more than non degree holders in the same tax bracket. Having said so, ask the following question: If current students, who have yet to benefit from their education, should be made to pay for a larger chunk of what it costs to educate them, should those who are currently benefiting from having a degree also be made to pay retroactively for a greater chunk of what it cost to educate them?
Monday, August 25, 2003
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Both Rice and Rumsfeld argued that the president was technically correct in what he said. The British had publicly said that “There is intelligence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa" and in uttering those 16 words the president was just echoed what they had said.
Why so few challenged Rumsfeld and Rice on this point is beyond me. The technical defense simply does not work and was in reality a ploy by the Whitehouse to obscure the fact that technically contained in Bush’s statement was the following truth claim: Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
Granted, although most people do not attribute something to an author by saying so and so learned that x, it happens from time to time. In discussing the results of a scientific study, for example, people have attributed something to the author by saying they learned that x. It certainly appears that this is just such a case. However, that it is neither here nor there. After all, minus any quotation or specific citation "technically" what Bush's statement amounts to is this: Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa and the British have come to know this.
(0) comments
Both Rice and Rumsfeld argued that the president was technically correct in what he said. The British had publicly said that “There is intelligence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa" and in uttering those 16 words the president was just echoed what they had said.
Why so few challenged Rumsfeld and Rice on this point is beyond me. The technical defense simply does not work and was in reality a ploy by the Whitehouse to obscure the fact that technically contained in Bush’s statement was the following truth claim: Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
Granted, although most people do not attribute something to an author by saying so and so learned that x, it happens from time to time. In discussing the results of a scientific study, for example, people have attributed something to the author by saying they learned that x. It certainly appears that this is just such a case. However, that it is neither here nor there. After all, minus any quotation or specific citation "technically" what Bush's statement amounts to is this: Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa and the British have come to know this.
Preventative War Red Herring
Contrary to what many people seem to believe, the Iraq War was not the first of many preventative wars that neo-cons in Washington are set to embark on. The events of the last few months have proven once and for all that depending on what side of the ideological fence one sits, the idea of Washington embarking on a series of preventive wars is either a wet dream, or paranoid delusion. Once more, the fact of the matter was that the Iraq war was not a preventative war at all. The 1991 cease-fire agreement “between the Iraq and Kuwait and the Member States cooperating with Kuwait” was still in affect and thus the US and Britain where technically at war with Iraq already.
The issues at hand were, in reality, as follows. One, if some of the member nations determined that Iraq had violated the terms of 1991 cease-fire, did those nations have the legal authority to enforce those resolutions by themselves, or was the agreement of the security council needed for such an action? Two, what lengths could a party go to reinforce the relevant resolutions. France et al argued that only the Security Council as a whole had the right to decide whether Iraq had met its obligations under the 1991 cease-fire and that only the Security Council as a whole had the right to act and to decide what was needed to enforce various UN resolutions. The US et al disagreed on both counts.
Disagreements of this kind predated the buildup to the current crisis. The biggest bone of contention was what to make of paragraphs 21 and 22 of UN resolution 687. Whereas, the French and Russians focused on paragraph 22 which seems to allow the lifting of sanctions once Iraq has rid itself of its WMD weapons and programs, the US and British focused on paragraph 21, which required the Iraqis to comply with “all relevant UN resolutions”, including, the US and Britain argued, UN resolution 688. The impetus for the creation of Iraqi Kurdistan and the two no fly zones, 688 condemned “the repression of the Iraqi civilian population in many parts of Iraq.” Where this relates back to the matter at hand is that all sides tacitly allowed Britain and the US to enforce an interpretation of the cease-fire that not everyone agreed was correct. This led support to the US and British contention that they were free to act unilaterally back in March.
Ironically, the Bush administration had been very reluctant to pass 688 in the first place, but was pressured into it by the weight of public opinion.
(0) comments
Contrary to what many people seem to believe, the Iraq War was not the first of many preventative wars that neo-cons in Washington are set to embark on. The events of the last few months have proven once and for all that depending on what side of the ideological fence one sits, the idea of Washington embarking on a series of preventive wars is either a wet dream, or paranoid delusion. Once more, the fact of the matter was that the Iraq war was not a preventative war at all. The 1991 cease-fire agreement “between the Iraq and Kuwait and the Member States cooperating with Kuwait” was still in affect and thus the US and Britain where technically at war with Iraq already.
The issues at hand were, in reality, as follows. One, if some of the member nations determined that Iraq had violated the terms of 1991 cease-fire, did those nations have the legal authority to enforce those resolutions by themselves, or was the agreement of the security council needed for such an action? Two, what lengths could a party go to reinforce the relevant resolutions. France et al argued that only the Security Council as a whole had the right to decide whether Iraq had met its obligations under the 1991 cease-fire and that only the Security Council as a whole had the right to act and to decide what was needed to enforce various UN resolutions. The US et al disagreed on both counts.
Disagreements of this kind predated the buildup to the current crisis. The biggest bone of contention was what to make of paragraphs 21 and 22 of UN resolution 687. Whereas, the French and Russians focused on paragraph 22 which seems to allow the lifting of sanctions once Iraq has rid itself of its WMD weapons and programs, the US and British focused on paragraph 21, which required the Iraqis to comply with “all relevant UN resolutions”, including, the US and Britain argued, UN resolution 688. The impetus for the creation of Iraqi Kurdistan and the two no fly zones, 688 condemned “the repression of the Iraqi civilian population in many parts of Iraq.” Where this relates back to the matter at hand is that all sides tacitly allowed Britain and the US to enforce an interpretation of the cease-fire that not everyone agreed was correct. This led support to the US and British contention that they were free to act unilaterally back in March.
Ironically, the Bush administration had been very reluctant to pass 688 in the first place, but was pressured into it by the weight of public opinion.
Sunday, August 24, 2003
Powell's Audio Tapes: Unanswered questions
It is looking more and more likely that Iraq had no stock piles of chemical or biological weapons. That being the case why have journalists not taken another look at the most convincing evidence of their supposed existence, viz., the three audio tapes played by Colin Powell on February 5th.
Let us recall what was said in those tapes. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/02/05/iraq/main539459.shtml
1) A day before the weapons inspectors were set to reenter Iraq, what we are led to believe is an Iraqi colonel asks an Iraqi general the following question “We have this modified vehicle. What do we say if one of them sees it?" The general responds by saying “You didn't get a modified. You don't have one of those, do you?" Yes, “I have one of those.” “From where” asks the general. “From the workshop, from the al-Kindi company” responds the colonel. The general then decides that he will “come to see you in the morning. I'm worried. You all have something left." Seemingly protesting the generals decision the colonel proclaims that “We evacuated everything. We don't have anything left."
2) A supposed Iraqi confirms for another that there is no “forbidden ammo” at an ammo dump.
3) In by far the most intriguing of the three tapes, one supposed Republican Guard commander tells another sometime in mid January to “write this down … remove the expression ‘nerve agent’ wherever it comes up in the wireless instructions.”
If one is authentic, then it is telling. The problem is it does not tell us enough. We do not know just what is evacuated and we are not provided with enough background material about the suspected site to speculate as to what it might be. Once more, because the tape was made on November 26th, it does not necessarily call in question the Iraqi weapons declaration for the simple reason that it had not been released yet. What the message does tell us is that in addition to the evacuated material there is a modified vehicle and this modified vehicle from the Al-Kindi (a missile company) is problematic; it is for this reason that the colonel who knows, after all, what the modified vehicle is asks his superior for advice about how to lie to the inspectors if asked about the vehicle.
Two is a little less damming. As Powell said in introducing the tape, just days before the UN found 12 empty chemical war heads. The problem for Powell is that it is not clear is whether these warheads were remnants of past chemical weapons programs or whether they were a sign of an active chemical weapons program. Powell suggests that latter interpretation is correct and that the audio tape is further proof that what the UN found on the January 16th was just the tip of the ice berg. “Let me remind you that, of the 122 millimeter chemical warheads, that the U.N. inspectors found recently, this discovery could very well be, as has been noted, the tip of the submerged iceberg.”
That said, even if the former interpretation is correct the tape does prove something, viz., that the Iraqis’ weapons declaration could hardly be called a definite account of what weapons Iraq actually had and that far from being willing to admit that something was missing from the declaration, the Iraqis preferred to cover it up. “We sent you a message yesterday to clean out all of the areas, the scrap areas, the abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there. … After you have carried out what is contained in this message, destroy the message because I don't want anyone to see this message."
Three, it is first important to note that the Iraqis were not talking about nerve agents, but rather about the expression “nerve agents.” However as was pointed out by the UN and by various antiwar forces, what nerve agents the Iraqis had admitted to having back in 1991 would have long since degraded. That being the case, even if one is generous and conceives of them talking about past instructions and not of future ones, why was the expression “nerve agents” still appearing in any wireless instruction?
(0) comments
It is looking more and more likely that Iraq had no stock piles of chemical or biological weapons. That being the case why have journalists not taken another look at the most convincing evidence of their supposed existence, viz., the three audio tapes played by Colin Powell on February 5th.
Let us recall what was said in those tapes. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/02/05/iraq/main539459.shtml
1) A day before the weapons inspectors were set to reenter Iraq, what we are led to believe is an Iraqi colonel asks an Iraqi general the following question “We have this modified vehicle. What do we say if one of them sees it?" The general responds by saying “You didn't get a modified. You don't have one of those, do you?" Yes, “I have one of those.” “From where” asks the general. “From the workshop, from the al-Kindi company” responds the colonel. The general then decides that he will “come to see you in the morning. I'm worried. You all have something left." Seemingly protesting the generals decision the colonel proclaims that “We evacuated everything. We don't have anything left."
2) A supposed Iraqi confirms for another that there is no “forbidden ammo” at an ammo dump.
3) In by far the most intriguing of the three tapes, one supposed Republican Guard commander tells another sometime in mid January to “write this down … remove the expression ‘nerve agent’ wherever it comes up in the wireless instructions.”
