<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/30EASTERB.html?8bu=&pagewant
ed=print&position=>
The New York Times
January 30, 2005
'Collapse': How the World Ends
By GREGG EASTERBROOK
COLLAPSE
How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
By Jared Diamond.
Illustrated. 575 pp. Viking. $29.95.
EIGHT years ago Jared Diamond realized what is, for authors, increasingly a
fantasy -- he published a serious, challenging and complex book that became
a huge commercial success. ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' won a Pulitzer Prize,
then sold a million copies, astonishing for a 480-page volume of
archeological speculation on how the world reached its present ordering of
nations. Now he has written a sequel, ''Collapse,'' which asks whether
present nations can last. Taken together, ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' and
''Collapse'' represent one of the most significant projects embarked upon
by any intellectual of our generation. They are magnificent books:
extraordinary in erudition and originality, compelling in their ability to
relate the digitized pandemonium of the present to the hushed agrarian
sunrises of the far past. I read both thinking what literature might be
like if every author knew so much, wrote so clearly and formed arguments
with such care. All of which makes the two books exasperating, because both
come to conclusions that are probably wrong.
''Guns'' asked why the West is atop the food chain of nations. Its
conclusion, that Western success was a coincidence driven by good luck, has
proven extremely influential in academia, as the view is quintessentially
postmodern. Now ''Collapse'' posits that the Western way of life is
flirting with the sudden ruin that caused past societies like the Anasazi
and the Mayans to vanish. Because this view, too, is exactly what
postmodernism longs to hear, ''Collapse'' may prove influential as well.
Born in Boston in 1937, Diamond is a professor of geography at the
University of California, Los Angeles. Initially he specialized in
conservation biology, studying bird diversity in New Guinea; in 1985 he won
one of the early MacArthur ''genius grants.'' Gradually he began to wonder
why societies of the western Pacific islands never developed the
metallurgy, farming techniques or industrial production of Eurasia. Diamond
also studied the application of natural-selection theory to physiology, and
in 1999 received a National Medal of Science for that work, which is partly
reflected in his book ''Why Is Sex Fun?'' (Sex is fun; the book is
serious.) Today Diamond often returns to the Pacific rim, especially
Australia, where in the outback one may still hear the rustle of distant
animal cries just as our forebears heard them in the far past.
''Collapse'' may be read alone, but begins where ''Guns, Germs, and
Steel'' ended: essentially the two form a single 1,000-page book. The
thesis of the first part is that environmental coincidences are the
principal factor in human history. Diamond contends it was chance, not
culture or brainpower, that brought industrial power first to Europe;
Western civilization has nothing to boast about.
Many arguments in ''Guns'' were dazzling. Diamond showed, for example,
that as the last ice age ended, by chance Eurasia held many plants that
could be bred for controlled farming. The Americas had few edible plants
suitable for cross-breeding, while Africa had poor soil owing to the
millions of years since it had been glaciated. Thus large-scale food
production began first in the Fertile Crescent, China and Europe.
Population in those places rose, and that meant lots of people living close
together, which accelerated invention; in other locations the
low-population hunter-gatherer lifestyle of antiquity remained in place.
''Guns'' contends the fundamental reason Europe of the middle period could
send sailing ships to explore the Americas and Africa, rather than these
areas sending sailing ships to explore Europe, is that ancient happenstance
involving plants gave Europe a food edge that translated into a head start
on technology. Then, the moment European societies forged steel and
fashioned guns, they acquired a runaway advantage no hunter-gatherer
society could possibly counter.
Also, as the ice age ended, Eurasia was home to large mammals that could
be domesticated, while most parts of the globe were not. In early history,
animals were power: huge advantages were granted by having cattle for meat
and milk, horses and elephants for war. Horses -- snarling devil-monsters
to the Inca -- were a reason 169 Spaniards could kill thousands of Incas at
the battle of Cajamarca in 1532, for example. ''Rhino-mounted Bantu shock
troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire,'' Diamond speculates, but
the rhino and other large mammals of Africa defied domestication, leaving
that continent at a competitive disadvantage.
Large populations and the fact that Eurasians lived among domesticated
animals meant Europe was rife with sicknesses to which the survivors
acquired immunity. When Europeans began to explore other lands, their
microbes wiped out indigenous populations, easing conquest. Almost all
variations in societies, Diamond concludes, are caused not by societies
themselves but by ''differences in their environments''; the last 500 years
of rising power for the West ''has its ultimate roots in developments
between about 11,000 B.C. and A.D. 1,'' the deck always stacked in Europe's
favor.
In this respect, ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' is pure political correctness,
and its P.C. quotient was a reason the book won praise. But the book must
not be dismissed because it is P.C.: sometimes politically correct is,
after all, correct. The flaws of the work are more subtle, and they set the
stage for ''Collapse.'' One flaw was that Diamond argued mainly from the
archaeological record -- a record that is a haphazard artifact of items
that just happened to survive. We know precious little about what was going
on in 11,000 B.C., and much of what we think we know is inferential. It may
be decades or centuries until we understand human prehistory, if we ever do.
Diamond's analysis discounts culture and human thought as forces in
history; culture, especially, is seen as a side effect of environment. The
big problem with this view is explaining why China -- which around the year
1000 was significantly ahead of Europe in development, and possessed
similar advantages in animals and plants -- fell behind. This happened,
Diamond says, because China adopted a single-ruler society that banned
change. True, but how did environment or animal husbandry dictate this?
China's embrace of a change-resistant society was a cultural phenomenon.
During the same period China was adopting centrally regimented life, Europe
was roiled by the idea of individualism. Individualism proved a potent
force, a source of power, invention and motivation. Yet Diamond considers
ideas to be nearly irrelevant, compared with microbes and prevailing winds.
Supply the right environmental conditions, and inevitably there will be a
factory manufacturing jet engines.
Many thinkers have attempted single-explanation theories for history. Such
attempts hold innate appeal -- wouldn't it be great if there were a single
explanation! -- but have a poor track record. My guess is that despite its
conspicuous brilliance, ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' will eventually be
viewed as a drastic oversimplification. Its arguments come perilously close
to determinism, and it is hard to believe that the world is as it is
because it had to be that way.
Diamond ended his 1997 book by supposing, ''The challenge now is to
develop human history as a science.'' That is what ''Collapse'' attempts --
to use history as a science to forecast whether the current world order
will fail. To research his new book, Diamond traveled to the scenes of
vanished societies like Easter Island, Norse Greenland, the Anasazi, the
Mayans. He must have put enormous effort into ''Collapse,'' and his
willingness to do so after achieving wealth and literary celebrity --
surely publishers would have taken anything he dashed off -- speaks well of
his dedication.
''Collapse'' spends considerable pages contemplating past life on Easter
Island, as well as on Pitcairn and Henderson islands, and on Greenland, an
island. Deforestation, the book shows, was a greater factor in the
breakdown of societies in these places than commonly understood. Because
trees take so long to regrow, deforestation has more severe consequences
than crop failure, and can trigger disastrous erosion. Centuries ago, the
deforestation of Easter Island allowed wind to blow off the island's thin
topsoil: ''starvation, a population crash and a descent into cannibalism''
followed, leaving those haunting statues for Europeans to find. Climate
change and deforestation that set off soil loss, Diamond shows, were
leading causes of the Anasazi and Mayan declines. ''Collapse'' reminds us
that like fossil fuels, soil is a resource that took millions of years to
accumulate and that humanity now races through: Diamond estimates current
global soil loss at 10 to 40 times the rate of soil formation.
Deforestation ''was a or the major factor'' in all the collapsed societies
he describes, while climate change was a recurring menace.
How much do Diamond's case studies bear on current events? He writes
mainly about isolated islands and pretechnology populations. Imagine the
conditions when Erik the Red founded his colony on frigid Greenland in 984
-- if something went wrong, the jig was up. As isolated systems, islands
are more vulnerable than continents. Most dire warnings about species
extinction, for example, are estimates drawn from studies of island
ecologies, where a stressed species may have no place to retreat to.
''Collapse'' declares that ''a large fraction'' of the world's species may
fall extinct in the next 50 years, which is the kind of conclusion favored
by biologists who base their research on islands. But most species don't
live on islands. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature,
the leading authority on biodiversity, estimates that about 9 percent of
the world's vertebrate species are imperiled. That's plenty bad enough, but
does not support the idea that a ''large fraction'' of species are poised
to vanish. Like most species, most people do not live on islands, yet
''Collapse'' tries to generalize from environmental failures on isolated
islands to environmental threats to society as a whole.
Diamond rightly warns of alarming trends in biodiversity, soil loss,
freshwater limits (China is depleting its aquifers at a breakneck rate),
overfishing (much of the developing world relies on the oceans for protein)
and climate change (there is a strong scientific consensus that future
warming could be dangerous). These and other trends may lead to a global
crash: ''Our world society is presently on a nonsustainable course.'' The
West, especially, is in peril: ''The prosperity that the First World enjoys
at present is based on spending down its environmental capital.'' Calamity
could come quickly: ''A society's steep decline may begin only a decade or
two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth and power.''
Because population pressure played a prominent role in the collapses of
some past societies, Diamond especially fears population growth. Owing to
sheer numbers it is an ''impossibility'' that the developing world will
ever reach Western living standards. Some projections suggest the globe's
population, now about 6 billion, may peak at about 8.5 billion. To Diamond,
this is a nightmare scenario: defenders of population growth
''nonchalantly'' mention ''adding 'only' 2.5 billion more people . . . as
if that were acceptable.'' Population growth has made Los Angeles ''less
appealing,'' especially owing to traffic: ''I have never met an Angeleno
(and very few people anywhere in the world) who personally expressed a
desire for increased population.'' About the only nonaboriginal society
Diamond has kind words for is pre-Meiji Japan, where population control was
strictly enforced. But wait -- pre-Meiji Japan collapsed!
If 2.5 billion more people are not ''acceptable,'' how, exactly, would
Diamond prevent their births? He does not say. Nuclear war, plague, a comet
strike or coerced mass sterilizations seem the only forces that might stop
the human population from rising to its predicted peak. Everyone dislikes
traffic jams and other aspects of population density, but people are here
and cannot be wished away; the challenge is to manage social pressure and
create enough jobs until the population peak arrives. And is it really an
''impossibility'' for developing-world living standards to reach the
Western level? A century ago, rationalists would have called global
consumption of 78 million barrels per day of petroleum an impossibility,
and that's the latest figure.
If trends remain unchanged, the global economy is unsustainable. But the
Fallacy of Uninterrupted Trends tells us patterns won't remain unchanged.
For instance, deforestation of the United States, rampant in the 19th
century, has stopped: forested acreage of the country began rising during
the 20th century, and is still rising. Why? Wood is no longer a primary
fuel, while high-yield agriculture allowed millions of acres to be retired
from farming and returned to trees. Today wood is a primary fuel in the
developing world, so deforestation is acute; but if developing nations move
on to other energy sources, forest cover will regrow. If the West changes
from fossil fuel to green power, its worst resource trend will not continue
uninterrupted.
Though Diamond endorses ''cautious optimism,'' ''Collapse'' comes to a
wary view of the human prospect. Diamond fears our fate was set in motion
in antiquity -- we're living off the soil and petroleum bequeathed by the
far past, and unless there are profound changes in behavior, all may crash
when legacy commodities run out. Oddly, for someone with a background in
evolutionary theory, he seems not to consider society's evolutionary arc.
He thinks backward 13,000 years, forward only a decade or two. What might
human society be like 13,000 years from now? Above us in the Milky Way are
essentially infinite resources and living space. If the phase of
fossil-driven technology leads to discoveries that allow Homo sapiens to
move into the galaxy, then resources, population pressure and other issues
that worry Diamond will be forgotten. Most of the earth may even be
returned to primordial stillness, and the whole thing would have happened
in the blink of an eye by nature's standards.
Gregg Easterbrook is an editor of The New Republic, a fellow of the
Brookings Institution and the author, most recently, of ''The Progress
Paradox.''
NEW BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT
Number 1 bestselling children's writer CORNELIA FUNKE
DRAGON RIDER
Dragon Rider is the quest of a young dragon called Firedrake, who sets out to
find the Rim of Heaven, a mythical place somewhere in the Himalayas, where all
dragons are supposed to come from. His companions on this magical journey are a
little brownie named Sorrel, a homunculous called Twigleg, and a brave orphan
boy called Ben. Will they succeed in outwitting, and outflying Nettlebrand, a
dangerous dragonhunter?
About the Author
CORNELIA FUNKE is one of Germany's best-selling children's authors, topped only
by J.K. Rowling and R.L. Stine. She was relatively unknown outside Germany until
the managing director and publisher of Scholastic Inc in the US discovered her
book Herr der Diebe and published it under the title, The Thief Lord in 2002.
The book was an instant success and won many awards.
Cornelia Funke has written over 40 books, and her books have been translated and
sold in many countries. She has sold over 2 million copies in English alone! She
lives near Hamburg, Germany, with her husband and two children
also available from Young Zubaan
INKHEART
by Cornelia Funke
Pub: Aug 04
Price: Rs. 295 (pbk)
534pp
ISBN: 0-439-53164-0
To order copies contact:
Young Zubaan, K-92 Hauz Khas Enclave, New Delhi 110 016,
email: zubaanwbooks@...
tels: 011-2686 4497, 2652 1008
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
From Thought to Action: Building Strategies on Violence Against Women
Aanchal Kapur, Sanjay Muttoo and Suman Bisht
Review by Ms. Aanchal Kapur aanchal@...
A 2004 publication titled 'From Thought to Action: Building Strategies on
Violence Against Women' presents a comprehensive conceptual framework within
which to understand gender-based violence, especially physical violence. It
also suggests strategies that can be used by NGO fieldworkers/activists to
prevent and eliminate this form of violence at home, at workplaces, on the
streets and society in general.
Based on exhaustive research over two years, including detailed interviews
with individuals, communities and institutions, spread over eight states of
India, the book interrogates the ways in which women themselves, local
communities, NGOs and institutions of the State (police, health centres,
educational institutes) and community institutions (panchayats, youth
groups, men and women's groups, SHGs), understand and respond to violence
against women. The book argues that violence has usually been understood
only in its manifest forms, as an `act' (its more extreme forms like murder,
severe physical abuse and rape) and not as a `process'. This has led to a
`normalising' of many other forms of violence that women face daily. This
perception, in turn, determines the kind of interventions that are made by
different institutions, some of which are usually reactive to a 'case' and
not responsive to the context, continuity and consequence of the act.
It is argued in the book, that while immediate relief to women facing
violence in the form of shelters, legal aid and counselling are crucial
interventions, a more proactive approach is required to prevent violence
from happening in the first place. This essentially implies that gendered
attitudes, behaviours and practices of society are challenged not only by
the victims and perpetrators of violence but also the passive spectators to
violence. It shows that, above all else the community must have a stake in
preventing this violence. The book outlines strategies of mobilization,
networking and advocacy to effect such changes.
