World: Eyeless in Gaza

From the New York Times

Promise was that I
Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver;
Ask for this great Deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves,
Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke;
Samson Agonistes, John Milton

One — this one, anyway — can't help wondering what the fuck is going on in Gaza this week. Why is Israel bombing, shooting, and sending the sixth largest and best equipped army in the world into Gaza, the refuge of 1.3 million Palestinians, most of whom are unarmed civilians? Some 400,000 of that population lives in refugee camps funded by the UN.

Israel has bombed the power plants, water and sewage treatment facilities, and restricted movement in and out of Gaza which has essentially become the world's largest standing concentration camp. Why? What is this about? And why is Israel getting away with this starkly inhumane treatment?

Before you start lecturing me about what the Palestinians have done to bring this upon themselves, stop. No. I'm well aware of the tortuous politics of the Middle East (or West Asia, if you prefer). Here's a timeline of the events leading up to today's report of tanks entering the much-bombed and repeatedly destroyed strip of Gaza.

This is the most recent mapping of the conflict. Its roots go back all the way to the fight of two desert tribes over scarce land and water resources. Or perhaps, given the Jewish Diaspora under Rome, only as far back as the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which established in Palestine a "home" for the Jewish people with a guarantee of "civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." Of course, in the intervening years, Israel has repeatedly taken land and scarce water from the Palestinians, refused the refugees that it has created the right of return (thereby ensuring that their lands and goods, if any, become the property of the state of Israel), and reduced the "land of Palestine" to a series of narrow unconnected strips with no sovereignty and severely restricted movement.

This fine map courtesy of aucegypt.edu

It was generous of the British to so dispose of the land and the fruits of the labour of others.

As a lifelong supporter of Israel, I long admired the state for its tenacity, its refusal to contemplate surrender or nonexistence, its bravery in the face of daunting odds. But there is a huge difference between fighting the remnants of the great Turkish empire and an assault upon a defenseless civilian population when you have the best army and armaments that the contents of the American Treasury can buy.

What is now going on in Gaza is nothing short of despicable. Yes, Israel has a right to exist. But nobody has a right to rain bombs on the heads of women, old people, children, noncombatant civilians. To those who seek to apologize for Israel's actions by claiming that it is Hamas, the "terrorists," who hide their bombs and guns behind the bodies of civilians, let me point out that Gaza is currently the most densely populated place in the world. Where exactly could Hamas locate their weapons of self-defense away from civilians? Why should they give up their pitifully ineffective weapons when the State of Israel kills 100 Palestinians for every Israeli that is killed? How can they trust Israel to safeguard their rights, when Israel brazenly destroys their homes, orchards, lands, wells, and their children?

It is well documented that Israel has eaten away at the "civil rights" of the Palestinians as well as at their territory. The Western Powers created the State of Israel as a salve for their collective guilt of a thousand years of pogroms, discrimination, hatred, bloodshed, killing, concentration camps, and Final Solutions. Why did they choose to carve out for the victims of their evil a "home" in a place already occupied by others? Why, since they were presumably moved by a generous spirit, did they not generously give up their own damned land, or some portion thereof?

They have discriminated against the Roma (gypsies) in much the same way, for nearly the same length of time. Yet they do not feel obliged to give the Gypsies a new home (assuming that they could find a location to which they could trace their historical roots). They prefer to leave them to the tender mercies of their fellow Europeans.

There is no honour in this battle; nothing of which to feel proud. This is not like the fight over the Golan Heights, the Six-Day War, in which Israel took on multiple armed foes and triumphed. This is a disgrace. Gaza has been cut off from the rest of the world for years now. Deprived of food, water, sewage treatment facilities, light, power, medicine, basic dignity. To attack an armed enemy and prevail is a mighty feat. To attack a weakened toothless civilian rabble of children and women — that is a disgrace and a shame.

Read what the Gazans have to say. It indicts the Israeli Army very effectively.

And not just the Israeli Army. The current occupant of the White House, the most wretched to occupy that space, has given Israel his full permission to indulge in this disgraceful carnage; asking only, in the most timid of voices, that Israel "try hard to avoid civilian casualties," even as reports tell us that Israel's air strikes over the past week have killed more than 400 Palestinians, wounded many more. And even as I write this, Israeli tanks are rumbling into the beleaguered Gaza strip.

