Cassandra Voices

Category: Global

  • Bull Moose: Recalling Roe v. Wade in the face of Alabama’s ‘Human Protection Act’

    Earlier this month Alabama Governor Kay Ivey signed into law ‘The Alabama Human Protection Act’ passed by both the Alabama House and Senate entitled. This law, which does not take immediate effect, bans all abortions except:

    …activities if done with the intent to save the life or preserve the health of an unborn child, remove a dead unborn child, to deliver the unborn child prematurely to avoid a serious health risk to the unborn child’s mother, or to preserve the health of her unborn child. The term [abortion] does not include a procedure or act to terminate the pregnancy of a woman with an ectopic pregnancy, nor does it include the procedure or act to terminate the pregnancy of a woman when the unborn child has a lethal anomaly.

    The law is now the most restrictive law outlawing abortion in the United States. But punishments for doctors performing procedures contrary to it could lead to a custodial sentence of up to ninety-nine years.

    It appears many have not actually taken the time to read the law. As is the case with most laws, hysteria makes more waves than actual discussion and it is no different in this case. It is worth taking a moment to check and see exactly what Alabama achieves.

    The law recognizes that a person is, ‘A human being, specifically including an unborn child in utero at any stage of development, regardless of viability.’  The law is designed to protect that human life because,

    In the United States Declaration of Independence, the principle of natural law that “all men are created equal” was articulated. The self-evident truth found in natural law, that all human beings are equal from creation, was at least one of the bases for the anti-slavery movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the Nuremberg war crimes trials, and the American civil rights movement. If those movements had not been able to appeal to the truth of universal human equality, they could not have been successful…

    It is estimated that 6,000,000 Jewish people were murdered in German concentration camps during World War II; 3,000,000 people were executed by Joseph Stalin’s regime in Soviet gulags; 2,500,000 people were murdered during the Chinese ‘Great Leap Forward.’ in 1958; 1,500,000 to 3,000,000 people were murdered by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during the 1970s; and approximately 1,000,000 people were murdered during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. All of these are widely acknowledged as Crimes Against Humanity. By comparison, more than fifty million babies have been aborted in the United States since the Roe v Wade decision of 1973, more than three times the number who were killed in German death camps, Chinese purges, Stalin’s gulags, Cambodian killing fields, and the Rwandan genocide combined.

    What the Holocaust, or Pol Pot’s purges have to do with abortion or an unborn fetus is unclear. It is equally unclear where the number of fifty million abortions comes from – the mind boggles that Alabama is using a national statistic to justify a specifically Alabama law.

    It is really unclear why this law quotes from the Declaration of Independence, which is a statement of principles not an actual law or part of any American Jurisprudence. Indeed, Justice Anton Scalia, among the most conservatives judges to have served on the Supreme Court, was fond of heckling any student or lawyer who cited the Declaration as precedent.

    In short, this law was written by an individual or individuals who knows nothing about the laws that govern this nation, passed by lawmakers that seemingly didn’t read it – even though the legislation is actually only about four pages in length – and signed off by a Governor who wants to make a political statement.

    Now for some real law. Roe v Wade (and its counterpart Planned Parenthood v. Casey) established that the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides a fundamental ‘right to privacy’ that protects a woman’s right to have an abortion.  This ‘right’ is not absolute however, and must be balanced by the government’s interest in protecting a woman’s health and protecting prenatal health. That’s the law as it stands: women have a fundamental right. This is the important part: her right may be balanced by interests of government or the health of the fetus but is the woman’s right not the government’s or the fetus’s.

    Alabama’s law takes away that right almost fully, and only recognizes the interests of the government and the fetus. For that reason alone the law cannot last.

    There has been much ink spilled over this law and many more tweets. The President and many Republicans have distanced themselves from the law stating, in effect, that it goes too far. Governor Ivey is also rumored to have said she does not expect the law to be upheld by the Supreme Court.

    This brings us to the twofold crux of the matter: first, we have a law that is being passed not for the sake of women but for the government’s interest in preventing abortion. This is a big leap for a Political Party that has at its base a philosophy of endeavouring to keep government out of people’s lives.

    Secondly, this law probably wasn’t even written by the people who passed it. It has been a long time since lawmakers in the US have taken the time to write laws. Laws are written by special interest groups and then copied wholesale onto State and Federal Letterhead where they are signed into law by Executives who have taken even less time to read what is in front of them.

    And it has to stop.  Alabama’s brainless and brazen effort to make headlines in their attempt to overturn forty-five years of American Jurisprudence makes a mockery of the process and the people they govern. It is shockingly insensitive to try and relate the Holocaust to the reproductive choices of many American women. This choice is intensely personal and excruciatingly difficult to make. If only this was an isolated event. In fact, this happens at all levels if State and Federal Government.

    It is time for American lawmakers to make at least a good faith effort to offer laws that they at least have a hand in crafting. Writing the laws is their job and they ought to start performing that role.

  • Palestine – To Exist is to Resist

    I have just returned from Hebron in the West Bank, a city where nearly sixty Palestinians have been extra-judicially executed by Israeli forces since the end of September 2015.

    On my last stint in Hebron, West Bank, while doing check point duty one morning one of my team mates overheard two very small children chatting:

    One said: ‘Will we throw some stones?’ To which the other child replied: ‘No, it’s the first day back at school.’

    That is how normal the fight for freedom from military occupation has become for Palestinian children, even if they are under age ten.

    We saw four small children, aged about ten, throwing stones at Qitoun checkpoint at 7.15 am, like 4 mice attacking an elephant. The response from the Israeli soldiers was to put on their gas masks, adjust their weapons and attack the children with sound bombs and canisters of tear gas.

    This new tear gas used by the Israeli forces pierces your eyes so badly you cannot open them. It scrapes across your throat so that you cough and cough. And all of this ensures that you cannot run away from it because you cannot see where you are going, and, even if you could see, you cannot breathe to move. Ten tear gas canisters landed in playgrounds of schools that morning. A little boy aged about four, with a Smurfs school bag on his back, and protected by his seven-year-old brother coughed and choked considerably longer than the other children. He was innocent, and the victim of the collective punishment that is systematically meted out to Palestinians by the Israeli state.