The book also contains some important information on organizations and
institutions working in this area, existing laws on the issue and some
myths/ facts about issues of violence that would be very useful for
fieldworkers/ activists/students. An annexure of questionnaires and
information on the methodology used could benefit researchers working on the
issue.
The book is co-authored by Aanchal Kapur, Sanjay Muttoo and Suman Bisht and
published by KRITI: a development research, praxis and communication team,
New Delhi.
Copies are available in English at a contribution of Rs.200.00 in India and
US$10.00 and UK Sterling £06.00 abroad. Postage and bank charges will be
extra
on actuals. Payments can be made by cheque, demand drafts, money order or
bank transfers, in the name of KRITI DRPCT, payable in New Delhi. Please
check with us when you confirm the order.
Contact
Davinder Kaur, KRITI Information Place, S-35 Tara Apartments,
Alaknanda, New Delhi 110019 Phone: 91-11-26477845 Email: kritidpc@vsnl.
Memory: From Mind to Molecules - By Larry R. Squire and Eric R. Kandel
Descartes was wrong, the authors say. It is not, "I think, therefore I am"
but "I am, therefore I think." Moreover, "We are not who we are simply
because we think. We are who we are because we can remember what we have
thought about." So saying, Squire and Kandel (respectively, professor of
psychiatry, neurosciences and psychology at the University of California
School of Medicine at San Diego, and university professor and founder of
the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior at Columbia University) present
what they call "the molecular biology of cognition." Their account, amply
and imaginatively illustrated, describes how memory functions and the
molecular events that take place in the brain as a memory is formed. They
also treat such malfunctions of memory as amnesia, Alzheimer's disease and
age-related memory loss. Their target is "the general reader who enjoys
science and is interested in becoming acquainted with the remarkable new
discoveries about how the nervous system learns and remembers."
The list price for this book is $27.00. To purchase it from Amazon.com
for $17.82, a 34% discount, go directly to
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0805073450/selfimprovemeonlA/
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
The Legends of Khasak
O.V. Vijayan
translated from the Malayalam
Penguin 1994 [1969]
208 pages
A book review by Danny Yee
http://dannyreviews.com/h/Legends_Khasak.html
Ravi comes to the village of Khasak in Kerala's Palghat region to be the
teacher in its first ever school, only to find that he has as much to
learn as to teach. But Ravi's is just the central story in O.V. Vijayan's
_The Legends of Khasak_ (1969), which offers an panoply of stories of
village life, with an extensive and diverse range of characters.
There's the village idiot Appu-Killi, who ends up being a Muslim on
some days of the week and a Hindu on others. There's the mullah, who
looks like being cast as a villain in the beginning but turns into a
tragic figure, his death the climax of the novel. There's the proud
toddy-tapper Kuppu-Acchan who, deprived of his occupation by a temperance
law, has become a malicious village gossip. And there are many more,
though some of them are just brief sketches.
"Gopalu Panikker, the village astrologer and teacher of the
alphabet, was an incongruous presence in a liquor den, and more so
as he sat listening to an unlettered mendicant. However, Gopalu
had time on his hands now, since the astrologer's teaching method
found fewer takers with each passing day. The method belonged
to the classical world; the children wrote out the letters on
spreads of sand and chanted them in a dirge. They wrote with
their forefingers on which they wore a dried gourd for protection.
Eight long years of this unhurried ordeal, after which nothing
short of decapitation could permit the scholar to regress on
his phonemes. But the new school of the District Board made
the child literate in a matter of months. Gopalu lamented in
bleak prophecy, 'What learning is this? Our country is ruined?'"
Khasak is a religiously diverse community, with an array of local shrines
and gods and different forms of Islam and Hinduism all coexisting.
Nor are there hard boundaries between the religious and the secular,
represented by Ravi himself, the school inspectors who visit him
periodically, and links to nearby towns and the world of factories
and labor disputes. When people fall sick, some ride to town to fetch
antibiotics and others offer prayers and invocations. The only people
depicted as incompatible are some communists who turn up with plans
to remake the village -- as he explains in an afterword, Vijayan was
himself a communist until disillusioned in 1956.
There is much in Khasak that is ugly: it has its share of death and
disease and ignorance and cruelty and grinding poverty. Without in any
way sentimentalising village life, however, Vijayan makes us view it
positively and compels us, despite its distance and its strangeness, to
accept it as normal. _The Legends of Khasak_ is a powerful depiction of
the numinous permeating ordinary life -- and an entrancing web of stories.
--
%T The Legends of Khasak
%A Vijayan, O.V.
%M Malayalam
%I Penguin
%C London
%D 1994 [1969]
%O paperback
%G ISBN 0-14-015647-X
%P 208pp
%K India
%Z a web of stories about life and death in a South Indian village
5 February 2005
------------------------------------------------------
Copyright (c) 2005 Danny Yee http://danny.oz.au/
Danny Yee's Book Reviews http://dannyreviews.com/
------------------------------------------------------
This is the "all-reviews" list for distribution of new book reviews
by Danny Yee. You can subscribe or unsubscribe at
http://dannyreviews.com/list.html
Source: http://www.daveyd.com/hitlerpol.html
Hitler's Forgotten Black Victims
September 26, 1997
The Nazi's final solution had a dress rehearsal in Namibia, writes Delroy
Constantine-Simms
At a time when the fight for justice for Jewish Holocaust victims makes
front-page news, few people know that a significant number of black people
suffered, too, under Nazi rule. Revelations about their experiences are
made in a documentary, to be screened in Britain next month, entitled
Hitlerís Forgotten Victims.
It reveals that sterilisation programmes of blacks were instituted by
Germanyís most senior Nazi geneticist, Doctor Eugen Fischer, who developed
his racial theories in German South West Africa (now Namibia) long before
World War I. In Namibia, Fischer claimed there were genetic dangers
arising from race mixing between German colonists and African women.
The documentary also provides disturbing photographic evidence of German
genocidal tendencies in Africa. In 1904 the Herero tribe revolted against
their German colonial masters in a quest to keep their land. It was a
rebellion that lasted four years and led to the death of 60 000 Herero
people ó 80% of their population. The survivors were imprisoned in
concentration camps or used as guinea pigs for medical experiments, a
foretaste of things to come.
Hitlerís Forgotten Victims shows that Germany's 24 000-strong black
community were the number-one target for Hitlerís sterilisation programme.
The film makes it clear that Hitlerís view on racial superiority did not
develop in a vacuum. He was influenced by the work of the 19th- century
German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, whose views were based on distorted
versions of Darwinism. He wrote of woolly- haired Negroes incapable of
higher mental development.
The film shows that the Nazisí obsession with racial purity and eugenics
was provoked and intensified in 1918, following Germanyís defeat in World
War I. Under the terms of the peace treaty signed at Versailles, Germany
was stripped of its African colonies and forced to submit to the
occupation of the Rhineland. The deployment of African troops from the
French colonies to police the territory incensed many Germans.
To many it was the final humiliation that began with their 1918 defeat in
the World War I. The film shows Germans complaining bitterly in newspapers
and propaganda films about African soldiers from the French colonial army
having relations with their women.
As soon as Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936, he retaliated by
targeting black people living there. At least 400 mixed- race children
were forcibly sterilised in the area by the end of 1937, while 400 others
disappeared into camps.
Hans Hauck, a victim of Hitlerís sterilisation programme, says: ìWe were
lucky that we werenít victims of euthanasia; we were only sterilised. We
had no anaesthetic. Once I got my vasectomy certificate, I had to sign an
agreement that we were not allowed to have sexual relations whatsoever
with Germans.
In 1932 in Bresau, Hitler gave a speech in which he ordered Africans, Jews
and anyone not Aryan to leave Germany or go into the camps. But most
blacks in Germany could not heed Hitlerís warning as they were German
citizens with German passports and had nowhere else to go. While a fair
number escaped to France, others tried to return to the former German
colonies, taken over by the League of Nations in 1920. The British
colonial authorities in the newly named South West Africa would not allow
black Germans refugee status on the grounds that they had fought for the
Germans in World War I.
Hitlerís Forgotten Victims does not give enough insight into the lives of
black Germans who resisted the Nazis, such as black activist Lari Gilges,
who founded an organisation of entertainers that fought the Nazis in his
home town of Dusseldorf. He was murdered by the SS in 1933, the year
Hitler came to power. More insight is given into black and mixed-race
Germans who toured in the Hillerkus Afrikaschau circuses, films and shows
to escape persecution.
Says interviewee Elizabeth Morton: ìMy father was one of the founders of
the Afrikaschau. There was everything: dances, songs and acrobatics, music
breaking, tap dancing. It was like a variety show. The Afrikaschau
actually became the place to go for all black people; it was something new.
These shows were eventually taken over in 1940 by the SS, who considered
them racially unacceptable and used them for racist propaganda. But
eventually Hitlerís propaganda chief, Josef Goebbels, realised that in
order to spread the Nazi gospel of Aryan supremacy, he needed to exploit
the most popular medium of the timeó German feature films. Propaganda
films such as Kongo Express, Quax in Africa, and Auntie Wanda from Uganda
presented Germany as a benevolent colonial power.
Says black actor Werner Egiomue: We had an agent then who had all the
addresses of black people in Berlin. The Reichís chamber of commerce was
in touch with him when they were casting a film. It was fun inside the
studio. Outside the door you could be arrested. But inside you were as
safe as in a bank.
Another experience is given by the Michaels family, who were orphaned and
separated at an early age. Theodore Michael, one of Germanyís greatest
character actors of the time, gives a gripping account of how he survived.
He says: ìBlack people in Germany were aware that if the Nazis wanted to
get rid of us, they could catch us in one swoop. I was eventually sent to
a munitions factory, where I was liberated by Russian soldiers. They were
surprised to see a black man still alive.
Not only black Germans suffered at the hands of the Nazis black soldiers
were also targets. Between 1939 and 1945, an estimated 200 000 black
troops from African colonies were serving in Europe. The Nazis segregated
black inmates for extra special treatment of the fatal kind. In breach of
the Geneva Convention, black prisoners were denied food, and given
dangerous jobs. In film never seen before, black soldiers and civilians
are seen scavenging for scraps of food in garbage heaps at the Hemer POW
camp near Dortmund in north-west Germany. No one knows how many black
soldiers or civilians died in the camps at the hands of the SS guards,
producer Moise Shewa says, because where Jews were noted as Jews, blacks
were noted by nationality.
One description of concentration camp life is given by Johnny William,
born to an African mother and white Frenchman, who was transported by the
Gestapo to the Neugengamme concentration camp near Hamburg. ìThere were
five or six of us. As soon as we arrived, we were immediately separated
from the white deportees by the SS. They considered us to be subhuman
beings like animals, chimpanzees.
Hitlerís Forgotten Victims makes it clear that the treatment of blacks in
the Holocaust should be acknowledged. Most black Germans were stripped of
their nationality, so it has been difficult for them to claim reparations.
Hopefully, this film will go some way to force the German government to
acknowledge their experience at the hands of the Nazis and recompense
black Germans in the same manner as the Jewish community, who suffered the
same fate.
True Globalists (Should) Reject Empire
by David Gordon
<http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1733>[January 31, 2005]
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1403936390/qid=1107139085/ludwigvo\
nmisesinst
In Praise of Empires: Globalization and Order, by Deepak Lal (Palgrave,
2004)
Deepak Lal writes as a convinced advocate of American Empire. But in the
course of the book, he undermines his own reasons for defending imperialism
and offers a devastating criticism of democratic imperialism and of Woodrow
Wilson's Utopianism.
Lal's basic argument for empire is straightforward: International trade is
essential to prosperity. But given a high degree of disorder, large scale
trade cannot occur, or at least will be greatly impeded. Throughout
history, empires have been the main means by which order has been preserved
and trade promoted: "By creating order over a large economic space, empires
have inevitably generated [Adam] Smithian intensive growth" (p. 43).
Applied to the present, Lal's argument becomes this: International trade
requires an imperial power. Only the United States has the resources to
maintain hegemonic control. Therefore, the United States ought exercise
imperial power.
Lal attempts to refute in advance an obvious counterargument. What about
the evils of empire? Have not many empires tyrannized and exploited those
whom they have conquered? Even if Lal is right about the benefits of
empire, must not its costs be set against these?
Lal responds by distinguishing two kinds of empire. Good empires are what
Michael Oakeshott calls civil associations. They are content to preserve
order. The bad empires are, in Oakeshott's terms, enterprise associations.
Here, "the state is seen as the manager of an enterprise seeking to use the
law for its own substantive purposes and, in particular, for the
legislation of morality. . . . Most of the empires which have been regarded
as evil fall into the latter [enterprise] category" (pp. 41, 43).
An empire, then, can be a force for good, so long as it avoids moralizing.
Should we, as Lal wishes, support non-moralizing American imperialism?
His arguments strike me as entirely unconvincing. First, though he touts
the benefits of empire for trade and economic growth, he is constrained to
admit that the greatest period of economic growth in world history did not
occur under the aegis of an empire. "Promethean intensive growth remains a
European miracle of the anarchical systems of nation-states established
after the breakdown of the Roman empire" (p. 43). Does this not give us
some reason to question Lal's claim that empire is needed to promote world
trade?
Lal has ready his response. He says: "But as I have argued in detail
elsewhere, it is incorrect to infer that it was this anarchy which caused
the miracle" (p. 43). Suppose that Lal is right: so what? It is still not
the case that empire is needed for trade and growth.
Our author's case for American empire fares no better when we turn for this
general claim to his specific assessment of present dangers that call for
American action. He fears two sources of world disorder: failed states in
Africa and Islamic aggression and terrorism.
The first of these may be readily set aside. The African nations are weak
and do not account for a significant part of either world or American
trade. Lal, incredibly, acknowledges this but finds it a cause for regret:
if only Africa posed a threat to us so that we could give it the "basic
order" it needs. "But (sadly)[!] with the ending of the Cold war, Africa
does not represent a strategic challenge to the United States or any of the
potential great powers" (p. 84).
Professor Lal possesses an enviable knowledge of his adopted American
society, but evidently he has not come across the adage that warns us not
to buy trouble. Even he admits, though, that "the best policy toward
Africa, if direct imperialism is ruled out as being too costly, is to keep
markets for African goods and capital flows to Africa open, and leave it to
the Africans to sort out their own problems" (p. 85).
Lal's real concerns lie elsewhere. Must we not act as an imperial power in
order to contain Islamic terrorism? Must we not realize "the obsolescence
of the view still being peddled by isolationists such as Pat Buchanan and
expressed in the title of his recent book, A Republic, Not an Empire?" (p.
55).
