Sunday, September 02, 2007

Neoliberal and Neoconservative

In an article published in Commondreams, George Monbiot writes about the rise and meaning of neoliberalism. While the term is is heard frequently, few people know what it means. According to Monbiot, it means the maximum freedom to corporations, and the withdrawal of the state from everything except defense of private property and the nation's perimeter.

If that is neoliberalism, what is neoconservatism? One may suppose it is the similar, defiant, twist of an old label to a new and opposite one, rather like Leon Trotsky being an adopted name, that of Trotsky's (whose real name was Lev Bronstein, I think) jailer.

Neoconservatism is the revision of all things conservative, the active intervention of the state to promote a political agenda. From muscular use to suborning of the state is usually an inevitable journey, and its tale in 21st century America is captured by two fine articles, also in Commondreams; one by Ted Rall, the cartoonist, "We are all Gonzaleses now", and the other by Paul Campos (Gonzales & Son: The Legacy of An Honest Day’s Work).


Sunday, May 27, 2007

The Immigration Bill

A bill several hundred pages long, full of fine print, crafted in secret and sprung upon a Senate with little time to reflect, must necessarily be viewed with suspicion. Especially when the provisions talk about increasing the nation's legal population, at one swoop, by some 4% (12 million/300 million). A country which has a serious debate over whether breaking and entering into the country is really such a serious issue, and carries on with platitudes such as:
  • This is inevitable,
  • We cannot really do anything about it
  • Immigration is a net plus
  • We are a nation of immigrants
  • etc.
is making a virtue of out of lassitude and lack of will. Two articles, one by George Will in the Washington Post, and the other by Ann Coulter in Human Events, both bring this idiocy sharply to light. George Will writes:

Some Democrats argue that liberalism's teetering achievement, the welfare state, requires liberal immigration policies. The argument is: Today there are only 3.3 workers for every retiree. In January, the first of 77 million baby boomers begin to retire. By the time they have retired, in 2030, there will be 2.2 workers for every retiree -- but only if the workforce is replenished by 900,000 immigrants a year.

On Monday, however, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation stunned some senators who heard his argument that continuing, under family-based immigration, to import a low-skilled population will cost the welfare state far more than the immigrants' contributions to the economy and government. He argued that low-skilled immigrants are costly to the welfare state at every point in their life cycle and are very costly when elderly. Just the 9 million to 10 million adults already here illegally will, if given amnesty, cost an average of $300,000 -- cumulatively, more than $2.5 trillion-- in various entitlements (Social Security, food stamps, Medicaid, housing, etc.) over 30 years.

As to those who argue that finding the illegal immigrants is impossible, Ann Coulter writes in Importing a Slave Class:
If it's "impossible" to deport illegal aliens, how did we come to have so much specific information about them? I keep hearing they are Catholic, pro-life, hardworking, just dying to become American citizens, and will take jobs other Americans won't. Someone must have talked to them to gather all this information. Let's find that guy -- he must know where they are!

How do we even know there are 12 million of them? Why not 3 million, or 40 million? Maybe we should put the guy who counted them in charge of deporting them.
She also makes a telling rejoinder to the argument that "We can't deport them all":
The jejune fact that we "can't deport them all" is supposed to lead ineluctably to the conclusion that we must grant amnesty to illegal aliens -- and fast!

I'm astounded that debate has sunk so low that I need to type the following words, but: No law is ever enforced 100%.

We can't catch all rapists, so why not grant amnesty to rapists? Surely no one wants thousands of rapists living in the shadows! How about discrimination laws? Insider trading laws? Do you expect Bush to round up everyone who goes over the speed limit? Of course we can't do that. We can't even catch all murderers. What we need is "comprehensive murder reform." It's not "amnesty" -- we'll ask them to pay a small fine.
Finally, why this hurry? Why does this have to be done this week (or the next). First, establish the principle that breaking into the country does not pay. On this basis, other things can be discussed. Debates that are rushed through with a view to 'getting it behind us' usually have a way of returning and biting us in the behind. Witness the Democratic Senate's stupidity in the Iraq War debate of 2002.

See also: Immigration Bill's Point System.

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Frank Rich: Iraq, the Larger Sin

April 22, 2007

President Bush has skipped the funerals of the troops he sent to Iraq. He took his sweet time to get to Katrina-devastated New Orleans. But last week he raced to Virginia Tech with an alacrity not seen since he hustled from Crawford to Washington to sign a bill interfering in Terri Schiavo’s end-of-life medical care. Mr. Bush assumes the role of mourner in chief on a selective basis, and, as usual with the decider, the decisive factor is politics. Let Walter Reed erupt in scandal, and he’ll take six weeks to show his face — and on a Friday at that, to hide the story in the Saturday papers. The heinous slaughter in Blacksburg, Va., by contrast, was a rare opportunity for him to ostentatiously feel the pain of families whose suffering cannot be blamed on the administration.

But he couldn’t inspire the kind of public acclaim that followed his post-9/11 visit to ground zero or the political comeback that buoyed his predecessor after Oklahoma City. The cancer on the Bush White House, Iraq, is now spreading too fast. The president had barely returned to Washington when the empty hope of the “surge” was hideously mocked by a one-day Baghdad civilian death toll more than five times that of Blacksburg’s. McClatchy Newspapers reported that the death rate for American troops over the past six months was at its all-time high for this war.