    That evening I arrived in Jaffa, Tel Aviv for a few days break, still coughing badly from the tear gas, and an Israeli man in a shop tells me that Israelis have had ‘enough’!

    And I’m thinking – you have no idea what ‘enough’ really means.

    ‘Enough’ is when you lock up seven hundred Palestinian children a year, from aged twelve to eighteen; when you arbitrarily arrest many of them at night from their beds.

    I have seen many children detained and arrested. The strongest memory I have is of one little boy, who looked about eleven, being detained. His little dark eyes locked hard on to my eyes. We looked at each other for a long time, he fearfully, pleading with hope in his eyes, and me with desperation and helplessness.

    ‘Enough’ is when you handcuff and blindfold children and abuse them while they lie on the floor of the military jeep, while you take them to prison. ‘Enough’ is when you ensure they will not see their parents until the day of military court, which can be four to eight days later.

    ‘Enough’ is when you beat them and put them in solitary confinement, you threaten that their family members will be arrested or that their home will be demolished or that you will sexually abuse them, if they do not confess. You force them to sign a confession in Hebrew, a language they do not understand, and this forms the basis on which the majority of Palestinian children are convicted in children’s court

    ‘Enough’ is when you ensure those children from twelve-years-of-age will not see a lawyer until a few minutes before their court case. You accuse the majority of throwing stones and you convict them in over 99% of cases with only 0.02% having a full evidentiary trial.

    ‘Enough’ is when you see that these children are brought into the military court in lines of four with chains on their feet joining them together.  I have heard the sounds of those chains clanking – twelve-year-olds with legs inn shackles in case they might escape from the fourth largest army in the world.

    The little child’s sad eyes pierce through the distraught eyes of their parents who have to sit in the back row of the military court, and who are not allowed to touch or hug their little ones. The public conversation that usually takes place between child and parent consists of: ‘Are you ok? Have you enough to eat?’; while he responds: ‘Are you all ok at home? What did the soldiers do after I left?’’

    And then the case is over in two minutes – cut and paste – same as all the other cases. Then the children are taken back to jail with their leg shackles clanking.

    ‘Enough’ is when you see from your child’s eyes that he has now completely lost his childhood.

    And none of this happens with Israeli settler children who are living in illegal settlements in the centre of Hebron.

    And you expect you will beat Palestinians into submission? Have you no idea that you are creating a university of learners who will react?

    This is life under Israeli military occupation in Hebron, West Bank. Enough.

    The Seanad and Dail recently passed the Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill 2018. 

    Despite the fact that it was passed by a 75 to 45 vote majority, and that all opposition parties voted for it in the Dail and in the Seanad, Fine Gael voted against this Bill and it is understood they will use the ‘Money Message’ procedure to block it.

    This is a little used procedure that Fine Gael have employed to block a number of Private Member’s Bills in the last months. This is undemocratic and a blatant political action to support Israel in its breach of International Law.  This move is in line with the non-recognition of the State of Palestine by Official Ireland, even though the elected members of the Dail and the Seanad voted unanimously to recognise the state of Palestine in 2014.

    Gerry O’Sullivan in Palestine with children.

    Gerry delivers Certified Professional Mediation Training that is accredited by the Mediators’ Institute of Ireland. She has delivered conflict and mediation training internationally with U.S. based Lawyers Without Borders, in partnership with the Director of Training from CEDR, U.K., and she is also an externally employed trainer with CEDR U.K. Gerry is a member of the Mediators Beyond Borders Consultants Team. She is a panel member with One Resolve and delivers mediation training under their auspices. Gerry was involved in the development of the Level 8 Certificate in Mediation training programme in the Law Faculty of Griffith College and she was invited to be the senior lecturer in that programme. She also delivered mediation training for the University of Limerick’s, “Masters in Peace and Development” programme. Gerry has written ‘The Mediator’s Toolkit: Formulating and Asking Questions for Successful Outcomes’, and it is published by New Society Publishing, Canada.

  • White American Pathology

    We don’t discuss white America’s common pathology. What we’ve begun, within limits, are discussions on racism, bigotry, white nationalism, and other disorders of the mind. Ever so guarded, these conversations are restricted to speculation about just who is a racist, a bigot, or a white supremacist, and always in the mode of, ‘us and them,’ as if we’re not all infected. Never do we seriously address the root cause of our illness, and how it manifests itself in our foreign policies. This national pathology manifests heavily when countless illegal acts by our government go uncontested. But let us save that story for some other time.

    Our common pathology is universal, infecting every white American citizen living in the States. There are no exceptions. No one is immune and there is no vaccine. Lifelong exposure to this plague starts early and occurs often. Many are infected by parents or siblings suffering advanced symptoms. If, as infants, we manage to avoid contracting the contagion at home, soon enough we’ll be exposed during a lifetimes’ social relations.

    It’s a serious psychological disorder of the mind on a par with Schizophrenia, a diagnosis as cruel as Cancer. Unlike Cancer, this contagion is measured in a million stages, from middle class microaggressions to self-styled white supremacists so riddled they’ve lost all logic and ability to reason.

    Their ideologies also usually include anti-Semitic and homophobic components that are in line with Nazi dogma. In contrast, groups such as the League of the South and Identity Europa propagate their radical stances under the guise of white ethno-nationalism, which seeks to highlight the distinctiveness––rather than the superiority––of the white identity.

    Furthermore, it claims that the white identity is under threat from minorities or immigrants that seek to replace its culture. For example, Identity Europa’s chant, ‘You will not replace us,’ insinuates that growing minority populations threaten to overtake whites of European heritage in American society.

    Members of this new generation of white supremacists, such as former Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP) leader Matthew Heimbach, have decried the traditional supremacist narrative of the inferiority of non-white races. Heimbach and his contemporaries have instead focused on racial separation rather than racial superiority, promoting the idea that all races are better served by remaining separate – take a look at www.counterextremism.com.

    More than two hundred hate-filled organizations have been documented in the United States. Their fear mongering membership find new recruits from every state. Growing in numbers as a percent of our population, these groups have local leadership within individual states, many directed by a centralized strategy, orchestrated from national level.

