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la vie viennoise

A great website for serious left wing commentary and news is ZDnet. They have a print edition available in the United States by subscription for just $19/year. As I much prefer reading things offline, I would subscribe were I physically able to receive the magazine.

Here are some excerpts from a 9000! word interview with Noam Chomsky. Chomsky's first bon mot provides a vivid image for the current state of intellectual property rights.

Even the free trade agreements, so-called, are highly protectionists, the extra-ordinary intellectual property rights go way beyond anything existed in the past those are purely protectionist. They are designed to maintain monopoly rights for major corporations. If the currently rich countries had ever been faced with such rules, the US would now be exporting fish and fur.

At the end of the interview, there were three or four difficult letters to Noam Chomsky from readers who accused him of just hating the United States and having nothing productive to say. His evaluation of the situation strangely invokes biblical references.

There were people in the biblical period who we would call dissident intellectuals, they're called Prophets. It's a bad translation of an obscure Hebrew word. But if you look at what the Prophets were saying, it's what we would call dissident intellectuals. Geopolitical critique, a call for justice and freedom and so on. Yes, that's dissident intellectuals. How were they treated? Well? No, they were denounced as haters of Israel. They were driven into the desert, they were imprisoned, reviled. Now, there were intellectuals at that time who were very highly respected, namely the flatterers at the court. Hundreds of years later they were called false prophets. That's the way it works. It's the flatterers at the court who are typically the mainstream of the intellectuals.

So Noam Chomsky sees himself as part of a Hebrew tradition stretching back to the beginning of recorded time. Quite a neat end run around the self-hating charge.

It was quite amusing to watch all of the artificial fuss about the colour revolution in Ukraine last year.

None of it really mattered. Which is why the Russians after an initial disappointment stood by and let it happen. Veteran observers knew what was coming. Which has now arrived.

The Ukrainians have been buying gas from the Russians at heavily subsidised prices since their days as part of USSR. How heavily subsidised? Try one-fifth of market price ($50 per 1000 m3).

Russian President Vladimir Putin has told the Ukraine that if they don't pay $230 per 1000 m3, no more gas. He means it.

What are his goals?

Twofold.

1. To destroy his political enemies (rapidly rising energy prices or cold houses don't make a government any friends in winter) political capital.
2. To force the United States to bear the burden of subsidising the Ukraine, further extending the American's own financial problems brought on by their invasion and occupation of Iraq (and the absurd wartime tax cuts).

It's quite a neat move and will cost the Americans money, destroy their puppet government in the Ukraine and put the rest of the region on notice that if they irritate Russia enough, to expect cold comfort.

The Americans deserve it. One can't go around making promises to all the pretty girls, deliver to none of them and not expect fall out.

Neatly done by President Putin.

Sitting in our Western societies with our cafés and police and supermarkets and cars, it is hard to imagine what it is like to be really oppressed. One paragraph from Janina Sulkowska-Gladun's Memoirs really knocked me out of my complacency.

It's so true that a well-fed person cannot understand the starving one. I had been malnourished continuously for a long time, but the hunger which forces every cell to scream only started in Punishment Camp Number 6 in the fall of 1941. For the second time my body began to bloat as prelude to death by starvation. My hunger was so overwhelming that stones looked like loaves of bread, and I wanted to chew bark and leaves. I prepared myself for death.

While we celebrate our holiday seasons - Christmas and Hannukah - people all over the world go hungry. Our armies bear down on innocent people we wish to displace in both Gaza and Iraq. Christmas cheer and commercialism goes out - yet the tanks roll and the airplanes drop their bombs. And in the havoc, people starve.

Starvation has always been the most effective weapon against other peoples. More people starved in the Soviet Union than were murdered by the NKVD. The numbers in Nazi Germany are probably similar. Likely death from overwork and hunger played the same role in the building of pyramids.

Dark stuff. What will wake mankind up and out of this murderous stupor?

We need to make a religion and an obligation of the reading of such war accounts. First to never forget what we have. Second to prevent us acceding to the ongoing oppression of others.