At home, the president is also hobbled by the Iraq cancer’s metastasis — the twin implosions of Alberto Gonzales and Paul Wolfowitz. Technically, both men have been pilloried for sins unrelated to the war. The attorney general has repeatedly been caught changing his story about the extent of his involvement in purging eight federal prosecutors. The Financial Times caught the former deputy secretary of defense turned World Bank president privately dictating the extravagant terms of a State Department sinecure for a crony (a k a romantic partner) that showers her with more take-home pay than Condoleezza Rice.

Yet each man’s latest infractions, however serious, are mere misdemeanors next to their roles in the Iraq war. What’s being lost in the Beltway uproar is the extent to which the lying, cronyism and arrogance showcased by the current scandals are of a piece with the lying, cronyism and arrogance that led to all the military funerals that Mr. Bush dares not attend. Having slept through the fraudulent selling of the war, Washington is still having trouble confronting the big picture of the Bush White House. Its dense web of deceit is the deliberate product of its amoral culture, not a haphazard potpourri of individual blunders.

Mr. Gonzales’s politicizing of the Justice Department is a mere bagatelle next to his role as White House counsel in 2002, when he helped shape the administration’s legal argument to justify torture. That paved the way for Abu Ghraib, the episode that destroyed America’s image and gave terrorists a moral victory. But his efforts to sabotage national security didn’t end there. In a front-page exposé lost in the Imus avalanche two Sundays ago, The Washington Post uncovered Mr. Gonzales’s reckless role in vetting the nomination of Bernard Kerik as secretary of homeland security in December 2004.

Mr. Kerik, you may recall, withdrew from consideration for that cabinet post after a week of embarrassing headlines. Back then, the White House ducked any culpability for the mess by attributing it to a single legal issue, a supposedly undocumented nanny, and by pinning it on a single, nonadministration scapegoat, Mr. Kerik’s longtime patron, Rudy Giuliani. The president’s spokesman at the time, Scott McClellan, told reporters that the White House had had “no reason to believe” that Mr. Kerik lied during his vetting process and that it would be inaccurate to say that process had been rushed.

Thanks to John Solomon and Peter Baker of The Post, we now know that Mr. McClellan’s spin was no more accurate than his exoneration of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby in the Wilson leak case. The Kerik vetting process was indeed rushed — by Mr. Gonzales — and the administration had every reason to believe that it was turning over homeland security to a liar. Mr. Gonzales was privy from the get-go to a Kerik dossier ablaze with red flags pointing to “questionable financial deals, an ethics violation, allegations of mismanagement and a top deputy prosecuted for corruption,” not to mention a “friendship with a businessman who was linked to organized crime.” Yet Mr. Gonzales and the president persisted in shoving Mr. Kerik into the top job of an already troubled federal department encompassing 22 agencies, 180,000 employees and the very safety of America in the post-9/11 era.

Mr. Kerik may soon face federal charges, and at a most inopportune time for the Giuliani presidential campaign. But it’s as a paradigm of the Bush White House’s waging of the Iraq war that the Kerik case is most telling. The crucial point to remember is this: Even had there been no alleged improprieties in the former police chief’s New York résumé, there still would have been his public record in Iraq to disqualify him from any administration job.

The year before Mr. Kerik’s nomination to the cabinet, he was dispatched by the president to take charge of training the Iraqi police — and completely failed at that mission. As Rajiv Chandrasekaran recounts in his invaluable chronicle of Green Zone shenanigans, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” Mr. Kerik slept all day and held only two staff meetings, one upon arrival and one for the benefit of a Times reporter doing a profile. Rather than train Iraqi police, Mr. Kerik gave upbeat McCain-esque appraisals of the dandy shopping in Baghdad’s markets.

Had Mr. Kerik actually helped stand up an Iraqi police force instead of hastening its descent into a haven for sectarian death squads, there might not now be extended tours for American troops in an open-ended escalation of the war. But in the White House’s priorities, rebuilding Iraq came in a poor third to cronyism and domestic politics. Mr. Kerik’s P.R. usefulness as a symbol of 9/11 was particularly irresistible to an administration that has exploited the carnage of 9/11 in ways both grandiose (to gin up the Iraq invasion) and tacky (in 2004 campaign ads).

Mr. Kerik was an exploiter of 9/11 in his own right: he had commandeered an apartment assigned to ground zero police and rescue workers to carry out his extramarital tryst with the publisher Judith Regan. The sex angle of Mr. Wolfowitz’s scandal is a comparable symptom of the hubris that warped the judgment of those in power after 9/11. Not only did he help secure Shaha Riza her over-the-top raise in 2005, but as The Times reported, he also helped get her a junket to Iraq when he was riding high at the Pentagon in 2003.

No one seems to know what she actually accomplished there, but the bill was paid by a Defense Department contractor that has since come under official scrutiny for its noncompetitive contracts and poor performance. So it went with the entire Iraq fiasco.

You don’t have to be a cynic to ask if the White House’s practice of bestowing better jobs on those who bungled the war might be a form of hush money. Mr. Wolfowitz was promoted to the World Bank despite a Pentagon record that included (in part) his prewar hyping of bogus intelligence about W.M.D. and a nonexistent 9/11-Saddam connection; his assurance to the world that Iraq’s oil revenues would pay for reconstruction; and his public humiliation of Gen. Eric Shinseki after the general dared tell Congress (correctly) that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to secure Iraq after the invasion.