    Knowing their First Amendment rights, they dispatch speakers to every debate and gather. Bolder than before, the extreme right appears to be thriving in 2019’s chaotic political climate, where they barter with national leaders, buying legitimacy in exchange for base support. These are the chronic, if not terminal cases. But before you gloat, know that you are sick too.

    Our primary pathology is the myth of our own superiority. Its genesis lies in a set of genes designed for survival, which in turn, create a convincing cultural overlay leading us to believe  we are better in all respects. This evolutionary delusion comes from the back of our brains when we compare ourselves to people of color.

    Culturally, and on an individual emotional level, it always comes down to ‘us and them.’ We absolve ourselves, yet launch accusations of racism and bigotry at others. We cannot grant equal rights, respect or recognition because black people act as ‘benchmark’.

    What justifies the myth, if not our ‘benchmark?’ Part and parcel of our pathology is that we don’t know ourselves and we don’t want to. You and I share a built-in paranoia. It’s an inherited fear of loss in a zero sum game, forever exploited by the hard-right, most notably since the 1980s.

    This four-hundred-year old legacy of non-introspection is why I venture that a majority of descendants from slavery know us whites better than we know ourselves. I’ll also postulate that as they age, black people become infinitely wiser than old whites.

    They’ve had four hundred years to observe our faults and feel our cruelties. Meanwhile, we excuse ourselves a million more times. Some whites today say, ‘ah but that was years ago during slavery,’ as if cruelty no longer continues.

    Maybe black people are better positioned to see how systemically these values have been  embedded. One learns best by example, good or bad. And anyone watching our bad examples these last four hundred years has realized early in the game they don’t want to become anything like us. Minorities don’t envy whites, only the benefits we monopolize. As humans finding fault in other humans, these people might pity us, but harbor no desire to be white.

    If you want to explore and understand more about our illness, read some of James Baldwin’s essays. Try ‘Stranger in The Village,’ ‘In Search Of A Majority,’ ‘The Devil Finds Work,’ and many others in The Price of the Ticket his collection of nonfiction writing.

    Baldwin points out that before immigrants came to America they were simply Swedish, English, Irish, German, or perhaps Polish. People weren’t considered white until after they arrived. If we face the reality that our society is infected, we can proceed towards a human society populated by equals. Until then we’ll remain sickly and never truly civilized.

  • When Home is an Untouchable Beloved

    The cruellest aspect of protracted displacement is a descent into the realms of collective forgetfulness, in places where social injustice and political abandonment are normalised. Fresh from her fourth visit to Lebanon, author and activist Bruna Kadletz sees the Palestinian cause being relegated more and more to the margins of global concern.

    In the autumn of 2017 I met three Palestinian elders at the Shatila Refugee Camp, in Beirut, Lebanon. All are survivors of Al-Nakba, meaning ‘disaster’ or ‘catastrophe’. The expression refers to the period during the violent birth pangs of the Israeli state in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their villages and forced into exile. Many of the survivors and their offspring still live as refugees in Lebanon without a right of return to their homeland in sight.

    To the elders, memory, oral history and tradition are essential pillars which sustain Palestinian identity. Otherwise, given the hardships of exile in refugee camps, the generations born expatriated are at risk of forgetting not only who they are, but also about the land of their ancestors.

    For millions of refugees around the world, home is an untouchable beloved, imagined in the sweetness and pain of memories, and only visited in the imageries of storytelling. Many Palestinians still carry the keys to their former homes in Palestine, symbolizing an unwavering desire to return. This dream of home is their life breath.

    Holding a misbaha in one of his hands, while moving prayer beads through his fingers, Abu Mahmoud and other elders talk about the Occupation’s deep wounds and transgenerational trauma, as well as community and ties to the land. In the old Palestinian villages, sharing and a sense of community were central values integrated into personal relationships and the economic system.

    To the villagers, the land held a deep meaning – involving devotion to the soil out of which figs, olives, wheat, among other crops, grew – and was not seen as a commodity, with a purely financial price. Before selling their produce, tradition demanded a share be reserved for the wider village community. This practice ensured all residents generally had access to sufficient nutritious food.

    This camp where the elders now reside lies far from those childhood memories. Shatila, along with another dozen camps in Lebanese territory, was set-up in 1949 in response to the Palestinian exodus. Today, there are approximately four hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians registered in refugee camps in that country.[i] Since the beginning of the Syrian War in 2011 the camps have been swollen further by the arrival of Syrian refugees.

    Being Brazilian, when I first entered an urban refugee camp in Lebanon, I was reminded of our favelas. The structure and living conditions of favelas and urban refugee camps are very similar: overpopulation, cramped buildings, a lack of sanitation and extreme poverty are among the resemblances. Favelas and urban refugee camps are pockets of social and political abandonment, zones of exclusion and punishment, where fundamental human rights and dignified living conditions are, all too often, unattainable.

    I was accompanied by my cousin Marina on my most recent visit to Lebanon in April 2019. As it was her first visit, I advised against drinking from taps, or even touching the camp´s water. Unfortunately she forgot the warning and rinsed her mouth with tap water, which was extremely salty, leaving her feeling nauseous. Most residents use this same water to wash their faces and hands, brush their teeth and bathe. I previously found it so salty that it burned my eyes.

    A local told us that most of the water distributed in refugee camps in Lebanon is contaminated. Treatment plants inject high volumes of disinfectant chemicals to mask the pollution, amidst a water crisis.

    Some Palestinian camps have another singular characteristic: the water distribution system is not subterranean. Instead, water is circulated via pipes which intertwine with electric wires, forming a deadly roof, covering great swathes of the camps. Wherever a leak occurs residents are in danger of electrocution.

    Because Palestinians living in Lebanon are prohibited from acquiring property in that state, and denied entry to over seventy professions, most have bleak future.

    Since they cannot build beyond the camp’s walls and expand horizontally, the remaining option is to build vertically and take advantage of every square inch in the camp. As a result, there is now insufficient gaps between buildings and deficient ventilation. The sun does not shine on the narrow alleys connecting the camps.