Lal may choose to mock Jeffersonians who hope that the American empire will
go away, but his own comments on the Islamic danger show, contrary to his
intent, that nonintervention is far better for us and the rest of the world
than empire. He finds the major threat from Islam to come from a particular
variety of that religion, Wahabism:
"The Saudis have directly and indirectly funded the mosques and madrasas
which preach hatred against the infidels-Jews, Christians, and above all
Hindus-to young minds. . . . But for the Saudis to eschew or put a stop to
this funding would undoubtedly create a Wahabi backlash in Saudi Arabia and
end the dynasty. . . . For the rest of the world, the poison being spread
by this Wahabi evangelism is becoming intolerable. . . . If there is to be
an end to the 'war on terror,' this poisoning of the Muslim mind clearly
has to stop" (p. 97).
Has not Lal here given us an excellent argument to cease our aid to Saudi
Arabia? Why support a regime that sponsors a religious ideology of this
kind? Further, as Lal himself recognizes, "one of Osama bin Laden's
ostensible reasons for his jihad was the presence of Americans in the
kingdom [Saudi Arabia] housing Islam's holiest shrines" (p. 200). Does this
not give us an even stronger reason to leave the area forthwith?
Lal himself feels the force of these considerations, but his imperialist
ideology prevents him from urging the course of reason-immediate and total
withdrawal. In his view, we should reduce our ties to the Saudi monarchy,
but only after conquering Iraq. In that way, we can secure a source of oil
independent of Saudi Arabia. Did it ever occur to Lal that the Iraqis might
have been happy to sell us oil, were we to have ended the inhumane and
ineffective blockade against them?
Lal inadvertently provides another reason we should reject the imperialist
program he favors. He warns us against trying to impose our own system of
values and beliefs on foreign countries. In his view, terrorists are apt to
be educated young men with some exposure to Western education. They cannot
cope with the Western challenges to their accustomed Islamic way of life.
In particular, Western sexual freedom puts them under intolerable pressure,
and they lash out in fury against us.
In our imperialist endeavors, Lal warns, we must keep intact the prevailing
morality lest the terrorists rise against us more than they have already
done. He condemns those who urge that we impose democracy and Western
values on this region. To do so will lead to disaster; Lal's favored
imperialism resolutely avoids such meddling. Would it not be simpler to
stay out of their way altogether? Lal promotes imperialism as a means to
counter terror; but it seems that without an interventionist policy, we
would not have to confront a terrorist threat.
In economic matters, Lal is a firm supporter of the free market; and he
develops a model of the state as predator that could be taken from Franz
Oppenheimer and Albert Jay Nock. Yet this state skeptic wishes the American
state to assume a gigantic burden. We must, as an example, solve the
Arab-Israeli conflict and impose a peace settlement on the Middle East.
"The primary task of a Pax Americana must be to find ways to create a new
order in the Middle East. . . . Far from being objectionable, imperialism
is precisely what is needed to restore order in the Middle East. . . . The
purpose of the American imperium would be to maintain the threat or actual
use of force to prevent any international disorder arising from the region.
Additionally, some way has to be found for maintaining domestic order in
the states in the region" (pp. 99-100).
Lal devotes some attention to arguing that the United States has the
material resources to carry out the program he suggests. He never asks why
we should trust the state to limit itself to the benevolent program he
envisions.
How can someone of Lal's undoubted intelligence fail to see these obvious
problems? I should like to offer a suggestion that can be no more than
highly speculative. Lal, though he teaches in America and has strong ties
to England, remains at heart a committed Indian nationalist. Hence his
surprising remark, earlier quoted, that Wahabi Islam is a threat "above
all" to Hindus. The United States need not be seriously menaced by Islamic
terrorism unless, by intervention in the Middle East we embroil ourselves
in matters that do not really concern us. India is not so fortunate.
Many Muslims in Pakistan and India itself wish to reconstitute India as a
Muslim theocracy and are not averse to using violence to achieve their
goals. Hence Lal's alarm over Saudi financing of Wahabi Islamic schools in
Pakistan. Further, if America follows an imperial course, Lal looks forward
to a commanding role for cosmopolitans such as himself: "Moreover, the
United States and many other countries are recognizing dual citizenship. .
. . With the growth of a cosmopolitan class . . . of primarily U.S. trained
technicians and executives at work in many different countries, the core of
a global 'Roman' political and economic elite-open to the talents of
all-already exists. It could run this new U.S. imperium" (pp. 74-75).
A book by Deepak Lal cannot be wholly bad. While defending his own version
of imperialism, Lal is anxious to refute competing programs of American
world meddling. His criticism of Wilsonianism rewards close study. Wilson
sought to achieve a Utopia, in which all nations would adhere strictly to
moral principles. National interest as a guide to policy was outdated;
instead, "the instrument for achieving this Utopia was to be the League of
Nations, which would ensure collective security by bringing transgressors
of the new order into line through sanctions" (p. 56). Lal raises a simple
but decisive objection to this program: economic sanctions do not work. "
These sanctions, as the 1990 detailed study by Gary Hufbauer and his
associates shows, have been ineffective and inefficient in serving foreign
policy goals" (p. 58, citing G. Hufbauer et al., Economic Sanctions
Revisited, 1990).
Lal cites a little-known comment by Wilson, written in 1886, that tells us
all we need to know about the aims of that pretentious busybody: "For it is
very clear that in fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if
not quite one and the same" (p. 226). We can now better understand what
Wilson meant when he said, "The world must be made safe for democracy."
Lal is an excellent economist, and when he confines himself to issues that
affect economic development, he has a great deal to offer. In a brief but
brilliant account of global warming, he notes that scientists, such as
Stephen Schneider, who advance alarmist models to justify government
interference with the free market "openly admitted they were creating alarm
about a phenomenon which they themselves recognized was highly speculative"
(p. 149).
But do not the alarmists have a point? If we follow their advice and
restrict economic development, what is the worst that can happen? We will
not be as prosperous as we otherwise might have been, and we will have
taken precautions against an imaginary danger. If they are right, we have
averted disaster. Is it not better to be safe than sorry?
Lal, here following Julian Simon, uncovers a fatal flaw in this reasoning.
Economic growth tends to increase population; a restrictive
environmentalist policy means that population will be less. Must not the
interests of those people prevented from coming into existence be taken
into account, when the costs of restricting the market are assessed?
"[Paul] Ehrlich [an extreme environmentalist] bets what he thinks will be
the economic gains that we and our descendants might enjoy against the
unborn's very lives" (p. 151, quoting Simon).
______________________________
<http://www.mises.org/fellows.asp?control=5>David Gordon covers new books
in economics, politics, philosophy, and law
for http://www.mises.org/misesreview.asp
The Mises Review, the quarterly review of literature in the social sciences,
published since 1995 by the
Mises Institute
(<http://www.mises.org/store/product1.asp?SID=2&Product_ID=125>Subscribe
Today). <mailto:dgordon@...>dgordon@....
Dear Friend,
The Campaign for Freedom of Information has published a users' guide to the
Freedom of Information Act, Environmental Information Regulations and new
rights to see personal data about yourself held by public authorities. The
guide covers both the UK and Scottish legislation.
The guide can be downloaded from http://www.cfoi.org.uk/pdf/foi_guide.pdf
Best wishes,
Katherine Gundersen
Research Officer
Campaign for Freedom of Information
http://www.cfoi.org.uk
----
Name of the Book: An Islamic Reformation?
Edited by: Michaelle Browers and Charles Kurzman
Publisher: Lexington Books, Oxford
Year: 2004
Pp: 209
ISBN: 0-7391-0554-X
Reviewed by: Yoginder Sikand
The challenges that modernity poses before us demand a reappraisal of
traditional ways of understanding the world and our place in it. Adjusting
to the rapidly changing world is ridden with tension and potential conflict.
The rise of radical Islamist as well as Islamic reformist movements
represents different ways of responding to modernity, and illustrates, in
different ways, the ongoing struggles on the part of Muslims to understand
the relevance of their faith in contemporary times.
The articles contained in this book cover various dimensions of the process
of 'reform', argued from a broadly defined Islamic perspective. The
diversity of positions articulated by the different Islamic thinkers
examined here points to the historical and ongoing process of the
construction of the notion of precisely what constitutes 'Islamic
authenticity'. Both the various Muslim reformers studied here as well as
their Muslim critics claim to represent 'genuine' Islam, thus clearly
suggesting that the 'reformist' project needs to be understood in the
context of a struggle for discursive hegemony between contending visions and
versions of Islam.
In their introduction to this volume, Michaelle Browers and Charles Kurzman
provide a broad overview of the trajectory and significance of the Islamic
reformist project. They see it as, in some sense, similar to the Protestant
Reformation, stressing the role of the individual, critiquing the clergy and
leading to a fragmentation of religious authority. Its stress on reason in
order to understand revelation reflects the influence of modern rationalism.
It is also a response to mass education, which has fractured religious
discourse, resulting in a growing challenge to the authority of the
traditional 'ulama to speak for Islam and to define Islamic normativity.
Although Islamism, defined as a political project that claims to structure
the whole of society on what it defines as Islamic grounds, is, on the
whole, hostile to the reformist project, Browers and Kurzman argue that its
critique of the traditional 'ulama and its embrace of modern technology
(features that it shares with the 'reformists') might ironically lead to an
inadvertent, albeit limited, modernization in the long term. This point is
further developed by Nader Hashemi in his piece, where he explains the
phenomenon of 'fundamentalism' as a response to and result of a certain form
of modernization that generates trauma and social disruption on a large
scale.
In his article on Islamic religious authority, Dale Eickelman asks the
provocative question 'Who Speaks for Islam?'. The traditionalist 'ulama, he
writes, can no longer be presumed to have a monopoly over Islamic discourse,
although they themselves would probably insist that they do or should.
Rather, as Eickelman notes, in the last two centuries there has been a
profound transformation in the nature and structure of Islamic religious
authority. 'Ordinary' Muslims, many of them trained in Western-style
institutions or in the West itself, now directly challenge the 'ulama's
claim to speak for Islam. Eickelman sees this as a positive development,
pointing out that many of these scholars are now calling for a
contextualised understanding of Islam that takes into account such pressing
issues as human rights, religious pluralism, secularism and democracy,
matters that many traditionalist 'ulama are completely incapable of
handling, given their education and training.
The efforts of key Muslim reformists is reflected in the significant legal
changes that several Muslim-majority countries have introduced, as Felicitas
Opwis explains. These reforms provide for legal equality of all citizens,
Muslims and others, men as well as women, and thus constitute a significant
departure from traditional notions of Islamic law. The advocates of legal
reform faced stiff opposition from the traditionalists, who claimed that
they were acting in violation of what they believed to be divinely revealed
laws. Many of the reformists sought to justify their efforts by seeking
'Islamic' legitimacy for their arguments. They claimed that these
constituted legitimate ijithad, based on maslaha, or public interest,
recognized as a major source of Islamic jurisprudence. This went along with
their trenchant critique of taqlid or 'blind imitation' of jurisprudential
precedent. Opwis argues that opposition to taqlid is now a standard means
adopted by reformists to develop creative responses to a host of issues that
the traditional corpus of fiqh or jurisprudence is seen as being incapable
of handling suitably.
In a provocative essay, Salwa Ismail examines new readings of the early
Islamic period as a means to critique the traditionalist 'ulama as well as
Islamist ideologues and to present a new agenda for reform of Muslim
societies. She studies two controversial Egyptian scholars, Mahmud Sayyid
al-Qimmi and Khalil Abdul Karim, both of whom provide a historical
understanding of the Prophet and his times. They see the rise of Islam as a
result of, or a response to, local social, economic and political factors,
and, thus, as historically conditioned, a proposition that believing Muslims
are unlikely to accept. They also critique the notion of the 'Golden Age' of
Islam, which both the traditionalist 'ulama and the Islamists seek to
present as a model for Muslims to emulate.
In Iran, the regime seeks its legitimacy from its avowed objective of
resurrecting precisely that contentious 'Golden Age' of Islam. However, as
Charles Kurzman points out in his article, numerous Islamic scholars have
bravely defied the regime on 'Islamic' grounds, thereby forcefully
contesting its claims to 'Islamicity'. These dissident clerics present an
alternate understanding of the relation between Islam and politics and claim
that Khomeini's concept of the 'rule of the jurist' (vilayat-i faqih)
actually has no legitimacy in Islam itself. Some of them go so far as to
insist that the state has no moral authority to decide on issues of
'Islamicity'. They make a crucial distinction between the shari'ah, or what
they believe to be divinely-revealed laws, on the one hand, and human
interpretations of it, on the other. Since the shari'ah can only be
understood in human terms, there is, they point out, ample scope for
dissent, and the state or the official 'ulama do not have the right
to impose their understandings of it on others. This approach to matters of
the shari'ah, Kurzman shows, has allowed some of these thinkers to adopt
novel, and in many cases, radical, positions on contentious issues such as
democracy and women's rights, that have earned for them the wrath of the
Iranian state. Not surprisingly, some of these dissident Islamic scholars
have even been sentenced to death for their arguments.
Islamic 'reformists' have, typically, enjoyed an ambiguous relationship with
Sufism. They have tended to see popular Sufism as 'irrational', 'backward',
'superstitious' and 'exploitative'. Islamists, too, appear to share the
same views, and claim that popular Sufism is 'un-Islamic'. Yet, as Sedgwick
shows in his incisive study of the Budshishiya Sufi order in Morocco, a
growing number of well-educated, middle-class men and women are being
attracted to Sufism. This owes to both for a search for meaning in an
increasingly settled world and to disillusionment with the traditionalist
'ulama and radical Islamists. The growing association of middle-class
Muslims with Sufi orders, at least in some countries, might, in turn, have
important consequences for how Sufism is understood and how it relates to
issues of contemporary social concern, including, and particularly, the
challenge of radicalism in the name of Islam.
This book is a passionate appeal for reforming traditional notions of
religion, particularly insofar as they impact on such sensitive issues as
women's rights, secularism, pluralism and democracy. It takes note of the
fierce resistance that demands for such reform encounter from various
quarters, including, but not only, from sections of the traditionalist
'ulama and Islamist groups. Yet, where it fails is its silence on the role
of western powers in propping up dictatorial regimes and ruling elites in
large parts of the world, who have been consistently hostile to key demands
of the reformists, and in supporting radical, fiercely anti-democratic
Islamist groups to serve their own agenda. Surely, this would suggest, the
burden of reform cannot be left on Muslim shoulders alone.
"When corporations rule the world"
by David Korten
(Urdu Translation by the Green Economics & Globalisation (GEG), Shirkat Gah
David Korten is an American economist well known in the international
development and NGO world. He served the US establishment for decades around
the world, but became disillusioned by what he observed first-hand of the
damaging and impoverishing effects of US foreign policy. He then turned his
back on it and wrote this book to expose to the world at large the inner
mechanisms of the power structure and vested interests that have coalesced
in a virtual corporate takeover of the world. In language anyone can
understand, he explains the invisible underpinnings of trade, investment and
international finance that keeps the unsuspecting 'developing' world in a
perpetual state of debt and impoverishment.