Once the war began, Mr. Wolfowitz cited national security to bar businesses from noncoalition countries (like Germany) from competing for major contracts in Iraq. That helped ensure the disastrous monopoly of Halliburton and other White House-connected companies, including the one that employed Ms. Riza.

Had Iraqi reconstruction, like the training of Iraqi police, not been betrayed by politics and cronyism, the Iraq story might have a different ending. But maybe not all that different. The cancer on the Bush White House connects and contaminates all its organs. It’s no surprise that one United States attorney fired without plausible cause by the Gonzales Justice Department, Carol Lam, was in hot pursuit of defense contractors with administration connections. Or that another crony brought by Mr. Wolfowitz to the World Bank was caught asking the Air Force secretary to secure a job for her brother at a defense contractor while she was overseeing aspects of the Air Force budget at the White House. A government with values this sleazy couldn’t possibly win a war.

Like the C.I.A. leak case, each new scandal is filling in a different piece of the elaborate White House scheme to cover up the lies that took us into Iraq and the failures that keep us mired there. As the cover-up unravels and Congress steps up its confrontation over the war’s endgame, our desperate president is reverting to his old fear-mongering habit of invoking 9/11 incessantly in every speech. The more we learn, the more it’s clear that he’s the one with reason to be afraid.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

You Said It!

From the NY Times

Imus in the Hornet's Nest

April 11, 2007, 5:42 pm
Dick Cavett

Don Imus must feel as if he has been run over by a cement truck, which then reversed and backed over him.

It’s probably true that the women on the Rutgers basketball team are not Imus fans and, as he says, they probably didn’t know who he is. It would be interesting to know exactly how the ladies got the bad news. Did someone say, for example, “A broadcaster announced on the air that you have undesirable ethnic hairdos and that you are prostitutes”?

Imus claims he doesn’t know how this happened and brought the ceiling down on him. As one who has had many opportunities to misspeak and to offend — and has taken them — I know how he feels. Much of the show’s appeal has to do with the entertaining danger in watching Imus and his colleagues dance on “the line” and sometimes on either side of it. This time he stepped off the starboard side onto a hornets’ nest, to mix metaphors.

Is there not a sort of a conundrum in everyone’s agreeing that the words are horrible, and not fit to be broadcast or heard — and then hearing them re-aired every 20 minutes on most TV channels? Not even euphemizing the H-word. Some of the seeming astonishment expressed about how well-spoken, attractive, articulate and self-possessed the basketball players are — all true — at times bordered a bit uncomfortably on Obama’s being called (surprisingly?) “articulate” and “clean.”

Would a white team be surprisingly articulate?

I don’t know all the questions to be asked about this. Some of them would be: Who said the words? What was the context? How damaging were the words meant to be, and how damaging were they in fact? What is known of the speaker? Is he a racist? Does he discriminate against black people? Has he ever done anything good for them?

It has reminded me of a hilarious old black comic I saw once at the Apollo Theater — the best house for comedy. In style, he affected lack of education and worked in dialect. “White folks sometimes seem amazed to see us folks can stand up on our hind legs.” (Audience giggles.) “And SPEAK.” (Big laugh.) “Sometimes I think they gonna offer me a dog biscuit.” (Pandemonium.)

At such times as this, the camera-shy reverend Al Sharpton can be counted on to pop up, this time in Draconian mode. He wants Imus out, gone, the show canceled and Imus dead, professionally at least.

Hold on a minute, Your Amplitude.

Millions like this show. All kinds of people, from college professors to firemen to actors, writers and — I’m told even G.I.’s in beds who have survived both Iraq and Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Nobody in his right mind defends what Imus said. Certainly not Imus. For decades, he has been an equal-opportunity offender. For many the combination of this style plus his contrasting high-quality guest list add up to the program’s quirky appeal. But it was inevitable that one day, as just happened, a land mine was stepped on by the risk-taking host. It shouldn’t be confused with Hiroshima.

Imus retooled his show and himself from an earlier persona, making it a program that welcomes a who’s who of guests. This very upgrading makes the blunder stand out in starker contrast than it would if his show were solely goofball, escapist entertainment.

I’ve noticed over the years that the hate-mail, get-’em-off-the-air crowd always tries to constitute itself as a pressure group that will “write to all your sponsors.” They want to not just get you off the air but — to savor the full enjoyment — bring you to your knees financially. In rare cases where they have succeeded, the health of their target has been destroyed. This is what that old bag Lillian Hellmann did to Mary McCarthy.

But Imus, I’m sure, has a shekel or two stashed away in case he were bounced or just decided to chuck it. He is a reader and would not be at a loss to fill his new free hours.

What is Donald Imus really like? I appear on his show sometimes, but I don’t pretend to know what all is concealed by the mask he works behind as an entertainer. He appears to be white, gentile and a family man. He’s a skilled conversationalist, an experienced broadcaster, a wry humorist and, lest we forget, an authentic philanthropist.

In addition, he belongs to a few minorities himself. He is a blonde, a genuine cowboy, a recognized bugler and one of three people in the media who pronounces both C’s in arctic.