    I am reminded of a popular Brazilian saying, ‘The sun rises for all’. Underpinning this optimistic view of life, is an understanding that everyone enjoys similar opportunities in life. But having witnessed the exclusion of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, and the deprivations they endure in their daily lives, it seems to me that, for those living in alleys and ghettos, the sun does not rise at all. Alas, a growing number of displaced people around the world, like the Palestinians, inhabit this dark space of dispossession.

    In August 2018, the Trump administration announced it would cease funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which is responsible for the protection and provision of aid to Palestinians in the Middle East.[ii] For many years, the U.S. had been contributing a quarter of UNRWA’s budget. This was part of a wider strategy of subjugating the Palestinian people by placing them in positions of greater economic vulnerability. The loss of funding is already harming projects supported by UNRWA, such as schools and medical clinics.

    Yet, in spite of adversity, Palestinians remain resilient. When I think of Palestinians, I see the olive trees they love so much. Olive trees are drought-resistant and grow in poor soil. This reflects Palestinian strength, resistance and endurance. The trees and the Palestinian people can teach us how to bear fruit, even in arid conditions.

    [i] United Nations relief and works agency for Palestinian refugees in the Near East, ‘Where We Work’, https://www.unrwa.org/where-we-work/lebanon, accessed 29/4/19.

    [ii] Karen DeYoung and Ruth Eglash, ‘Trump administration to end U.S. funding to U.N. program for Palestinian refugees’, August 30th, 2018, The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-administration-to-end-us-funding-to-un-program-for-palestinian-refugees/2018/08/30/009d9bc6-ac64-11e8-b1da-ff7faa680710_story.html?utm_term=.0798b05139ba, accessed 29/4/19.

  • The Wrong End of Gun Karma

    In the time it took him to close the three yards of separation between us, a well-dressed young man with a Saints ballcap pulled down low was holding a Glock 19 semi-automatic to my head.  I’d been hypervigilant for three weeks after a New Orleans tarot card reader at the Golden Leaves Bookstore divined bad juju all around me.  Misreading the bleeps on my psychic radar, by the time I realized what was happening, it was too late.

    A scant ten minutes earlier, I’d been in a meeting and now was pretending to listen to a Vietnam Vet turned lawyer who fancied himself a lady’s man.  Instead I was assessing each pedestrian on Napoleon Avenue.  It was a self-soothing technique used when on high alert.  Each person was quickly categorized as to safe or unsafe mostly based on their dress and posture.  This inner detection system had been honed on the New Orleans streets for over fifteen years and had never failed; but that was before I understood how easy it is for some to disguise evil as good.

    As I assured myself all was well, I felt a vibration much like the distortion in the audio when a speaker’s volume is turned up too high.  In the nanosecond it took for me to register consciously what was happening, the dapper dressed demon had already closed the space between us loaded and locked and was now shifting his gun from my head to the Vet/Lawyer’s face.  I knew they were both talking because their lips were moving but the information was lost in translation.

    That’s when I panicked.  Clutching my purse close to my chest, I started running away from the lighted street into the darkness of the poorer neighborhoods that exist behind all the old-world charm of uptown avenues.  Hiding behind a parked car, I watched and waited for him to come and find me.  When he did, he put me on my knees with the gun to my forehead so that I was looking up into dark blank eyes.  Smiling, he growled through clenched teeth, “give me your purse, you stupid bitch.”

    Two weeks later he killed a tourist who refused him his wallet.  Two weeks after that he was caught and later tried and convicted for murder and armed robbery.  I’ll never know why he killed the man and not me.  What I do understand is that in the time it would have taken to retrieve a gun from my purse, he would have shot me.  This was the catalyst for the slow and painful process of opening my heart and then changing my mind regarding gun ownership and gun control.

    I suffer no illusions about using guns.  My early life was wild and chaotic, filled with mean and nasty characters much like the ones found in any of Flannery O’Connor’s gothic depictions of the antebellum South.  As a Gulf Coast Navy brat born to poor circumstances, guns were the norm.  The maintenance of the big anti-aircraft guns mounted on the aircraft carriers used in WWII was my father’s responsibility.  Along with the 1950s baby sitter, the television set, those images shape shifted my baby boomer imagination.  My first heroes were President Eisenhower, the Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers – the good guys with guns.  Mounted firmly on my stick pony firing my toy guns, I passed days of creative play fighting the Russians and other bad guys.

    On my first hunting trip, we came across a mama raccoon and her babies hanging out on a limb.  Encouraged by the taunts of my teenage friends, I took aim and fired again and again and again.  Eight times.  Suddenly, I could hear the high-pitched squeal of a not quite dead rabbit as my grandfather slid a knife beneath its skin.  This Silence of the Bunnies memory mixed with my slaughter made death real and tangible leaving a metal taste in my mouth.  I never hunted again.

    As an adult, working my way through undergraduate school tending bar and waiting tables in 1970s New Orleans, I often found myself in the French Quarter after midnight mixing and mingling with the nightcrawlers and the tourists.  An uncle with mob connections had given me my first handgun, a hammerless, double-action derringer.  His only instructions were if you pull it, you better be ready to use it.

    A New Orleans cop gave me a better idea.  One evening as I stood outside the same Howard Johnson’s where just three years earlier Mark Essex, a dishonorably discharged Navy man had shot and killed seven people, two men approached trying to coax me to their car.  Hey there Baby, need a ride?  With my muff pistol safely hidden in a cheap purse with finger on the trigger, I pointed it toward the two men and firmly said GO AWAY!   As they slithered back into the dark night, they looked back at me saying, Hey now pretty girl.  We just wanted to party.   

    At twenty-six, I already knew killing someone would drive me over the edge.  The lingering guilt of having left that derringer loaded and unattended had been enough to make me rethink my fake bravado.  To be the cause of the fear in my son’s eyes as I watched his seven-year-old friend point it at him, shames me to this day.  As it should.  Just as ignorance is no defense under the law, neither is it with me when taking my own actions into account.

