Why should the IPL be globally managed?
Kerry Packer didn't ask the world's cricket boards if he could subsidise them for the trouble they had taken to raise the players he was buying for his pirate league © The Cricketer International
Some six years ago I wrote an article speculating about a world in which domestic cricket in India would be organised around commercial franchises and clubs on the football model, not the territorial principle on which the Ranji Trophy is based. With the IPL, this has (sort of) come to pass. I can't lay claim to prescience because I was dreaming of franchised first-class cricket, not a Twenty20 league.
I've no idea whether the IPL will work in the long term or not and I'm as surprised as anyone at the money that's been bid for the players. But it seems like an interesting experiment that might create a following for the game at a sub-national level. I'd like Twenty20 cricket to mutate into a four-innings format, like Test cricket in miniature. It's an idea that Chris Cairns once mentioned in a discussion in a television studio. It's a feasible format because even with each side batting twice, the 80 overs would take less time to bowl than the 100 overs of one-day cricket. The sports channels would love it (more time to flash commercials in) and the limited-overs game would be invested with some of the magic of Test cricket: the thrill of another chance, the prospect of the stirring fight back, the shot at a second-innings redemption.
I can see the reasons why people are anxious about the IPL: the fact that it’ll clog up an already crowded calendar, the fear that wads of easy money might devalue Test cricket and the possible disruption of domestic cricket seasons elsewhere in the world. Also, as a middle-aged fan, I wouldn’t trust Lalit Modi and Sharad Pawar as far as I could throw an elephant when it comes to protecting the long game which, for me, defines cricket.
What I can't understand is the chorus of voices - represented on Cricinfo by Ian Chappell and David Lloyd in discussion with Sanjay Manjrekar - asking that the BCCI ought to cut other cricket boards into the money (or that the ICC ought to collect an IPL cess and distribute it among other boards) and, even more bizarrely, that the IPL ought to be jointly managed by representatives of the cricket world's national boards.
County cricket in England is staffed by professional players from England and the rest of the world. Individual overseas players are paid for their services. I've never read or heard people arguing that the West Indies cricket board ought to be compensated by the ECB for lending it the services of players that the WICB has nurtured and developed. Individual players have historically arrived at contracts and understandings with their county managements that allow them to balance the responsibility of playing for their countries with the need to make as good a living as possible. Coming to Lloyd's point that the IPL would be seriously disruptive, it's worth pointing out that the county season lasts considerably longer than the proposed duration of the IPL, which is meant to last for all of two months.
Why is it bad for a properly constituted national board to organise a credibly franchised cricket league when it's okay for a solitary TV moghul to set up a circus wholly owned by one person? © AFP
Chappell and Lloyd press for the IPL to be 'globally' managed because that way it wouldn't be the BCCI going off on a tangent and selfishly disrupting world cricket. This is more than a bit rich coming from Chappell, who was once part of World Series Cricket, a circus dreamt up by a thwarted television magnate with the quite deliberate intention of holding every Test-playing nation to ransom. Given that he and his team-mates were enthusiastic participants for the duration of the WSC adventure, I'm surprised to hear him being sanctimonious about the BCCI not having the best interests of cricket at heart. I don't recall Packer asking the world's cricket boards if he could subsidise them for the trouble they had taken to raise the players he was buying for his pirate league. The BCCI, like the WSC, is run by a businessman who sees cricket as a cash cow. I can't see why it's bad for a properly constituted national board to organise a credibly franchised cricket league when it's okay for a solitary TV moghul to set up a circus wholly owned by one person. Lloyd and Chappell are having some difficulty coming to terms with the fact that this little circus isn't owned the ECB or Cricket Australia. I sympathise; it isn't easy to like or trust the BCCI. But then lots of crusty administrators and journalists didn't like Packer and much good came of WSC. Something similar might happen here.
The worst that could happen is that no one turns up to watch the games, the television ratings don't draw the eyeballs necessary to sustain the league, and the whole thing collapses. Who cares? The franchise owners don't need our sympathy and at least there'd be a bunch of players with their retirements taken care of. At best it could create a commercially viable tier of competitive cricket and, as Chappell suggests, new hybrid formats for the future of the game. I'll tell you what won't happen, though: having supplied the venues, the audiences, the franchise owners and the structure, the BCCI isn't about to hand the IPL over to the United Nations to run. I don't think Chappell advised Packer to share the goodness then; I'm not sure why he's asking the BCCI to do it now.
“Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes" Goethe. “Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.” Herbert Spencer. "My 80% friend isn't my 20% enemy" Ronald Reagan.
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Thursday 6 March 2008
Tuesday 4 March 2008
No, you're not a 'young adult'
Parents are abdicating their responsibilities towards children aged 11 to 16
Libby Purves
Parts of it are pointless: the figure of 71 per cent of parents giving under-18s alcohol at home makes no distinction between a well-governed child allowed a glass of wine and a poor brat getting senseless on alcopops while its parents shoot up.
It does seem odd that more than half of under-16s are allowed out after 11pm, given that two-thirds of parents then claim to be worried about the company they are keeping: perhaps they just enjoy worrying. But the key finding is that 55 per cent "think childhood is over at the age of 11".
Now that is interesting, and worryingly believable. Eleven is not very old: five years must elapse before the child can legally make love or earn a living. Even at 14 the brain is physiologically changing, experience of life is minimal, sexuality confused, emotions chaotic. Even if puberty strikes early, these are still children.
But it suits adults for them not to be. Despite the chattering-class perception that we overprotect, secondary school at 11 all too often heralds a kind of parental abdication. The weaselly expression "young adults" kicks in. When my eldest first went to "big school" he found the jostling lunch queue so frightening that he stopped going in at all, and hid hungrily in the library. Nobody noticed. When we found out after some weeks and remonstrated with the idiot head of year, she replied gaily: "Oh, it's not a primary school, we don't police their day, young adults make choices."
His next school took a saner view, but looking around I recognised the "young adult" mindset everywhere. Once primary school cosiness is over, the child is seen as having stepped into a wider world and joined a tribe of peers with new customs. Adults, nervous and preoccupied, may take the opportunity to step back farther than they should.
There are plenty of reasons. Parents could be holding down two jobs or more, because of the absurd price of homes and government's droolingly incompetent failure to plan for a rocketing immigrant population and the fallout from council house sales.
Family life and family meals suffer under heavy work pressures: how could they not? Besides, adults are tired and it takes energy and resolution to say no to beloved teenagers. Simpler to give them their "choices" as "young adults" and disguise emotional neglect as respect. A disastrous misunderstanding of the Children Act has made adults frightened of exerting authority, and even professionals talk nonsense. One would-be adopter, asked by the inspecting social worker if she would ration TV, said yes, an hour a day. Wrong answer. She was sternly told that this would violate the child's "human right" to "participate fully in the culture".
Even when financial and time pressures are light, cultural values militate against looking after children properly. It was interesting on Mothering Sunday to follow, parallel to the usual soppy blether, a whine about how tough it is to be a mother and how it drains your "selfhood". It is as if we wanted to be the children ourselves, petted and admired and given playtime and toys. Men also are encouraged to embrace a permanent adolescence of gadgets and treats. Children get in the way of this, especially when they stop being sweet and cuddly and believing everything you say.
Surprisingly often they become resented: I have heard a mother say, vindictively, of her 12-year-old: "That kid never brought me no luck."
Further up the social scale parents may be less frank, and just push the awkward-aged child into expensive activities and tutorings outside the house rather than ignoring it. But the same feeling of petulant, disappointed unwillingness to engage with a child's troublesome reality is sometimes discernible. Oh yes it is.
So into the vacuum comes a rush of alternative parents, greedy for the children's money: television and internet, celebrities, showbiz dreams, gadgets, fashionable must-haves, social websites, computer-game illusions. Where there is no money, out on the meaner streets, gangs become surrogate families offering leadership and protection and rules to live by. Not good rules, not at all - but they fill the gap.
There is an opposing force at work too, and that is the desire to suck up to youth and annex its more desirable qualities - energy, smooth skin, skinny thighs, big-eyed winsomeness, freedom. Stars dress like teenagers, grown men write drivel about pop, queenly Nigella Lawson goes on Desert Island Discs to express hip-hop kinship with Dr Dre of Niggaz With Attitude.
If I really wanted to upset you I would call this phenomenon cultural paedophilia. The late Alan Coren summed it up beautifully when he said that in his youth in the Fifties he sought to attract girls by dressing in broad-shouldered George Raft suits and trying to look 40 - but no sooner had he succeeded, than in the blink of an eye the Sixties arrived and the sexual norm of male desirability became "a skinny kid in a tattered Donald Duck T-shirt".