The final irony of all this is that when the suffering is past, good is likely to come of it. But if you change, Donald, don’t throw away all of the old Imus. We don’t want you to come back as Pat Boone.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

The Martin Luther King you don't see on TV

40 years ago today, Martin Luther King gave a speech at the Riverside Church in New York. By a coincidence, it was exactly one year before he was to die. Read the full text. King quotes James Russell Lowell's lines, "Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide, In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;", no less true today than it was 40 years ago.

An article marking Dr. King's death anniversary today, and why his activities from 1965-1968 are so little publicized, first drew my attention to this speech, which is surely one of his most memorable, and least known. The article, by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, is entitled: "The Martin Luther King you don't see on TV".

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Movement by Micrometers


Mr. Jefferson’s Inheritors

By Niranjan Ramakrishnan

"I belong to no organized party", Will Rogers once boasted famously, "I am a Democrat". Today, he would be dumbstruck by the conformity that has overtaken his party.

It is hard to imagine a time which cried out more for a vigorous opposition. Yet, when it was needed most, the Democratic Party failed to provide any check on a government run amok.

President Bush spoke last week, assuring his listeners that with 20,000 additional troops, he could hold off the Middle East from exploding. Simultaneously, he was also telling them there were no guarantees, that this was a last attempt before calling it a day in Iraq. Having destroyed a noncombatant nation and triggered the deaths of thousands (30,000 by his own admission, 655,000, according to Lancet), here he was, telling us how he proposed to save Iraq and the rest of the world. "Sau choohe kha ke billi Haj pe chali", as the saying goes (not to put too fine a point on it).

To be fair, Mr. Bush has been no less assiduous in devastating his own country. Today it was reported that the CIA and the Pentagon were accessing people's bank records without any official warrant. Earlier this month, it was discovered Bush had ordered postal mail to be intercepted and read without a warrant. Habeas Corpus is no longer guaranteed in the United States, phone conversations may be listened to, email monitored, library and book purchases tracked, all without any court order. Mr. Bush has been deciding which laws he will or will not choose to obey, using an artifice called a 'signing statement'. This is what the birthplace of modern democracy, the home of 'government of laws, not men', has become in our day.

At a more prosaic level, if the war has reduced Iraq’s infrastructure to rubble, America’s own can hardly be called shipshape. The tab for the war is already $350 billion, money which, experts have calculated, would’ve provided for hundreds of schools, built scores of hospitals, put thousands through college, or even paid for the inspection of all cargo coming into the United States, a oft-voiced concern. The budget surplus has been turned to a record deficit.

"Where were you when Kennedy died?", the question goes. So might the Democrats be asked, "Where were you when a boy president, taking power in a doubtful election, careened through and broke every norm in your own country and across the world?

"Missing in Action" (MIA) is mot juste. Who can forget that it was a Democratic-controlled Senate which gave President Bush the authority to go to war with Iraq!

It was October 2002, a month before the midterm election. Heedless of warnings from the likes of Sen. Robert Byrd, a majority of Democratic senators pushed for the war resolution, fearful of being labeled "soft on terror" by Bush and his twin Svengalis, Cheney and Rove. But this Faustian deal availed them nothing; the election took away the very majority they had compromised so much to retain.

By 2004, it was clear that the whole WMD thing was a crock. Yet, not one prominent Democrat receded from his or her vote. John Kerry even kept saying that, knowing what he knew now, he would still have voted for the war resolution. Neither Kerry, nor Hillary Clinton, nor any other big-name Democrat, deigned to visit Cindy Sheehan at Camp Casey outside Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, where she was on a Gandhian satyagraha to seek an answer from President Bush to a simple question: for what noble cause did her son die fighting in Iraq?

Bush would not even meet with her. Neither, to its everlasting shame, would the Democratic leadership.

In the end, the Democratic Party never took a bold stand on the two issues of our time, the Iraq War, and the shredding of the American Constitution.

By 2006, the country had itself moved far ahead of the Democrats. Bush’s dropping poll numbers lent them enough calcium to start speaking out on Iraq, though careful seldom to raise the issue of the Original Sin, content merely to critique Bush’s 'conduct' of the war.

Nevertheless, so reviled had Bush’s Republican Party become, all across the nation, in states red and blue, that the elections gave the Democrats a nice majority in the House, and unexpected control of the Senate.

Early indications are that caution is still their watchword, not impeachment. They will criticize the ‘surge’ but not say a word about the 'occupation'.

Still, there is euphoria. Because, to paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, you have to go to bat with the opposition you have, not the one you might wish you had.

If in these testing hours the Democrats were craven, the Republicans were in enthusiastic lock-step with the administration's lawlessness. Together, they call to mind these lines from a famous novel, "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness[…], and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

Tom and Daisy? Surely Fitzgerald meant George and Hillary...?

Torture by Worms

February 18, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

JIMMA, Ethiopia

Presidents are supposed to be strong, and on his latest visit to Africa Jimmy Carter proved himself strong enough to weep.

The first stop of Mr. Carter’s four-nation African trip was Ghana, where he visited his projects to wipe out the Guinea worm, a horrendous two-foot-long parasite that lives inside the body and finally pops out, causing excruciating pain.

Mr. Carter was shaken by the victims he met, including a 57-year-old woman with a Guinea worm coming out of her nipple.