Mr. Korten had generously donated the rights of Urdu translation to SHIRKAT
GAH, and this 400+ page book was launched at GEG's Fourth Food Security
Engagement held in December, 2004. We consider it 'MUST' reading for all
concerned citizens, scholars, professionals of all callings especially
economists and bankers, present and would-be political representatives, and
activists. Also for libraries.
Available directly only from Shirkat Gah at no-profit,
actual-cost-of-production.
A generous discount price is offered to individuals and students as well as
community-based organisations (CBOs).
For details write to geg-shirkat@... with your full name, postal
and e-mail address and organisational affiliation.
BLAZING TRAIL
Journey Of The Indian Revolution
" An all inspiring video documentary from the Red areas of India. This Film
documents the emergence of the Indian Revolutionary process, coming as it
did in a World of Struggle, Mass upheaval, Rebellion and Revolution! This
film includes footage of the Vietnamese People's defeat of the US
imperialists, the Victory and Success of the Chinese People's Revolution and
massive street rebellions shaking the citadels of imperialism. It shows the
overall dialectical development of Revolution, both in the Oppressed and
Oppressor Nations, shaking the imperialist systems foundations, proving
again that " all imperialists and reactionaries are paper tigers".
Today in India, the Communist forces are stronger, united within the
Communist Party Of India (Maoist), leading the Indian Revolution by
developing People's War. A Must buy for any Communist, Socialist,
Anti-imperialist or democrat" -
A Saga of India's Communist Revolutionary Movement initiated by the
historical Naxalbari uprising of May 1967, breaking the chains of
revisionism that had enveloped the Movement for decades. From the first
Congress of the Communist Party Of India (Marxist-Leninist) held in 1970 to
its second congress held over three decades later in 2001 under the name
Communist Party Of India (Marxist-Leninist) - (People's War). A Saga of
heroism and sacrifice in the face of a brutal enemy masquarading as the
World's 'largest democracy', foundations are being laid for a New Democratic
India.
Price: £ 7:50, Available from
Housemans bookshop,
5,Caledonian Road,
King`s Cross,
London, N5
( Can now be ordered by ringing Tel: 0207 837 4473 and ordering by postal
service ! )
Or write to India Video, BM BOX 7970, London, WC1N - 3XX (Include either an
e mail or postal address for contact)
Earthscan would like to welcome you to the launch of its new website
(www.earthscan.co.uk <http://www.earthscan.co.uk/> ) which offers a
dynamic online resource specifically for those in the sustainable
development and environment community. You can ask questions, offer
advice, debate recent news items and provide valuable feedback to
practitioners, researchers, policy-makers and NGOs, as well as our
authors and readers, in our new online Forum. The new Earthscan website
is designed to be both the door to a vibrant and extensive network of
contacts and a library packed with information and resources.
Highlights include:
- Free articles, features, abstracts and reviews from our
magazines, books and journals
- E-alert and e-newsletter service that you can manage directly
through your own member's page
- Secure, user-friendly online bookshop
- Bookmark pages of interest or email them to friends or
colleagues
- Search our entire books catalogue online and begin a discussion
on what you've read
- Special 10% discount on all books to celebrate launch
Simply register on the new site now at www.earthscan.co.uk
<http://www.earthscan.co.uk/> - it is quick, easy and free.
For more information on Earthscan or our new website, please contact
jon.raeside@...
From: "dabblingmum" <dabblingmum@...>
Child Out Of Place: A Story For New England
By Patricia Q. Wall
ISBN: 0-9742185-0-2
Fall Rose Books
P.O. Box 39
Kittery Pointe, ME 03905
207-439-2878
fallrosebk1@...
www.fallrosebooks.com
Price $12
Set in historic Portsmouth, New England, Child Out Of Place allows
children to experience life as a young slave girl named Matty. It's
through Matty's eyes that children can begin to understand a deeper,
more emotional aspect of slavery and what it means to enjoy personal
freedom, endure hardships, and find self-respect.
Matty's family was taken from Africa and forced into slavery, but
when they're finally free to live as they choose, the family is torn
apart. Matty's father leaves to find a better life, leaving Matty
behind to be cared for by her grandmother and great Uncle: two people
who fear change and stay on, as servants, in their former master's
home.
Child Out Of Place reaches back through time to share a heartwarming
story of triumph over adversity-of duty, honor, courage, faith, hope,
and most of all, family. It's a story of a family who struggles to
keep safe while longing for something more-freedom. And when they
finally get that freedom, it becomes a struggle to step beyond fear
and accept the new life that awaits them.
Bylines to choose from:
Long-
Alyice Edrich is the editor of The Dabbling Mum.com-where BUSY
parents find balance (http://thedabblingmum.com). She is also the
author of several work-from-home e-books, including one that allows
parents to earn $50 in two hours without joining an MLM or home party
business.
Short-
Courtesy of Alyice Edrich, editor of The Dabbling Mum.com; where BUSY
parents find advice, balance, inspiration, and how-to e-books.
Publishing Guidelines:
You may freely reprint this article in a print or online magazine, e-
zine, or newsletter provided you leave the byline intact, don't
change the content, and make The Dabbling Mum web address clickable.
You can even start a column in your publication using my free
articles/reviews. Please consider sending a courtesy copy for my
records. Send an email to dabblingmum@...
Peterman Rides Again
By John Peterman
ISBN: 0-7352-0199-4
Price $25
Prentice Hall Press
240 Frisch Court
Paramus, NJ 07652
http://johnpeterman.com
Ever wonder what it was like for a multi-million dollar company to be
build from the ground floor? Ever wish you could've been a fly on the
wall or afforded the luxury of requesting mentorship from the founder?
In Peterman Rides Again, you'll not only get an inside look into a
multi-million dollar company that got it's start on a mere $500, but
in Peterman's own words, you'll get a first-hand glimpse at what it
was like to build that million dollar company from scratch.
But what I found most inspiring about Peterman Rides Again was the
openness and honesty of Peterman as he shares his mistakes, comments
on how things could've been done better, and takes you on the ride of
a lifetime.
While Peterman may have had regrets as his company was put on the
auction block, it's his attitude towards life that is inspiring.
Peterman reminds us that it is never wrong to follow our dreams, to
dare to be different, to keep honesty at the forefront of any
business, to build relationships within a business, and that it's
never too late. In the words of Peterman's Uncle Joe, "Once you
realize that most people are keeping up appearances and putting on a
show, their approval becomes much less important." What a profound
statement to ponder as we strive to reach our dreams and "never give
up."
Update: In 2001 Peterman regained ownership of his name and company.
Check it out at: http://www.jpeterman.com/
Bylines to choose from:
Long-
Alyice Edrich is the editor of The Dabbling Mum.com-where BUSY
parents find balance (http://thedabblingmum.com). She is also the
author of several work-from-home e-books, including one that allows
parents to earn $50 in two hours without joining an MLM or home party
business.
Short-
Courtesy of Alyice Edrich, editor of The Dabbling Mum.com; where BUSY
parents find advice, balance, inspiration, and how-to e-books.
Publishing Guidelines:
You may freely reprint this article in a print or online magazine, e-
zine, or newsletter provided you leave the byline intact, don't
change the content, and make The Dabbling Mum web address clickable.
You can even start a column in your publication using my free
articles/reviews. Please consider sending a courtesy copy for my
records. Send an email to dabblingmum@...
Known as the Gilgit Manuscript, or more appropriately the Naupur Manuscript
[after the village where it was found in], the authoritative work is now
under the possession of the National Archives of India. Airlifted under
special instructions from Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, during the 1948 Indo-Pak
conflict, the manuscript recently found a new lease to life when NAI
laminated a number of its pages
http://www.the-south-asian.com/Aug2004/Gilgit_manuscript.htm
-------------------------------
GILGIT MANUSCRIPT
- PIECING TOGETHER FRAGMENTS OF HISTORY
by
Gyan Marwah
The Gilgit Manuscript...an important historical link
The almost seventeen centuries old Gilgit Manuscript has been giving
historians a hard time, as no one has yet been able to fully decipher it.
The lamination of the manuscript by the National Archives of India sometime
ago has once again put the limelight back on this all-important literature
concerning India, Tibet, China, Japan and other neighbouring countries.
Sometime ago when the National Archives of India (NAI) laminated 3,366 pages
and many fragments of the Gilgit Manuscript, literary circles of the world
were euphoric.
And there was good reason for cheer. The almost seventeen centuries old
Gilgit Manuscript has been giving historians a hard time, as no one has yet
been able to fully decipher it. The process of lamination and preservation
has once again put the limelight back on this all-important literature
concerning India, Tibet, China, Japan and other neighbouring countries.
In fact in 1897 - 34 years before it was discovered - the Buddhist Text
Society of Calcutta had published references to the Gilgit Manuscript saying
that if it were ever to be found it would unravel the ancient history of
several communities as it is considered to be the oldest Buddhist
manuscript.
But how did India come to possess it? The story began some sixty years ago
when a group of cattle grazers unearthed a box in the region of Gilgit [now
part of Pakistan occupied Kashmir] in the then undivided Jammu & Kashmir
state. Little did they realize that the box contained one of the world's
oldest manuscripts which could hold the key to the exact evolution of
Sanskrit, Buddhist, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Tibetan literatures.
Gilgit was then the major trade centre on the Silk Route.
For the cattle grazers, unearthing of this box was of no significance. The
manuscript was hurriedly taken to the chambers of the erstwhile Maharaja of
Jammu & Kashmir and the international media published special supplements to
tell the world that history was in the making. Editorials said that it was
world property and should be well protected and preserved by the Maharaja.
It was also suggested that a combined international team of scholars be
constituted to decipher it. Leading Buddhist scholars from all parts of the
world also rushed to Gilgit to unravel the mysteries locked up in the box.
Authoritative Work
Known as the Gilgit Manuscript, or more appropriately the Naupur Manuscript
[after the village where it was found in], the authoritative work is now
under the possession of the National Archives of India. Airlifted under
special instructions from Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, during the 1948 Indo-Pak
conflict, the manuscript recently found a new lease to life when NAI
laminated a number of its pages.
Opinions vary about the date of this manuscript. One branch of scholars says
it was written in the second century AD., while another puts the date at
somewhere between the sixth and seventh centuries.
That the manuscript has at all survived is partly attributed to the fact it
has been written on bhoj patra (bark of the bhoj tree) which doesn't decay
or decompose and partly because of the near-freezing temperatures of the
Gilgit region where it was buried like a 'time capsule'.
Originally written in Pali text, the Gilgit Manuscript contains four sutras,
with each leaf between ten and twelve feet in length and five feet in width.
The main scripture is the Lotus Sutra which even today is an important
scripture in Japan and deeply influences the cultural and political life of
the country. Several researchers and scholars have attempted to transcribe
the text but till date the manuscript has not been deciphered in its
entirety.
Lokesh Chandra...Unlocking the mystery of the treasure trove.
Says Prof. Lokesh Chandra, renowned Buddhist scholar and director of
International Academy of Indian Culture, who has put in several years of
research on the manuscript," It will probably take another 50 years to
understand it completely. Scholars from Germany, Japan and Korea are
currently trying to decipher the text as sporadic translations in Sanskrit
and Chinese have helped them get some idea of the missing links in the
original texts."
The Gilgit Manuscript contains the texts on Vinay Vastu, the treatise on
monastic discipline. There are texts on Ayurvedic medicines like Anna Panna
Vidhi and Bhaisajya Guru Sutra. There are references to iconometry, folk
tales, philosophy and culinary skills. It also has a chronological list of
the various Buddhist Shahi kings of Gilgit.
Experts say that a Buddhist monk, Narendrayasa of the Northern Tshi dynasty
translated it into Chinese in 557 A.D. But there is no trace of that now. Of
the incomplete translations, one was made by Shih-sien-kun of the Sun
dynasty in 420-479 A.D. Around the same period a third translation was done
by Ngan-She-Kao.
From the different incomplete Chinese translations available it is evident
that the original sutra of the manuscript was in existence even before 2nd
century A.D. But in view of the fact that the earlier translations were of a
shorter text, it may be inferred that the sutra in its original form was
shorter.
According to Prof. Lokesh Chandra who has done a serialisation of the text,
the Gilgit Manuscript has references of the three Buddhist Synods [meeting
of religious heads]. This suggests a date sometime around or after the time
of Emperor Kanishka. According to the Sanskrit texts, the third Synod was
held during Kanishka's reign.
Some reference of the script and description of the sutras can also be found
in an eight-volume serialisation of the manuscript done by Prof. Nalinaksha
Dutt in the 50s. His work suggests that verses in the text are composed in
Sanskrit and Prakrit languages. The vocabulary is derived from ancient
Buddhist texts in Prakrit.
Grammatical Inflexions
Prof. Dutt's work also suggests that the grammatical inflexions are
indiscriminately applied for the sake of metre and melody of verses. There
are Sanskrit words with Prakrit inflexions and Prakrit words with Sanskrit
inflexions. And often, there are Pali words with correct inflexions, but in
the garb of Sanskrit.
Regarding the dialectical peculiarities of the text, Dutt says that though
the language of the prose portion is Sanskrit it bristles with Buddhist
religious and philosophical terms and uses Prakrit language quite liberally.
Prof. Dutt also suggests that the text's versified portion is extremely
confusing as it disregards the elementary canons of grammar, meter, and even
vocabulary. A sweet melody seems to be its chief aim and for this it
sacrifices every essential condition of a language. It doesn't use
convenient forms of verbs or singulars or plurals or masculine or feminine
genders - all of which makes Prof. Dutt suspect that the author of the
original text was a versatile linguist and could play around with languages
and blend them together.
Though the grammatical and literature aspects of the text are gradually
becoming more of historical interest in the contemporary world, what is of
interest is the social relevance of some of the sutras mentioned in the
manuscript. Experts feel that when the full text is deciphered a common
thread will be found in the language and people of countries like India
China, Japan, Thailand, Tibet and Korea which would have the potential of
altering the very geo-political map of the region.
The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited
Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold
War (London: Granta Books), £20.
James Petras
This book provides a detailed account of the ways in which the CIA
penetrated and influenced a vast array of cultural organizations, through
its front groups and via friendly philanthropic organizations like the Ford
and Rockefeller Foundations. The author, Frances Stonor Saunders, details
how and why the CIA ran cultural congresses, mounted exhibits, and organized
concerts. The CIA also published and translated well-known authors who toed
the Washington line, sponsored abstract art to counteract art with any
social content and, throughout the world, subsidized journals that
criticized Marxism, communism, and revolutionary politics and apologized
for, or ignored, violent and destructive imperialist U.S. policies. The CIA
was able to harness some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom
in the West in service of these policies, to the extent that some
intellectuals were directly on the CIA payroll. Many were knowingly involved
with CIA "projects," and others drifted in and out of its orbit, claiming
ignorance of the CIA connection after their CIA sponsors were publicly
exposed during the late 1960s and the Vietnam war, after the turn of the
political tide to the left.
