Letter Never Sent

Turkey declares publishing Chomsky is terrorism from Counterpunch:

Scarcely two months after the European Union praised Turkey for passing new laws protecting freedom of expression, the authorities in Ankara are using anti -terrorism legislation to prosecute Mr Chomsky’s Turkish publisher. …

Mr Chomsky plans to visit the Turkish city of Diyarbakir to meet Kurdish “activists” and it will be a test of Turkey’s freedoms to see if he is allowed to visit the area.

In one of his essays, originally a university lecture, he says that “the Kurds have been miserably oppressed throughout the whole history of the modern Turkish state … In 1984, the Turkish government launched a major war in the south-east against the Kurdish population … The end result was pretty awesome: tens of thousands of people killed, two to three million refugees, massive ethnic cleansing with some 3,500 villages destroyed.”

This, according to the Turks, constitutes an incitement to violence. Mr Chomsky has been suitably outraged, regarding the trial as part of a much broader wave of repression directed against Kurds appealing for greater use of the Kurdish language. Bekir Rayif Aldemyr, Turkey’s chief prosecutor, claims that the Chomsky essay “propagates separatism”.

Of course, Turkey is one of the United States’s biggest allies. The US government has had a long history of turning a blind eye to repression around the world. All the rhetoric about supporting freedom and democracy is hot air.

I don’t remember exactly how I found out about Studs Terkel, but I do remember picking up his book, Hard Times, at the used book store. It’s an amazing book. Studs Terkel specializes in recording our collective oral history. I’m eager to read his latest book, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith, where he talks with people about death. As someone who thinks about death a lot this is right up my alley.

A while back he did an interview with Salon. I tried to read it there, but they have some sort of subscription thing now and you can only read the first few paragraphs of whatever it is you’re looking for. Thanks to the internet I was able to find the same interview elsewhere. It’s a good one, here it is.

There’s a recurring refrain in the book, you’ll spot it: “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual.” Now, it sounds like one of those New Age bromides, but it’s not. They want no middleman between themselves and God, whatever He, She or It is. And I find that fascinating. I find myself astonished by many of the responses. …

How did the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 change our perceptions of death?

Well that’s a good question. You see, I’d started the book long before that. Has it changed my perception of life and death, you mean? If anything, it’s italicized it. If anything, more than ever, [the Sept. 11 attacks were] a tragic, stupid event, a barbaric event that has made the book even more pertinent than it may have been before. And I find this ironic and tragic at the same time.

How can I put it? What has happened has made us more vulnerable. We are not the Fortress America. I think that’s the last thing Thomas Paine had in mind 200 years ago. Following “Common Sense” he wrote “Rights of Man,” and in that he spoke of this new society, this open society, and he said it could lift the world, lift it. I’m talking about 1791 he was writing it. He didn’t mean for us to be Fortress America. If we are Fortress America, then we are against “Them,” whoever “Them” is — the rest of the world, of course. So suddenly it’s happened. We are vulnerable and in this vulnerability, I hope we’re more human. You see, to err is human, to be vulnerable is human and so, in a sense, I’m looking now to find something hopeful that’s come out of this, ironically enough, that we ourselves may recognize what it is to be “the other.”

So you think the attacks should teach us all how to empathize?

You know, when we saw that picture of that little girl running, the Vietnam shot, that little terrified girl, napalm around her — remember that? That should be our little girl from now on. That’s the thing you see. That little girl should be considered our little girl.

Remember Einstein? I still lean on Einstein. I love to quote Einstein because no one dares contradict me. Einstein said shortly before he died, he was so overwhelmed, his own findings led to Hiroshima, subsequently — the irony — he tore his hair when he learned about Hiroshima. He never expected [the bomb] to be dropped on human beings, and then he said something along the lines of, “Everything in the world has changed with the split atom except one thing — the way we think.” We have to think anew. If we don’t think anew we’re in the soup.

And are people now thinking anew?

Remember, all my books have dealt with the extraordinary possibilities of ordinary Americans. And we saw it of course with the tenacity of the firefighters and the cops and the paramedics and everybody. So the ordinary American, I think, senses something deep down, inchoate though the feeling is, that our spokesmen, politicians or whoever they are, don’t understand at all.

Will the current campaign — this long War Against Terrorism we’ve embarked upon — become another Vietnam for the United States?

I don’t know. I wish to hell I knew because there’s no precedent for this. It won’t even be Vietnam because Vietnam was a country, where of course we had no business being to begin with. It was an obscene misadventure. Now, there are groups, there are fragments, we know that. Afghanistan is a fragmented land and it’s one warlord against another, and even the Northern Alliance, when it comes to human rights, have not been overwhelmingly great. I think we have to have this new move, a whole new Einsteinian approach. I return to him all the time.

Here is an interview with him on the radio show, The Connection. An excellent program.

Well, sometimes I think the official name for Texas should be “The Shibboleth State.” Know what a shibboleth is? The term is of biblical origin, from Judges 12. The Hebrews were in a war with the Ephramites, and since the two tribes looked alike, the Hebrews needed a non-visual test to tell friend from foe at the Jordan River ford. Some bright fellow came up with a password — one that the enemy couldn’t pronounce, because a critical phoneme wasn’t in their language. That word was “shibboleth,” meaning an ear (or kernel) of corn. If the person crossing the river pronounced the password ‘sibboleth,’ he (or she, I suppose) was wasted on the spot. Bloody bunch, those biblical-era folk, eh?