If one is authentic, then it is telling. The problem is it does not tell us enough. We do not know just what is evacuated and we are not provided with enough background material about the suspected site to speculate as to what it might be. Once more, because the tape was made on November 26th, it does not necessarily call in question the Iraqi weapons declaration for the simple reason that it had not been released yet. What the message does tell us is that in addition to the evacuated material there is a modified vehicle and this modified vehicle from the Al-Kindi (a missile company) is problematic; it is for this reason that the colonel who knows, after all, what the modified vehicle is asks his superior for advice about how to lie to the inspectors if asked about the vehicle.
Two is a little less damming. As Powell said in introducing the tape, just days before the UN found 12 empty chemical war heads. The problem for Powell is that it is not clear is whether these warheads were remnants of past chemical weapons programs or whether they were a sign of an active chemical weapons program. Powell suggests that latter interpretation is correct and that the audio tape is further proof that what the UN found on the January 16th was just the tip of the ice berg. “Let me remind you that, of the 122 millimeter chemical warheads, that the U.N. inspectors found recently, this discovery could very well be, as has been noted, the tip of the submerged iceberg.”
That said, even if the former interpretation is correct the tape does prove something, viz., that the Iraqis’ weapons declaration could hardly be called a definite account of what weapons Iraq actually had and that far from being willing to admit that something was missing from the declaration, the Iraqis preferred to cover it up. “We sent you a message yesterday to clean out all of the areas, the scrap areas, the abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there. … After you have carried out what is contained in this message, destroy the message because I don't want anyone to see this message."
Three, it is first important to note that the Iraqis were not talking about nerve agents, but rather about the expression “nerve agents.” However as was pointed out by the UN and by various antiwar forces, what nerve agents the Iraqis had admitted to having back in 1991 would have long since degraded. That being the case, even if one is generous and conceives of them talking about past instructions and not of future ones, why was the expression “nerve agents” still appearing in any wireless instruction?
Saturday, August 23, 2003
Some Canadian Politicians are Open to Legalizing Marijuana, but George Bush et al stand in the way
Alas, there is no chance that the Canadian government will legalize Marijuana in the near future. Given the current situation in the States, any move to legalize the stuff would cause us no end of grief. That said, this does not mean that all politicians openly dismiss the idea. Indeed, in September of last year the Liberal dominated senate, a good chunk of whom where appointed by the same ruling Liberal government, said in unequivocal terms that there was no good reason for keeping pot illegal. Marijuana, they said, is not illegal because it is dangerous; it is dangerous (risks associated with procuring it) because it is illegal. That is to say, it is no more dangerous than alcohol and given that it is not physically addictive, perhaps less so and there is no truth the notion that it is gateway drug or that it is directly linked to an increased likelihood of criminal behavior in anyway. The issue also came up on during the NDP’s leadership race (the NDP is Canada’s most left of center main stream party). That said, when the candidates were asked about the issue during a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) nationally televised leadership debate, all six candidates, without mincing their words or giving an extended answer, said yes marijuana should be legalized and next question was promptly asked.
Senate report Volume 1: http://www.parl.gc.ca/37/1/parlbus/commbus/senate/com-e/ille-e/rep-e/repfinalvol1-e.htm
Senate report Volume 2: http://www.parl.gc.ca/37/1/parlbus/commbus/senate/Com-e/ille-e/rep-e/repfinalvol2part2-e.htm
Senate report Volume 3: http://www.parl.gc.ca/37/1/parlbus/commbus/senate/Com-e/ille-e/rep-e/repfinalvol3-e.htm
(0) comments
Alas, there is no chance that the Canadian government will legalize Marijuana in the near future. Given the current situation in the States, any move to legalize the stuff would cause us no end of grief. That said, this does not mean that all politicians openly dismiss the idea. Indeed, in September of last year the Liberal dominated senate, a good chunk of whom where appointed by the same ruling Liberal government, said in unequivocal terms that there was no good reason for keeping pot illegal. Marijuana, they said, is not illegal because it is dangerous; it is dangerous (risks associated with procuring it) because it is illegal. That is to say, it is no more dangerous than alcohol and given that it is not physically addictive, perhaps less so and there is no truth the notion that it is gateway drug or that it is directly linked to an increased likelihood of criminal behavior in anyway. The issue also came up on during the NDP’s leadership race (the NDP is Canada’s most left of center main stream party). That said, when the candidates were asked about the issue during a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) nationally televised leadership debate, all six candidates, without mincing their words or giving an extended answer, said yes marijuana should be legalized and next question was promptly asked.
Senate report Volume 1: http://www.parl.gc.ca/37/1/parlbus/commbus/senate/com-e/ille-e/rep-e/repfinalvol1-e.htm
Senate report Volume 2: http://www.parl.gc.ca/37/1/parlbus/commbus/senate/Com-e/ille-e/rep-e/repfinalvol2part2-e.htm
Senate report Volume 3: http://www.parl.gc.ca/37/1/parlbus/commbus/senate/Com-e/ille-e/rep-e/repfinalvol3-e.htm
Friday, August 22, 2003
Is Canada Cool?
All of a sudden Canada is hip. All we needed to do was to decriminalize pot and recognize gay marriages and, poof, US journalists started putting stuff to pen that what shame any good PR person. Here some of those complementary articles and some other articles talking about the creation of the our northern Nirvana.
From the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?030707ta_talk_hertzberg
From the NY Times Magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/magazine/06QUESTIONS.html?ex=1061697600&en=5c469e9929ae55fa&ei=5070
From the Nation: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030721&s=klein
From the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A54502-2003Jun30¬Found=true
From the Christian Science Monitor: http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0627/p02s01-woam.html
From the San Jose Mercury News: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v03/n1051/a10.html?1057
From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: http://www.post-gazette.com/columnists/20030730sam0730p1.asp
From the Seatle Times: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2001262091_ocanada27m.html
From CanWest News Service: http://cpod.ubc.ca/analysis/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewItem&itemID=421
From Macleans: http://www.macleans.ca/switchboard/essay/article.jsp?
content=20031013_67003_67003
In the September 27 2003 edition the Economist also prounced that Canada was cool, but in order to access that article you have to pay for it.
From the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/02/international/americas/02CANA.html?th
From the International Herald Tribune: http://www.iht.com/articles/91154.html
From the International Herald Tribune: http://www.iht.com/articles/119962.html
(0) comments
All of a sudden Canada is hip. All we needed to do was to decriminalize pot and recognize gay marriages and, poof, US journalists started putting stuff to pen that what shame any good PR person. Here some of those complementary articles and some other articles talking about the creation of the our northern Nirvana.
From the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?030707ta_talk_hertzberg
From the NY Times Magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/magazine/06QUESTIONS.html?ex=1061697600&en=5c469e9929ae55fa&ei=5070
From the Nation: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030721&s=klein
From the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A54502-2003Jun30¬Found=true
From the Christian Science Monitor: http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0627/p02s01-woam.html
From the San Jose Mercury News: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v03/n1051/a10.html?1057
From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: http://www.post-gazette.com/columnists/20030730sam0730p1.asp
From the Seatle Times: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2001262091_ocanada27m.html
From CanWest News Service: http://cpod.ubc.ca/analysis/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewItem&itemID=421
From Macleans: http://www.macleans.ca/switchboard/essay/article.jsp?
content=20031013_67003_67003
In the September 27 2003 edition the Economist also prounced that Canada was cool, but in order to access that article you have to pay for it.
From the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/02/international/americas/02CANA.html?th
From the International Herald Tribune: http://www.iht.com/articles/91154.html
From the International Herald Tribune: http://www.iht.com/articles/119962.html
Thursday, August 21, 2003
The Fruits of Chomsky’s Mind Need First to be Checked for Worms and then Washed
I can not help but think that the muddled thinking of many young activists can be traced back to Chomsky. Although Chomsky has done some decent work and there is certainly a place for him, he is as dogmatic as they come and this dogmatism leads him to say and do some stupid things. The most notorious example that comes to mind is the support he gave to holocaust denier Robert Faurisson.
Chomsky, in classic civil libertarian fashion, threw his support behind Faurisson when a number of people tried to prevent his work from being disseminated. The problem was Chomsky had never bothered to read a thing Faurisson had put to pen and so was embarrassed when the debate turned to what is hate literature and whether Faurisson’s work could be described as such. The upshot of all this was Chomsky admitted that he should have familiarized himself with Faurisson’s writings before publicly saying that he should have the right to disseminate his work.
This though is, in the greater scheme of things, a forgivable mistake and besides he willingly ate crow for it. There are other more dubious causes for which he has been questioned about in the past (e.g. his selective reading of Pol Pot’s litany of crimes). However, it is only in recent times that people on the both the Left and Right have really started to openly question the accuracy of his moral compass. For example, he was, rightly, taken to task by Hitchens for saying that the bombing of the pharmaceutical factor in Sudan was on the same level as the 911 attack. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20011015&s=hitchens20011004
What is just is bad is that some of predications and analysis of late have been so horribly wrong. Consider, for example, the following monumental gaffe about what he thought might happen in Afghanistan. “The US has already demanded that Pakistan terminate the food and other supplies that are keeping at least some of the starving and suffering people of Afghanistan alive. If that demand is implemented, unknown numbers of people who have not the remotest connection to terrorism will die, possibly millions. Let me repeat: the US has demanded that Pakistan kill possibly millions of people who are themselves victims of the Taliban. This has nothing to do with revenge. It is at a far lower moral level even than that. The significance is heightened by the fact that this is mentioned in passing, with no comment, and probably will hardly be noticed. We can learn a great deal about the moral level of the reigning intellectual culture of the West by observing the reaction to this demand.”
Then there was his willingness to defend France, Germany and his old whipping boy Turkey from those who would question their motives for opposing the US lead war in Iraq. “There is now a whole literature trying to explain why France, Germany, the so-called "old Europe", and Turkey and others are trying to undermine the United States. It is inconceivable to the pundits that they are doing so because they take democracy seriously and they think that when the overwhelming majority of a population has an opinion, a government ought to follow it.”