U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect
funding included Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and
many others. Among the intellectuals who were funded and promoted by the CIA
were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney
Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary
McCarthy, and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe,
the CIA was particularly interested in and promoted the "Democratic Left"
and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler,
Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell.
The CIA, under the prodding of Sidney Hook and Melvin Lasky, was
instrumental in funding the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a kind of
cultural NATO that grouped together all sorts of "anti-Stalinist" leftists
and rightists. They were completely free to defend Western cultural and
political values, attack "Stalinist totalitarianism" and to tiptoe gently
around U.S. racism and imperialism. Occasionally, a piece marginally
critical of U.S. mass society was printed in the CIA-subsidized journals.
What was particularly bizarre about this collection of CIA-funded
intellectuals was not only their political partisanship, but their pretense
that they were disinterested seekers of truth, iconoclastic humanists,
freespirited intellectuals, or artists for art's sake, who counterposed
themselves to the corrupted "committed" house "hacks" of the Stalinist
apparatus.
It is impossible to believe their claims of ignorance of CIA ties. How could
they ignore the absence in the journals of any basic criticism of the
numerous lynchings throughout the southern United States during the whole
period? How could they ignore the absence, during their cultural congresses,
of criticism of U.S. imperialist intervention in Guatemala, Iran, Greece,
and Korea that led to millions of deaths? How could they ignore the gross
apologies of every imperialist crime of their day in the journals in which
they wrote? They were all soldiers: some glib, vitriolic, crude, and
polemical, like Hook and Lasky; others elegant essayists like Stephen
Spender or self-righteous informers like George Orwell. Saunders portrays
the WASP Ivy League elite at the CIA holding the strings, and the vitriolic
Jewish ex-leftists snarling at leftist dissidents. When the truth came out
in the late 1960s and New York, Paris, and London "intellectuals" feigned
indignation at having been used, the CIA retaliated. Tom Braden, who
directed the International Organizations Branch of the CIA, blew their cover
by detailing how they all had to have known who paid their salaries and
stipends (397-404).
According to Braden, the CIA financed their "literary froth," as CIA
hardliner Cord Meyer called the anti-Stalinist intellectual exercises of
Hook, Kristol, and Lasky. Regarding the most prestigious and best-known
publications of the self-styled "Democratic Left" (Encounter, New Leader,
Partisan Review), Braden wrote that the money for them came from the CIA and
that "an agent became the editor of Encounter" (398). By 1953, Braden wrote,
"we were operating or influencing international organizations in every
field" (398).
Saunders' book provides useful information about several important questions
regarding the ways in which CIA intellectual operatives defended U.S.
imperialist interests on cultural fronts. It also initiates an important
discussion of the long-term consequences of the ideological and artistic
positions defended by CIA intellectuals.
Saunders refutes the claims (made by Hook, Kristol, and Lasky) that the CIA
and its friendly foundations provided aid with no strings attached. She
demonstrates that "the individuals and institutions subsidized by the CIA
were expected to perform as part ... of a propaganda war." The most
effective propaganda was defined by the CIA as the kind where "the subject
moves in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his
own." While the CIA allowed their assets on the "Democratic Left" to prattle
occasionally about social reform, it was the "anti-Stalinist" polemics and
literary diatribes against Western Marxists and Soviet writers and artists
that they were most interested in, funded most generously, and promoted with
the greatest visibility. Braden referred to this as the "convergence"
between the CIA and the European "Democratic Left" in the fight against
communism. The collaboration between the "Democratic Left" and the CIA
included strike-breaking in France, informing on Stalinists (Orwell and
Hook), and covert smear campaigns to prevent leftist artists from receiving
recognition (including Pablo Neruda's bid for a Nobel Prize in 1964 [351]).
The CIA, as the arm of the U.S. government most concerned with fighting the
cultural Cold War, focused on Europe in the period immediately following the
Second World War. Having experienced almost two decades of capitalist war,
depression, and postwar occupation, the overwhelming majority of European
intellectuals and trade unionists were anticapitalist and particularly
critical of the hegemonic pretensions of the United States. To counter the
appeal of communism and the growth of the European Communist Parties
(particularly in France and Italy), the CIA devised a two-tier program. On
the one hand, as Saunders argues, certain European authors were promoted as
part of an explicitly "anticommunist program." The CIA cultural commissar's
criteria for "suitable texts" included "whatever critiques of Soviet foreign
policy and Communism as a form of government we find to be objective (sic)
and convincingly written and timely." The CIA was especially keen on
publishing disillusioned ex-communists like Silone, Koestler, and Gide. The
CIA promoted anticommunist writers by funding lavish conferences in Paris,
Berlin, and Bellagio (overlooking Lake Como), where objective social
scientists and philosophers like Isaiah Berlin, Daniel Bell, and Czeslow
Milosz preached their values (and the virtues of Western freedom and
intellectual independence, within the anticommunist and pro-Washington
parameters defined by their CIA paymasters). None of these prestigious
intellectuals dared to raise any doubts or questions regarding U.S. support
of the mass killing in colonial Indochina and Algeria, the witch hunt of
U.S. intellectuals or the paramilitary (Ku Klux Klan) lynchings in the
southern United States. Such banal concerns would only "play into the hands
of the Communists," according to Sidney Hook, Melvin Lasky, and the Partisan
Review crowd, who eagerly sought funds for their quasi-bankrupt literary
operation. Many of the so-called prestigious anticommunist literary and
political journals would long have gone out of business were it not for CIA
subsidies, which bought thousands of copies that it later distributed free.
The second cultural track on which the CIA operated was much more subtle.
Here, it promoted symphonies, art exhibits, ballet, theater groups, and
well-known jazz and opera performers with the explicit aim of neutralizing
anti-imperialist sentiment in Europe and creating an appreciation of U.S.
culture and government. The idea behind this policy was to showcase U.S.
culture, in order to gain cultural hegemony to support its military-economic
empire. The CIA was especially keen on sending black artists to
Europeparticularly singers (like Marion Anderson), writers, and musicians
(such as Louis Armstrong)to neutralize European hostility toward
Washington's racist domestic policies. If black intellectuals didn't stick
to the U.S. artistic script and wandered into explicit criticism, they were
banished from the list, as was the case with writer Richard Wright.
The degree of CIA political control over the intellectual agenda of these
seemingly nonpolitical artistic activities was clearly demonstrated by the
reaction of the editors of Encounter (Lasky and Kristol, among others) with
regard to an article submitted by Dwight MacDonald. MacDonald, a maverick
anarchist intellectual, was a long-time collaborator with the CIA-run
Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter. In 1958, he wrote an article
for Encounter entitled "America America," in which he expressed his
revulsion for U.S. mass culture, its crude materialism, and lack of
civility. It was a rebuttal of the American values that were prime
propaganda material in the CIA's and Encounter's cultural war against
communism. MacDonald's attack of the "decadent American imperium" was too
much for the CIA and its intellectual operatives in Encounter. As Braden, in
his guidelines to the intellectuals, stated "organizations receiving CIA
funds should not be required to support every aspect of U.S. policy," but
invariably there was a cut-off pointparticularly where U.S. foreign policy
was concerned (314). Despite the fact that MacDonald was a former editor
ofEncounter, the article was rejected. The pious claims of Cold War writers
like Nicola Chiaromonte, writing in the second issue of Encounter, that
"[t]he duty that no intellectual can shirk without degrading himself is the
duty to expose fictions and to refuse to call `useful lies,' truths,"
certainly did not apply to Encounter and its distinguished list of
contributors when it came to dealing with the `useful lies' of the West.
One of the most important and fascinating discussions in Saunders' book is
about the fact that CIA and its allies in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)
poured vast sums of money into promoting Abstract Expressionist (AE)
painting and painters as an antidote to art with a social content. In
promoting AE, the CIA fought off the right-wing in Congress. What the CIA
saw in AE was an "anti-Communist ideology, the ideology of freedom, of free
enterprise. Non-figurative and politically silent it was the very antithesis
of socialist realism" (254). They viewed AE as the true expression of the
national will. To bypass right-wing criticism, the CIA turned to the private
sector (namely MOMA and its co-founder, Nelson Rockefeller, who referred to
AE as "free enterprise painting.") Many directors at MOMA had longstanding
links to the CIA and were more than willing to lend a hand in promoting AE
as a weapon in the cultural Cold War. Heavily funded exhibits of AE were
organized all over Europe; art critics were mobilized, and art magazines
churned out articles full of lavish praise. The combined economic resources
of MOMA and the CIA-run Fairfield Foundation ensured the collaboration of
Europe's most prestigious galleries which, in turn, were able to influence
aesthetics across Europe.
AE as "free art" ideology (George Kennan, 272) was used to attack
politically committed artists in Europe. The Congress for Cultural Freedom
(the CIA front) threw its weight behind abstract painting, over
representational or realist aesthetics, in an explicit political act.
Commenting on the political role of AE, Saunders points out: "One of the
extraordinary features of the role that American painting played in the
cultural Cold War is not the fact that it became part of the enterprise, but
that a movement which so deliberately declared itself to be apolitical could
become so intensely politicized" (275). The CIA associated apolitical
artists and art with freedom. This was directed toward neutralizing the
artists on the European left. The irony, of course, was that the apolitical
posturing was only for left-wing consumption.
Nevertheless, the CIA and its cultural organizations were able to profoundly
shape the postwar view of art. Many prestigious writers, poets, artists, and
musicians proclaimed their independence from politics and declared their
belief in art for art's sake. The dogma of the free artist or intellectual,
as someone disconnected from political engagement, gained ascendancy and is
pervasive to this day.
While Saunders has presented a superbly detailed account of the links
between the CIA and Western artists and intellectuals, she leaves unexplored
the structural reasons for the necessity of CIA deception and control over
dissent. Her discussion is framed largely in the context of political
competition and conflict with Soviet communism. There is no serious attempt
to locate the CIA's cultural Cold War in the context of class warfare,
indigenous third world revolutions, and independent Marxist challenges to
U.S. imperialist economic domination. This leads Saunders to selectively
praise some CIA ventures at the expense of others, some operatives over
others. Rather than see the CIA's cultural war as part of an imperialist
system, Saunders tends to be critical of its deceptive and distinct reactive
nature. The U.S.-NATO cultural conquest of Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR
should quickly dispel any notion that the cultural war was a defensive
action.
The very origins of the cultural Cold War were rooted in class warfare.
Early on, the CIA and its U.S. AFL-CIO operatives Irving Brown and Jay
Lovestone (ex-communists) poured millions of dollars into subverting
militant trade unions and breaking strikes through the funding of social
democratic unions (94). The Congress for Cultural Freedom and its
enlightened intellectuals were funded by the same CIA operatives who hired
Marseilles gangsters to break the dockworkers' strikes in 1948.
After the Second World War, with the discrediting in Western Europe of the
old right (compromised by its links to the fascists and a weak capitalist
system), the CIA realized that, in order to undermine the anti-NATO trade
unionists and intellectuals, it needed to find (or invent) a Democratic Left
to engage in ideological warfare. A special sector of the CIA was set up to
circumvent right-wing Congressional objections. The Democratic Left was
essentially used to combat the radical left and to provide an ideological
gloss on U.S. hegemony in Europe. At no point were the ideological pugilists
of the democratic left in any position to shape the strategic policies and
interests of the United States. Their job was not to question or demand, but
to serve the empire in the name of "Western democratic values." Only when
massive opposition to the Vietnam War surfaced in the United States and
Europe, and their CIA covers were blown, did many of the CIA-promoted
and -financed intellectuals jump ship and begin to criticize U.S. foreign
policy. For example, after spending most of his career on the CIA payroll,
Stephen Spender became a critic of U.S. Vietnam policy, as did some of the
editors of Partisan Review. They all claimed innocence, but few critics
believed that a love affair with so many journals and convention junkets, so
long and deeply involved, could transpire without some degree of knowledge.
The CIA's involvement in the cultural life of the United States, Europe, and
elsewhere had important long-term consequences. Many intellectuals were
rewarded with prestige, public recognition, and research funds precisely for
operating within the ideological blinders set by the Agency. Some of the
biggest names in philosophy, political ethics, sociology, and art, who
gained visibility from CIA-funded conferences and journals, went on to
establish the norms and standards for promotion of the new generation, based
on the political parameters established by the CIA. Not merit nor skill, but
politicsthe Washington linedefined "truth" and "excellence" and future
chairs in prestigious academic settings, foundations, and museums.
The U.S. and European Democratic Left's anti-Stalinist rhetorical
ejaculations, and their proclamations of faith in democratic values and
freedom, were a useful ideological cover for the heinous crimes of the West.
Once again, in NATO's recent war against Yugoslavia, many Democratic Left
intellectuals have lined up with the West and the KLA in its bloody purge of
tens of thousands of Serbs and the murder of scores of innocent civilians.
If anti-Stalinism was the opium of the Democratic Left during the Cold War,
human rights interventionism has the same narcotizing effect today, and
deludes contemporary Democratic Leftists.
The CIA's cultural campaigns created the prototype for today's seemingly
apolitical intellectuals, academics, and artists who are divorced from
popular struggles and whose worth rises with their distance from the working
classes and their proximity to prestigious foundations. The CIA role model
of the successful professional is the ideological gatekeeper, excluding
critical intellectuals who write about class struggle, class exploitation
and U.S. imperialism"ideological" not "objective" categories, or so they are
told.
The singular lasting, damaging influence of the CIA's Congress of Cultural
Freedom crowd was not their specific defenses of U.S. imperialist policies,
but their success in imposing on subsequent generations of intellectuals the
idea of excluding any sustained discussion of U.S. imperialism from the
influential cultural and political media. The issue is not that today's
intellectuals or artists may or may not take a progressive position on this
or that issue. The problem is the pervasive belief among writers and artists
that anti-imperialist social and political expressions should not appear in
their music, paintings, and serious writing if they want their work to be
considered of substantial artistic merit. The enduring political victory of
the CIA was to convince intellectuals that serious and sustained political
engagement on the left is incompatible with serious art and scholarship.
Today at the opera, theater, and art galleries, as well as in the
professional meetings of academics, the Cold War values of the CIA are
visible and pervasive: who dares to undress the emperor?
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
From: "Benjamin Kaila" <benjamin_kaila@...>
Hymn And History Were the Aryans the original inhabitants of India from
where they migrated to different parts of the world? Habib's own convictions
remain as puissant as ever.D.N. JHA
THE VEDIC AGE
by Irfan Habib and Vijay Kumar Thakur
Tulika Books
Rs 95; Pages: 100
To get Irfan Habib to release a collection of papers by the Indian Council
of Historical Research is hardly unusual. But when the collection consists
of historians arguing that the Aryans were the original inhabitants of India
from where they migrated to different parts of the world-the saffron view of
India's past that Habib has consistently exposed as "absurd"-one wonders how
they got Habib up there for the launch. However, reading this book, it's
clear that Habib's own convictions remain as puissant as ever.