    My progun opinions didn’t change then nor when my cousin used a handgun to shoot herself in the heart after chain smoking crack cocaine for a week.  My uncle had given her a gun too.  I can still hear the hum and hollow whooshing sound of the ventilator in her ICU suite.  In real life, gunshot victims don’t look like they do in the movies.  There is no make-up, no weak smiles, no last confessions; just a physical body doing its best to stay alive with medical assistance.

    There were tubes coming in and out of every orifice plus one for feeding.  Barely conscious with the intubation tube pushing air into her lungs, she stared out of tear-filled slits for eyes.  Looking like she was about to crack wide open like a split tomato left on the vine too long, her body clung to life long enough to recover.  That’s how biological life is – it goes on pitted against death whether the consciousness inhabiting the form is up to the task or not.

    Several years later, I sold my last gun in 1995 after Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.  I still don’t know why this terrorist act got my attention when a Glock 19 held to my head failed to do so.   What I do know is that for me the differences between owning a handgun, a rifle or a military weapon like an AR-15 are painfully obvious:

    One is for protection.

    One is for hunting.

    One is for killing as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time.

  • Bull Moose – A Monthly Column from Across the Pond

    Temperature Rising

    ‘Give them enough rope and they’ll hang themselves.’ That’s what a wise ex-colleague of mine used to say whenever someone made a boneheaded move out of extreme self-interest.

    Democrats would do well to heed that lesson.  In the first edition of this newsletter we argued that they should move on from the Mueller investigation and focus on the issues affecting electors. Have they? Hardly. The House is in full swing to subpoena Trump for everything he has ever said or done prior to taking office.

    Despite Nancy Pelosi’s repeated promises not to go down the route of impeachment, the question keeps coming up, as the news media tries its darnedest hardest to feed the frenzy. Meanwhile, the White House has vowed to ‘boycott’ any and all subpoenas from Congress. An escalated public battle, and playing the victim, suits Trump just fine.

    The real question is, what are the Democrats trying to prove? That the President lies? That his campaign had multiple contacts with the Russians? That the President is a narcissist who brands all real news he doesn’t like as ‘fake news’? That he rarely paid taxes and isn’t half as rich as he claims to be?

    Americans know all this, and, mostly, don’t care. At least those that voted for him. They look at the economy and see it chugging along; Wall Street is not far off an all-time high and pension funds are doing just fine.

    The Mueller report, when it was finally was released, included nearly one thousand redactions.[i] But there was still plenty of incriminating evidence, perhaps none more so than the President’s own words: ‘Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.’ Hardly the words of a man who knew he would be ‘totally vindicated and exonerated.’

    Those that like Trump, or voted for him, have bought into the notion that the media is out to get him. They get their daily fix of consternation and reality bending news from Fox, talk show radio and Facebook/Twitter. It’s no better on the left, where MSNBC and the NY Times are crying foul, and have become so accustomed to doing so, that they are increasingly at risk of sounding like whiners.

    At the end, you can blame the Russians all you want, but Americans do a pretty good job of creating division themselves when it’s in their interest to do so.

    So Democrats, don’t spend the next year and half going down a rabbit hole trying to impeach him. As the Trump anointed ‘Crazy Bernie’ rightfully pointed out, this will merely play into his hands.

    Start, instead, by giving him a nickname that sticks – like the ‘The Mafia Don’ or simply ‘The Don.’

    (BTW, ‘Sleepy Joe Biden’ just entered the race. If elected he’ll be the oldest president ever at 76, and he’s got more than a few skeletons in his closet. For now, he’s polling first ahead of the twenty other candidates in the race. It should make for an interesting Democratic primary. More on this in due course)

    For now, the Democrats need to hammer aggressively on the issues and differentiate themselves from ‘The Don,’ by being more principled and solution-oriented.

    He’s banking on being able to play the victim – please don’t fall for that trick again.

    [i] Luke Harding, ‘What’s missing? The clues to Barr’s 1,000 Mueller report redactions’, 20th of April, 2019, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/19/mueller-report-redactions-whats-missing-clues, accessed 26/4/19.

  • ‘Discourse of Pollution’ from the ‘Trump of the Tropics’

    The use of xenophobic language by Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, known as the ‘Trump of the tropics’, reinforces a dangerous narrative in which refugees and migrants are portrayed as threats to national security, writes humanitarian worker Bruna Kadletz.

    FLORIANÓPOLIS, Brazil – In his first official visit to the White House, Brazil’s new Far Right President Jair Bolsonaro, declared his support to president Donald Trump´s dehumanising immigration policies.

    Publicly reinforcing dangerous stereotypes of refugees and migrants as threats to national security, cultural heritage and social order he said in an with Fox News on Monday, March 18th: ‘The majority of potential immigrants do not have good intentions or do not intend to do the best or do good for the American people.’[efn_note]Jill Colvin and Peter Prengman, ‘Trump buddies up with Bolsonaro, the ‘Trump of the Tropics’’ March 20th, 2019, Associated Press, https://www.apnews.com/bdc70648e5814d25b549d1c252910006, accessed 27/3/19.[/efn_note]During the same interview Bolsonaro lent support to Trump’s plan to build his infamous wall along the US-Mexico border.

    Such remarks are in line with a growing global anti-immigrant trend, treating refugees as unwanted, and referring them to as potential criminals and threats to stability.[efn_note]Vince Chadwick, ‘The top 10 wackiest anti-refugee remarks’ October 19th, 2015, www.politico.eu, https://www.politico.eu/article/toxic-news-refugees-migrants-eu/, accessed 27/3/19.[/efn_note]

    The Populist language of violence and xenophobia promotes the idea that asylum seekers, refugees and vulnerable migrants pollute societies, contaminating social and economic relationships, and that their presence leaves streets dirty. This normalises confinement in exclusion zones, such as refugee camps, detention centres or ships on dangerous voyages.