To say the least, Chomsky is being a tad hypocritical here. Could anyone imagine Chomsky ever saying that the American government is doing X because it takes democracy seriously? Did he forget that the majority of the Americans supported the war and by the same logic the American government did the right thing? At any rate, what he said was flat wrong. France did not snuggle up to the thugs in Zimbabwe because they wanted to ensure the will of the French people prevailed and the war was stopped. (Three members of the UN Security Council are small African nations. Both France and the US both tried to curry favor with them. One of the things France did was invite, as Guinea, Cameron and Angola wanted, Zimbabwean leader Mugabe to EU conference dealing with EU sanctions against Zimbabwe for its poor human rights record. One of the impositions placed on the Zimbabwean leader had been a European wide travel ban. Now, the travel ban had ended the day before the conference. So, by inviting Mugabe, France technically played by the rules. However, the other council members viewed the invitation as a direct challenge to the authority of the council and the decision to invite Mugabe was highly unpopular with the French people.)
Finally there is the following.
“This should be seen as a trial run. Iraq is seen as an extremely easy and totally defenceless target. It is assumed, probably correctly, that the society will collapse, that the soldiers will go in and that the U.S. will be in control, and will establish the regime of its choice and military bases. They will then go on to the harder cases that will follow. The next case could be the Andean region, it could be Iran, it could be others.
The trial run is to try and establish what the U.S. calls a "new norm" in international relations. The new norm is "preventive war" (notice that new norms are established only by the United States). So, for example, when India invaded East Pakistan to terminate horrendous massacres, it did not establish a new norm of humanitarian intervention, because India is the wrong country, and besides, the U.S. was strenuously opposed to that action.
This is not pre-emptive war; there is a crucial difference. Pre-emptive war has a meaning, it means that, for example, if planes are flying across the Atlantic to bomb the United States, the United States is permitted to shoot them down even before they bomb and may be permitted to attack the air bases from which they came. Pre-emptive war is a response to ongoing or imminent attack.
The doctrine of preventive war is totally different; it holds that the United States - alone, since nobody else has this right - has the right to attack any country that it claims to be a potential challenge to it. So if the United States claims, on whatever grounds, that someone may sometime threaten it, then it can attack them.
The doctrine of preventive war was announced explicitly in the National Strategy Report last September. It sent shudders around the world, including through the U.S. establishment, where, I might say, opposition to the war is unusually high. The National Strategy Report said, in effect, that the U.S. will rule the world by force, which is the dimension - the only dimension - in which it is supreme. Furthermore, it will do so for the indefinite future, because if any potential challenge arises to U.S. domination, the U.S. will destroy it before it becomes a challenge.
This is the first exercise of that doctrine. If it succeeds on these terms, as it presumably will, because the target is so defenceless, then international lawyers and Western intellectuals and others will begin to talk about a new norm in international affairs. It is important to establish such a norm if you expect to rule the world by force for the foreseeable future.”
Where should I start? Well, first of all, it was a lot more strategically important to oust Saddam than take out the leadership in either Syria or Iran or Libya or the Sudan. They are not of a piece. As Pollack has pointed out, Saddam loved to upset the apple cart, frequently miscalculated, was extremely risk tolerant, and the information his yes man provided him meant he lived in a kind of Never Never Land. No one and mean no one wanted Saddam to get his hands on a nuke.
Two, Chomsky has this annoying habit of using international law to buttress his arguments and ignoring it when it harms them. This is particularly true in this case. Technically speaking the US did not launch a unilateral War back in March. They were already at with war with Iraq and so technically was the UN. Talk of the US doing what Japan did back in 1941 is thus a misnomer.
Three, the Iraq situation was different from, say, Iran. Attacking Iraq did not have the backing of the world public opinion, but at least it had certain degree of legitimacy. UN resolution 1441 passed and it is possible to argue that the US was doing what the UN itself lacked the political will to do. Plus, let us not forget that everyone believed that Saddam possessed WMD. Indeed, German intelligence believed that he would have a bomb in 2 to 3 years time.
Four, far from proving that America will strike preemptively whenever it sees fit, the Iraq case has revealed that the doctrine of preemption is a dead letter and that the likelihood of any adventures in the near future is close to zero. The doctrine of preemption now scares no one. This administration lacks the economic, political, and diplomatic wherewithal to carry the battle to, say, Syria. What is more, although the supremacy of the American military goes without saying, every available soldier the US has in Iraq.
Now, the failure to find any WMD was not foreseeable and a result neither was the amount of political and diplomatic fallout. However the simple fact of the matter is that many inside and outside government foresaw the costs of the Iraq campaign and how this would tie the administration’s hands (see, for example, James Fallows 51st state in the Atlantic Monthly). What is more, the General staff thought Rumsfeld’s suggestion that only 75,000 troops would be needed to take Iraq and that this number could be brought down in a matter of months to 40,000 was completely absurd. They were quite clear that at least 200,000 would be needed to secure the peace and that a least a good chunk of those would be needed for the foreseeable future. As the US only had about 200,000 non-committed troops with which to work with, without re-imposing the draft, something that just is not going to happen, just where did Chomsky think the US was going to get the troop strength to occupy, say, Iran which has more than 2 times as many people as Iraq and territorially is much larger? The only one it would seem that bought into the rosy post war scenario being painted by the Pentagon was Chomsky.
The ironic thing about the doctrine of preemption and all the surrounding intellectual infrastructure is that far from laying down the scary precedent, in terms of foreign policy doctrine there is a large gap between what American says it will do and what it can do.
(0) comments
I can not help but think that the muddled thinking of many young activists can be traced back to Chomsky. Although Chomsky has done some decent work and there is certainly a place for him, he is as dogmatic as they come and this dogmatism leads him to say and do some stupid things. The most notorious example that comes to mind is the support he gave to holocaust denier Robert Faurisson.
Chomsky, in classic civil libertarian fashion, threw his support behind Faurisson when a number of people tried to prevent his work from being disseminated. The problem was Chomsky had never bothered to read a thing Faurisson had put to pen and so was embarrassed when the debate turned to what is hate literature and whether Faurisson’s work could be described as such. The upshot of all this was Chomsky admitted that he should have familiarized himself with Faurisson’s writings before publicly saying that he should have the right to disseminate his work.
This though is, in the greater scheme of things, a forgivable mistake and besides he willingly ate crow for it. There are other more dubious causes for which he has been questioned about in the past (e.g. his selective reading of Pol Pot’s litany of crimes). However, it is only in recent times that people on the both the Left and Right have really started to openly question the accuracy of his moral compass. For example, he was, rightly, taken to task by Hitchens for saying that the bombing of the pharmaceutical factor in Sudan was on the same level as the 911 attack. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20011015&s=hitchens20011004
What is just is bad is that some of predications and analysis of late have been so horribly wrong. Consider, for example, the following monumental gaffe about what he thought might happen in Afghanistan. “The US has already demanded that Pakistan terminate the food and other supplies that are keeping at least some of the starving and suffering people of Afghanistan alive. If that demand is implemented, unknown numbers of people who have not the remotest connection to terrorism will die, possibly millions. Let me repeat: the US has demanded that Pakistan kill possibly millions of people who are themselves victims of the Taliban. This has nothing to do with revenge. It is at a far lower moral level even than that. The significance is heightened by the fact that this is mentioned in passing, with no comment, and probably will hardly be noticed. We can learn a great deal about the moral level of the reigning intellectual culture of the West by observing the reaction to this demand.”
Then there was his willingness to defend France, Germany and his old whipping boy Turkey from those who would question their motives for opposing the US lead war in Iraq. “There is now a whole literature trying to explain why France, Germany, the so-called "old Europe", and Turkey and others are trying to undermine the United States. It is inconceivable to the pundits that they are doing so because they take democracy seriously and they think that when the overwhelming majority of a population has an opinion, a government ought to follow it.”
To say the least, Chomsky is being a tad hypocritical here. Could anyone imagine Chomsky ever saying that the American government is doing X because it takes democracy seriously? Did he forget that the majority of the Americans supported the war and by the same logic the American government did the right thing? At any rate, what he said was flat wrong. France did not snuggle up to the thugs in Zimbabwe because they wanted to ensure the will of the French people prevailed and the war was stopped. (Three members of the UN Security Council are small African nations. Both France and the US both tried to curry favor with them. One of the things France did was invite, as Guinea, Cameron and Angola wanted, Zimbabwean leader Mugabe to EU conference dealing with EU sanctions against Zimbabwe for its poor human rights record. One of the impositions placed on the Zimbabwean leader had been a European wide travel ban. Now, the travel ban had ended the day before the conference. So, by inviting Mugabe, France technically played by the rules. However, the other council members viewed the invitation as a direct challenge to the authority of the council and the decision to invite Mugabe was highly unpopular with the French people.)
Finally there is the following.
“This should be seen as a trial run. Iraq is seen as an extremely easy and totally defenceless target. It is assumed, probably correctly, that the society will collapse, that the soldiers will go in and that the U.S. will be in control, and will establish the regime of its choice and military bases. They will then go on to the harder cases that will follow. The next case could be the Andean region, it could be Iran, it could be others.
The trial run is to try and establish what the U.S. calls a "new norm" in international relations. The new norm is "preventive war" (notice that new norms are established only by the United States). So, for example, when India invaded East Pakistan to terminate horrendous massacres, it did not establish a new norm of humanitarian intervention, because India is the wrong country, and besides, the U.S. was strenuously opposed to that action.
This is not pre-emptive war; there is a crucial difference. Pre-emptive war has a meaning, it means that, for example, if planes are flying across the Atlantic to bomb the United States, the United States is permitted to shoot them down even before they bomb and may be permitted to attack the air bases from which they came. Pre-emptive war is a response to ongoing or imminent attack.
The doctrine of preventive war is totally different; it holds that the United States - alone, since nobody else has this right - has the right to attack any country that it claims to be a potential challenge to it. So if the United States claims, on whatever grounds, that someone may sometime threaten it, then it can attack them.
The doctrine of preventive war was announced explicitly in the National Strategy Report last September. It sent shudders around the world, including through the U.S. establishment, where, I might say, opposition to the war is unusually high. The National Strategy Report said, in effect, that the U.S. will rule the world by force, which is the dimension - the only dimension - in which it is supreme. Furthermore, it will do so for the indefinite future, because if any potential challenge arises to U.S. domination, the U.S. will destroy it before it becomes a challenge.
