http://www.thespleen.com/international/baikilo7/index.php?artID=545 The View From Leftward Ho They call it "blogging," those onomatopoeic right-wingers � the practice of jotting down your immediate thoughts on how all liberals are scum on your personal website. I don't have personal website, but theSpleen'll do for a little blogging in the opposite direction of my own. IMPRISON THEM ALL AND LET FIDEL SORT THEM OUT: There are plenty of things not to like about Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay. I won't get into them all, but one thing in particular strikes me as particularly fucked up. It hasn't been played up much, but one of the reasons the Bush Administration has given for holding prisoners captured in Afghanistan at the military base - and not in the US itself -- is that they are "among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth," according to Donald Rumsfeld. Wouldn't want those vicious fuckers in the heart of America, now would we? Hell, they might escape and kill a bunch of Americans! But we've solved that, see? This way, if they escape, they'll only kill a bunch of dirty commie Cubans! And who cares about Cubans? They're a nation of degenerates who think parents' custody rights to their biological offspring supercede the rights of second cousins twice-removed! Still, there would be a certain perverse logic to having "Tony al-Montana" in a Havana holding cell, proclaiming: "Dere ees noteen joo can do to me dat Rumsfeld has not done already!" PERCENTAGES OF POPULATION: I have a gripe with a particular rhetorical device. It's when somebody evaluates an atrocity in terms of the percentage of the total population killed, rather than the actual number of deaths. It goes something like this: "Let us not forget that those who died in (Dresden/Hiroshima/Mae Lai), as a percentage of the overall population, represent (five, 50, 500) World Trade Centers blah blah blah �" We've all heard this one in recent weeks, mostly from the left, but also from Ariel Sharon, who described several hundred Israeli dead in the latest Intifada as "our own World Trade Center" in terms of percentage of the population. Probably the most bandied about example of this is East Timor, where various writers describe the 200,000 Timorese killed by the Indonesian military and militia groups as "greater than the Holocaust" in terms of � you guessed it. What's my problem with this? It's stupid. 200,000 dead people is horrific enough without trying to somehow make it seem worse than 6 million plus dead people. And the reverse logic is inescapable: 6 million divided by 200,000 equals 1 Timorese life is worth 30 Jewish lives. Somehow, I don't think the writers who employ the population percentage trick really want to say this. And we can take it even further. Roughly 3,000 people died in the World Trade Center. The total population of the US is about 300 million. Now just keep this in the back of your head and bear with me. Imagine a fictional Indian living in the Northern California wilderness in the early part of the last century. A group of anthropologists convince him to move into their museum - to become sort of a "living exhibit." He contracts tuberculosis and dies. The anthropologists, by bringing him into an environment where he would come into contact with diseases his immune system was woefully unprepared for, essentially killed him. Here's the kicker: this guy really existed. His name was Ishi and he was the very last Yahi Indian alive in the world. Therefore, the anthropologists -- Alfred L. Kroeber and Theodore T. Waterman - are guilty of precisely 100,000 World Trade Centers. Just do the math. Oh, and I happen to know a guy trying to liquidate a warehouse full of Alfred L. Kroeber and Theodore T. Waterman urinal targets. Send me an email if you're interested. IN THIS CORNER � A BUNCH OF CREEPS: The website I love to hate, nationalreview.com, has a new in-house "blogging" board called "The Corner." In it you'll find such delightful debates as this one: Mark Krikorian: "We should call the terrorists 'POWs' before we blow their brains out!" versus Jonah Goldberg/Rich Lowery: "You bleeding heart! We should call them 'unlawful combatants' before we force them to choke to death on their own genitalia!" The nice thing about The Corner is that these armchair commandos basically post their gut reactions to the news of the day, without the self-editing they presumably conduct for their lengthier columns. (The joys of blogging.) So you get to see the full blackness of their hearts in each shameless display of hypocrisy-ridden, self-important drivel. Like this proclamation from Goldberg: "The pressure to 'internationalize' or 'Nurembergize' a war crimes trial would be monumental. If these guys go [to] the Hague, I'm lying down on the tarmac to stop it." Apparently Golberg thinks "lying down on the tarmac" involves delivering a running commentary of smirking recriminations from a syndicated pulpit. But for sheer blindness to the principle that rules of conduct ought to apply to "us" as well as "them," this comment from Mark Krikorian in The Corner takes the cake: "� the foundation