    American author and cultural critic Henry Giroux calls this rhetoric the ‘discourse of pollution.’ In the United States, the Trump administration employs it as a form of dehumanization, enabling ‘policies in which people are relegated outside boundaries of justice and become the driving force for policies of terminal exclusion.’[efn_note]Henri Giroux, ‘Trump’s Racist Language of Pollution Drives His Brand of Fascism’, January 9th, 2019, Truthdig, https://www.truthdig.com/articles/trumps-racist-language-of-pollution-drives-his-brand-of-fascism/, accessed 27/3/19.[/efn_note]

    The Bolsonaro administration shadows Trump´s moves and employs the same rhetoric from the discourse of pollution. On entering office, his first major move was to pull Brazil out of the United Nations-led Global Compact for Safe Orderly and Regular Migration, adopted by more than 160 countries in December 2018.[efn_note]UN News, ‘Governments adopt global migration pact to help ‘prevent suffering and chaos’, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, December 10th, 2018, https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/global-migration-pact.html, accessed 27/3/19.[/efn_note]‘Not just anyone can come into our home,’ he declared on Twitter. ‘Defending our national sovereignty has been a key part of our campaign and it is now a priority of our government,’ he continued in another tweet.

    Bolsonaro’s views on migrants is consistent with a history of xenophobic comments. In a 2015 interview, he referred to Senegalese, Haitian, Syrian and other asylum seekers arriving in Brazil as ‘the scum of the world,’[efn_note]Alexandre Parrode, ‘Ouça entrevista em que Bolsonaro chama refugiados de “escória” e sugere infarto a Dilma’, September 21st, 2015, Jornal Opcao, https://www.jornalopcao.com.br/ultimas-noticias/ouca-entrevista-em-que-bolsonaro-chama-refugiados-de-escoria-e-sugere-infarto-a-dilma-46313/, accessed 27/3/19.[/efn_note] implying the country had enough problems already, and that they would even pose a threat to the Brazilian Armed Forces.

    On January 6th, he posted a video on his official Facebook page of a Muslim woman being stoned to death. The description underneath reads, ‘Under Sharia law, a woman is stoned to death by many coward Muslims. This is the culture wishing to invade the West and subject us to this aberration.'[efn_note]Jair Bolsonaro Official Facebook Page: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1340804376068545&id=211857482296579, accessed 17/3/19.[/efn_note]

    The Brazilian government’s xenophobia and decision to walk away from the migration compact signals dark days of hostility, and stricter border controls.

    Refugees and immigrants, seeking protection and better living conditions, are most affected by the discourse of pollution. Instead of having their human rights vindicated, such a point of view increases the vulnerability and fear of refugees and migrants.

    Far Right global leaders seem to think their individual online rantings exist in a vacuum, but their words embed belief systems, and legitimates the behaviour of extremists. For a head of State to say migrants do not have good intentions or are scum is highly irresponsible. Leaders should be uniting people with a progressive vision, rather than exploiting existing divisions.

    This perverse language informs policies which could lead to further exclusion and vulnerability in places from Brazil to the United States.

    Thus, Bolsonaro’s administration poses a threat to refugees’ human rights. If his discourse of pollution brings harsher migration policies, the result could be further xenophobic attacks, hostility and policies of exclusion. That would only accentuate the vulnerability of asylum seekers and refugees in Brazil.

    Violent and xenophobic language can lead to violent acts being perpetrated against refugees and migrants. The recent massacre at the two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, of fifty people, is just the latest example of White Supremacy and Far Right terrorism, encouraged by a misleading narrative of refugees and migrants as pollutants that need to be cleaned up.

    In contrast to others, New Zealand´s Prime Minister, Jacinta Ardern, responded to the massacre with courage and leadership. Her compassionate and caring response is a stark contrast to the angry words of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsanaro and others. Only with the power of love can we move forward as a united global community.

    We rely on contributions to keep Cassandra Voices going.

  • Bull Moose – A New Monthly Column from Across the Pond.

    Bull Moose is a monthly bulletin discussing the politics and society of the United States.

    A Gift to Dems – should they take it…

    The news that Donald Trump had not been adjudged to have colluded with the Russians prior to the 2016 election was greeted with elation on the Right and disappointment and annoyance on the Left. Emboldened, the White House renewed calls to investigate the investigators. Little was said about how Attorney General Barr did exactly as promised when he wrote a memo in 2018, stating that the President should not be indicted for collusion, and that, frankly, he should be considered above the law in certain respects.[i] The 4-page memo of the 300-page Mueller report that Barr sent to Congress merely followed up on this promise to protect the President.

    The Democrats, for their part, reacted with a mixture of incredulity, anger and promises to continue the investigations. Clearly, they are within their rights – there is plenty of smoke, and where there is smoke there should be some fire at least. But they are missing an opportunity by not refocusing attention on issues that matter to Americans

    Realistically this shouldn’t be a win from Trump – he is not celebrating innocence, only the inability of prosecutors to pin conclusively any charges on him, even as some of his closest allies fester in jail. Trump’s strategy is clear and simple: aggressively go after anyone who questions him and say, repeatedly, ‘we want the full report released,’ without having any intention of ever doing so. Does ‘I will disclose my tax returns’, ring any bells?

    Most Americans have more progressive views than the Republican party. On issues like the environment, immigration, health care, and yes, even freedom and civil liberties, the public should naturally side with Democrats. Even on core issues like balanced budgets, debt and higher rates of marginal taxation, Republicans are vulnerable.

    Yet, the next election will be won by whoever controls the dialogue in the media. Trump won last time out, and will likely win again, because of his ability and desire to maintain a firm grip on the narrative.  Not for nothing, in order to get an idea to stick in a listener’s head he will mention a soundbite three times in a row – it’s a simple trick that is wildly effective.

    For him any day that he is not in the headlines is a bad one. Under this principle – bad publicity is better than none. At least he is still at the center of the conversation. Few Democrats seem to realize this. Yet, in order to win back the White House, they will need to learn from Trump, rather than simply demonize him.

    Control the narrative, control the outcome…

    Not Rich Enough

    News that some celebrities had paid bribes for their children to gain entry into the most prestigious universities in America received widespread attention in March. Some had paid around a million dollars to coaches and middle men, who helped game the system in their favor. About fifty people were accused and some will, no doubt, spend time in jail.

    The best take on this whole ‘scandal’ emerged organically, via social media. Dr Dre posted a picture of his daughter’s acceptance letter from USC, proudly boasting how she had ‘earned’ her entry. Shortly afterwards, one commenter reminded him of his $70 million gift to USC, whereupon he quickly deleted the post.