This is the first exercise of that doctrine. If it succeeds on these terms, as it presumably will, because the target is so defenceless, then international lawyers and Western intellectuals and others will begin to talk about a new norm in international affairs. It is important to establish such a norm if you expect to rule the world by force for the foreseeable future.”
Where should I start? Well, first of all, it was a lot more strategically important to oust Saddam than take out the leadership in either Syria or Iran or Libya or the Sudan. They are not of a piece. As Pollack has pointed out, Saddam loved to upset the apple cart, frequently miscalculated, was extremely risk tolerant, and the information his yes man provided him meant he lived in a kind of Never Never Land. No one and mean no one wanted Saddam to get his hands on a nuke.
Two, Chomsky has this annoying habit of using international law to buttress his arguments and ignoring it when it harms them. This is particularly true in this case. Technically speaking the US did not launch a unilateral War back in March. They were already at with war with Iraq and so technically was the UN. Talk of the US doing what Japan did back in 1941 is thus a misnomer.
Three, the Iraq situation was different from, say, Iran. Attacking Iraq did not have the backing of the world public opinion, but at least it had certain degree of legitimacy. UN resolution 1441 passed and it is possible to argue that the US was doing what the UN itself lacked the political will to do. Plus, let us not forget that everyone believed that Saddam possessed WMD. Indeed, German intelligence believed that he would have a bomb in 2 to 3 years time.
Four, far from proving that America will strike preemptively whenever it sees fit, the Iraq case has revealed that the doctrine of preemption is a dead letter and that the likelihood of any adventures in the near future is close to zero. The doctrine of preemption now scares no one. This administration lacks the economic, political, and diplomatic wherewithal to carry the battle to, say, Syria. What is more, although the supremacy of the American military goes without saying, every available soldier the US has in Iraq.
Now, the failure to find any WMD was not foreseeable and a result neither was the amount of political and diplomatic fallout. However the simple fact of the matter is that many inside and outside government foresaw the costs of the Iraq campaign and how this would tie the administration’s hands (see, for example, James Fallows 51st state in the Atlantic Monthly). What is more, the General staff thought Rumsfeld’s suggestion that only 75,000 troops would be needed to take Iraq and that this number could be brought down in a matter of months to 40,000 was completely absurd. They were quite clear that at least 200,000 would be needed to secure the peace and that a least a good chunk of those would be needed for the foreseeable future. As the US only had about 200,000 non-committed troops with which to work with, without re-imposing the draft, something that just is not going to happen, just where did Chomsky think the US was going to get the troop strength to occupy, say, Iran which has more than 2 times as many people as Iraq and territorially is much larger? The only one it would seem that bought into the rosy post war scenario being painted by the Pentagon was Chomsky.
The ironic thing about the doctrine of preemption and all the surrounding intellectual infrastructure is that far from laying down the scary precedent, in terms of foreign policy doctrine there is a large gap between what American says it will do and what it can do.
Letters to the Editor: What You Send Them is Not Always What They Print
A word to the wise, do not send letters to the editor. They just might print “your” letter. I responded to the following article a number of months back.
“If Saddam Hussein had governed Iraq to the end of his natural life, it would hardly have been within his power to endanger and make miserable the lives of the great majority of the people of Iraq as much as the U.S. government did in the past 12 years, and especially in the past two months. Yet we are supposed to look upon the agents of that disruption and destruction as heroes, whose victimization of a nation and maiming of innocent children is supposed to be all to the good because in another 10 years those children will not be tortured by Hussein's secret police--they will be tortured by the secret police of the regime the U.S. is putting in place.
The Shiite majority in Iraq wants an Islamic republic, but the U.S. government will, instead, ensure that essential control devolves into the hands of the more secular-oriented Sunnis, who worked so well with the Americans when Hussein was a U.S. ally. The Kurds have to be compensated for not getting a Kurdistan, and disarming them is a problem the U.S. would rather not deal with, so the northern district of the U.S. occupation will become an area of rule by the gun, with the Kurds getting some of their own back on Sunnis and Shiites together. The U.S. does not want Iraq to achieve self-determination as a nation lest its peoples decide to govern themselves in a way that does not match U.S. interests.
Thus in the next year or so, when most aid to Iraq will have to be paid for in oil, there will be some aid that won't appear on the books. That will be the equipment, instructors, and funding for a U.S. style police agency with the responsibility of making sure democracy does not interfere with commercial exploitation of Iraq's resources. Meanwhile, the returning expatriates whom the U.S. has decreed will control the government will be out for their own payback. This combination of U.S. fear of Islamic democracy plus government by revenge ensures repression will be necessary. That repression will be noticed from Morocco to Indonesia, if not in the world outside the Islamic community. And that repression will involve the worst kind of terrorism: state terrorism.
Last week we noted that in 1987 the United Nations passed a resolution requiring member nations to fight terrorism in all its forms, and all nations voted for it except Honduras, which abstained, and Israel and the U.S., who voted against. The problem for Honduras at the time was that it was being used as a staging area for U.S. backed terrorist attacks on Nicaragua, a nation that had made the mistake of opting for a popular democracy rather than conforming to policies favouring international corporations. During those days when the U.S. was publicly less concerned with terrorism, the International Court of Justice at the Hague passed a rare judgment, declaring that the U.S. committed international terrorism when it mined the harbour in Managua and ships from several countries were damaged or sunk.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, during Gulf War III, said he does not count civilian casualties. This is an attitude known only to terrorists. Rumsfeld is at least being consistent with U.S. government attitudes over the past 40 years. While the name of every U.S. citizen who died in Vietnam is carved in stone in that nation's capital, no one in the U.S. can estimate within a million deaths the number of Vietnamese who should have their names carved in stone. Three million? Five million? The U.S. does not count civilian casualties.
The Vietnam war shares with Gulf War I and Italy's mid- to late-1930s Abyssinian (Ethiopian) conflict the distinction of being the only wars since the First World War in which chemical weapons of mass destruction were employed. In Vietnam, the U.S. sprayed chemical agents that defoliated forests, destroyed the soil, and have caused birth defects to this day; in Ethiopia, Benito Mussolini's forces dropped mustard gas from the air, in one instance killing thousands in an attack on a single village; and in the First Gulf War, Iran and Iraq spewed gases at each other, with the Iraqis getting the edge because the U.S. had supplied them with the latest and best WMDs. Ever since Winston Churchill gritted his teeth during the Second World War and said Britain would not use chemical WMDs unless the home islands were invaded, the U.S. has been unique among so-called Great Powers in its willingness to develop and deploy chemical agents, the only other example being the Germans' use of gas in concentration camps during the war Churchill was fighting.
What about Israel, the other country that in 1987 refused to agree with more than 100 nations that terrorism should be stopped? No matter what the initial intention or policy, Israel has become a militarist state continually carrying out terrorist attacks, largely at the behest of, and heavily subsidized by, the U.S. The question is whether or not there is a real difference, other than one of degree, between crashing aircraft into office buildings in New York or blasting high-explosive tank shells (made in the U.S.) into houses full of women and children in the Gaza Strip, or perhaps running a bulldozer over an innocent protestor or callously gunning down a few others.
Obviously, terrorism is not the real target. The real goal is to brush aside the United Nations, make the U.S. government the ruler of the world, a dominance it can confirm if no one objects to its attitude that problems can be solved by intimidation, repression, and slaughter. Outside of Britain and Spain, most of the world seems to agree that if the U.S. government is going to run the planet, it had better show a lot more tolerance, maturity, and ability to get along with other people than it is displaying now. Academic Noam Chomsky said after the attack on the World Trade Center that if the U.S. wanted less terrorism, the U.S. should stop supporting and subsidizing it. But that does not seem to be on the agenda.
As George W. Bush said after September 11, 2001, you are either with him or you're against him. We fervently hope the 21st century will not begin with a Third World War of the genuinely democratic people of the world against a U.S. government bent on establishing a corporate tyranny.”
This is what I wrote.
“While reading McDonald and Majeed’s piece I was overcome with the same feeling that I get whenever I read such pieces, viz., that I am lost in wonderland. It is not that everything the New Left says about the US simply dead wrong. The US has indeed propped up a number of bad regimes over the past 5 decades and they have even supported some groups that by anyone’s definition are terrorist organizations. The problem is that in their zeal to denounce the US people like McDonald and Majeed see no harm in taking all kinds of liberties with the truth and with language. We are told, for example, that given the dynamics of the situation in Iraq today, some kind of repressive state will emerge and that this state will be equally brutal to Saddam’s. This is not only wild speculation, it also trivializes and downplays just how brutal Saddam’s regime truly was. Be rest assured, there are a whole host of governments that torture their citizens and there are no guarantee that Iraq will not be one of them in the future, but only a very few kill up to 2,000 prisoners on any given Wednesday in the country’s largest prison.
We are also told that Israel regularly carries out “terrorist attacks” and that these attacks differ only in scale from the attacks Al Qaeda carried out on 911. Its comments like this that leave me wondering: Do McDonald and Majeed work for Mossad? Anyway, I am not sure if they are saying that Israel intentionally targets non-combatants, or that they are showing wanton disregard for them. The former is false. The odd Israeli soldier, or soldiers might take pot shots at people, but there has never been any evidence to suggest that non-combatants are being systematically targeted. The latter is debatable and even if true does not mean that what Al Qaeda did is, in any way, on the level with what Israel has done during the Second Intifada. For one, the Sharon crack down has cut down on the suicide bombers in recent months. Nothing Al Qaeda did on 911 lessened the toll on anyone group of people nor was it intended to.
In addition to everything else, Majeed and McDonald succeed in confusing people by, as Wittgenstein puts it, taking language on a holiday. Consider their use of the word “terrorist”. For whatever reason, “terrorist” only refers non-state actors only. Thus, while Stalin and Hitler did bang up job of terrorizing huge numbers of people, it is just plain odd to say they are the most prominent terrorists of the 20th century. As for the mining the Managua harbor, the ICJ found that the US was guilty of “force against another state,” and not terrorism.
McDonald and Majeed do not stop there though. They claim that Agent Orange is a WMD. This is good humor. Something is a weapon by virtue of how it is employed, or how it was designed to be used. Agent Orange was designed as a defoliant and it was employed as defoliant and not as a weapon. The fact that it caused a great deal of harm no more makes it a WMD then the fact that alcohol causes a great deal of heartache makes it a weapon.