“She and her medical attendants said she had another coming out her genitals between her legs, and one each coming out of both feet,” Mr. Carter added. “And so she had four Guinea worms emerging simultaneously.”

“Little 3-, 4- and 5-year-old children were screaming uncontrollably with pain” because of the worms emerging from their flesh, Mr. Carter said. “I cried, along with the children.”

We tend to think of human rights in terms of a right to vote, a right to free speech, a right to assembly. But a child should also have a right not to suffer agony because of a worm that is easily preventable, as well as a right not to go blind because of a lack of medication that costs a dollar or two, even a right not to die for lack of a $5 mosquito net.

As president, Mr. Carter put the issue of human rights squarely on the national agenda. Now Mr. Carter argues — and he’s dead right — that we conceive of human rights too narrowly as political and civil rights, and that we also need to fight for the human right of children to live healthy lives.

He has led the way in waging that battle. Because of Mr. Carter’s two-decade battle against Guinea worm disease, it is expected to be eradicated worldwide within the next five years. It will be the first ailment to be eliminated since smallpox in 1977, and it has become a race between the worm and the ex-president to see who outlasts the other.

“I’m determined to live long enough to see no cases of Guinea worm anywhere in the world,” Mr. Carter said as he walked in blue jeans through a couple of villages in a remote corner of southwestern Ethiopia, the third country of his African tour.

After leaving the White House, Mr. Carter ended up “adopting” diseases like Guinea worm disease, river blindness, elephantiasis, trachoma and schistosomiasis that afflict the world’s most voiceless people. These are horrific diseases that cause unimaginable suffering, yet they rarely get attention, treatment or research funding because their victims are impoverished and invisible.

When Mr. Carter met with Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, then Pakistan’s president, President Zia had never heard of Guinea worm and didn’t know it existed in Pakistan. Nor did his health minister. But after Mr. Carter put the issue on the agenda, Pakistan worked energetically with the Carter Center to eliminate the parasite in that country.

The villages here in Ethiopia that Mr. Carter visited cradle a fast-moving creek, making a lovely image of thatch huts and bubbling water. But the creek is home to the black flies whose bites spread the parasite that causes river blindness, leading to unbearable itching and often eventually to blindness.

“It’s almost impossible to imagine the suffering of people with river blindness,” Mr. Carter said as he traipsed through the village beside his wife, Rosalynn.

Already, Mr. Carter’s campaign is making huge progress against the disease.

Kemeru Befita, a woman washing her clothes in the creek near Mr. Carter, told me that two of her children had caught river blindness in the last couple of months. After a visit to the witch doctor didn’t help, she took them to a clinic where — thanks to Mr. Carter’s program — they received medicine that killed the baby worms. They are two of the nearly 10 million people to whom the Carter Center gave medication last year alone, who won’t go blind.

At the end of the day, this one-term president who left office a pariah in his own party will transform the lives of more people in more places over a longer period of time than any other recent president. And I hope that he can also transform our conception of human rights, so that we show an interest not only in the human rights of people suffering from the oppression of dictators, but also from the even more brutal tyranny of blindness, malaria and worms.

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Molly Ivins Dies

With wit, conscience and courage, Molly Ivins exposed the sham of the Bush administration before and after its scourge began. She died of cancer on Jan 31. I once heard her speak, on television, at a meeting to protest the Patriot Act and the assault on civil liberties post 9-11. She was full of Texas adages, making everyone laugh as only she could, even as she told the cold truth. If we had a few more journalists like her, Iraq would never have been launched.

Here are a few tributes to her. But first, here's her final column, still fighting, as she knew she was at the end of her life. She was 62.

Enough is Enough (Jan 26, 2007)

I remember Molly (John Nichols' Tribute in The Nation)

New York Times Tribute

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Gandhi Photographs, Solzhenitsyn's Harvard speech

On Gandhi's death anniversary, Slate has published a set of pictures taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson, the photographer. (Thanks, Anand, for the link).

By chance, I read Solzhenitsyn's Harvard commencement speech of 1978 yesterday. It could have been given by Gandhi, reading out from "Hind Swaraj". Or Lohia from "Marx, Gandhi and Socialism". As he left Russia, Solzhenitsyn smuggled out a single message to the Russian people, "Live not by Lies". He tries, in this speech, to say the same thing to America. The warning, given 29 years ago, acquires an air of clairvoyance today.

Here's the address in full:

A World Split Apart
Speech by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at Harvard, 1978.

am sincerely happy to be here with you on the occasion of the 327th commencement of this old and illustrious university. My congratulations and best wishes to all of today’s graduates.

Harvard’s motto is "VERITAS." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us as soon as our concentration begins to flag, all the while leaving the illusion that we are continuing to pursue it. This is the source of much discord. Also, truth seldom is sweet; it is almost invariably bitter. A measure of truth is included in my speech today, but I offer it as a friend, not as an adversary.

Three years ago in the United States I said certain things that were rejected and appeared unacceptable. Today, however, many people agree with what I said . . .

The split in today’s world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of destroying each other. However, the understanding of the split too often is limited to this political conception: the illusion according to which danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is both more profound and more alienating, that the rifts are more numerous than one can see at first glance. These deep manifold splits bear the danger of equally manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a kingdom — in this case, our Earth — divided against itself cannot stand.