Beginning with an overview of the Vedic corpus, Habib speaks of the
migration of the Aryan communities from the localities to the west of the
Indus where the horse and the chariot played a central role. He touches upon
different aspects of early Aryan life and, despite "disappointingly meagre"
data from the Rigveda (1500-1000 BC), portrays them as dominantly
agricultural. But had agriculture been so important, the Rigveda would not
reveal such "an essentially town-less environment". We are rightly told that
the Aryan society consisted of tribes: thirty of them being mentioned in the
Rigveda, each headed by a rajan, though the statement that he lived in
"many-pillared palaces" and was "linked to a definite territory" implies an
unacceptable possibility of the Aryans establishing territorial states in
the very early phase of their expansion.
Habib recognises the patriarchal nature of the family and the establishment
of the institution of marriage, but ignores the Rigvedic evidence of
brother-sister incest. The deities of the Aryans were predominantly male and
their religion was aniconic. Sacrifice occupied a central place in their
religious life and tended to become increasingly elaborate during the later
Vedic period. But it needs to be stressed that the beginnings of heresy in
religious tradition is already in evidence. The later Vedic texts (1000-600
BC) indicate the shifting of the Aryan territorial horizons towards the east
into the Gangetic valley and their references to kings and territorial
states in the region begin to multiply, implying the colonisation of land
and the emergence of stable settlements. The use of fire for extending the
area of Aryan settlements is attested by the famous story of Videgha Mathava
who helped the fire-god (Agni) cross the river Sadanira leading to the
Aryanisation of the land of Videha. The iron axe could also have accelerated
the process of forest clearance and the dispersal of agriculture. A separate
section on the coming of iron in India adds to the book's merit.
The Rigvedic social stratification seems to have given way to the fourfold
social division of the caste system, though the evidence of untouchability,
Habib should have emphasised, is tenuous and became a visible feature of
society only in subsequent times. However, he rightly punctures the tall
claims often made by indigenists and chauvinists about the progress of
science in the Vedic period. The Vedic Aryans did not even have full
knowledge of calendar, and going by the later evidence of Varahamihira, the
Vedic Brahmins did not practise astrology. Knowledge of medicine, similarly,
was limited. So, despite the claims of Hindutva forces, the Vedas cannot be
considered the source of all knowledge. The Vedic people didn't even have a
script; their history is reconstructed mainly on the basis of orally
transmitted texts coupled with archaeology.
Enriched by extracts from primary texts, Habib can clearly handle a wide
variety of sources. Far from being a narrow specialist in medieval history,
he works on a very wide canvas of time. In fact, those of us who've seen him
present research papers on ancient Indian historical geography at the IHC
may be puzzled to find a coauthor on the cover. Did he really need that?
<http://www.townhall.com/bookclub/sharansky.html>
Townhall.com
The Case for Democracy
The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror
By Natan Sharansky
Review by Johannes L. Jacobse
The West first came to know Natan (Anatoly) Sharansky as an articulate and
courageous fighter against Soviet rule who organized like-minded dissidents
in a tireless crusade against their totalitarian oppressors. His work
earned him a nine-year jail term.
Sharansky recalls the time when he believed freedom might be possible:
One day, my Soviet jailers gave me the privilege of reading "Pravda."
Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Reagan for
having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an "evil empire." Tapping on
walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan's "provocation" quickly
spread through the prison. The dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the
leader of the free world had spoken the truth - a truth that burned within
the hearts of each and every one of us.
Reagan's infamous remark aroused the ire of liberals who believed that it
heightened the conflict between the free West and the totalitarian Soviet
Union. Nothing could be further from the truth, contends Sharansky in The
Case for Democracy. Reagan brought down the Soviet Empire because he had
faith in democracy, a faith derived from his conviction that most people
yearn to breathe free. Sharansky believes that democracy is a morally
superior form of government because it promises the concrete opportunity to
live in freedom.
Sharansky says two types of societies exist in the world, broadly speaking.
Free societies are the nations where citizens can "express their views
without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or punishment." Fear societies
prohibit the free expression of ideas altogether.
Fear societies will always have a number of true believers. They impose a
uniformity of thought that creates a kind of double think where a person
acts and thinks one way in public and another way in private. Maintaining a
constant state of anxiety about external threats is necessary for
preserving a tyrant's rule because it creates the illusion of legitimacy
for the regime - South Korea or Cuba toward the U.S., for example.
In regimes where no dissent is possible - Saudi Arabia, Iraq under Saddam,
Cuba, North Korea, Palestine under Arafat, Afghanistan under the Taliban,
et. al - the rule of government is near absolute. The absence of dissent
creates an appearance of stability that often seduces Western cultural
elites. In the 1930's when Stalin was killing millions, leftists like
George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and New York Times correspondent Walter
Duranty defended Soviet tyranny, oblivious to the carnage around them. Just
recently CNN reported repeatedly that popular sentiment was behind the
Taliban before the war in Afghanistan. Today we know the opposite was true.
Sharansky argues that free societies should deal boldly with fear regimes
by demonstrating how the combination of diplomatic and economic initiatives
can lessen the grip of oppressive tyrants. Exposing this link brings moral
clarity into international affairs.
In addition, elevating human rights will embolden freedom fighters in the
fear societies. "I owe my freedom to Reagan," Sharansky writes, because in
linking American foreign policy to the internal workings of the Soviet
Union, Reagan enabled Sharansky and others to begin changing the regime
from within. Reagan's policy stood in stark contrast to Nixon's détente,
which Sharansky regards as a colossal failure, and Carter's stillborn
attempt to elevate human rights as the centerpiece of American foreign
policy.
Sharansky chides the Israeli government for seeking accommodation with
Yassar Arafat and the PLO. Peace was not possible with Arafat because he
was a terrorist and despot. If Israel had linked its policy to the
democratization of the Palestinian people, the PLO could have been
challenged internally, and the terror of PLO extremists would have abated.
The greatest fear of despots and the greatest threat to their regimes is
the emancipation of their people. Only democracy can defeat despotism and
terror.
Can democracy work in nations with no democratic tradition? Sharansky
believes it can, and cites Russia, Germany, Japan, and Afghanistan as
proof. Certainly some of these democracies function differently than
democracies in the West, but almost no one believed democracy in these
nations was possible before despotism fell. Already we see the emboldened
dissent in different countries of the Arab world.
Sharansky argues in his own way the same point Alexander Solzhenitsyn made
almost thirty years ago - that the crisis in the West not a crisis of
policy but of courage. The relationship between free and fear societies is
first a question of morality and second a question of policy. Moral clarity
needs to inform this discussion, and a renewed confidence in democracy will
help that clarity emerge.
Johannes L. Jacobse is a Greek Orthodox priest and edits the website
www.orthodoxytoday.org.
REVIEW: Politics of deceit
Reviewed by Shamim-ur-Rahman
This book is an account of the negotiations between the military regime and
the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal that finally culminated in the adoption of the
17th amendment, giving more powers to General Pervez Musharraf. It gives the
point of view of Mr S.M. Zafar who held the government's brief in the
crucial negotiations which proved successful because of the MMA's
willingness to work with Gen Musharraf through and through. Even a cursory
reading of the book confirms that the MMA's strategy strengthened Gen
Musharraf's hand and entrenched the military dispensation in the seat of
power. Was it by design or was it a misreading of the evolving political
development?
This was not the first time S.M. Zafar was involved in negotiating a deal
for a military ruler with political elements. He therefore has some very
useful information to share. Considerable space has been given to procedural
matters for structuring the dialogue. It became obvious that while the
military was not conducting negotiations as part of an exit strategy, the
MMA was also not working towards that goal. The MMA's goal was to work out a
modus vivendi for mutual coexistence while maintaining a facade of offering
resistance to military rule.
The key underlying strategy of this negotiating process was to establish
publicly that all efforts were being made to avoid the derailment of
democracy. It was also aimed at sending signals to the international
community about the democratic dispensation under a military ruler.
Before going into the details of the structured dialogue Mr Zafar also
discusses the difference between a coup d'etat and a revolution. It is
shocking to note that he has categorized Ayub Khan's intervention as a
revolution, because the general had claimed so and had "given" a
constitution, by dismantling the previous system, to perpetuate his own
rule. More shocking is the author's failure to note that a military
take-over is in any case unconstitutional and a claim by a dictator that his
coup d'etat is a revolution does not give it legitimacy. Neither can the
so-called law of necessity be used as a pretext to validate a coup.
It is clear from the book that Qazi Hussain Ahmed and others were critical
of the president remaining in uniform and were not prepared to condone the
"fraud of referendum". But at some point in time Qazi Hussain was willing to
work with Gen Musharraf. In this context he is quoted by the author as
saying, "If General Pervez Musharraf were to contest the election as a
president, MMA would support him in the present circumstances."
It seems that points of agreement and disagreement that had emerged during
the talks were a part of the public posturing by the MMA in particular to
appease its electorate.
On the question of the president holding more than one office, despite a bar
under Article 41 of the Constitution, the two parties settled on the
following terms:
"Article 63 (1)(d) shall be made operative from a date to be mutually agreed
between the parties (including the president) and that the constitutional
package shall be finalized only when the cut out date is supplied."
Article 58(2)(b) came under discussion and it was noted that the
parliamentary form of government had not yet taken roots therefore 58(2)(b)
would prove to be helpful. The only objection the MMA had was that the
arbitrary exercise of the president's power to dissolve the assembly had in
the past harmed democracy. Therefore, if the remedy against the decision of
the president was put on a fast track that might meet its objection.
Although the Constitution requires that the president should be elected by
the electoral college consisting of the members of the Senate, National
Assembly and the four provincial assemblies whose votes are counted in a
specified manner, Mr Zafar also describes how and why the MMA agreed to his
suggestion that the vote of confidence should be treated as an alternative
mode of General Musharraf's election.
The MMA leadership had in its earlier round of talks indicated that if the
president were to contest the election as required by the Constitution the
MMA would support him. But the author writes that on the contrary the MMA
leadership found the suggestion regarding a vote of confidence an easy way
to get out of their commitment to give the vote to the president.
When the issue of giving the vote of confidence to the president was taken
up, Qazi Hussain Ahmed proved a hard bargainer. He said as the MMA did not
agree with many policies of the present government the MMA could not give
its vote to the president. "It will be tantamount," he said, "to endorsing
his policies." Qazi Hussain Ahmed was fiercely critical of the government
policies on Afghanistan and Iraq. He also denounced the 'modernism' of
General Pervez Musharraf. Qazi Hussain Ahmed suggested that the rules
providing for the manner of casting the votes may also contain a declaration
that the votes cast only express confidence in the continuation of General
Musharraf as president. Qazi Hussain Ahmed rebutted Mr Zafar's suggestion by
saying that in politics people do not read the rules framed by the federal
government. They observed the conduct of political parties against a broad
backdrop.
The author claims that Qazi Hussain Ahmed and the Chief Minister of the
NWFP, Mr Akram Durrani, and the MMA negotiating team also indicated their
willingness to accept and include in the constitutional package a vote of
confidence mechanism for the president and yet not vote for him. In this way
the MMA leadership intended to maintain its political posture but at the
same time facilitate the progress of the negotiation towards a solution.
But according to Aitzaz Ahsan, as recalled by Mr Zafar, "by substituting
'vote of confidence' for 'election' the MMA had endorsed the fraud of the
referendum".
This proclamation of truth had put the MMA on the defensive and Qazi Hussain
Ahmed denounced the 17th amendment bill contending it was not in line with
the accord. But Maulana Fazlur Rahman defended the package claiming that to
conclude a dialogue successfully you have to move beyond the stated
position. The fact that the MMA had been focusing more on public posturing
rather than using its power to force an exit option on the military ruler
also became obvious when the MMA walked out during Gen Musharraf's address
to the parliament, after having supported the 17th Amendment which
legitimized the general's presidency. According to S.M. Zafar a senior MMA
leader told him, "If we were seen on the TV screen, sitting and listening to
General Pervez Musharraf while he unfolded his road map, our electorate
would have interpreted it as a surrender.
-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
Selected for you by:
Muhammad Ashfaq Ayaz (M.A)
Khizer Colony, Jalalpur Jattan - 50780 - Pakistan
E-Mail: lalapak@...voiceofjalalpur@...
Moderator: voiceofjalalpur@yahoogroups.com
(The ultimate voice of creative minds)
Do you Yahoo!?
All your favorites on one personal page - Try My Yahoo!
Support Freedom of Expression: Join PEN Canada today!
http://www.pencanada.ca/
How Convenient!
Access the Writers Forum Group, Click here:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Writers_Forum/
To post messages,email to:
Writers_Forum@yahoogroups.com
Yahoo! Groups Sponsor
ADVERTISEMENT
Yahoo! Groups Links
To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Writers_Forum/
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
Writers_Forum-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.
Reading Manto anew
By Intizar Hussain
There are writers, who after acquiring popularity in their lifetime, are
forgotten as soon as they pass away. They may have their place in literary
history, but their names are erased from memory. But there are some writers
who get a new lease of life after they die. Their death creates a sense of
loss, which provides an opportunity to the critics and readers to read them
anew with more care and seriousness. This makes them grow in stature. Sadat
Hasan Manto was one such writer.
In the last 50 years Manto has been read with more care than during his
lifetime. Almost all of his works have been transliterated into Hindi. He
has been vastly translated into English and other languages too. A number of
critical studies on his works have also come up. And now Manto has a stature
loftier than he used to enjoy when he was alive. He has numerous readers all
over the world. Old prejudices against his bold expressions viz-a-viz
man-woman relationship have, to a great extent, withered away. He is now
acknowledged as an unparalleled story writer of all time. After 50 years,
all of us can now pay homage to him without running any kind of risk.
These days, a variety of functions are being held all over the country in
connection with Manto's 50th death anniversary. Recently, the Academy of
Letters arranged a function in Lahore, chaired by Abid Hasan Manto, in which
glowing tributes were paid to Manto for his achievements in the field of
fiction. It was followed by a function in Islamabad where Manto's daughter
Nusrat Jalal was the chief guest. In her brief talk, she had a few sad
things to tell about her father. The next day we once again gathered at the
same place. This time the occasion was the inauguration of Fateh Mohammad
Malik's book on Manto.
In fact, two books have lately come out on the same subject. The first was
Mumtaz Shirin's Manto, Noori Na Nari which has already been discussed in
this column. And now it's Fateh Mohammad Malik's Sadat Hasan Manto, Aik Nai
Tabeer. Malik's book is a Manto study with particular reference to Pakistan.