Finally, Majeed and McDonald are guilty of lying by omission. They rightly point out that the US and Israel voted against a 1987 UN initiative aimed at ending terrorism, but they fail to mention the reason why they did so was because there was a clause in the resolution that recognized all actions of the PLO and other such groups as legit.”
This is what they printed.
“In their zeal to denounce the U.S., people like Verne McDonald and Usman Majeed take all kinds of liberties with truth and language. We are told, for example, that some kind of repressive state will emerge that will be equally brutal to Saddam Hussein's. This is not only wild speculation, it also trivializes just how brutal Hussein's regime was. A host of governments torture their citizens, and there are no guarantees that Iraq will not be one of them, but only a few kill up to 2,000 prisoners on any given Wednesday in the country's largest prison.
We are also told that Israel regularly carries out "terrorist attacks" and that these attacks differ only in scale from the attacks al-Qaeda carried out on 9/11. I am not sure if they are saying that Israel intentionally targets noncombatants or is showing wanton disregard for them. The former is false. The odd Israeli soldier might take potshots at people, but there has never been any evidence to suggest that noncombatants are being systematically targeted. The latter is debatable and even if true does not mean that what al-Qaeda did is on the level with what Israel has done during the Second Intifada. For one, the Ariel Sharon crackdown has cut down on suicide bombers in recent months. Nothing al-Qaeda did on 9/11 lessened the toll on any one group of people, nor was it intended to.
In addition, Majeed and McDonald confuse people by taking language on a holiday. Consider their use of the word terrorist. Terrorist only refers to non-state actors. As for the mining Managua harbour, the International Court of Justice found that the U.S. was guilty of "force against another state" and not terrorism.
McDonald and Majeed also claim that Agent Orange is a WMD. Something is a weapon by virtue of how it is employed or how it was designed to be used. Agent Orange was designed as a defoliant and was employed as a defoliant and not as a weapon.
Finally, Majeed and McDonald are guilty of lying by omission. They rightly point out that the U.S. and Israel voted against a 1987 UN initiative aimed at ending terrorism, but they fail to mention they did so because there was a clause in the resolution that recognized all actions of the PLO and other such groups as legit.”
Now I have no problem with them editing out a few sentences here and there and shortening a few others. For example they were right to shorten the beginning. However, even there they should have left in the following. “The US has indeed propped up a number of bad regimes over the past 5 decades and they have even supported some groups that by anyone’s definition are terrorist organizations.” By removing this qualification and entitling my letter truth takes a holiday, they pigeon holed me politically, making me seem entirely like a right wing partisan writing in a left wing newspaper. If that were not bad enough, though, by leaving out “Its comments like this that leave me wondering: Do McDonald and Majeed work for Mossad?”, “This is good humor” and “Thus, while Stalin and Hitler did bang up job of terrorizing huge numbers of people, it is just plain odd to say they are the most prominent terrorists of the 20th century” they essentially undercut the entire point of my piece, viz., that in their zeal, McDonald and Majeed and others of their ilk, unintentionally say some pretty stupid things. As it was, I was regretting not have tempered my comments about Israel.
Indeed, the simple fact of the matter is that I am not all that bothered by political viewpoint of the authors. It was the teacher in me coming and saying “Christ you can come up with something better than this. Some things you say are just plain wrong, others are confused and by and large the language that you use only appeals to the converted. I mean Gulf war 3! Come on.”
Leaving out “Thus, while Stalin and Hitler did bang up job of terrorizing huge numbers of people, it is just plain odd to say they are the most prominent terrorists of the 20th century” and having the un-tempered “Terrorist only refers to non-state actors” flowed by “As for mining the Managua harbour, the International Court of Justice found that the U.S. was guilty of "force against another state" and not terrorism” particularly annoyed me as well. Saying that terrorist only refers to non-state actors is a controversial comment. Chomsky, for example, regularly calls state actors terrorists. That is why it was necessary to point out that even though Stalin and Hitler would seem to fit the bill, no one refers to them as terrorists.
In the subsequent edition of the paper “my” letter garnered all sorts of attention and letters condemning my supposed jingoism strangely dominated the letter to the editor’s page. In one of those letters someone blathered on about how while the word “terrorist” might have once referred to only state actors, it now most assuredly refers to both, state actors and non-state actors. This made me all the angrier. The meaning of the word has changed only not in the way he suggested. The origin of the word dates back to the Jacobin terror and originally referred to state actors only.
(0) comments
A word to the wise, do not send letters to the editor. They just might print “your” letter. I responded to the following article a number of months back.
“If Saddam Hussein had governed Iraq to the end of his natural life, it would hardly have been within his power to endanger and make miserable the lives of the great majority of the people of Iraq as much as the U.S. government did in the past 12 years, and especially in the past two months. Yet we are supposed to look upon the agents of that disruption and destruction as heroes, whose victimization of a nation and maiming of innocent children is supposed to be all to the good because in another 10 years those children will not be tortured by Hussein's secret police--they will be tortured by the secret police of the regime the U.S. is putting in place.
The Shiite majority in Iraq wants an Islamic republic, but the U.S. government will, instead, ensure that essential control devolves into the hands of the more secular-oriented Sunnis, who worked so well with the Americans when Hussein was a U.S. ally. The Kurds have to be compensated for not getting a Kurdistan, and disarming them is a problem the U.S. would rather not deal with, so the northern district of the U.S. occupation will become an area of rule by the gun, with the Kurds getting some of their own back on Sunnis and Shiites together. The U.S. does not want Iraq to achieve self-determination as a nation lest its peoples decide to govern themselves in a way that does not match U.S. interests.
Thus in the next year or so, when most aid to Iraq will have to be paid for in oil, there will be some aid that won't appear on the books. That will be the equipment, instructors, and funding for a U.S. style police agency with the responsibility of making sure democracy does not interfere with commercial exploitation of Iraq's resources. Meanwhile, the returning expatriates whom the U.S. has decreed will control the government will be out for their own payback. This combination of U.S. fear of Islamic democracy plus government by revenge ensures repression will be necessary. That repression will be noticed from Morocco to Indonesia, if not in the world outside the Islamic community. And that repression will involve the worst kind of terrorism: state terrorism.
Last week we noted that in 1987 the United Nations passed a resolution requiring member nations to fight terrorism in all its forms, and all nations voted for it except Honduras, which abstained, and Israel and the U.S., who voted against. The problem for Honduras at the time was that it was being used as a staging area for U.S. backed terrorist attacks on Nicaragua, a nation that had made the mistake of opting for a popular democracy rather than conforming to policies favouring international corporations. During those days when the U.S. was publicly less concerned with terrorism, the International Court of Justice at the Hague passed a rare judgment, declaring that the U.S. committed international terrorism when it mined the harbour in Managua and ships from several countries were damaged or sunk.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, during Gulf War III, said he does not count civilian casualties. This is an attitude known only to terrorists. Rumsfeld is at least being consistent with U.S. government attitudes over the past 40 years. While the name of every U.S. citizen who died in Vietnam is carved in stone in that nation's capital, no one in the U.S. can estimate within a million deaths the number of Vietnamese who should have their names carved in stone. Three million? Five million? The U.S. does not count civilian casualties.
The Vietnam war shares with Gulf War I and Italy's mid- to late-1930s Abyssinian (Ethiopian) conflict the distinction of being the only wars since the First World War in which chemical weapons of mass destruction were employed. In Vietnam, the U.S. sprayed chemical agents that defoliated forests, destroyed the soil, and have caused birth defects to this day; in Ethiopia, Benito Mussolini's forces dropped mustard gas from the air, in one instance killing thousands in an attack on a single village; and in the First Gulf War, Iran and Iraq spewed gases at each other, with the Iraqis getting the edge because the U.S. had supplied them with the latest and best WMDs. Ever since Winston Churchill gritted his teeth during the Second World War and said Britain would not use chemical WMDs unless the home islands were invaded, the U.S. has been unique among so-called Great Powers in its willingness to develop and deploy chemical agents, the only other example being the Germans' use of gas in concentration camps during the war Churchill was fighting.
What about Israel, the other country that in 1987 refused to agree with more than 100 nations that terrorism should be stopped? No matter what the initial intention or policy, Israel has become a militarist state continually carrying out terrorist attacks, largely at the behest of, and heavily subsidized by, the U.S. The question is whether or not there is a real difference, other than one of degree, between crashing aircraft into office buildings in New York or blasting high-explosive tank shells (made in the U.S.) into houses full of women and children in the Gaza Strip, or perhaps running a bulldozer over an innocent protestor or callously gunning down a few others.
Obviously, terrorism is not the real target. The real goal is to brush aside the United Nations, make the U.S. government the ruler of the world, a dominance it can confirm if no one objects to its attitude that problems can be solved by intimidation, repression, and slaughter. Outside of Britain and Spain, most of the world seems to agree that if the U.S. government is going to run the planet, it had better show a lot more tolerance, maturity, and ability to get along with other people than it is displaying now. Academic Noam Chomsky said after the attack on the World Trade Center that if the U.S. wanted less terrorism, the U.S. should stop supporting and subsidizing it. But that does not seem to be on the agenda.
As George W. Bush said after September 11, 2001, you are either with him or you're against him. We fervently hope the 21st century will not begin with a Third World War of the genuinely democratic people of the world against a U.S. government bent on establishing a corporate tyranny.”
This is what I wrote.
“While reading McDonald and Majeed’s piece I was overcome with the same feeling that I get whenever I read such pieces, viz., that I am lost in wonderland. It is not that everything the New Left says about the US simply dead wrong. The US has indeed propped up a number of bad regimes over the past 5 decades and they have even supported some groups that by anyone’s definition are terrorist organizations. The problem is that in their zeal to denounce the US people like McDonald and Majeed see no harm in taking all kinds of liberties with the truth and with language. We are told, for example, that given the dynamics of the situation in Iraq today, some kind of repressive state will emerge and that this state will be equally brutal to Saddam’s. This is not only wild speculation, it also trivializes and downplays just how brutal Saddam’s regime truly was. Be rest assured, there are a whole host of governments that torture their citizens and there are no guarantee that Iraq will not be one of them in the future, but only a very few kill up to 2,000 prisoners on any given Wednesday in the country’s largest prison.