The only good news to report in the midst of this revolting ongoing Holocaust upon the Palestinians is that finally, the scales seem to be falling from everyone's eyes. I can no longer support Israel. I will always support the right of the Israeli people and the State of Israel to exist, but that existence must now be tempered with a verifiable demonstration of their commitment to civil rights for Palestinians, peace with their neighbours, and a return of Palestinian land and property.

Rest assured, those of you who are demonstrating against Israel's unacceptable military actions, that millions of Jews, whether Israeli, American, or other, and countless millions of people of every nation, ethnicity, and faith or lack thereof stand with you. Israel can no longer whitewash these crimes against humanity.

The blindness of the Israeli hawks who willingly lead their own people into the role of catspaw for the American military-industrial complex is sad to see. So great a nation, deluded by its failure to recognize that there is no military solution to the Gordian knot that binds it.

Stumble It!

Economy: Feedback

It's a good idea, actually. Longtime friend and commenter Bob has this to say about that bailout bill:

The bailout "consensus" has fallen apart. It seems that Congress actually wants to discuss the wisdom of a trillion dollar outlay before rushing it through. That's good. As long as we're going to discuss this, let's add something to the deal.

We can't afford to be engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan if our economy is in grave danger. Whatever bailout is deemed necessary, we'll need to put our tax money into trying to save the economy, rather than fighting oil wars. What should we do?

We should stand firm on the requirement that, before any bailout money is dispersed, the Iraq war must end. The Iraq war can be ended in a few days; just bring the troops back home. Stop pouring money into a dumb oil-theft scheme. "We can't just leave"? That mantra is what kept us in Vietnam for years. In the end, we left. In Iraq, just leave now.

If the Iraq war isn't ended, then let's see what happens if there's no bailout at all. Maybe nothing will happen besides the bankruptcy of companies which richly deserve it.

Congress will need to develop a spine to do this.

Maybe the Chinese will be more willing to lend us money to shore up our crumbling economy if we're not destroying ourselves in Iraq?

Stumble It!

Iraq: We'll Leave If They Ask Us To

From an anonymous contributor over at WTF Is It Now?, the blog of the incomparable Maru, whose regular assaults upon the douchebags in charge leave us weeping with laughter:

Why is this quote not burning all around the internet right now???? From the whitehouse's _own goddam site_, a direct quote from the May 07 press conference. Quote Duh bya:

"We are there at the invitation of the Iraqi government. This is a sovereign nation. Twelve million people went to the polls to approve a constitution. It's their government's choice. If they were to say, leave, we would leave."

The White House official site. It's way down near the end of the press release, after reporters have begun asking questions.

From CBS' report of the quote dated May 2007.

Spread the meme!

Stumble It!

World: Colonialism and Its Discontents

Even well-meaning friends of La Casa de Los Gatos have been known to say, "Why do you go on and on about colonialism? That stuff happened years ago." Which, when you think of it, is like saying, "Genocide happened years ago," or "The Holocaust happened years ago." On one level it's true. On another, it's an ever-present threat. Colonialism, or Neo-colonialism has yet to ease its death-grip on many small poor countries yet. Its legacy still carries over in Africa. Western nations, although the majority of the offenders, have shown other nations how to carry on. Indonesia still struggles with the issue.

Today, we have something for you in a "speak bitterness" mode which helps to set a sort of perspective on colonialism:

"Today in 1964 some historians aver that if China had had a native dynasty at the time, she might have taken her place in the modern world more rapidly; and the sense of injury that was to be carried forward into the twentieth century might have been dispelled, and there would have been a capitalistic China, not a Communist Revolution. [...] The last thing the West wanted was a strong China, capitalistic or not. If we are not capitalistic today, it is because the West broke our native capitalism very early on, or rather never allowed it to grow.

[...]

(Referring to the indemnities the various Western powers and Japan exacted from China for the privilege of having wars waged against her, in particular the Treaty of Shimonoseki) But China in 1895 could not pay. Two hundred million ounces of silver was too much, more than the revenue available to her after having paid all she owed the Western powers for the previous wars they had waged upon her.

{...]

A loan was contracted, the largest of a series of crushing loans, and it was England who arranged the loan. Within forty months, fifty-five million pounds in foreign loans were contracted for; the French, the Germans, and the Russians quarrelled over who would lend money to China. Britain won the largest portion of the loan.

[...]

In order to guarantee [these loans] the West asked for mortgages and concessions in land, in mines, in natural resources, in factories, in import goods, and in railways.

