The International Caucasian Court

Tags

Afghanistan, gambia, international criminal court, Iraq, Israel, syria, war crimes

 

Gambia has threatened to withdraw its ratification of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, citing concerns over racial bias. So far, South Africa is the only African state to actually withdraw. Are these concerns of bias valid? Well, no – the Court only indicts at the request of involved nations. But, on the other hand, yes – because the most notorious potential villains are senior politicians in the UK, Israel and the United States. Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine remain areas where the most egregious of apparent war-crimes have occurred. Why, then, have individuals or groups in the countries implicated not brought forward relevant charges for the Court? It is a good question, and one for which nobody seems to have an answer. Tony Blair, G.W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz – after Hitler and the Nazis, these are the most appalling war-criminals the world has ever known. And they also know it. I will be most surprised to learn that any of them has ever left his cushioned continent since 2001. It is the same with that arch-demon, Henry Kissinger. He cannot travel far from home, because there are warrants for his arrest all over the place. You have not heard this? Read my dear late old friend, Christopher Hitchens’ book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger. And, while you’re at it, read his book on the Clintons. The contents are deeply disturbing, and, since neither book was ever sued, one must assume that these diabolical accusations are true. In Hilary’s case, this is who America will elect as President – and that, perhaps, explains why none of its previous criminal leaders were suggested for the ICC’s prosecution? In the West, we have an intrinsic bias – but only because we no longer know our own history. There is nothing to be proud of in it. For America, there is a vast delusion, going back to the Beginning and those most grandiose of documents. “All men are born equal and independent”? I don’t think so. Do the black slaves, or the Indigenous – or, for that matter, women – have certain “inalienable rights”? Or certain unalienable ones? Evidently not. And who exactly are, “We the people”? It would seem that they are the signees to this ridiculously pompous, self-aggrandizing screed: the cabal of oligarchic, land-owning faux-aristocrats who had managed to steal the British colonies before the Motherland knew they’d done it. Much as I hate to admit Donald J. Trump is right, he is right in claiming this election to be stolen. Confessedly, I would also steal it from him if I controlled America. But the hordes who will wail when Trump loses – as he will – ought, perhaps, to wonder why they have not dispatched their alleged war-criminals to the ICC. It is, as Gore Vidal used to say, because of the United States of Amnesia. Just going back to Vietnam, I could name a dozen people who deserve a criminal trial – if only to clear their names. Yet American – or really global – media focus their concerns on the present moment. All that seems to matter today is November the 8^th. Yet, when that arrives, and Hilary is the next President, these concerns will change. No one will ever resurrect past worries, because we are not supposed to dwell on those. Thus, the lame ICC is left prosecuting tribal malfeasants, or possibly the odd east European despot. The world, however, is always left wondering if real justice is ever going to be served.

 

Pondering this perpetual calamity, I am left thinking about what might be truly interesting to readers. Would it, perhaps, be a glimpse of what goes on, much of the time, in the writer’s head? If such is the case – and I do not insist it is – then a new novel begins like this:

 

When I died, things really got interesting. Which is to say they were definitely not interesting before this. I had been a scientist, an expert in earthworms, and a teacher of my expertise. It was even said, at one glorious point, that I was the 5^th most knowledgeable person on earthworms in the world. I objected to this attestation. McFinn was far less knowledgeable than I. But, after death, there was much to distract me from petty concerns. I must say that death was unexpected – who knew that lorry was skidding out of control on the icy road ahead? Not me. But, instead of this, I found myself wondering about all the lives I had previously lived. I must admit I had never, not for a moment, believed in reincarnation – and I did not now. I was forced to accept it, though, because it was true. In the same way, I was obliged to accept all the musings and ponderings I had ever had regarding the past. Amongst these – and I scarcely recalled it – was the questioning of Shakespeare’s identity. In my youth, I imagine, I had become obsessed, for a week or a month, with the specious issue of who wrote those plays. To be frank, I don’t think I had cared about this in half a century. Yet there I was, moments after death, plunged into the London of a very late 16^th-century. Of course, it had never crossed my mind that one of my earlier selves had been involved in the Globe Theatre, and in Shakespeare’s life. Admittedly, I was not that involved – but I was there. And this revelation was not without its vast surprises. As I find my diary records: September 9^th, 1593, Deptford, London:

 

And so it goes…

 