What do we get instead? An ongoing diet of war films and vilification of the Muslim world from Hollywood... The United States on a permanent war footing. Support the troops? Why should we be supporting an invading army? Support the troops means taking them out of other people's countries where they involved in an ongoing war against a civilian population.

Other than that we are told to interest ourselves in our careers and our bank accounts. Individualism and commercialism. What little we feel should be in self-gratifying and narcissistic love affairs.

Let the people who know take care of political issues. How can you know anything about this? Do you live in Israel? Are you a friend of Sadam Hussein? Or any of the other trite talking points...

No, no and no are the answers. But I do recognise murder and I do understand oppression and I do know lies when I hear them. It is all enough to make one wish for an afterlife and a hell to be certain that those responsible for the depleted uranium shelling and white phospher attacks and the torture chambers will go to their just end.

One comfort of reading so much about the Second World War over the last few days is the knowledge that the Nazis did come to a just end in short period of time. What is more distressing is that Stalin and his henchmen got away with it and managed to stay in power for over thirty years.

Happily, Stalin for his malignant qualities was a lot more talented and charming than anyone in the Bush/Cheney administration, as the initial editor of Pravda and the author of a 16 tome collected works in his second language. British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden had this to say about post-war negotiations with Stalin:

Marshal Stalin as a negotiator was the toughest proposition of all. Indeed, after something like thirty years' experience of international conferences of one kind and another, if I had to pick a team for going into a conference room, Stalin would be my first choice. Of course the man was ruthless and of course he knew his purpose. He never wasted a word. He never stormed, he was seldom even irritated.

The other day I was wondering about the mechanisms of mass murder, particularly of soldiers. Why and how is it that men can be made to dig their own graves or why it is they would go along with their own destruction?

In the immediate, I was thinking of the state terrorism of the Bush/Cheney administration - in many cases, the subjects haven't gone along with their own annihalation, witness the major prison revolt.

But a clearer cut historical example was the massacre of 25,000 Polish officers by the NKVD in Katyn forest?

How was it that the NKVD managed to murder so many military men - men who surely would and could defend themselves if they knew what was to befall them? Twenty-five thousand trained soldiers is a force to be reckoned with.

So I went to do some research. And found myself on quite a dark path.

First, while the Katyn Forest massacre is called that, there were actually three sites: Katyn near Smolensk, another near Tver and another near Moscow. At each of these sites approximately 5000 officers were murdered. Another seven thousand were killed in random locations.

The motivation behind the killings was simple. The Soviet political commissars had tried to politically reeducate these Polish Catholic officers with total failure. A decision was made to execute all of the officers.

While it is certainly easier to control and kill five thousand men than twenty five thousand, the major question remains. How does a small group of guards kill a massively more numerous group?

The solution is quite simple. The Polish officers were told that they were being moved elsewhere and set free. They were taken away in very small groups. Diaries exist from some of the very few Polish officers to escape execution. While the Katyn murders are taking place this is the kind of rumour that the NKVD floated in the camps:

News arrived today that 30 non-commissioned officers are departing for home. Who knows maybe I too will be at home shortly? We got supper late today--and then kipiatok and baked pumpkin suddenly appeared and I really ate my fill.

Of course, when they arrive in a forest and are led in groups of five or ten to the open grave where they are to be shot in the back of the head, there is not much to be done. Some of them were blindfolded, some were handcuffed. Those who struggle are bayoneted.

I read through the rest of the diary of the officer above - Leon Gladun - and discovered what Poland went through. First the division of Poland by the Germans and the Soviets - Poland was attacked simultaneously on both sides. On the Soviet side, there was collectivisation and imposition the Soviet order, total elimination of the Polish intellegentsia and bourgeoisie and mercantile class. On the German side, the Poles were considered untermenschen and scheduled for elimination.

Far from laying down arms and allowing the Germans to roll through Poland (think France), the Polish army fought back valiantly against a vastly overwhelming force and destroying 30% of German armour and inflicting 16,000 casualties on the German invaders.