We are also told that Israel regularly carries out “terrorist attacks” and that these attacks differ only in scale from the attacks Al Qaeda carried out on 911. Its comments like this that leave me wondering: Do McDonald and Majeed work for Mossad? Anyway, I am not sure if they are saying that Israel intentionally targets non-combatants, or that they are showing wanton disregard for them. The former is false. The odd Israeli soldier, or soldiers might take pot shots at people, but there has never been any evidence to suggest that non-combatants are being systematically targeted. The latter is debatable and even if true does not mean that what Al Qaeda did is, in any way, on the level with what Israel has done during the Second Intifada. For one, the Sharon crack down has cut down on the suicide bombers in recent months. Nothing Al Qaeda did on 911 lessened the toll on anyone group of people nor was it intended to.
In addition to everything else, Majeed and McDonald succeed in confusing people by, as Wittgenstein puts it, taking language on a holiday. Consider their use of the word “terrorist”. For whatever reason, “terrorist” only refers non-state actors only. Thus, while Stalin and Hitler did bang up job of terrorizing huge numbers of people, it is just plain odd to say they are the most prominent terrorists of the 20th century. As for the mining the Managua harbor, the ICJ found that the US was guilty of “force against another state,” and not terrorism.
McDonald and Majeed do not stop there though. They claim that Agent Orange is a WMD. This is good humor. Something is a weapon by virtue of how it is employed, or how it was designed to be used. Agent Orange was designed as a defoliant and it was employed as defoliant and not as a weapon. The fact that it caused a great deal of harm no more makes it a WMD then the fact that alcohol causes a great deal of heartache makes it a weapon.
Finally, Majeed and McDonald are guilty of lying by omission. They rightly point out that the US and Israel voted against a 1987 UN initiative aimed at ending terrorism, but they fail to mention the reason why they did so was because there was a clause in the resolution that recognized all actions of the PLO and other such groups as legit.”
This is what they printed.
“In their zeal to denounce the U.S., people like Verne McDonald and Usman Majeed take all kinds of liberties with truth and language. We are told, for example, that some kind of repressive state will emerge that will be equally brutal to Saddam Hussein's. This is not only wild speculation, it also trivializes just how brutal Hussein's regime was. A host of governments torture their citizens, and there are no guarantees that Iraq will not be one of them, but only a few kill up to 2,000 prisoners on any given Wednesday in the country's largest prison.
We are also told that Israel regularly carries out "terrorist attacks" and that these attacks differ only in scale from the attacks al-Qaeda carried out on 9/11. I am not sure if they are saying that Israel intentionally targets noncombatants or is showing wanton disregard for them. The former is false. The odd Israeli soldier might take potshots at people, but there has never been any evidence to suggest that noncombatants are being systematically targeted. The latter is debatable and even if true does not mean that what al-Qaeda did is on the level with what Israel has done during the Second Intifada. For one, the Ariel Sharon crackdown has cut down on suicide bombers in recent months. Nothing al-Qaeda did on 9/11 lessened the toll on any one group of people, nor was it intended to.
In addition, Majeed and McDonald confuse people by taking language on a holiday. Consider their use of the word terrorist. Terrorist only refers to non-state actors. As for the mining Managua harbour, the International Court of Justice found that the U.S. was guilty of "force against another state" and not terrorism.
McDonald and Majeed also claim that Agent Orange is a WMD. Something is a weapon by virtue of how it is employed or how it was designed to be used. Agent Orange was designed as a defoliant and was employed as a defoliant and not as a weapon.
Finally, Majeed and McDonald are guilty of lying by omission. They rightly point out that the U.S. and Israel voted against a 1987 UN initiative aimed at ending terrorism, but they fail to mention they did so because there was a clause in the resolution that recognized all actions of the PLO and other such groups as legit.”
Now I have no problem with them editing out a few sentences here and there and shortening a few others. For example they were right to shorten the beginning. However, even there they should have left in the following. “The US has indeed propped up a number of bad regimes over the past 5 decades and they have even supported some groups that by anyone’s definition are terrorist organizations.” By removing this qualification and entitling my letter truth takes a holiday, they pigeon holed me politically, making me seem entirely like a right wing partisan writing in a left wing newspaper. If that were not bad enough, though, by leaving out “Its comments like this that leave me wondering: Do McDonald and Majeed work for Mossad?”, “This is good humor” and “Thus, while Stalin and Hitler did bang up job of terrorizing huge numbers of people, it is just plain odd to say they are the most prominent terrorists of the 20th century” they essentially undercut the entire point of my piece, viz., that in their zeal, McDonald and Majeed and others of their ilk, unintentionally say some pretty stupid things. As it was, I was regretting not have tempered my comments about Israel.
Indeed, the simple fact of the matter is that I am not all that bothered by political viewpoint of the authors. It was the teacher in me coming and saying “Christ you can come up with something better than this. Some things you say are just plain wrong, others are confused and by and large the language that you use only appeals to the converted. I mean Gulf war 3! Come on.”
Leaving out “Thus, while Stalin and Hitler did bang up job of terrorizing huge numbers of people, it is just plain odd to say they are the most prominent terrorists of the 20th century” and having the un-tempered “Terrorist only refers to non-state actors” flowed by “As for mining the Managua harbour, the International Court of Justice found that the U.S. was guilty of "force against another state" and not terrorism” particularly annoyed me as well. Saying that terrorist only refers to non-state actors is a controversial comment. Chomsky, for example, regularly calls state actors terrorists. That is why it was necessary to point out that even though Stalin and Hitler would seem to fit the bill, no one refers to them as terrorists.
In the subsequent edition of the paper “my” letter garnered all sorts of attention and letters condemning my supposed jingoism strangely dominated the letter to the editor’s page. In one of those letters someone blathered on about how while the word “terrorist” might have once referred to only state actors, it now most assuredly refers to both, state actors and non-state actors. This made me all the angrier. The meaning of the word has changed only not in the way he suggested. The origin of the word dates back to the Jacobin terror and originally referred to state actors only.
Tuesday, August 19, 2003
Affirmation of humanity, Confusion and Home: a little more about Saving Private Ryan
One of the large themes of the movie is communication or lack there of. The theme is immediately apparent. The landing is not well coordinated and when Miller tries to contact his superiors the radio operator and radio are shot up. As for the mission itself, although the meaningfulness is apparent to those in command, they are unable communicate the reasonableness of the mission to Miller and his troop. In their minds, “the mission is serious misallocation of valuable military resources.” To them, it makes no sense to send the eight of them to save Ryan accept in so far as a “public relations” ploy. Adding to the mix is the presence of Corporal Upham, who despite having the express desire to write about the commutative bond that develops between fighting men, does not have the first idea how converse with the others in the troop.
One result of this lack of communication is Captain Miller is unable to maintain discipline. Unmoved moved by comments like “we are not here to do the decent thing. We are here to follow fucking orders.”, the men, most notably Reiban, regularly disobey orders. Things finally come to a head with the death of Wade. Disgusted that Miller would allow a German prisoner to go free, Reiban threatens to walk out on the unit and soon after finds himself looking down the barrel of Sgt. Horvath’s gun (Sizemore). Before things could be taken any further Miller intervenes. Revealing what he did back home, Miller begins an extended monologue about how the war has changed him and how by saving Ryan he can reverse the process. “Back home I tell people what I do and they say, well it figures. But over here it is a big mystery. So, I guess I changed some. Sometimes I wonder if I changed so much my wife is even going to recognize me when ever it is I get back to her. … If going to Romel and finding him [(Ryan)] so he can go home if that earns me the right to get back to my wife well that is my mission. … [All I know is] the more men I kill, the further away from home I feel.”
What Miller’s monologue does is that it gives meaning not only mission but to the deaths of Wade and Caparzo (Diesel). Indeed, if you recall Caparzo died trying to save a little girl that looked just like his niece back home and Wade literally died carrying Caparzo’s message of home. Later Miller will die trying to delivery Ryan home so, as stated above, he could get home.
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One of the large themes of the movie is communication or lack there of. The theme is immediately apparent. The landing is not well coordinated and when Miller tries to contact his superiors the radio operator and radio are shot up. As for the mission itself, although the meaningfulness is apparent to those in command, they are unable communicate the reasonableness of the mission to Miller and his troop. In their minds, “the mission is serious misallocation of valuable military resources.” To them, it makes no sense to send the eight of them to save Ryan accept in so far as a “public relations” ploy. Adding to the mix is the presence of Corporal Upham, who despite having the express desire to write about the commutative bond that develops between fighting men, does not have the first idea how converse with the others in the troop.
One result of this lack of communication is Captain Miller is unable to maintain discipline. Unmoved moved by comments like “we are not here to do the decent thing. We are here to follow fucking orders.”, the men, most notably Reiban, regularly disobey orders. Things finally come to a head with the death of Wade. Disgusted that Miller would allow a German prisoner to go free, Reiban threatens to walk out on the unit and soon after finds himself looking down the barrel of Sgt. Horvath’s gun (Sizemore). Before things could be taken any further Miller intervenes. Revealing what he did back home, Miller begins an extended monologue about how the war has changed him and how by saving Ryan he can reverse the process. “Back home I tell people what I do and they say, well it figures. But over here it is a big mystery. So, I guess I changed some. Sometimes I wonder if I changed so much my wife is even going to recognize me when ever it is I get back to her. … If going to Romel and finding him [(Ryan)] so he can go home if that earns me the right to get back to my wife well that is my mission. … [All I know is] the more men I kill, the further away from home I feel.”
What Miller’s monologue does is that it gives meaning not only mission but to the deaths of Wade and Caparzo (Diesel). Indeed, if you recall Caparzo died trying to save a little girl that looked just like his niece back home and Wade literally died carrying Caparzo’s message of home. Later Miller will die trying to delivery Ryan home so, as stated above, he could get home.
Saving Private Ryan as TLGW?