There is the concept of the Third World: thus, we already have three worlds. Undoubtedly, however, the number is even greater; we are just too far away to see. Every ancient and deeply rooted self-contained culture, especially if it is spread over a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes a self-contained world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. As a minimum, we must include in this China, India, the Muslim world, and Africa, if indeed we accept the approximation of viewing the latter two as uniform.

For one thousand years Russia belonged to such a category, although Western thinking systematically committed the mistake of denying its special character and therefore never understood it, just as today the West does not understand Russia in Communist captivity. And while it may be that in past years Japan has increasingly become, in effect, a Far West, drawing ever closer to Western ways (I am no judge here), Israel, I think, should not be reckoned as part of the West, if only because of the decisive circumstance that its state system is fundamentally linked to its religion.

How short a time ago, relatively, the small world of modern Europe was easily seizing colonies all over the globe, not only without anticipating any real resistance, but usually with contempt for any possible values in the conquered people’s approach to life. It all seemed an overwhelming success, with no geographic limits. Western society expanded in a triumph of human independence and power. And all of a sudden the twentieth century brought the clear realization of this society’s fragility.

We now see that the conquests proved to be short lived and precarious (and this, in turn, points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests). Relations with the former colonial world now have switched to the opposite extreme and the Western world often exhibits an excess of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns, will be sufficient for the West to clear this account.

But the persisting blindness of superiority continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems, the best in theory and the most attractive in practice; that all those other worlds are but temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in that direction. But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, a result of mistakenly measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development bears little resemblance to all this.

The anguish of a divided world gave birth to the theory of convergence between the leading Western countries and the Soviet Union. It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not evolving toward each other and that neither one can be transformed into the other without violence. Besides, convergence inevitably means acceptance of the other side’s defects, too. and this can hardly suit anyone.

If I were today addressing an audience in my country, in my examination of the overall pattern of the world’s rifts I would have concentrated on the calamities of the East. But since my forced exile in the West has now lasted four years and since my audience is a Western one, I think it may be of greater interest to concentrate on certain aspects of the contemporary West, such as I see them.

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.

Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And the decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood, is ironically emphasized by occasional outbursts and inflexibility on the part of those same functionaries when dealing with weak governments and with countries that lack support, or with doomed currents which clearly cannot offer resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.

Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?

When the modern Western states were being formed, it was proclaimed as a principle that governments are meant to serve man and that man lives in order to be free and pursue happiness. (See, for example, the American Declaration of Independence.) Now at last during past decades technical and social progress has permitted the realization of such aspirations: the welfare state.

Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and in such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness, in the debased sense of the word which has come into being during those same decades. (In the process, however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to this end imprint many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to carefully conceal such feelings. This active and tense competition comes to dominate all human thought and does not in the least open a way to free spiritual development.)

The individual’s independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed; the majority of the people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, preparing them for and summoning them toward physical bloom, happiness, and leisure, the possession of material goods, money, and leisure, toward an almost unlimited freedom in the choice of pleasures. So who should now renounce all this, why and for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good and particularly in the nebulous case when the security of one’s nation must be defended in an as yet distant land?

Even biology tells us that a high degree of habitual well-being is not advantageous to a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to take off its pernicious mask.

Western society has chosen for itself the organization best suited to its purposes and one I might call legalistic. The limits of human rights and rightness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting, and manipulating law (though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert). Every conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the ultimate solution.

If one is risen from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be right, and urge self-restraint or a renunciation of these rights, call for sacrifice and selfless risk: this would simply sound absurd. Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of: everybody strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of the legal frames. (An oil company is legally blameless when it buys up an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to purchase it.)

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take full advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.

And it will be simply impossible to bear up to the trials of this threatening century with nothing but the supports of a legalistic structure.

Today’s Western society has revealed the inequality between the freedom for good deeds and the freedom for evil deeds. A statesman who wants to achieve something highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; thousands of hasty (and irresponsible) critics cling to him at all times; he is constantly rebuffed by parliament and the press. He has to prove that his every step is well founded and absolutely flawless. Indeed, an outstanding, truly great person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind does not get any chance to assert himself; dozens of traps will be set for him from the beginning. Thus mediocrity triumphs under the guise of democratic restraints.

It is feasible and easy everywhere to undermine administrative power and it has in fact been drastically weakened in all Western countries. The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

On the other hand, destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people’s right not to look and not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

And what shall we say about the dark realms of overt criminality? Legal limits (especially in the United States) are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also some misuse of such freedom. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency — all with the support of thousands of defenders in the society. When a government earnestly undertakes to root out terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorist’s civil rights. There is quite a number of such cases.

This tilt of freedom toward evil has come about gradually, but it evidently stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man — the master of the world — does not bear any evil within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected. Yet strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still remains a great deal of crime; there even is considerably more of it than in the destitute and lawless Soviet society. (There is a multitude of prisoners in our camps who are termed criminals, but most of them never committed any crime; they merely tried to defend themselves against a lawless state by resorting to means outside the legal framework.)

The press, too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word "press" to include all the media.) But what use does it make of it?

Here again, the overriding concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no true moral responsibility for distortion or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist or a newspaper have to the readership or to history? If they have misled public opinion by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, even if they have contributed to mistakes on a state level, do we know of any case of open regret voiced by the same journalist or the same newspaper? No; this would damage sales. A nation may be the worse for such a mistake, but the journalist always gets away with it. It is most likely that he will start writing the exact opposite to his previous statements with renewed aplomb.