Manto left Bombay for Lahore in 1947. And in January 1955 he passed away.
That means he spent his last seven years in Pakistan. This period, though
brief, has a special significance in the writing career of Manto. It was
during this time that he wrote stories where his art of short story writing
seems to have reached its peak. Fateh Mohammad Malik has rightly focused on
this period. He is of the opinion that the birth of Pakistan brought about a
great change in Manto. With his changed outlook on life, he soon found
himself engaged in an ideological war with his contemporaries.
Malik Sahib has discussed Manto against the backdrop of this ideological
battle, where on the one side were Manto, Mumtaz Shirin, and Mohammad Hasan
Askari, while on the other side were the progressives. In an attempt to give
a fuller view of this battle he has presented a selection from the writings
of the warring groups. As a result, we have four articles of Mohammad Hasan
Askari along with a number of writings of Manto. But he has not cared much
to present a representative selection from the progressives' writings. Just
one article written by Zaheer Kashmiri, a kind of address to the progressive
writers, has been reproduced in the book.
Zaheer Kashmiri's article does not help us to know about the progressives'
differences with Manto. In fact, their ideological attack on Manto was
spearheaded by Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, who in those years was secretary-general
of the Progressive Writers Association. Unless we keep in view the way Qasmi
Sahib censured Manto for his new writings such as Siyah Hashiay and for his
new literary alliances, we can hardly understand the post-partition literary
situation leading to Manto's estrangement from the progressive writers. It
is only through the two writings of Manto included in this volume that we
know about the changed attitude of Ali Sardar Jafri and Qasmi towards him
and his new stories and Manto's bitter reaction to the two of them.
However, Malik Sahib has discussed the then situation in detail. He has
dared to differ with Qasmi Sahib, who wanted to prove that Manto had been
misled by Askari. In Malik's opinion the root cause of trouble was the party
line, which could not reconcile with the 'Pakistaniat' of Manto and Askari.
The book is an interesting read. Through the book, comes alive to us a
period of our literary history known mainly for a big battle between two
points of view associated with the inception of Pakistan
http://www.dawn.com/weekly/dmag/dmag12.htm
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Far Eastern Economic Review (Jan./Feb. 2005)
The Idea of Pakistan
by Stephen Philip Cohen
Brookings Institution Press, 382 pages, $32.95
Pakistan's Drift Into Extremism: Allah, the Army and America's War on
Terror
by Hassan Abbas
M.E. Sharpe, 275 pages, $25.95
Reviewed by Nancy deWolf Smith
Stephen Philip Cohen's broad-stroke survey is a success on two levels. For
readers seeking a comprehensive introduction to Pakistan's strategic,
political, social and economic history, there could be no more lucid guide
to the forces that have shaped the country. More importantly, since Mr.
Cohen's ultimate aim is to provide information and analysis useful to policy
makers, the book, even when it is reviewing historical developments from
1946 onward, is structured so that all this information feeds into chapters
outlining choices for the future.
Although that future, like the choices, is presented in stark terms, this is
not a deeply pessimistic book. Its most disheartening aspect is implied in
the title, since examining the idea of Pakistan raises the question of
whether it should ever have come into being, or will survive. There are many
in India, surely, who fall upon such cues with relish, and indeed, when all
is said and
done, the one burden Pakistan carries that is surely not self-inflicted is
that of existing next to a hegemon.
True, Pakistan was born, and has continued to wrestle, with several
different visions of a guiding principal or goal: Was it to be a homeland
for oppressed Muslims, can it be a democracy, or will it become an Islamic
regime? In so much as these sorts of questions remain unanswered, examining
them is a legitimate exercise. On the other hand, nobody ever asks, "What is
the idea of Denmark?"-or the idea of many states even newer than Pakistan,
for that matter.
That said, there is hardly any front today on which the future of the
country looks settled, let alone rosy. Among the problems are "staggering
demographic pressures," a "decrepit" educational system and "a military
establishment that wants the façade but not the substances of democracy."
The economy may continue to grow at a 6% rate, but that can't keep up with
the basic needs of an exploding population, maldistribution of aid and other
resources through corruption, and, above all, 50 years of relentlessly high
defense spending.
Although most Pakistanis accept defense spending as a costly but necessary
response to Indian power, Mr. Cohen asserts that their country would be
stronger today if it hadn't been "hijacked" by the notion of perpetual
external struggle. "Instead of building a state," he says, "Pakistan's
Establishment sought to build a nation by acquiring allies, developing
nuclear and conventional weapons and manufacturing myths, all in the service
of balancing out a more powerful and seemingly implacable India."
Today, as always, the core of that establishment is the military, and it is
to the military that Mr. Cohen directs some of his most astute comments:
To reverse Pakistan's decline, Pakistan's military leaders must come to a
better understanding of the new international environment and a more
objective assessment of India, as well as Pakistan's own deep structural and
social problems. Pakistan is a case in which an excellent army depends upon
a failing economy, a divided society, and unreliable politicians. The army
lacks the capacity to fix Pakistan's problems, but is unwilling to give
other state institutions and the political system the opportunity to learn
and grow.
In such an environment, he notes, Islamic radicals, while still rejected by
the majority of Pakistanis, find a fertile recruiting ground. The leaders of
radical groups often resemble Bolsheviks, with a lust for raw power that
masquerades as piety. They operate with the ruthlessness and organizational
structure of Leninist dimensions. And like Marxists of an earlier era, Mr.
Cohen points out, they feed on economic and social discontent.
"Ironically," Mr. Cohen adds, "the chief obstacle to democracy-the army-is
also the principal barrier to political extremism." As long as that
situation lasts, it will pose another of those chicken-and-egg dilemmas that
paralyze
attempts to make progress on virtually every front in Pakistan. Which
problem do you tackle first, without unleashing a host of even worse ones?
Islamabad has long exploited such conundrums in its relationship with the
United States. Today, for instance, it in effect argues that support for the
War on Terror is domestically unsustainable without substantial American
aid-and yet it cannot crack down on domestic radicals too hard lest they
overthrow the government that is pledged to control them. In the final
chapters of his book, Mr. Cohen cuts through this muddle:
Pakistanis are expert at deciphering American interests and appealing to
short-term American fears in the hope of establishing a relationship of
mutual dependency in which Pakistani obligations are minimal while American
ones are substantial....In dealing with Pakistan, the United States must
also recognize that Islamabad may complain about being constrained by public
opinion, but the government is what shaped that opinion over the years.
Since Mr. Cohen's purpose is not to smack Pakistan around, but to help find
a formula for its success, he is equally determined to examine where and
how Washington has failed. "America's relationship with Pakistan has been
one of
engagement and withdrawal," he begins, underlining what is painfully obvious
to all Pakistanis. After charting the dismal results of U.S. inattention, or
attention myopically focused only on strategic considerations, he also
offers a long list of specific fixes. Some detail options for cooperation on
broad issues, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and Pakistan's
relationship
with India, with suggestions for managing the issue of Kashmir.
Most significantly, Mr. Cohen directs Washington's attention to the crucial
area of domestic aid that can help Islamabad begin to address its crushing
deficits in realms such as education, technology and manufacturing.
Acknowledging the issue of accountability, or a lack of it, that has seen so
much aid-and, indeed, Pakistan's own resources-wasted or stolen in the past,
he suggests the structure for a new bargain that would involve a massive,
steady new flow of carefully directed aid in return for specific
accountability measures.
The one subject Mr. Cohen does not address directly is the rule of law. As
many Pakistanis have noted, their society remains one in which the winner
takes all, in which you are either in power or hanging on by your
fingernails. This mentality affects virtually every sphere of life. It
results in politicians who see office not as an opportunity to serve but as
a way to grab-and to avoid being grabbed from, as happens so easily to
those out of power. It has infected generations of civil service graduates
who struggled to get into the customs service, where the opportunities of
salary-padding were greater. It results in poorly paid policemen who
behave, as Mr. Cohen says, "like predators" rather than protectors. Until
the rule of law is a priority, no real strides forward are possible in
Pakistan and no other reforms will be secure.
Hassan Abbas is not as prescriptive as Mr. Cohen. A former Pakistani
government official and police superintendent who has been a fellow at
Harvard Law School and studied at Tufts University, he is more focused on
the past than the future.
However, the picture he paints and the red flags he waves are strikingly
similar to Mr. Cohen's, driving home a frightening message of government
incompetence in the face of ominous challenges.
Mr. Abbas's documentation of how radical Islamist groups have steadily
penetrated Pakistani society is particularly chilling. He, too, notes that
the decrepit state of public education in Pakistan has led many families to
enroll their children in madrasas, "decadent religious seminaries" where the
sole academic endeavor involves memorizing verses of the Koran. The schools'
offer of "free food, housing, and clothing proved to be an effective
incentive for the poor," many of whom "did not know that instead of learning
to read and write [their sons] would be taught how to kill people." There
are an estimated 30,000 such schools in Pakistan today.
More alarming still, in its way, is the inability or reluctance of
Pakistani authorities to rein in either the schools for killers, or the
groups of terrorists they produce. Pakistan is not the first country to have
tolerated and actively used radicals toward some other end-as foils in a
battle against other political enemies, for instance. They are always
difficult, if not impossible, to put back in the bag. Throughout Mr. Abbas's
account, however, there is evidence of ambivalence about even trying.
Describing a member of President Pervez Musharraf's inner circle in 2001-as
Pakistan prepared to respond to America's post-9/11 request for
cooperation-Mr.Abbas gives a droll but ultimately baffling account of "the
number two man in the army," Gen. Lt. Gen. Muzzafir Usmani:
A self-confessed "soldier of God" ... Usmani had started out as a moderate
and an open-minded officer, but later in his career he found the intolerant
fringe of Islam, where he saw his own piety in discovering the imperfections
of others. By the time he became deputy chief of army staff, he had become
reclusive, shutting himself in his house and walking about in a Saudi jubba
(gown) topped by a green turban. All this was widely known when Musharraf
promoted him.
Although Mr. Abbas's subtitle is Allah, the Army and America's War on
Terror, his book gives ample space to peripheral topics such as the
Khrushchev years, political machinations and personalities in Islamabad, and
the still unanswered mystery of who or what power conspired to shoot down
the plane carrying President Zia-ul-Haq, U.S. Ambassador Arnold Raphael, and
a group including senior military officers of both countries in 1988.
On this last subject, the possibility that the U.S. itself shot down the
plane is given serious attention, although to his credit Mr. Abbas
pronounces that unlikely. Like many of his compatriots, however, he or his
sources detect an American hand in so many developments in Pakistan that at
times one is left with the impression that no official ever acted and no
event transpired without taking guidance or orders from somebody in the
U.S. Embassy.
This sort of thing, often murkily sourced or just reported as rumor, can get
distracting. And now and then there is a statement that cannot be sourced
because it is demonstrably untrue, such as the sweeping assertion that in
Afghanistan in late 2001, "what was left of the country was bombed to
smithereens" by the U.S. A figure of speech perhaps, but one that hardly
builds credibility with those of us who traveled through Afghanistan in
early 2002.
These are quibbles, however, about a book that is full of fascinating
detail about the who-said-and-did-what-to-whom aspects of Pakistani politics
over the past few decades. Given the degree of detail, readers already
familiar with the milieu and key players will be best suited to appreciate
both the reporting and speculation. But anyone who dips into it will find
something to savor.
interpreting china's military power: doctrine makes readiness
Ms. Smith is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board and
covered Pakistan and Afghanistan from 1987-91.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
REVIEW: There is no Islamic problem
Reviewed by Ashfak Bokhari
How and why 9/11 occurred, shattered the myth of America's supremacy of
power for a while, and provided a raison d'etre for the renewal of
'crusades' against Islam, as a religion and society, is a theme that has
seized the attention of western intelligentsia since the event and led to a
flood of books on the subject in the market. But the way this sensitive
subject has been treated and the explanations offered in most of the essays,
20 in all, in this outstanding work by a Pakistani economist who teaches in
an American university, is inspiring.
The question commonly asked is: Is there an Islamic problem behind this
unthinkable tragedy? The answer the author gives is: there is no Islamic
problem - and, if any, it is a problem of temporary disruption in the West's
legacy of plunder, conquest and massacres to subjugate the rest of the
world. Two opposite visions dominate American scholarship on Islam and
Islamic societies. One represents Islam as an enemy that must be destroyed,
or otherwise it will destroy the West. Its prominent advocates are Bernard
Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Charles Krauthammer and Martin Kramer.
The second vision tends to accommodate Islam and argues that since political
Islamists do not reject modernity, they must be given a chance to run
Islamic societies as this will, ultimately, either discredit them or bring
them into political mainstream of western orientation. The upholders of the
first vision, whom the author calls "anti-Islam warriors", consider Islamic
societies lagging in economic development, deficit in democracy, and having
"bloody borders" - a phrase coined by Samuel Huntington.
The author, Shahid Alam, says the evidence fails to support these charges.
Although the Islamic countries do face numerous serious economic problems,
they are not worse or much worse than others. Judging from the 1999 living
standards, according to the World Development Report, 2000, one can see
Muslims have not done too badly: Malaysia is well ahead of Thailand, Iran
fares better than Venezuela, Egypt is modestly ahead of Ukraine, Turkey is
slightly behind Russia, Tunisia is well ahead of Georgia and Armenia, etc.
Regarding bloody borders, Jonathan Fox has shown that Islam was involved in
23.2 per cent of all inter-civilizational conflicts during 1945-1989 period
and 24.7 per cent of these conflicts during 1990 to 1998. This is not too
far above Islam's share in the world population, nor is there any dramatic
rise in this share since the end of the cold war. Hence, Huntington's claim
of "Muslim bellicosity" does not qualify as a fact. Islamic societies have
not suffered from democracy deficit either. Incredible as it may appear,
Tunisia, Egypt and Iran were in the process of making a transition to
constitutional monarchies during the 19th century but their attempts were
foiled by the West. In 1881, the Egyptian nationalists had succeeded in
convening an elected parliament but the British disbanded it when they
occupied the country a year later. Tunisia promulgated a constitution in
1860, setting up a supreme council with an intention to limit the powers of
monarchy. Ironically, the French suppressed this council in 1864 when they
discovered that it interfered with their ambitions in Tunisia.
Turkey elected its first parliament in 1877; it was dissolved by the Caliph
a year later. A second parliament was convened in 1908. In 1906, Iran's
first elected parliament adopted a constitutional monarchy limiting the
powers of the monarch but in 1911, with the support of Russia and Britain,
the pro-monarch forces defeated the constitutionalists and the parliament
was dissolved.
And in recent period, it has been oil, Israel and the old antipathy to Islam
that have kept democracy away from the Arab world. It is interesting to note
that the western donors have, especially after the end of the cold war, used
their financial leverage to encourage democratization in client countries.