After the very successful German attack on Russia in June of 1941, the Soviet Union decided to form a Polish army with the remains of the Polish POW's. This Polish army fought valiantly in the Middle East and then in Italy. Many Polish pilots flew in the RAF. When the war was over, to placate Stalin no Polish divisions were allowed to march in any victory parades.

Not only Polish soldiers were imprisoned by the Soviets. The woman who was to become Leon Gladun's wife, Janina Sulkowska wrote her own memoir covering her arrest and her odyssey through the Soviet gulags. It is worth reading. A lot of the latent Polish anti-semitism is explained in these pages.

The Poles watched the Soviet invaders with a mixture of revulsion and fear. Not a few of us cried. My brother became so distraught that shortly after, his hair began to come out in clumps while my little sister could only ask: "How could they do this?" But as disconcerting was the emergence of a local Jewish militia which was friendly to the Red Army and had made its appearance even before the enemy had marched in. Armed and organized, its first task was to arrest the students and Boy Scouts who had been posted as guards with old carbines in some cases taller than them. The Jews roughed up the shocked youngsters who had considered their captors as friends and classmates, before turning them over to the Soviets from whom they had prior directions. What was the fate of these young Poles? In many cases torture and death. This Jewish militia would help carry out the Soviet's dirty work during their occupation. My family and others would fall victim to them.

In the German occupied territories, some argue that Poles returned the favour. This doesn't seem a fair reflection of circumstance. Poles were the second largest single group of Holocaust victims, over two million Poles perished in concentration camps. The majority of Righteous gentiles honored at Yad Vashem are Poles.

The Polish underground was an ongoing nuisance to the Germans with apparently over 250,000 members. Poles produced their own automatic weapons and munitions underground. Outside of Poland after the fall of France, the Polish constituted was the second largest Allied armed force until the entry of the Americans with up to 250,000 soldiers. One of the Polish air squadrons had the highest number of kills in the battle of Britain. The Polish navy sailed with the British navy.

The contribution of the Poland to the Allied war effort is enormous. The efforts of Poles to trying to save Jews from the Nazis were amazing. The fate of Poland - left to Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union as war spoils - is a huge blot on England, France, Canada and the United States.

Amazingly, the Austrians got off more lightly than the Poles, allowed to finally become part of Western Europe after the partition. Austria who was part of the Third Reich, while Poland contributed to the Allied war effort in the skies, as underground partisans and as soldiers in Europe and North Africa.

Some days it is better not to pose oneself questions. The answers can be too shaking. To think in Canada, we were brought up on Polish jokes. Poland is perhaps the most tragic land in the history of the world. Divided, conquered, liberated, partitioned and decimated.

Considering what proportion of Poland's elite have been lost to German concentration camps, Soviet gulags and emigration just in the last century, it is no wonder that Poland's rebirth is taking some time.

If you have the time, I highly recommend reading the first hand accounts of Poland's war at Poland's Holocaust, both the Katyn diary and the Gulag and Holocaust Memoir.

This is a story I know well from days in Moscow, working as an ABC News assistant and assistant producer: Well-intentioned American journalists giving up their ethics to advance their careers.

At first it starts slowly and then conscience caves away before the career triumphs which follow.

A lot like the beginnings of a hesitant call girl. In two months, you won't know her so clear and hard is she in her new life. Or prostitution isn't for her and she quits. So it is with MSM journalists. I know of only a very few exceptions to this rule.

I remember once going to cover a story for The Moscow Times about some Armenian or Georgian businessmen who were holding a reception with the American Chamber of Commerce.

I'd been living in Russia for five years at this point and knew my way around Moscow pretty well. I had already done big stories on the Moscow bankers and knew how to gauge the business milieu by then.

I returned to the office and explained to the editor that these guys were mobsters and crooks and were about to fleece all of their investors, if they didn't throw them in the Moscow river in winter first.

They bought a big ad this month and have the backing of the American Chamber of Commerce. That's not what our readers want to hear. Write something positive.