    The lesson? Don’t try to bribe your way into college unless you can pay for an entire building.

    The most interesting insight into the American mindset came from the comments section – the most liked ones were those adopting this line of thinking: if he donates that much money, he should be allowed to send his daughter there because he is providing opportunities for those less fortunate on scholarships.

    Twisted thinking to be sure, but clearly, if you are rich enough you can act like a socialist to rig the capitalist system in your favor.

    [i] Jonathan Hafetz and Brett Max Kaufmann, ‘William Barr’s Unsolicited Memo to Trump About Obstruction of Justice’, February 14th, 2019, ACLU, https://www.aclu.org/blog/executive-branch/william-barrs-unsolicited-memo-trump-about-obstruction-justice, accessed 30/3/19.

  • Brazil Special Report: Families Still Seeking Bodies after Brumandinho Dam Disaster

    Last January 25th a dam burst over the town of Brumandinho from a height of eighty-six metres. It unleashed a tsunami of approximately twelve million cubic metres of toxic red sludge over the valley below, eviscerating all in its path.

    The structure had been built as part of an iron-ore-mining operation in Minais Gerais, Brazil’s second most populous state. This is the heartland of the country´s extractive sector, servicing industries all over the world.

    Responsibility for the humanitarian and ecological disaster in Brumadinho lies squarely with Vale, a Brazilian-owned mining company, which has been extracting minerals from the region for decades. Reports circulating indicate the company had been aware of the risks, but failed to adopt precautions in line with international guidelines.[i]

    In prioritising profit, the company externalised the inherent danger of retaining toxic by-products from a mining operation in a tailing dam.

    In late February I visited Brumadinho and Mina do Feijão district, the scene of one of Brazil’s worst Brazilian humanitarian and ecological disasters.

    With main access roads to the town destroyed, I journeyed via unpaved, narrow streets through lush Atlantic forest, enhancing my awareness of the breath-taking ecology still surviving in this region.

    The mountainous state of Minas Gerais is rich in iron, gold, niobium and other minerals, and responsible for more than half of the country’s mineral extraction, with over three hundred mines operating. According to a report published by the Nacional Agency for Mining (Agência Nacional de Mineração), Minas Gerais concentrates 63.1% of the high-risk mining dams in the country.[ii] As in Brumadinho and Mina do Feijão district, most of these dams sit atop mountains, posing threats to villages, towns and ecosystems located in valleys adjacent to the sites.

    Walking down the dirt road towards the epicentre of the disaster, I was hit by a wave of unpleasant odour. A mixture of smells, from decomposing bodies to toxic metals, charges the atmosphere, growing stronger at the approach to the worst scenes of devastation.

    The sight of what greets me is as striking as the odour. At the end of the street, a sea of red mud has consumed all before it. Its force so intense that it has uprooted trees, crushed houses and swallowed human lives. It spread nine kilometres, as far as the Paraopeba River where it has killed aquatic life, adversely affecting local indigenous communities, whose subsistence depends on fishing, and a healthy river for drinking water.

    A month on, families are still looking for bodies. So far, the Brazilian civil defence has set the official death toll at one-hundred-and-eighty-six, but one-hundred-and-twenty-one are still unaccounted for.

    Despite there now being almost no chance of finding anyone still alive, firefighters tirelessly keep up the search for bodies.

    One-hundred-and-twenty volunteers from different parts of the country sustain the rescue mission. Their courage is a lesson in solidarity and care, in the midst of Vale´s criminal negligence and indifference. While firefighters heroically contribute their time and strength, equipped with rescue dogs, bulldozers, drones and helicopters, Vale continues to extract minerals, even from the very site where the tragedy occurred.

    The sound of trucks carrying minerals from the open pit speaks louder than the silenced cries of victims.

    At the disaster´s scene I encountered a woman whose husband is still missing. Martha (not her real name) had arrived with two relatives. Every day she travels the hour’s journey from a neighbouring town, hoping to hear news of her husband José (also not his real name).

    The dam collapsed, without warning, during lunchtime. Around two hundred employers were dining at Vale´s refectory when the walls of the barrage burst. In less than two minutes the mud consumed all, including the refectory.

    According to three surviving workers, José was waiting for the shuttle bus at the time of the disaster. His shift had ended, and having finished his lunch, he was waiting outside, under a tree – the usual spot where the shuttle bus picked-up staff.

    Alas, on that last Friday of January, the shuttle bus never arrived, and José remains missing.

    Martha is grieving her loss. She endures the agony of not knowing what has become of her husband. At least a body, or even a piece of it, would allow her to dignify him with a funeral.

    Martha´s grief resonates with the sorrow of an entire town. Most of Brumadinho´s forty-thousand inhabitants either work for Vale themselves, or know someone who does.

    the sacred soil

    When I think of mud, I think of earth and water, essential elements to life on planet Earth. I also think of soil and its healing properties. Pure mud is the foundation of life, the sacred soil out of which food grows.

    On the contrary, toxic mining mud is lethal.

    When I speak of toxic mud, I speak of earth and water contaminated by heavy metals and poisonous chemicals. Mining operations are sources of pollution and harm. Among the chemicals involved are lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury. These kill people, other animals and soil.

    Yet, of all the pollutants the most hazardous is greed, the moving force in our economic system that demands the extractive industries.

    To truly decontaminate the affected region and purify river and soil, we as individuals and societies must first decontaminate the financial greed from our economic and political systems. We may purify our hearts and minds by awakening an understanding of the Earth as a source of life to be cared for, not a resource to be exploited.

    We rely on contributions to keep Cassandra Voices going.

    All images (c) Bruna Kadletz

    [i] Beatric Juca, ‘Detenidos otros ocho empleados de Vale por el desastre de la mina de Brumadinho’, 15th of February, 2019, El Pais International, https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2019/02/15/politica/1550262453_887391.html accessed 4/3/2019.

    [ii] Matthew Bloch, Scott Reinhard and Sergio Pecanha, ‘Where Brazilians Live in High-Risk Areas Downhill From Mining Dams’ February, 14th, 2019, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/14/world/americas/brumadinho-brazil-dam-collapse.html, accessed 4/3/19.