Because instant and credible information is required, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors, and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be refuted; they settle into the readers’ memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading judgments are expressed everyday, confusing readers, and then left hanging?

The press can act the role of public opinion or miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters pertaining to the nation’s defense publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion into the privacy of well-known people according to the slogan "Everyone is entitled to know everything." (But this is a false slogan of a false era; far greater in value is the forfeited right of people not to know, not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life has no need for this excessive and burdening flow of information.)

Hastiness and superficiality — these are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century and more than anywhere else this is manifested in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press; it is contrary to its nature. The press merely picks out sensational formulas.

Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within Western countries, exceeding that of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. Yet one would like to ask: According to what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? In the Communist East, a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has voted Western journalists into their positions of power, for how long a time, and with what prerogatives?

There is yet another surprise for someone coming from the totalitarian East with its rigorously unified press: One discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole (the spirit of the time), generally accepted patterns of judgment, and maybe common corporate interests, the sum effect being not competition but unification. Unrestrained freedom exists for the press, but not for readership, because newspapers mostly transmit in a forceful and emphatic way those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and that general trend.

Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block dangerous herd development.

In America, I have received letters from highly intelligent persons — maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but the country cannot hear him because the media will not provide him with a forum. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to a blindness which is perilous in our dynamic era. An example is the self-deluding interpretation of the state of affairs in the contemporary world that functions as a sort of petrified armor around people’s minds, to such a degree that human voices from seventeen countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will be broken only by the inexorable crowbar of events.

I have mentioned a few traits of Western life which surprise and shock a new arrival to this world . The purpose and scope of this speech will not allow me to continue such a survey, in particular to look into the impact of these characteristics on important aspects of a nation’s life, such as elementary education, advanced education in the humanities, and art.

It is almost universally recognized that the West shows all the world the way to successful economic development, even though in past years it has been sharply offset by chaotic inflation. However, many people living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society. They despise it or accuse it of no longer being up to the level of maturity by mankind. And this causes many to sway toward socialism, which is a false and dangerous current.

I hope that no one present will suspect me of expressing my partial criticism of the Western system in order to suggest socialism as an alternative. No; with the experience of a country where socialism has been realized, I shall not speak for such an alternative. The mathematician Igor Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliantly argued book entitled Socialism; this is a penetrating historical analysis demonstrating that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death. Shafarevich’s book was published in France almost two years ago and so far no one has been found to refute it. It will shortly be published in English in the U.S.

But should I be asked, instead, whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my country, I would frankly have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through deep suffering, people in our own country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just enumerated are extremely saddening.

A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human personality in the West while in the East it has become firmer and stronger. Six decades for our people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe; during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. The complex and deadly crush of life has produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting personalities than those generated by standardized Western well-being. Therefore, if our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant points.

Of course, a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case in our country. But it is also demeaning for it to stay on such a soulless and smooth plane of legalism, as is the case in yours. After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.

All this is visible to numerous observers from all the worlds of our planet. The Western way of life is less and less likely to become the leading model.

There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, a decline of the arts or a lack of great statesmen. Indeed, sometimes the warnings are quite explicit and concrete. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.

But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive. You can feel their pressure, yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?

How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present debility? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing steadily in accordance with its proclaimed social intentions, hand in hand with a dazzling progress in technology. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.

This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very foundation of thought in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was born in the Renaissance and has found political expression since the Age of Enlightenment. It became the basis for political and social doctrine and could be called rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the pro-claimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of all.

The turn introduced by the Renaissance was probably inevitable historically: the Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, having become an intolerable despotic repression of man’s physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. But then we recoiled from the spirit and embraced all that is material, excessively and incommensurately. The humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs.

Everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtle and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any higher meaning. Thus gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today. Mere freedom per se does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and even adds a number of new ones.

And yet in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted on the ground that man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding one thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims.

Subsequently, however, all such limitations were eroded everywhere in the West; a total emancipation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming ever more materialistic. The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistic selfishness of the Western approach to the world has reached its peak and the world has found itself in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century.

As humanism in its development was becoming more and more materialistic, it also increasingly allowed concepts to be used first by socialism and then by communism, so that Karl Marx was able to say, in 1844, that "communism is naturalized humanism."

This statement has proved to be not entirely unreasonable. One does not see the same stones in the foundations of an eroded humanism and of any type of socialism: boundless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility (which under Communist regimes attains the stage of antireligious dictatorship); concentration on social structures with an allegedly scientific approach. (This last is typical of both the Age of Enlightenment and of Marxism.) It is no accident that all of communism’s rhetorical vows revolve around Man (with a capital M) and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today’s West and today’s East? But such is the logic of materialistic development.

The interrelationship is such, moreover, that the current of materialism which is farthest to the left, and is hence the most consistent, always proves to be stronger, more attractive, and victorious. Humanism which has lost its Christian heritage cannot prevail in this competition. Thus during the past centuries and especially in recent decades, as the process became more acute, the alignment of forces was as follows: Liberalism was inevitably pushed aside by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism, and socialism could not stand up to communism.