Then started the terrible years, the years of accelerated wholesale, headlong plunder. China's weakness exposed, the Powers rallied to dismember the foundering land. [...] America evolved the Open Door Policy, which meant that no country's goods were to be taxed more than any other country's goods, when imported into China [. ...] Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany suddenly proclaimed China the Yellow Peril; when she was at her weakest, with a fine flourish of drama he announced himself leader of Christendom and the White Race in a crusade against the coloured and the yellow, and seized the province of Shantung; all because he had not done well in the quartering of Africa, and wanted his share of the spoils in China. Who would have thought that the forgotten little man with a withered arm would yet have left his lunatic mark upon the world in this phrase? Perhaps because he was one of the first in giving voice to the myth of Aryan, white superiority, which still finds exponents today?

[...]

If you get to the point where you have nothing to lose, then you get up and make a revolution. But a revolution is not made only by the people who are exploited. It is also prepared by those who exploit them. That is the paradox of history. The Japanese, the West, all of them helped to bring about the Revolution of 1911, and who knows but that after this big War another revolution may come?

[...] the land tax was collected two or three times a year; and every year it increased, and now taxes were collected at every level, district, county, province, as well as state. [...] But none broke the back of our native industry and commerce more effectively than the likin or road-toll taxes.

[...] We paid fourteen to twenty taxes on a distance of seventy miles, so that a load of tobacco from Chengtu [... cost] four times its original price (by the time it reached Chungking). And now a flood of foreign goods came in, for there was one exception to the imposition of taxes: and these were foreign goods. They came in under a 'transit pass,' totally exempt by treaties imposed upon us through wars, and thus paid one tax only, varying from five to seven-and-a-half per cent ad valorem, and no more. And so all our native industries were ruined. [...] Finally, by treaty, our own native produce, such as raw cotton, could be brought out from the interior on a 'transit pass' by foreign company and travelled exempt from the likin tax, while our Chinese merchants had to pay the likin tax to take the same material out! [...] To survive, a Chinese merchant must become a middleman to a foreign company, reducing himself to the role of employee, of servant, to the Western merchant.

Our tobacco trade was strangled and later tobacco became a monopoly in the hands of the British-American Tobacco Company [...]; it was exported on an outward transit pass, not taxable, taken to the foreign cigarette factories erected in Shanghai, Hankow and Tientsin, in the foreign concession territories, enclaves of Western territory on our soil, and then re-sold to us in the form of cigarettes.

Handloom textiles were exterminated by the import of cotton goods, first from Lancashire, later made in India where British companies benefited from cheaper native labour. Later still the Japanese built factories in China's treaty ports (Note: The treaty ports were ceded to the Western nations and despite being part of Chinese territory, were not under the jurisdiction, fiscal or legal, of China.), flooded the market with textiles, and annihilated the British textile market.

Taxes were levied on Chinese junks and boats plying the rivers, but never on the foreign steamer companies [...]."

From The Crippled Tree, Han Suyin

After this litany, is it any wonder that China is exporting cheap goods to the West, flooding the market? They're only doing what was done to them. They learned their lesson well. And, they hold trillions of dollars in foreign reserve. In other words, they've been bankrolling our rapid slide into the pits of our own making. Just as Britain "loaned" money to China to be repaid with interest that strained the economy, so the Chinese have now loaned us money so we can buy their goods without restraint. And observe who encourages us to continue spending in this manner: our own "leaders."

Observe also that Britain destroyed China's native textile industry by flooding it with inferior goods from the Lancashire cotton mills, just as they did with India. And when the mill workers of Lancashire struck for better wages and working conditions, British mill and factory owners moved their factories to India, throwing British workers out of jobs while exploiting Indian workers in the effort to destroy the Chinese textile industry.

Capitalism has never had any loyalty to people or nation. Capitalists &mdash and especially now, international corporations &mdash see all the peoples of the world as a resource to be exploited for their own accumulation of wealth. They don't care that you cannot feed your children or care for your sick relatives. If you cost them two pennies more than a worker in some other nation, then go you must, to the midden or the funeral home, if necessary, so that they can kill and cripple workers in that other nation to make goods which they will sell to your children.

We don't espouse any ism over any other. We only want to note that any ism that does not first consider the benefit of the people whom that ism purports to represent, is not an ism worth the peoples' allegiance. Out with all these miserable philosophies that seek the good of the very few from the blood, sweat, and tears of the very many.

Stumble It!