In his review of Pearl Harbour (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/onfilm/message/3463) , SFU (Vancouver, BC Canada) professor of American History, Michael Fellman contends that “ever since that silly Second World War film, Saving Private Ryan, the last Good War, (hereafter TLGW) has been filling American screens and spilling over on to ours.” This trend troubles him for more than just aesthetic reasons. As Fellman sees it “TLGW is not just about cleansing the past and putting young butts in theatre seats.” It is helping provide the ideological scaffolding the Bush administration needs to justify billions of dollars in increased defence spending. More generally, TLGW films help sustain one of a few popular myths that “provide cover stories for militarism, racism and poverty.”
That said, what films does Fellman count as TLGW? Fellman names four, U571, Saving Private Ryan, Pearl Harbour and the Patriot. Although the last of these is not about the WWII, but is rather about the American Revolution, Fellman contends that the Patriot is structured in much the same way as the other films thus “establishing the United States in 1776 becomes the same as preserving it in 1941.” Indeed, according to Fellman, not only are the British depicted as being as “utterly dastardly” as the Nazis, but they are shown as doing things that the British never did but that the Nazis did do. Most infamously, they lock members of one town in a Church and burn it.
As mentioned above, one of the things TLGW films function to do is that they smooth over some the more troubling aspects of America’s past. Fellman cites two main examples. First, he notes how in U571 the US is seen as successfully planning and carrying out a mission to capture a German Enigma machine and in the process gaining an immense intelligence victory that ultimately saved not only many US lives but the lives of many of her allies as well. In so doing, he contends that film makers give credit to the US for something the US did not do. The British, he notes, captured the first Enigma machine 7 months before the US even entered the War. Equally important, “this construction evades the award question about what in fact the Americans were doing sitting out the war for so long, while the British, Canadians and the Russians were doing the dying.” Second, having noting that race relations are one of the biggest obstacles facing TLGW film makers, Fellman looks at how race plays out in the Patriot. He notes that whereas in the Patriot, the British are depicted as kidnapping happy and loyal free black folks at gunpoint, in reality, the Santee River Basin in South Carolina, the setting for the movie, had the dubious distinction of having the highest concentration of slave-owners in the American colonies and “thousands of slaves fled to the British, who offered them and their families freedom in exchange for enlistment.” Once more, he notes while the efforts of one black soldier in the Patriot were enough to convince even the most hardened racist in the movie that there should be a place for African Americans in the emerging American democracy, the constitutional fathers soon built black slavery into the national compact and that the descents of that soldier’s South Carolinian compatriots would later fight a war to keep slavery.
This brings me to the matter that I want to pursue. Namely, although I think Fellman is right in believing that since Saving Private Ryan there have been a number of TLGW films, I think that Fellman is mistaken in believing that Saving Private Ryan is itself a prime example of a TLGW film. Sure, it shares with these other movies some characteristics. There is, literally, a bit of flag waving and it is about a good war that the Americans fought. However, on one level Saving Private Ryan is not even about Americans vs. bad Nazis, but is rather about a tiny band of men trying to create some meaning out of all the destruction - and they do that in typically Spielbergian fashion - by coming to believe, in some way, that the saving of one human life is an affirmation of humanity (a la Schindler's list). As Tom Sizemore’s character says near the end of the movie, “some day we may decide that saving private Ryan was the one decent thing that we were able to pull out of the whole god awful shitty mess.”
As Fellman see things one of the key characteristics of TLGW films is that “although actual combat is always morally compromising with soldiers on both sides committing atrocities, in Hollywood, American soldiers are always high-minded, and the American soldiers would never imagine nasty stuff like shooting captured Nazis.” Any doubt that Fellman thinks Saving Private Ryan shares this characteristic is clarified later on in his discussion of Senator John Kerrey of Nebraska: who, Fellman adds “was outed as a lieutenant who led his patrol into killing 14 defenceless women and children in a nasty little ‘action’ in Vietnam.” Fellman contends that even though “any honest combat veteran will tell you that what Kerrey’s patrol did was common in their war, as it was in the Second World War,” John Wayne is preferred, not only by the American people but also by “Spielberg and the other producers of this genre”, to a decorated War hero like Kerrey.
Now what is surprising about all of this is that American soldiers in Saving Private Ryan do not show the “Nazis” any quarter. A soldier is who is about to finish off burning German soldiers is ordered by a superior not to do it and instead “let them burn”, thus prolonging their suffering. Later on, in one of the more interesting sequences of the film, an American soldier accidentally brings done a damaged wall of a house and in the process reveals a number of concealed German soldiers. Shown to be but a few feet away from each other, the stand off between the two equally matched sides is made all the more intense by Spielberg switching from a close up of the Germans to a close of Americans. However, rather than having the Germans or Americans throw done their arms to avoid an unnecessary slaughter, as is usual movie protocol, Spielberg has a second group of Americans massacre the Germans before the eyes of the first group. Most important of all though, Americans do shoot captured Nazis in Saving Private Ryan and to make matters worse some take a sadistic delight in doing so.
Saving Private Ryan is unlike the other films mentioned by Fellman in other ways too. For instance, whereas the token African America makes an appearance in the Patriot, U571, and Pearl Harbour, there is no such role for anyone in Saving Private Ryan. The only African American actor in the film, Vin Diesel, is made out to be an Italian decent and not African American at all: something that is partially palatable due to Vin Diesel’s relatively light skin colouring.
Another thing that is missing in Saving Private Ryan is that the role of the protagonist is not that of a leading man. Rather, Tom Hanks, Hollywood’s every man, serves at one level as a father figure to Matt Damon’s character and at a another level as a symbolic representative of a whole generation of young soldiers, who sometimes had to make the ultimate sacrifice, as Tom Hanks character does, to “Save” a future generation. Hence, at the end of the movie an aged Ryan says while leaning over Sergeant Miller’s Grave (Hanks) “I hope I have earned what all of you have done for me.” This is in marked contrast to the role carved out for the likes of Mathew McConaughey, Mel Gibson and Ben Affleck. Indeed, in these later films these leading Hollywood men play roles geared to, well, leading Hollywood men. To this end, McConaughey, Gibson and Affleck are imparted with special powers usually imparted to leading men. Thus, Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett by themselves account for a third of all the Japanese plans downed on the eventful day. Mel Gibson with the help of two young boys is able to take out 20 British soldiers, with a bunch of muskets no less. And McConaughey is able to sink half the German navy with but a handful of torpedoes, a crippled sub, and a skeleton crew.
Furthermore, not only does Tom Hank’s character not posses these gifts, the entire movie, as mentioned above, is about a group of soldiers trying to give meaning to why they are trying to save private Ryan and by extension why they are fighting the war. Hence, while the conclusion Hank’s character draws is a well wore theme, the very fact he has to go through such a process and is not blessed with an ingrained historical consciousness of the events that are enveloping him reveals that there is wide gulf between his character and always historically self consciousness leading TLGW characters.
If there is one striking similarity between Saving Private Ryan and these other films it is this: In all four films various characters are able to, in the vast majority of cases through their engagement in the war, transcend various obstacles. Besides the token black figure in U571, the Patriot and Pearl Harbour struggling to overcome racism, there is Ben Affleck’s character struggling, if only briefly, to overcome his dyslexia, and a fellow pilot who struggles with stuttering. In the case of Saving Private Ryan, it is a young clerk struggling to overcome his fears, his deficiencies and his naïve understanding of the realities of war so as to gain acceptance of his peers.
That said, the manner by which this character transcends these things is partly problematic for TLGW filmmakers. Let me explain. Early on in the film this same character tries to convince his mates that they should not shoot a German they have taken prisoner. Common to Vietnam films, characters who take on such a position are almost always cast in a positive light. However, in Saving Private Ryan things are turned right around. The prisoner is in fact spared, but not because the group was swayed by the moral force of the clerk’s argument; indeed, his fellows believe that his arguments lend credence to their belief that he lacks a true understanding of what it is to be one of them. Rather, Hank’s character, having changed his mind on the matter, decrees, much to the displeasure of the majority of the troop, that the prisoner be set free. To make matters worse for the clerk, he bares part of the burnt of troops displeasure with Hank’s decision. As they see it, if he had just gone long with them in the first place, Hanks character would not have had the time to change is mind and they would have been able to avenge the death of one of their own. In the closing battle scene the clerk reaches the point of no return. After having helplessly stood by while a German sinks a knife into the heart of one of his compatriots, the clerk is left with a choice. Either he must make amends by doing something heroic or fall into psychological oblivion. Mustering all his courage the clerk single handily takes a group of Germans prisoner. One of prisoners is the very German prisoner that he had earlier helped spare and who just delivered the fatal blow to Tom Hank’s character. Now, here is what is problematic about the clerk’s coming of age theme. Immediately, after having taken the group of prisoners, his old nemesis again tries to manipulate him so as to again gain his freedom. However, having found his place in the sun the clerk is not about to give it up and immediately shoots his tormentor dead. In the process the clerk not only secures his new found status, he avenges the death of Hank’s character and thus proves that he is one of the troop. That said, at the same time he gives into a temptation that no true TLGW character would give into: namely kill a villain who is more or less at his mercy.
So, why go to all this trouble to differentiate Saving Private Ryan from TLGW films? Well, as stated at the outset, Fellman feels that “TLGW is not just about cleansing the past and putting young butts in theatre seats.” Specifically, he feels that TLGW films are effacing a generation of antiwar films about the Vietnam War in the public consciousness and in the process helping to clear the way for George Bush Junior’s New World Order. I feel Fellman is greatly overstating his case. If the antiwar movies no longer have a hold on the public imagination these days, it is because the Gulf War and Serbia have fundamentally altered the American public’s view of war. Prior to that, movies such as the DeerHunter, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, and Born on the Fourth of July, had an impact on American culture because they were able to give voice to a number of, sometimes unconnected, concerns the American people had about the Vietnam War and about war generally. That said, the same can not be said about TLGW films. Salvaged by critics and not greatly liked by movie goers, Pearl Harbour, U571, and the Patriot made a scant dent on the American consciousness and as a result will quickly disappear from popular memory. This leaves Saving Private Ryan. It was the only one of the movies that Fellman mentioned that captured the imagination of American movie goers and it is not, as I have argued above, a good example of a TLGW film.