The communist regime in the East could endure and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who (feeling the kinship!) refused to see communism’s crimes, and when they no longer could do so, they tried to justify these crimes. The problem persists: In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. And yet Western intellectuals still look at it with considerable interest and empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East.

I am not examining the case of a disaster brought on by a world war and the changes which it would produce in society. But as long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we must lead an everyday life. Yet there is a disaster which is already very much with us. I am referring to the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness.

It has made man the measure of all things on earth — imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.

We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West. This is the essence of the crisis: the split in the world is less terrifying than the similarity of the disease afflicting its main sections.

If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it.

It is imperative to reappraise the scale of the usual human values; its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President’s performance should be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or to the availability of gasoline. Only by the voluntary nurturing in ourselves of freely accepted and serene self-restraint can mankind rise above the world stream of materialism.

Today it would be retrogressive to hold on to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Such social dogmatism leaves us helpless before the trials of our times.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, life will have to change in order not to perish on its own. We cannot avoid reassessing the fundamental definitions of human life and society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities should be ruled by material expansion above all? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our integral spiritual life?

If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.

The ascension is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage. No one on earth has any other way left but — upward.

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

A Deadly December



Two Satraps and an Emperor

Niranjan Ramakrishnan

Three famous people died in December 2006. Everyone knows what 'Emperor' means. But what is a "Satrap"?

The word, which is usually said to be of Latin and Greek origin, actually turns out to be from Sanskrit, via Old Persian. The root is "Kshethra Paavana", which means "region protector", which is to say, a vassal who oversees a province or area on behalf of an emperor. Ancient empires used satraps to manage far-flung possessions, a tried and tested technique based on an established spoils system. The satrap, or local lord, exercised wide powers over his subjects, unhindered by the Empire in whose name he ruled, so long as he proclaimed fealty to the Emperor, and, of course, forked over a suitable portion of the revenues from his region.

It is, come to think of it, one of the oldest recorded applications of outsourcing. The Greek and Roman empires used it, as evidenced by the word itself. Empires in India did the same: the great Emperor Ashoka (circa 300 BC) was known to have a great many satraps, as did the Mughals (1526-1707).

So has the practice continued, right down to our times, although the nature and form of the spoils system have evolved. During the Cold War, the West and the Communist bloc's each had their own set of satraps, turning the world into a checkerboard of allegiances.

When Alexander the Great invaded the Punjab, he faced a local king, Porus, who fought with great valor before being defeated. When Porus was brought before Alexander in chains,the story goes, Alexander mocked him, asking, "How would you like to be treated?" Porus is said to have replied, "Like a king treats a king!" Alexander was so impressed by his bearing and dignity, it is reported, not to mention his bravery, that he gave Porus his kingdom back, and made him a satrap. I've always wondered how a spirited soul like Porus could come to an accommodation that would leave him a vassal. But then, the swallowing of one's pride at the right time is evidently a time-honored skill essential to both business and statecraft. How many times have we not seen proud CEOs of an acquired company mutating into meek heads of departments in the new dispensation; all it took was a few million dollars!

Things might go the other way too. Sometimes, a satrap would get too big for his boots, and develop notions of independence or delusions of grandeur. At other times, satraps would attempt a well judged leap into the arms of another empire, in search of a better deal. The task of an empire, then, became the decapitation of that satrap and installation of a new one. Since this was a lengthy and costly proposition, wise emperors would make sure the vassals were kept in fair humor.

The age of Revolutions changed this some. Woodrow Wilson's encouragement of nationality changed it even more. Whereas "Civis Romanus Sum" was once a proud cry, no local ruler could retain/bolster the self-respect of his people any longer by open fealty to an outside empire. Subtler ways were needed. Nothing was more vexatious than democracy, where, by definition, there could be multiple opinions, even on which Empire to align with. Far easier to foster a dictatorship as with the old satrapy, where keeping the local ruler in power was all it took to retain allegiance. As a corollary, the more emasculated the people, the less effort required to maintaining the satrapy.

History will note that two former satraps of America, in two different hemispheres, died at the end of 2006. Both ran regimes that, everyone agrees, perpetrated untold numbers of crimes -- murders and disappearances, torture and rape.

One was sought by half-a-dozen countries for many years, yet escaped prosecution for "crimes against humanity", partially with the help of United States. He died of natural causes, before he could be tried, having used every artifice to avoid the certain prospect of the noose.

The other, was hunted down and captured by the United States, and kept in its custody for three years. He was tried, after a fashion, in circumstances that would hardly be called dispassionate by any Western standard. A sentence of death handed down, for "crimes against humanity". Following an appeals process that was over almost before it started, he was executed by hanging. Saddam Hussein mounted the gallows saying that he was not afraid, for this was the path he had chosen.

Fazed less and less by irony with each passing day, America lionized Pinochet, upon his death, as a visionary responsible for Chile's resurgence. In Saddam Hussein's case, it welcomed his execution as a vindication of the judicial process. All this while simultaneously heaping praise upon a recently departed President Ford, for pardoning President Nixon in advance, thereby sparing the nation the agony of... the selfsame judicial process!

It is testament to our public diplomacy that women in India, among other parts of the world, have vowed to name their newborn sons "Saddam".

Perhaps it is written that he who rises by a hanging (chad) will fall by a hanging (sad).


Niranjan Ramakrishnan is a writer living on the West Coast. He can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com.