How do you write something positive about a situation like this? If you're lucky you'll just lose your money. Or American Chamber of Commerce gives Crooks a Green Light. Or Soviet Minority Groups making huge advances in International Crime.

Today's particular story is about Ted Koppel and is written by his trusted stringer from early days in Indochina.

Ted was at that time the State Department correspondent for ABC News, and I decided to call him for lunch to talk about the six-month trip to Indochina I had just returned from -- particularly the new evidence I had amassed that the ongoing Kissinger-led bombing in Cambodia was continuing to murder civilians. Although I realized that Ted had to be circumspect regarding Kissinger's culpability for the war crimes that he had observed on the ground in Laos, I assumed we'd be in as much agreement on the horror as we had been in Indochina, and hoped he might do some stories on my new findings. I still remember the friendliness and warmth of Ted's jovial greeting when I called him up for lunch, and my awe as I entered the beautiful State Department restaurant, filled with important domestic and international dignitaries.

After 15 minutes or so of pleasantries and reminiscences, I brought up the flattering book on Kissinger that had just been published by the brothers Marvin and Bernard Kalb, who worked for NBC and CBS News respectively. Everyone I knew had been outraged by the book, which was a typical establishment journalist suck-up to Kissinger, praising him for his successes and avoiding even a mention of the mass murder that he was even then continuing to conduct. I was particularly annoyed because I had worked with Bernie Kalb as closely as I had with Ted, and Bernie also knew full well of Kissinger's responsibility for what was occurring.

I said something like "Can you believe that garbage by the Kalb brothers?" To my utter amazement, Ted suddenly drew back and said, in what was to be known years later as his full-throated "Nightline" "Voice of God": "I'll have you know that Marvin Kalb is a close personal friend of mine. And so is Dr. Kissinger, for that matter!" Ted was clearly offended, and our luncheon went downhill from there. Shocked, I tried to remind him of Kissinger's war crimes, which he had personally witnessed just a few years ago. He refused to discuss it. I tried to turn the conversation to my new findings on the ongoing bombing of civilians. He wasn't interested. We parted, not to talk again for 30 years.

I realized at the time that it was not Ted who had changed, but his institutional role. In Indochina, on the ground, face-to-face with the refugees, he had been a truth-seeking foreign correspondent. Assigned to cover Kissinger back in Washington, depending upon him for information, susceptible to the secretary’s flattery and manipulations, he had become a card-carrying member of the journalistic establishment.

And Ted Koppel is the one who actually read out the names of the fallen in Iraq, to the fury of the Bush administration and the right-wing pundits. Imagine what some of the others must be like?

In fairness to Ted Koppel, he admits as much:

A young friend of mine...sought his advice about changing careers in Washington, D.C. Ted, in his typically gracious fashion, granted him a private talk. My friend explained that he had had a successful career running a nonprofit group, but was turned off by the lies and deceit he had found. What did Ted think he should do? he asked. Ted answered that he didn't know whether my friend’s ethical concerns were sincere, or if he was just looking for a job in journalism. If the latter, he seemed like a bright young guy, and Ted would consider helping him out. But if he was sincere, Ted advised, he should get out of Washington immediately. Ted then went on a rant for 15 minutes excoriating the officials he dealt with on a daily basis as liars, deceivers and hypocrites. My friend could not have a decent life and remain human so long as he remained in D.C., Ted explained. He should leave.

In Venezuala this weekend, an election took place. All of the principal opposition parties boycotted the election.

Why is this boycott important? It provides an excuse for the US military to intervene Venezuala.

the history of U.S. policy in the region shows that the U.S. has a record of supporting and profiting from electoral boycotts. Also, the U.S. is in a good position to pressure the Venezuelan opposition, given the $20 million of funding it has provided opposition groups over the past five years. The U.S., of course, denies any involvement in the opposition’s decision. Still, it served U.S. interests very well when opposition parties boycotted the 1994 Nicaraguan elections and when opposition parties boycotted the 2000 elections in Haiti. In each case, the boycott set the stage, in international opinion, to de-legitimize and smooth the path for the eventual defeat of left-leaning governments.