Anyway, the word’s found its way into semi-common usage, meaning a word — usually a place name — that “foreigners” pronounce differently from natives. I call Texas the “Shibboleth State” ’cause there are so darn many of ’em in the Lone Star State! If you pronounce a word wrong, then the natives know you’re not one of ’em, and you’re liable to get slain on the spot. Well, maybe not slain… So I’ve compiled a list of some shibboleths from Texas (and a few from other parts of the country) that might help you pass…

I have to agree with this person. Here are a few examples. I’m sure anyone who lives here in Texas could come up with some more.

Bush is such an arrogant hypocrite. This is the man who as governor of Texas oversaw the execution of 152 human lives. His administration has killed thousands of people in Afghanistan, a number equalling those who were killed in the World Trade Center. As if this weren’t bad enough he has proclaimed January 20th, the National Sanctity of Human Life Day. It’s no coincidence that January 22nd is the 29th anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade decision which decriminalized abortion.

Death penalty quotations:

“Evidence of innocence is irrelevant.”
—Mary Sue Terry, Attorney General of Virginia, 1986-94 (replying to an appeal to introduce new evidence from a prisoner sentenced to death)

“In my own experience, I know of four persons convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, who were later found to be innocent . . . long after the appellate process had been exhausted.”
—Honorable Harry Fogle,
Chief Judge of the Sixth Judicial Circuit, Florida

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind.
—George Bernard Shaw

An execution is not simply death. It is just as different from the privation of life as a concentration camp is from prison. It adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future victim, an organization which is itself a source of moral sufferings more terrible than death. Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.
—Albert Camus

I watched a Brookings Institution forum on CSPAN, “The Propaganda
War” [full transcript], which aired on January 16. It is part of their project on the role of the press in the anti-terrorism campaign. The panel included: Christopher Ross, Special Coordinator for the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs; Joe Duffey, Former Director, United States Information Agency; Thomas A. Dine, President, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Inc.; and Karen De Young, Associate Editor, The Washington Post.

Now, of course, 3 out of 4 members of the panel are either current or former members of the government propaganda apparatus, either employed in the government proper or in the case of Mr. Dine employed by a corporation which is directly funded by the US Government. The 4th member of the panel Karen De Young, is an Associate Editor of one of the largest mainstream news outlets, The Washington Post. Due to the composition of the panel one could hardly expect to hear anything halfway decent or informative. It mostly resembled a commercial for the American position tailored to the demographic with college degrees. However, there were some interesting things worth noting. One thing worth mentioning is the subtle hint that the US may seek to push the educational systems of nations around the world to support the US viewpoint:

(from the transcript)

MR. ROSS: I would answer from a slightly different vantage point, Steve, to say that the new Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Charlotte Meers [ph], has now been on the job a matter of a few months and has been very conscious of the point that Tom made that there is an absolute necessity for a guiding strategy. She is currently involved in crafting such a strategy and is consulting within the government and outside the government, is soon to travel abroad to consult our embassies there and to touch base with local opinion leaders. What she’s sketching out at this point is a strategy of total communication on three essential themes.

One is to re-present the basic American values that unite this country. The second theme is to present democratization and openness as a vision for a better future, a future which does not require people to resort to terrorism. And a third theme which hits at what we are coming to consider increasingly to be perhaps the most important audience for our work, young people, those who are going to create the future who’s world views and mind sets are not yet fully formed. The third theme focuses on them through a look at educational systems and how they are structured.

So you have values, you have democratization and openness, you have education as three focal points of a total communications plan that would mobilize the resources of public diplomacy in all their aspects both on the information side and on the educational and cultural exchange side. …

MR. HESS: But Karen De Young is taking notes like mad over there. And when she…

MS. DE YOUNG: I was just writing down the three themes…

MR. HESS: She writes that, you will write your story tomorrow on what U.S., the strategy of U.S. public diplomacy, what’s your lead going to be?

(Laughter)

MS. DE YOUNG: Gosh. This is knee-jerk on my part. I just write things, so it goes in here, comes out here.

What would be the lead on that? I think, the lead would be how they’re going to go about trying to influence the education systems in other countries.

Senator Levin made a statement the other day about something that’s not new, but about Saudi Arabia, saying that in their education systems they teach people to hate. He said some fairly extreme things. The Saudi Ambassador, Prince Bandar, who happens to be in Saudi Arabia at the moment where he seems to have been most of the time since this started, but issued a statement this morning and said we don’t teach anybody to hate in our school, our schools conform to our own values and our own traditions, and basically said I like Senator Levin but he’s completely off base and please stay out of our education system.

And I guess my question would be how are you going to do that? How is that a matter of public diplomacy? I would ask more about how you’re going to go about that.

MR. ROSS: It’s one of the aspects of, it’s one of the sectors in which our existing educational and cultural exchange program has always been active. Of course the resources available in that program are minuscule compared to the task. So part of this strategy involves encouraging other agencies within the U.S. government that have much greater resources to work along a common task to focus on this problem.

It’s essentially an effort to make sure that educational systems, particularly in the current campaign against terrorism, particularly in the Muslim and Arab countries, evolve in a way that provides to young people the tools needed for modern life so that they are not attracted to the apocalyptic kind of vision that Osama bin Laden and others have proffered.

We recognize it’s an enormous task, but the fact that it’s enormous doesn’t make it not worth pursuing. As a matter of fact there are some government officials in the region who have already expressed an interest in seeking our help on this point.

MS. DE YOUNG: And this would be primarily bringing students here for visits, or helping them form their own school systems there?

MR. ROSS: It would depend very much on the results of consultations with those foreign government officials who are seeking this kind of assistance. We have nothing to impose. It’s a collaborative process…