  • Inside China: What My Students Knew about European Culture

    Up to my retirement several years ago I taught spoken English at an agricultural university in North-East China. The routine was relieved by an assignment to deliver an elective course that I called ‘Western Art and Culture’. I was given carte blanche to draw up a curriculum to fill the ten weeks allotted.

    From my experience of teaching at this and two other Chinese universities I was aware that young students have only a patchy knowledge of visual arts, theatre and music. At middle school they study Dynastic nature poetry, and read some of China’s classic novels including the sixteenth century Ming masterpiece Journey to the West.

    I once glanced at a middle school textbook, in Chinese, on ‘Western Culture’. It carried black and white photos of Greek temple, ceramic pots, an armless Venus de Milo, the Roman forum and Colosseum, and Leonardo’s rendering of Mona Lisa. Musical and artistic instruction is only offered in a serious way on curricula of select urban fee-paying schools. Middle class parents in the booming cities often pay for their sons and daughters to be privately tutored in piano or violin, or traditional string instruments like the erhu or the guzheng.

    Guzheng practice.

    Sweatshop Art Reproduction

    I discovered that few third level Chinese students have ever visited a city art museum. One reason is the high cost of admission relative to most students’ disposable pocket money. A lucky few have visited the Summer Palace and Forbidden City in Beijing, or lit incense sticks ‘for good luck’, at a Buddhist temple during the annual spring festival. Downloading free movies on their laptops in student dormitories is the most common cultural experience.

    Female students in China are particularly draw to romantic B-movies, churned out in South Korea, with Chinese subtitles attached. Japanese Manga comic books, infamous for lurid depictions, cater to lowbrow reading taste.

    Around China you might see replica Mona Lisas in cafes, restaurants and hotel rooms. Van Gogh’s expressionist studies of ‘Starry Night’ and ‘Twelve Sunflowers in a Vase’ are other common wall-fillers. Renoir’s charming portraits of the late 19th-century French bourgeoisie are also to be found.

    There are two or three factories in South China where teams of skilled painters churn out reproductions of these and other Western classic. One week they might have to recreate a Constable, the following a Rubens. It is sweatshop reproduction art.

    In other sections of the factories workers on assembly lines fit the canvases into gilt frames. Every six months business people from all over the world attend the trade exhibition held in the southern boom town of Guangzhou (formerly Canton). There they buy up large quantities of these as well as mock-period furniture for export. The next time you see Monet’s sunset-red grain stacks at Giverney on a European café wall, pause and reflect that it might have been made to order by a Chinese sweatshop painter.

    The Origins of Western Civilisation

    For my course I chose to begin with Leonardo and Michelangelo, moving on to Johannes Vermeer, Goya, the French impressionists, Vincent Van Gogh, Wassily Kandinsky, and finally Picasso, whose political work is officially praised in China; though his erotic material is never reproduced in schoolbooks, and shocks the curious who seek out more online.

    The Ancient Greeks and Romans form a composite myth about the origins of western civilization, succinctly laid out in the approved middle school textbooks of Communist China. Chinese school-leavers are at least familiar with photos of the Parthenon in Athens and Roman Colloseum.

    I happened to have a DVD of the film ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’. which fictionally recreates the household circumstances in which Vermeer painted a work that has appeared on everything from chocolate boxes to 1500-piece jigsaw puzzles. I emphasised that the Girl is often called the Mona Lisa of Northern Europe. My students empathised with her simple peasant garb and down-to-earth prettiness. They were aware that the pearl earring had been supplied for the portrait.

    Shyness and lack of of art observation practice made it difficult for me to elicit comments on selected screened paintings. I persisted and let every student in class take his or her turn.

    Admiring Leonardo’s Guts

    Knowing that Chinese secondary school students only learn about Leonardo da Vinci through the Mona Lisa and her enigmatic smile, I took the trouble to show several of his anatomical and engineering drawings. Communist leaders are constantly exhorting young citizens to cultivate a serious ‘scientific outlook’ on life.

    I made it clear to my students that Leonardo first trained as an engineer before discovering his gift for drawing and painting. I revealed how he had been given permission to dissect and draw bodies in a hospital mortuary, amid the smell of summer putrefaction, and that reproductions of muscles, veins, organs and skeletons drawn by Leonardo were scrutinised by European medical students for hundreds of years; until the publication of Gray’s Anatomy in 1858 with its stunning illustrations by Henry Vandyke Carter.

    Some of my Chinese undergraduates admired Leonardo’s guts; others squirmed audibly when confronted with graphic details of skulls and skeletons and a dead baby in the womb, as most students would.

    In another push to get beyond the Mona Lisa stereotype I also showed reproductions of his other portraits and explored religious themes. ‘The Woman with an Ermine’ impressed students with her natural beauty, carefully groomed fawn hair and colourful dress. La Belle Ferroniere moved them similarly. I hoped this would give Chinese students a more rounded understanding of Leonardo’s stature in western art history.

    In one class I showed a selection of traditional Chinese landscapes from various dynasties and juxtaposed them with selected Dutch landscapes of the 17th and 18th centuries. I noted that Chinese and Renaissance painting styles were different but not unequal in merit; artists in different cultural milieus attempting to achieve varying social-aesthetic objectives.

    Students performing dance moves to pop music.

    Final Grades

    Music was an additional focus of my courses. I prepared a series of pictures of orchestral instruments, moving on to American popular music in Britain and America.

    Finally, I assigned short writing pieces about the painters and a final paper was written on the subject of ‘art and music in my life’.

    I was generally underwhelmed by the manuscripts. Many students wrote about listening in their dormitories late at night to popular music; none listened to Classical or jazz. Only a few wrote about paintings and sculptures. I hope my students have taken something with them about Western art, music and cultural norms. Maybe a few will drop into an art museum on their travels, assuming they are earning enough money to purchase the admission..

    Garreth Byrne lives in retirement in Leitrim, Ireland after teaching English at universities and other institutions in five different cities in China, where he spent twelve years.

    We rely on contributions to keep Cassandra Voices going.