There is a lot of more useful information on the election in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela at the site above on Axis/Logic.

According to US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld torture is okay if you're just watching. What's amazing is that the five star general with whom Rumsfeld was giving the news conference disagreed with him.

Asked about torture by Iraqi authorities, Rumsfeld said that "obviously, the United States does not have a responsibility" beyond objecting. Pace disagreed, saying that each and every U.S. soldier has an "absolute responsibility" to stop inhumane treatment if he or she sees it. Rumsfeld disagreed, saying, "I don't think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it. It's to report it." Pace fired back: "If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it."

Pretty clear who was giving the orders at Abu Graib. Clearly it wasn't the army but the politicos. Rumsfeld doesn't move without Vice-President Cheney's permission.

These torture policies go along way to explaining the suicide - or murder - of Colonel Ted Westhusing, professor of military ethics at West Point, who had volunteered for a tour in Iraq. It's a chilling story.

One hot, dusty day in June, Col. Ted Westhusing was found dead in a trailer at a military base near the Baghdad airport, a single gunshot wound to the head.

The Army would conclude that he committed suicide with his service pistol. At the time, he was the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq.

The Army closed its case. But the questions surrounding Westhusing's death continue.

Westhusing, 44, was no ordinary officer. He was one of the Army's leading scholars of military ethics, a full professor at West Point who volunteered to serve in Iraq to be able to better teach his students. He had a doctorate in philosophy; his dissertation was an extended meditation on the meaning of honor.

So it was only natural that Westhusing acted when he learned of possible corruption by U.S. contractors in Iraq. A few weeks before he died, Westhusing received an anonymous complaint that a private security company he oversaw had cheated the U.S. government and committed human rights violations. Westhusing confronted the contractor and reported the concerns to superiors, who launched an investigation.

While thieves and brigands rob the public purse and send youths to murder and mutilation, men of honour drink hemlock.

Check out this editorial from the the Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence report of yesterday:

The presidency of George W. Bush is failing.

Love him or hate him, Bush has had the most dramatic international impact of any U.S. president in a generation. But as Bush's fortunes ebb, his ability to control events in Washington and much further afield are fading as well...

In August...we argued that the United States had achieved the bulk of what it had set out to do in first containing, and then pursuing and dismantling, al Qaeda....

But Iraq has not flowed gently into epilogue, and the final agreements that seemed so tantalizingly close in August remain elusive. In the interim, the American citizenry has grown weary of the conflict -- in which the number of American dead has now passed 2100 -- and Bush's popularity has suffered as a result.

But the real inflection point of this presidency was not Iraq; rather, it was Hurricane Katrina. Rightly or wrongly, Bush was perceived not just as unprepared for a major hurricane strike, but also as oblivious to the seriousness of the humanitarian disaster in New Orleans. This perception solidified the opposition of the U.S. left, denied the president any help from the American center and cracked the heretofore unified American right. The result was a president in danger of losing his core supporters, without whom no president can effectively rule. Similar circumstances condemned past statesmen such as Wilson, Truman, Johnson and Nixon into the unenviable company of failed presidents.

Since Katrina, the Bush administration's fortunes have only slid further, with three critical defeats standing out most glaringly. First, its primary congressional ally, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, has been indicted for fundraising improprieties. Second, the administration's efforts to shuttle Harriet Miers into the Supreme Court resulted in a break within the Republican Party. Third, the vice president's chief of staff -- Lewis "Scooter" Libby -- has been indicted for disclosing the status of undercover intelligence officers to the press, a charge that may well be pressed against political mastermind Karl Rove, and perhaps even the vice president himself.

What this amounts to is that the Bush administration has alienated the Republican Party's religious wing and those who value national defense above all else. Between that and the loss of DeLay, the president's star has fallen so far that he can no longer demand meetings with key legislators; he must negotiate for them. His foreign policy agenda is weighed down by the albatross of Iraq, and since congressional Republican leadership is keeping its distance from the president, his legislative agenda has not so much as budged in months.