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In his review of Pearl Harbour (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/onfilm/message/3463) , SFU (Vancouver, BC Canada) professor of American History, Michael Fellman contends that “ever since that silly Second World War film, Saving Private Ryan, the last Good War, (hereafter TLGW) has been filling American screens and spilling over on to ours.” This trend troubles him for more than just aesthetic reasons. As Fellman sees it “TLGW is not just about cleansing the past and putting young butts in theatre seats.” It is helping provide the ideological scaffolding the Bush administration needs to justify billions of dollars in increased defence spending. More generally, TLGW films help sustain one of a few popular myths that “provide cover stories for militarism, racism and poverty.”
That said, what films does Fellman count as TLGW? Fellman names four, U571, Saving Private Ryan, Pearl Harbour and the Patriot. Although the last of these is not about the WWII, but is rather about the American Revolution, Fellman contends that the Patriot is structured in much the same way as the other films thus “establishing the United States in 1776 becomes the same as preserving it in 1941.” Indeed, according to Fellman, not only are the British depicted as being as “utterly dastardly” as the Nazis, but they are shown as doing things that the British never did but that the Nazis did do. Most infamously, they lock members of one town in a Church and burn it.
As mentioned above, one of the things TLGW films function to do is that they smooth over some the more troubling aspects of America’s past. Fellman cites two main examples. First, he notes how in U571 the US is seen as successfully planning and carrying out a mission to capture a German Enigma machine and in the process gaining an immense intelligence victory that ultimately saved not only many US lives but the lives of many of her allies as well. In so doing, he contends that film makers give credit to the US for something the US did not do. The British, he notes, captured the first Enigma machine 7 months before the US even entered the War. Equally important, “this construction evades the award question about what in fact the Americans were doing sitting out the war for so long, while the British, Canadians and the Russians were doing the dying.” Second, having noting that race relations are one of the biggest obstacles facing TLGW film makers, Fellman looks at how race plays out in the Patriot. He notes that whereas in the Patriot, the British are depicted as kidnapping happy and loyal free black folks at gunpoint, in reality, the Santee River Basin in South Carolina, the setting for the movie, had the dubious distinction of having the highest concentration of slave-owners in the American colonies and “thousands of slaves fled to the British, who offered them and their families freedom in exchange for enlistment.” Once more, he notes while the efforts of one black soldier in the Patriot were enough to convince even the most hardened racist in the movie that there should be a place for African Americans in the emerging American democracy, the constitutional fathers soon built black slavery into the national compact and that the descents of that soldier’s South Carolinian compatriots would later fight a war to keep slavery.
This brings me to the matter that I want to pursue. Namely, although I think Fellman is right in believing that since Saving Private Ryan there have been a number of TLGW films, I think that Fellman is mistaken in believing that Saving Private Ryan is itself a prime example of a TLGW film. Sure, it shares with these other movies some characteristics. There is, literally, a bit of flag waving and it is about a good war that the Americans fought. However, on one level Saving Private Ryan is not even about Americans vs. bad Nazis, but is rather about a tiny band of men trying to create some meaning out of all the destruction - and they do that in typically Spielbergian fashion - by coming to believe, in some way, that the saving of one human life is an affirmation of humanity (a la Schindler's list). As Tom Sizemore’s character says near the end of the movie, “some day we may decide that saving private Ryan was the one decent thing that we were able to pull out of the whole god awful shitty mess.”
As Fellman see things one of the key characteristics of TLGW films is that “although actual combat is always morally compromising with soldiers on both sides committing atrocities, in Hollywood, American soldiers are always high-minded, and the American soldiers would never imagine nasty stuff like shooting captured Nazis.” Any doubt that Fellman thinks Saving Private Ryan shares this characteristic is clarified later on in his discussion of Senator John Kerrey of Nebraska: who, Fellman adds “was outed as a lieutenant who led his patrol into killing 14 defenceless women and children in a nasty little ‘action’ in Vietnam.” Fellman contends that even though “any honest combat veteran will tell you that what Kerrey’s patrol did was common in their war, as it was in the Second World War,” John Wayne is preferred, not only by the American people but also by “Spielberg and the other producers of this genre”, to a decorated War hero like Kerrey.
Now what is surprising about all of this is that American soldiers in Saving Private Ryan do not show the “Nazis” any quarter. A soldier is who is about to finish off burning German soldiers is ordered by a superior not to do it and instead “let them burn”, thus prolonging their suffering. Later on, in one of the more interesting sequences of the film, an American soldier accidentally brings done a damaged wall of a house and in the process reveals a number of concealed German soldiers. Shown to be but a few feet away from each other, the stand off between the two equally matched sides is made all the more intense by Spielberg switching from a close up of the Germans to a close of Americans. However, rather than having the Germans or Americans throw done their arms to avoid an unnecessary slaughter, as is usual movie protocol, Spielberg has a second group of Americans massacre the Germans before the eyes of the first group. Most important of all though, Americans do shoot captured Nazis in Saving Private Ryan and to make matters worse some take a sadistic delight in doing so.
Saving Private Ryan is unlike the other films mentioned by Fellman in other ways too. For instance, whereas the token African America makes an appearance in the Patriot, U571, and Pearl Harbour, there is no such role for anyone in Saving Private Ryan. The only African American actor in the film, Vin Diesel, is made out to be an Italian decent and not African American at all: something that is partially palatable due to Vin Diesel’s relatively light skin colouring.
Another thing that is missing in Saving Private Ryan is that the role of the protagonist is not that of a leading man. Rather, Tom Hanks, Hollywood’s every man, serves at one level as a father figure to Matt Damon’s character and at a another level as a symbolic representative of a whole generation of young soldiers, who sometimes had to make the ultimate sacrifice, as Tom Hanks character does, to “Save” a future generation. Hence, at the end of the movie an aged Ryan says while leaning over Sergeant Miller’s Grave (Hanks) “I hope I have earned what all of you have done for me.” This is in marked contrast to the role carved out for the likes of Mathew McConaughey, Mel Gibson and Ben Affleck. Indeed, in these later films these leading Hollywood men play roles geared to, well, leading Hollywood men. To this end, McConaughey, Gibson and Affleck are imparted with special powers usually imparted to leading men. Thus, Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett by themselves account for a third of all the Japanese plans downed on the eventful day. Mel Gibson with the help of two young boys is able to take out 20 British soldiers, with a bunch of muskets no less. And McConaughey is able to sink half the German navy with but a handful of torpedoes, a crippled sub, and a skeleton crew.
Furthermore, not only does Tom Hank’s character not posses these gifts, the entire movie, as mentioned above, is about a group of soldiers trying to give meaning to why they are trying to save private Ryan and by extension why they are fighting the war. Hence, while the conclusion Hank’s character draws is a well wore theme, the very fact he has to go through such a process and is not blessed with an ingrained historical consciousness of the events that are enveloping him reveals that there is wide gulf between his character and always historically self consciousness leading TLGW characters.
If there is one striking similarity between Saving Private Ryan and these other films it is this: In all four films various characters are able to, in the vast majority of cases through their engagement in the war, transcend various obstacles. Besides the token black figure in U571, the Patriot and Pearl Harbour struggling to overcome racism, there is Ben Affleck’s character struggling, if only briefly, to overcome his dyslexia, and a fellow pilot who struggles with stuttering. In the case of Saving Private Ryan, it is a young clerk struggling to overcome his fears, his deficiencies and his naïve understanding of the realities of war so as to gain acceptance of his peers.
That said, the manner by which this character transcends these things is partly problematic for TLGW filmmakers. Let me explain. Early on in the film this same character tries to convince his mates that they should not shoot a German they have taken prisoner. Common to Vietnam films, characters who take on such a position are almost always cast in a positive light. However, in Saving Private Ryan things are turned right around. The prisoner is in fact spared, but not because the group was swayed by the moral force of the clerk’s argument; indeed, his fellows believe that his arguments lend credence to their belief that he lacks a true understanding of what it is to be one of them. Rather, Hank’s character, having changed his mind on the matter, decrees, much to the displeasure of the majority of the troop, that the prisoner be set free. To make matters worse for the clerk, he bares part of the burnt of troops displeasure with Hank’s decision. As they see it, if he had just gone long with them in the first place, Hanks character would not have had the time to change is mind and they would have been able to avenge the death of one of their own. In the closing battle scene the clerk reaches the point of no return. After having helplessly stood by while a German sinks a knife into the heart of one of his compatriots, the clerk is left with a choice. Either he must make amends by doing something heroic or fall into psychological oblivion. Mustering all his courage the clerk single handily takes a group of Germans prisoner. One of prisoners is the very German prisoner that he had earlier helped spare and who just delivered the fatal blow to Tom Hank’s character. Now, here is what is problematic about the clerk’s coming of age theme. Immediately, after having taken the group of prisoners, his old nemesis again tries to manipulate him so as to again gain his freedom. However, having found his place in the sun the clerk is not about to give it up and immediately shoots his tormentor dead. In the process the clerk not only secures his new found status, he avenges the death of Hank’s character and thus proves that he is one of the troop. That said, at the same time he gives into a temptation that no true TLGW character would give into: namely kill a villain who is more or less at his mercy.
So, why go to all this trouble to differentiate Saving Private Ryan from TLGW films? Well, as stated at the outset, Fellman feels that “TLGW is not just about cleansing the past and putting young butts in theatre seats.” Specifically, he feels that TLGW films are effacing a generation of antiwar films about the Vietnam War in the public consciousness and in the process helping to clear the way for George Bush Junior’s New World Order. I feel Fellman is greatly overstating his case. If the antiwar movies no longer have a hold on the public imagination these days, it is because the Gulf War and Serbia have fundamentally altered the American public’s view of war. Prior to that, movies such as the DeerHunter, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, and Born on the Fourth of July, had an impact on American culture because they were able to give voice to a number of, sometimes unconnected, concerns the American people had about the Vietnam War and about war generally. That said, the same can not be said about TLGW films. Salvaged by critics and not greatly liked by movie goers, Pearl Harbour, U571, and the Patriot made a scant dent on the American consciousness and as a result will quickly disappear from popular memory. This leaves Saving Private Ryan. It was the only one of the movies that Fellman mentioned that captured the imagination of American movie goers and it is not, as I have argued above, a good example of a TLGW film.