Paul William Roberts      

The Great American Divide

Tags

Afghanistan, america, hilary, hiroshima, iran, Iraq, racism, trump, vietnam

 

During the American Civil War, when fathers fought against sons, brothers against brothers, and families against families, a profound psychic divide in US society was first concretized. By ‘psychic divide’ I mean a pronounced mental proclivity to seek out fundamental social divisions. Of course, the rich-poor division exists in all societies. But it is innate in them, an inequity that can be addressed without necessarily tearing the social fabric. In the US these divisions always threaten social strife, sometimes apocalyptically – and I use the word in its original sense of ‘a revealing’. Perhaps the earliest division was between the Puritan Fathers and a settlement of avowed hedonists who lived along the shore from them and practised free love, as well as, one assumes, free speech. Naturally, these sybarites were termed ‘demonic’ by the purist Christians. The next major division was between white European settlers and the indigenous tribes, where countless fabricated tales were told of Indian atrocities to make the white population amenable to their extermination – which, after all, was the project. There is a reason indigenous peoples are not mentioned in the republic’s foundational documents, where all men are born free and independent. The African slaves aren’t mentioned there either, and they would go on to constitute another great divide which, lamentably, still exists – black-white. Nowhere are the rancid politics of division more apparent than in the US, in Washington, where partisan rhetoric is bitter and hateful, and, although there is little difference between Democrats and Republicans in terms of policies, one party is always the Devil, the other the Lord. In Canada, and in most western democracies, there is always a race between opposing parties – and there are usually more than two of them – yet when the race is run peaceful co-existence reigns. Not so in America, where shout-shows on far-right media even skirmish with the other media that are, at best, centre-right. And perceptions always trump issues in these so-called public debates.

One of the great unsolved riddles of American social history is the issue of why the working-class invariably votes against its own best interests by casting a ballot for the Republicans. Theoretically at least, the Democrats are more concerned with workers and the middle-class, and certainly don’t advocate tax cuts for corporations or the super-rich – although the party behaves differently when in power. As Noam Chomsky has observed, it is not difficult to win a US election: you simply promise what everyone wants – subsidized education and health-care. The working-class majority, however, votes emotionally along carefully delineated lines of division, including black-white, Christian-or not, salt of the earth-toff, pro-or-anti-immigrant, gay-straight, liberal-conservative, and, ironically, rich-poor. Sadly, it usually counts for more that a candidate seems like ‘the kinda guy you can have a beer with’ than he does the kinda guy who can intelligently run a country. And, although you could probably have a beer with Donald Trump – not necessarily an enjoyable one – you actually couldn’t have had one with George W. Bush, unless it was de-alcoholised. Again, the perception not the reality rules. Why? It is tempting to conclude that the lumpen proletariat is stupid, easily led by the nose. Yet why can’t a left-wing candidate lead them? It is, I think, the us-and-them divide, where ‘us’ means good old-time religion, traditional values, no blacks, no Jews, no immigrants, and ‘them’ means the opposite, a psychic break-up of the Union by the advocacy of change. It is no wonder that politicians are increasingly exploiting this polarised view of society. ‘Change’ has often been an appealing slogan, yet change is not really what 100 million citizens seem to want. What they do want is a politician who’s not a politician.

The politics of division do not stop at home either. US Foreign Policy deals only in angels and demons. Starting with the Axis Powers, and moving on through communism, the Axis of Evil, Islamic extremism, drug lords, and now Isis and terrorism in general, the attitude is not rational and certainly not open to diplomacy or debate. They’re always the Devil, we’re always the Lord. It is often said in war that you become like your enemy, and America has come to bear an eerie resemblance to totalitarian states, to a drug lord, and to international terrorism of the state-sponsored variety. For example, we now find that the CIA was responsible for the arrest of Nelson Mandela in South Africa – because he was a suspected communist. The us-and-them divide controls and directs such erroneous thinking. There is now a foreign minister in Israel who has threatened to blow up Egypt’s Aswan Dam, and to ‘flatten Gaza like a soccer-field’. We are outraged, no? Yet we are scarcely bothered by infinitely worse US aggression and mayhem in countless other countries – why? Because almost all western media play along with the American version of divide and conquer: we can do no harm, they can do no good. It is insidious, and only the few independent media, like the BBC and CBC, stand between us and the deluge of warped thinking.