I couldn't have said it better myself. Normally Stratfor are imperialist cheerleaders in deep sympathy with PNAC, so for them to abandon the Bush/Cheney war train means the cars are really heading off the tracks.

Delightful. The world can move on to slowly becoming a better place. The heat is on the Americans and those countries in Europe who abetted the CIA in its illegal imprisonment and torture of invisible prisoners within their borders.

Illegal American torture in Europe is front page news in all the newspapers in Austria today. This story has been on the front page most of the last ten days. People are very unhappy about it.

I was out in flex again tonight. "Are you American?" asked the beautiful dancer hesitantly and with vague distaste.

"No, I'm no torturer," I was happy to be able to answer.

The Alaskan senators have not given up on blowing hundreds of millions of dollars on bridges to nowhere.

While the two bridges had already achieved some notoriety prior to the transportation bill's passage, after Katrina hit, the notion of spending federal money on infrastructure that would serve so few in such a remote area struck many as outrageous. It sparked some rather dramatic infighting among Republicans.

In late October, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., attempted to divert money from the bridge projects in favor of repairing a hurricane-damaged bridge in New Orleans. Coburn said he was answering America's call to stop wasteful spending. This was apparently too much for Sen. Stevens, formerly chairman of the powerful appropriations committee. He threatened to quit in no uncertain terms, declaring he would become a "wounded bull on the floor of this Senate." If his colleagues passed the bill, he said, "I will be taken out of here on a stretcher."

It's like watching the Roman Empire fall in fast forward. What would be the equivalent of these bridges in Alaska? Sending the treasury of Rome to rebuild Hadrian's wall?

Surely given the total collapse of one of America's great historical cities and hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, one could find some better way to spend the $200 million burning a whole in your pocket, Senator Stevens.

Of the eighteen figures who signed the PNAC’s 1998 letter to Clinton calling for regime change in Iraq, eleven took positions in the Bush administration. In addition to Armitage, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, they were Elliot Abrahms (senior director for near east, southwest Asian and North African affairs on the National Security Council); John Bolton (undersecretary, Arms Control and International Security); Paula Dobriansky (undersecretary of state for global affairs); Zalmay Khalilzad (president’s special envoy to Afghanistan and ambassador-at-large for Free Iraqis); Richard Perle (chair of the Pentagon’s semi-autonomous Defense Policy Board); Peter W. Rodman (assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs); William Schneider, Jr. (chair of the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board); and Robert B. Zoellick (U.S. trade representative). Other PNAC associates and/or prominent unipolarists who landed high-ranking positions included Stephen Cambone (director of the Pentagon Office of Program, Analysis and Evaluation); Eliot Cohen (Defense Policy Board); Devon Gaffney Cross (Defense Policy Board); I. Lewis Libby (Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff), William Luti and Abram Shulsky (eventually, directors of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans), James Woolsey (Defense Policy Board), and David Wurmser (special assistant to the undersecretary of state for arms control). Libby served as assistant to the president and national security adviser to the vice-president in addition to being Cheney’s chief of staff, an unprecedented trifecta of positions that amplified Cheney’s influence.

By all appearances this extraordinary harvest of appointments put the neo-cons in the driver’s seat of the new administration. But for eight months, until 9/11, they didn’t feel that way. They worried about Powell’s influence over the president, Rice was hard to read, and Bush had other priorities. The complaining began very early. Shortly before Bush’s inauguration, Kagan declared that the incoming administration had an obvious split between its leading hawks (Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz) and doves (Powell and Rice), and that even Bush’s commitment to missile defense was jeopardized by it.

Gary Dorrien's article takes the reader behind the scenes of the Project for the New American Century machinations by following its founder William Kristol's trajectory through the Clinton presidency, the Gore election and 9/11.

For more info on PNAC, the Project for the New American Century. More PNAC info at Wikipedia. But for shock and awe nothing beats the original paper Rebuilding America's Defenses where they argue that US does not spend enough money on the military.