But not so in the case of Arab countries because democracy there could bring
Islamists to power. They do get enough support of various kinds so long as
they come to terms with Israel and are willing to suppress Islamist
opposition. When Iraq violated this understanding in 1990, it faced endless
war and crippling sanctions. Then, Algeria shows the fate a Muslim country
can face if the Islamists seek to capture power.
The author takes note of an essay written by a well-known physicist and
activist, Pervez Hoodbhoy, in December 2001 in which he argues that a
deadening obscurantism has paralyzed Islamic civilization since the 12th
century and that the Muslims can end this paralysis only if they decide to
"replace Islam with secular humanism which alone offers the hope of
providing everybody on this globe with the right to life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness". This suggests, the author says, Hoodbhoy has been
raised "on a pure diet of Orientalism and its falsification of Islamic
history".
Shahid Alam refutes the claim of Eurocentrists and their Muslim acolytes
quite forcefully that religion and culture are the principal source of
backwardness of Islamic societies and its so-called antipathy to science,
rationality and modernity. He quotes a historical fact, often ignored by the
western scholars, that had the Egyptian bid to industrialize - initiated by
Muhammad Ali Pasha in 1810 - not been dismantled by the European powers, the
Middle East would have been industrially transformed. But since an
industrialized Middle East would have renewed the "old threat of Islam", the
European powers united to abort Pasha's great initiative. In contrast, when
Japan made a similar industrial drive some 60 years later, Europe did not
block it.
Referring to Hoodbhoy's advice to the Muslims to "give up the false notions"
of Islam, the author asks them instead to give up false Orientalist notions
of an Islam that has been misrepresented as "irrational, fatalist and
fanatical". Rational thinking, he says, did not begin with the Enlightenment
as the West claims. In fact, several Enlightenment thinkers turned to Islam
to advance their own struggle against medieval obscurantism. Shahid Alam
concludes his first chapter, which is the core essay lending its name to the
book, by suggesting that the Muslims, a fourth of the world's peoples, are
today seeking their identity within a stream of history that flows from the
Quran. The Quranic impulse towards truth, justice, sincerity and beauty will
find expression again, not in combat, but in a new Arabesque of creative
minds.
The book is divided into three parts: Islamic societies and the West, Arabs
and the United States, and Palestine and Israel. Each chapter begins with a
verse from the Quran , relevant to the subject-matter. The author has
devoted one chapter to Huntington's thesis "Clash of Civilizations", calls
it utter nonsense and demolishes his philosophy. Another chapter takes to
task Bernard Lewis, the doyen of the Orientalists, who has actually been
serving the Zionist interests for 50 years.
"Why 9/11 and why now" is a fascinating essay in which he says the tragic
event, irrespective of whoever engineered it, has incidentally enabled the
quartet of American Likudniks, Corporate America, the Zionists and the
Christian coalition to launch their project of a 'new American century'.
Is There an Islamic Problem? Essays on Islamicate Societies, the US and
Israel
By M. Shahid Alam
The Other Press, 607 Mutiara Majestic, Jalan Othman, 46000 Petaling Jaya,
Selangor, Malaysia
Website: www.ibtbooks.com
ISBN 983-9541-43-9
223pp. Price not listed
REVIEW: The crucible of enduring conflict
Reviewed by Karamatullah K. Ghori
In the flush of 9/11, George W. Bush instinctively christened his "war on
terrorism" as a crusade. His gut reflex was quickly finessed by his neocon
spin-doctors as "a slip of the tongue". But the damage had been done.
The world took instant fright at the prospect of a 21st century
reincarnation of a clash embedded deep in the psyches of world Muslims and
Christians for nearly a thousand years. The academia gurus and
intelligentsia icons of the world went back to their archives to research
the historical perspective that had spawned, between the 11th and 13th
centuries, a grusome and gory age of relentless feuding and bloodletting
between the world's two predominant religions - Islam and Christianity - and
their zealous followers.
The horror that the crusades proved to be over almost two centuries was set
in motion in 1095 by the then patriarch of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope
Urban II, with his electrifying and provocative sermon to a large crowd of
doting worshippers and 'princes' of the church at Clermont, in Southern
France.
Urban was, ostensibly, goaded into what subsequently was destined to prove
as history's bloodiest adventure, by the Byzantium Emperor, Alexius I
Comnenus whose empire was under constant threat from the Seljuk Turks.
Alexius' royalty, by the last decade of the 11th century, had been reduced
to the confines of Constantinople, then sharing the title of one of the
greatest cities of the world, along with Baghdad and Cordoba. The valiant
Seljuks had made a mockery of the erstwhile glory of Byzantium.
But while Alexius' fervent and desperate appeal to the pope was entirely
triggered by worldly and temporal reasons, Urban saw in it a golden
opportunity to galvanize the European princes - constantly warring among
themselves - under the banner of the church and thus exalt his own status
above anybody else.
Thomas Asbridge, a lecturer in early medieval history at the Queen Mary
College of the University of London, has done a superb academic job of
painstakingly digging out original, medieval, documents and sources to paint
a highly readable and composite narration of Urban's Machiavellian
enterprise. He has, reference by reference, rebuilt the Europe of Urban's
age and how cleverly the egregious and overtly ambitious pope set the worlds
of Christianity and Islam alight with his demagoguery.
Urban played on raw religious sentiments and emotions of his audience to
hold forth a spectre of the land of Jesus' birth having been taken over by
barbarians and, in his words, "a race absolutely alien to God". His
flamboyant words ignited religious passion when he exhorted his audience to
rise in defence of 'the children of God' whose rights were being trampled
under the hoofs of a savage race.
Urban's rhetoric can well be appreciated in its right historical context by
those of us now being subjected to the demagoguery of the Bush neocons. The
likes of General William Boykin, a Deputy Secretary of Defence at the
Pentagon and a blue eyed boy of Donald Rumsfeld, compared, not too long ago,
his God of compassion with the "idol God" of the Muslims. Boykin was never
reprimanded for his hate crime.
Bush justified his war on terror by reminding his audience that the
terrorists hated "American values". Urban, in his heyday, provoked his
audience to rise in defence of "Christian values" and salvage "God's
Kingdom" from "infidels" and "barbarians".
Asbridge has brought out in detail with the help of copious data, how Urban,
entirely for his self-aggrandizement, turned Jesus' teachings of
non-violence (the other cheek philosophy), piety and compassion for mankind
on its head by sanctifying the shedding of "infidel" blood. In his sermons,
he proclaimed that the liberation of "Holy Jerusalem" from the clutches of
"unclean races" (Muslims) was a duty that every Christian was commanded by
Christ himself to perform. In return, he promised a "remission of all sins"
and "cleansing of the soul".
Asbridge has rightly concluded that in the quest of consolidating his hold
over the European ruling houses, Urban made war into a holy pursuit. He was
the author and inventor of the macabre idea of a "holy war". Armed with his
religious sanction, the European hordes descended on Palestine in what was
to them an armed pilgrimage in the service of God.
Asbridge sums up that the crusades were never meant to be evangelical in
their mission. They were solely meant to kill the 'infidels' and not
proselytize them. In fact, the crusaders, once they had settled down in
Palestine, conjured up alliances with a number of neighbouring Muslim rulers
and interacted with them on a footing of equality. The business of
conversion took several more centuries to become, eventually, the "white
man's burden", in the words of that arch colonialist, Rudyard Kipling.
The first crusade, set alight with so much rhetoric and elan, didn't even
honour the sanctity of the non-European, eastern Christians who had been
ensconced in Jerusalem under the benign rule of successive Muslim dynasties
for more than four centuries.
But the most lethal spin off of the crusades, as Asbridge aptly concludes,
was that it imparted a religious sanctity to bloodletting and perpetuated
the religious divide between the Christian and Islamic worlds.
Urban, pandering to crass and whimsical religious prejudices, chiseled a
portrait of uncivilized and unholy Muslims on the minds of his followers. To
the lament of history, that stereotype has endured through all cavalcades of
centuries separating us from the deadly affairs of the crusades.
The nexus Urban fashioned between the sword and the cross unleashed
horrendous terror on the non-European and non-white "infidels" in Asia,
Africa and Latin America. The colonialists and soldiers of fortune, in the
centuries since the first crusade, revelled in bloodletting with impunity
and relish under the protection of the cross.
Little wonder that the tradition of pandering to raw religious passion for
political ends is alive and thriving in the 'land of the free, and home of
the brave.' Anyone looking for evidence need not travel too far back in
history. In November 2004, 55 million Evangelicals of the US voted, en
masse, to keep George W. Bush in the White House because, to them, he has
been anointed by God to lead America in the "war on terror". Pope Urban may
well have taken a new life in the 21st century.
The First Crusade: A New History
By Thomas Asbridge
Simon & Schuster.
Available with Paramount Books, 152/O, Block 2, PECH Society, Karachi-75400
Tel: 021-4310030
Email: paramount@...
ISBN 0-7432-2083-8
408pp. Rs1,495
Reply to: Disha Counseling Center [dishacenter@...]
Disha feels proud to announce the release of their second publication "Born
to Win" a student's guide to maximizing academic skills.
Academic success is largely determined by the ability to concentrate,
judicious use of time, study aids and techniques, way of processing
information, learning styles, note taking abilities, using the textbook more
astutely etc.
"Born to Win" aims to help one strategize and learn all these techniques
that would facilitate students to experience academic success and thus make
winning a habit and not a constant uphill task.
At present the copy is available in English but the Marathi version is on
its way.
The cost of this book is only Rs.60/-and we would be happy if you could
further our new venture.
Warm Regards,
Ms. Anuradha Prabhudesai.
dishacenter@...
Consulting Psychologist
Disha Counseling Center, Room No 34, Keshav Bhavan, LJ road, Shivaji park ,
Mumbai 16. ph no:4384575/98194-78538. www.dishacounseling.com
BOOK: UN life is sex by night, dicing with death by day
Source: AlertNet
http://www.alertnet.org/thefacts/reliefresources/110744057135.htm
""Emergency Sex"
A true story of death, drinking and sex on assignment with the U.N.
told by three young aid workers
AlertNet's Ruth Gidley reviews "Emergency Sex (and Other Desperate
Measures): True stories from a war zone", by Kenneth Cain, Heidi
Postlewait and Andrew Thomson
The book is published in the United States by Miramax Books and in
Britain by Ebury Press.
Not everybody knows that aid workers drink too much, sleep around and
get angry with their bosses.
"Emergency Sex" tells the true story of three young U.N. aid workers
in violent hotspots in the '90s, who spend their evenings in drinking
dens where undercurrents of sexual desire are fed by days of intimate
contact with death.
The publishers say the United Nations wanted to ban the book for its
candid portrayal of the rowdy side of aid workers' lives and its
angry descriptions of U.N. cock-ups.
Miramax obviously think there's mileage in the story, and is
apparently planning a TV drama series based on the book.
Like most good war stories, the book revolves around wildly
different characters thrown together on a turbulent journey.
Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the
Church
Contact: Sabrina Ravipinto of HarperCollins, 212-207-7411 or
Sabrina.Ravipinto@...
The following was released today by Harper Collins Publishers on Angela
Bonavoglia's new book "Good
Catholic Girls": "I am no innocent bystander. I am a woman with a history, a
woman
scarred, a woman at her wit's end. I abide the women in this book. I
echo their words. I applaud their patience. And I remind this Church how
fortunate it is to have such brilliant and devoted women clamoring for
the Catholic hierarchy to open its doors, bring the wizard out of the
sacristy, rethink the sacred with women in mind, and make a new Catholic
Church." -- Angela Bonavoglia
So says journalist and author Angela Bonavoglia in the introduction to
her explosive new book GOOD CATHOLIC GIRLS. The recently exposed
transgressions of priests within the Catholic Church stunned the
faithful, implicated the hierarchy, and sent a new surge of energy
through the progressive Church reform movement. Despite the movement's
growing profile, only recently has the world learned that Catholic women
are the driving force behind reform.
GOOD CATHOLIC GIRLS is a lively account of these amazing and courageous
women, as seen through Bonavoglia's eyes. They include Joan Chittister,
the Benedictine nun who refused to obey a Vatican order not to speak at
the first international conference of women's ordination groups
worldwide; Mary Ramerman, ordained a Catholic priest before 3,000
jubilant supporters in a packed theater in Rochester, New York; Frances
Kissling, whose fight for women's reproductive rights has shaken the
Church at its highest levels; priest abuse survivor Barbara Blaine, who
created the most powerful voice for victims, the Survivors Network of
those Abused by Priests; and Sister Jeannine Gramick, who built a
pioneering ministry to gays and lesbians, despite Vatican orders to ban
her work.
Backed by legions of supporters worldwide, these and other Catholic
women are rethinking Catholic theology, changing the face of ministry,
and resurrecting the lost lives of female Church leaders. They are
working to open ordination to all, challenging the Church's sexual
repression, and calling the Church to openness and accountability. Their
work is brave, provocative and vital, for what becomes of women in the
Catholic Church will determine what becomes of the Church itself. As
Bonavoglia shows in this compelling book, the hierarchy ignores them at
its peril.
About the Author: Angela Bonavoglia is an award-winning journalist and
author, nationally recognized for her writing about women's issues and
Catholic Church reform.
http://www.usnewswire.com/
Reply to: "CERE India" <cere_India@...>
CERE Publication of a School Reader Series entitled A Wisdom of Words
The Centre for Environmental Research and Education (CERE) has published an
18-book English Literature Series of Primary and Secondary School Readers
and Workbooks, entitled 'A Wisdom of Words'. The Series Moves beyond the
uninspiring, functional approach style adopted by conventional Readers and
teaches varied English language skills to young children by using creative
techniques so as to develop critical thinking, appreciation and analytical
abilities, while simultaneously also inculcating a keen awareness and
sensitivity for nature. The books also aim to develop a cognizance for
colour, form and design.
Prominent schools across of India, such as Rishi Valley School (Chittor),
J.B. High School for Girls (Mumbai), Bombay International School (Mumbai),
Hiranandani Foundation School (Mumbai) are already presently using the books
while many others have shown keen interest in adopting the Series.
The entire Reader Series consists of 8 Reader books (Standards I to VIII)
and 8 corresponding grammar Workbooks (Standards I to VIII) with 2 Teacher
Handbooks (Primary and Secondary Sections). The price of each Reader is Rs.
160/- and each workbook is Rs. 125/- . CERE is a non-profit organization and
profits from the sale of the books will be utilized to establish an
Environment Resource Centre in the J. S. Municipal School in Mumbai.
If your school would be interested in ordering books, please contact the
CERE at cere_india@... or send us a letter at
Centre for Environmental Research and Education (CERE)
Jaganath Shankar Seth Chowk Municipal School
3rd Floor - Room # 78
Nana Chowk
Mumbai - 400 007
INDIA
Tel: (+ 91 - 22) 2381 1581
Website: http://www.cere-india.org
Offline 
Send Email