of the customary law of war is that non-combatants must not be killed, and if you kill them, your life is forfeit -- and it's very much in our interest to reinforce this basic concept." Either Krikorian is blissfully ignorant of the implications of this statement for certain American military planners, or I'm a formulaic Jonah Goldberg punchline. MORE ON 'GITMO': Andrew Sullivan is a fairly reasonable guy, for such a deeply conflicted cunt. I think I like him the most out of the right-wing pundits, maybe because his conservative/Catholic/gay inner struggle makes him seem very human to me. I particularly like his recent attacks on mainstream journalists who've accepted Enron cash. But other times he morphs into the worst sort of representative of all his many identities, a kind of kill-em-all God botherer flinging balloons full of pink paint at "breeders." Here's his take on the Camp X-Ray prisoners: "These terrorists are not soldiers. They are beneath such an honorific. They are not even criminals. In that respect, Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's contempt for the whines of those complaining about poor treatment is fully justified." So they're not "soldiers." Hmm, well actually � okay, whatever. But they're "not even criminals" either? So what exactly is lower than a criminal? An evil non-human who must be executed on sight? "Terrorists!" Sullivan would exclaim. But what does this mean? The way the Bush Administration is playing it, al Qaeda members are "unlawful combatants." This means they're in the category of foreign spies and saboteurs captured domestically - something that happened during the Cold War, both by the US and the USSR. Regarding their treatment and rights, it's useful to point out that US spies captured in the USSR were generally given the brush off by the Americans. So I suppose there's some merit in arguing that since the US was willing to abandon its own unlawful combatants when they were captured (mainly to avoid embarrassment), the ones it captures can't expect better treatment. There would be some merit in that argument � IF these guys had been captured in the US. But they weren't. The Red Army never raided Quantico and captured a bunch of "unlawful combatants in training." You'd be reading this with all three eyes from behind your radiation mask if they had. Seeking the justification or non-justification for Camp X-Ray in historical precedence, international law, the Geneva Accords or even the US Constitution is certainly proper, but ultimately the issue boils down to our ideals of ourselves as a society, and the practical safeguards we have put in place to ensure that we maintain those ideals. Plainly put, we consider ourselves an open society, and a crucial safeguard to maintaining our society as such is transparency in our elected government's pursuit of justice against those who harm our citizenry. This is a fundamental part of the "checks and balances" system we consider to be the most practical means available to make real the notion that particular minorities or majorities ought not to have runaway power over other people's lives. This is not a simple situation by any means, however. It's certainly complicated by the fact that these are foreign nationals we're talking about. It's a bit more intuitive to say we want trials of US citizens to be transparent, because we happen to be US citizens. Nor is "transparency" ever really possible in the ultimate sense. We all have to basically just trust each other - and our government and hopefully our media - on a regular basis. All fine and well. And we may ask ourselves whether our Constitution applies to these prisoners in Camp X-Ray. But a more important question in my opinion is what do the core principles that gave rise to the Constitution have to say about this situation? Principles like: It's important to make sure that governments don't go around torturing, imprisoning and executing people in secret. A LITTLE BIT OF ENRON: Since I'm not dealing with the news itself, but rather conservative reactions to the news, it would be criminal not to say a few things about Enron. I particularly love the line about how the collapse of Enron is a "triumph of capitalism" � parroted by Goldberg, among others. Why do I suspect that all these brave capitalists weren't exactly lining up to call Jimmy Hoffa's pilfering of Teamster pension funds "a triumph of labor organizing"? (Maybe because Goldberg wasn't even born back then?) Another funny bit of scrambling by the right came with the release of a NY Times poll revealing that 58 percent of respondents think the Bush administration is "hiding something" about Enron � while, get this, JUST 9 PERCENT THINK BUSH & CO. ARE "LYING" ABOUT THE FAILED ENERGY COMPANY! The distinction between "hiding something" and "lying" is getting big play amongst right-wingers - who presumably would have commuted John Wayne Gacy's death sentence � seeing as how, while he certainly did HIDE a bunch of bodies under his house, he never LIED about them being there. So there's my first "blogging" attempt, perhaps it won't be the last. by damon poeter bangkok, thailand