Of course, nowhere has the Great American Divide been more apparent than in the current and catastrophic race to the next White House. There have been some pretty repulsive presidential candidates, but I can think of none so flamboyantly revolting than Donald Trump – but I don’t like Hilary much either. At best, she’d be dirty business as usual. They’re both up against an avowed socialist who, I fear, knows little about economics. Indeed, they’re all big on denunciatory rhetoric, and fanciful promises, or threats, but almost invisibly small on policies. When Trump says he’s going to make America great again, does he mean greater than it is with him in it? When, in fact, was America ‘great’? Hiroshima? Civil Rights? The Cold War? Korea? Vietnam? South and Central America? The useless War on Drugs? Iran? Afghanistan? Iraq? And now the Syrian vacillation? Forgive me, but I don’t perceive much greatness. I do, however, see divisive politics opening up a chasm amounting to a Cold, possibly Hot, Civil War. One is forced to wonder if there’s a way out of this dilemma. You can lead a cowboy’s horse to water but you can’t make the rider think. It’s not as if the Internet isn’t choc-a-bloc with insightful articles revealing the real issues at stake.

When I was in Iraq, writing for Harper’s magazine, I witnessed new levels of cunning in military intelligence. I wasn’t embedded, and you had to get permission from the army authorities to travel here or there. I was never refused, but the BBC and many national newspapers had a dreadful time. I realised that the Pentagon didn’t care what a few hundred thousand Harper’s­-reading intellectuals got to think about the war, but they cared tremendously what millions of BBC-watchers or New York Times-readers got to think – and this they monitored carefully. It does not augur well for the health of a society that nearly half of its members base their voting decisions on slogans and not the intricacy of issues. Trump supporters have said that there is nothing he could do to change their minds about voting for him. Nothing? Well, the good news is that he won’t win, and the bad news is that Hilary will. Where will this leave America? It will leave a gaping wound in which the divide between have-brains and don’t-care-to- think has never been more apparent, and will not easily be healed. It is not even really a question of education. No society has been able to deal effectively with those elements which simply don’t wish to participate in the advantages a democratic government offers them. In Canada we have the Hell’s Angels; in America you’ve got 100 million Trump supporters. Welcome to the Grand Canyon…

 

 Paul William Roberts

 

Politocrisy

Tags

9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Osama bin Laden, Palestine, politics, Saddam Hussein

After the travesty of 9/11, the United States attacks Afghanistan ferociously, and then invades. Many civilians are killed; nothing is achieved. The twin-towers terrorists are Egyptians and Saudi Arabians, not Afghans. But the U.S. is after Osama bin-Laden, who they believe to be the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks. He is not, as it turns out, but he’s also not entirely innocent. Eventually he’s found, in Pakistan, not Afghanistan, and murdered, or, rather, executed without a trial. In 2003, the U.S. invades Iraq, having shamelessly concocted a flimsy excuse, not to mention persuaded many, if not most, Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. He was not, yet Iraq is reduced to chaos and rubble, both of which conditions still persist over a decade later. The civilian death-toll exceeds one million; nothing is achieved, although America pretends to build schools, etc., none of which are completed.

The political world does not really protest these unwarranted and criminal actions.

Israel responds savagely to rocket attacks from Hamas militants in Gaza, however, and the world is appalled because many civilians are killed – a result of them being used by Hamas as human shields. Israel is merely defending itself, as it has a right to do, and as you or I would do if attacked. America was not defending itself in Afghanistan or Iraq. This is political hypocrisy – politocrisy.

Imagine the fuss there would be if Israel attacked Jordan and invaded Saudi Arabia, using some flimsy excuse about national security!

If Quebec separatist militants fired rockets into Ontario, how would Ottawa respond? With diplomacy? Through the U.N.? Unlikely. The army – or the Anglophone portion of it – would go in heavy, as they say, and take out the militants and their launchers. Pierre Trudeau suspended habeas corpus during the F.L.Q. crisis, which was a barroom rumpus compared with what Israel is currently enduring.

Naturally, one grieves for the innocent victims; yet one senses less grief for innocent Israelis than one does for innocent Palestinians. The Israelis can only defend themselves, however; but the Palestinians can vote Hamas out of existence, if they so choose. Knowing, as they must, that Hamas militants deliberately put civilians at risk, by launching rockets from heavily-populated zones, it is only a wonder that Palestinians do not produce a Ghandi, someone capable of achieving all their desired goals through non-violent means.