Very perceptive. There you go. Half the time we admire late childhood as cool and sexy, the other half we ignore it as awkward and spotty. Either way, we find it easy to treat it as a different but equal "culture". And it isn't. It's childhood. Someone has to be the grown-up round here, and I'm afraid it's us.
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Monday 3 March 2008
HOW TO FAST
Physical preparation
Although fasting is primarily a spiritual discipline, it begins in the physical realm. You should not fast without specific physical preparation.
If you plan on fasting for several days, you will find it helpful to begin by eating smaller meals before you abstain altogether. Resist the urge to have that "last big feast" before the fast. Cutting down on your meals a few days before you begin the fast will signal your mind, stomach, and appetite that less food is acceptable.
Some health professionals suggest eating only raw foods for two days before starting a fast. I also recommend weaning yourself off caffeine and sugar products to ease your initial hunger or discomfort at the early stages of your fast.
MAINTAINING NUTRITIONAL BALANCE
I know the prospect of going without food for an extended period of time may be of concern to some. But there are ways to ensure that your body is getting the nutrients it needs so you can remain safe and healthy during your fast.
For an extended fast, I recommend water and fruit and vegetable juices. The natural sugars in juices provide energy, and the taste and strength are motivational to continue your fast. Try to drink fresh juices, if possible. Off-the-shelf juice products are acceptable, as long as they are 100% juice with no sugar or other additives.
If you are beginning a juice fast, there are certain juices you may wish to avoid and certain ones that are especially beneficial. Because of their acid content, most nutritionists do not advise orange or tomato juice (these are better tolerated if mixed with equal portions of water). The best juices are fresh carrot, grape, celery, apple, cabbage, or beet. They also recommend "green drinks" made from green leafy vegetables because they are excellent "de-toxifiers."
Fruit juices are "cleansers" and are best taken in the morning. Since vegetable juices are "restorers" and "builders," they are best taken in the afternoon.
I usually dedicate a portion of my 40-day fast to a special liquid formula, which I have found to be effective over many years. A few recipes and my comments are on this page, as well as a helpful schedule.
One gallon distilled water
1-1/2 cup lemon juice
3/4-cup pure maple syrup
1/4-teaspoon cayenne pepper.
The lemon juice adds flavor and vitamin C, the maple syrup provides energy, and the cayenne pepper-an herb-acts to open small blood vessels which, I believe, helps the body as it cleanses itself of stored toxins. (A word of caution: although I use this formula with no ill effects, cayenne pepper could cause severe physical reactions in persons with a specific allergy to this herb.)
My favorite juice is a mixture of 100% pure white grape juice and peach juice. The juice is available in frozen cans under the Welch label. Most knowledgeable nutritionists recommend:
* Watermelon-just put it in the blender without adding water.
* Fresh apple juice
* Green juice-blend celery, romaine lettuce, and carrots in equal proportions. (Vegetable juices like this one are important, for they supply the electrolytes necessary for proper heart function!)
Some nutritionists recommend warm broth, especially if you live in a colder climate. You may find their recipes helpful:
Boil sliced potatoes, carrots, and celery in water. Do not add salt
After about a half-hour, drain off the water and drink.
Gently boil three carrots, two stalks of celery, one turnip, two beats, a half head of cabbage, a quarter of a bunch of parsley, a quarter of an onion, and a half clove of garlic
Drain off the broth and drink up to two or three times daily.
You may find the following daily schedule helpful during your fast. I recommend you print it and keep it handy throughout your fast.
# 5:00 a.m. - 8:00 a.m.
Fruit juices, preferably freshly squeezed or blended, diluted in 50 percent distilled water if the fruit is acid. Orange, apple, pear, grapefruit, papaya, grape, peach or other fruits are good.
# 10:30 a.m. - noon
Green vegetable juice made from lettuce, celery, and carrots in three equal parts.
# 2:30 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Herb tea with a drop of honey. Make sure that it is not black tea or tea with a stimulant.
# 6:00 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
Broth from boiled potatoes, celery, and carrots (no salt).
I suggest that you do not drink milk because it is a pure food and therefore a violation of the fast. Any product containing protein or fat, such as milk or soy-based drinks, should be avoided. These products will restart the digestion cycle and you will again feel hunger pangs. Also, for health reasons, stay away from caffeinated beverages such as coffee, tea, or cola. Because caffeine is a stimulant, it has a more powerful effect on your nervous system when you abstain from food. This works both against the physical and spiritual aspects of the fast.
Another key factor in maintaining optimum health during a fast is to limit your physical activity. Exercise only moderately, and rest as much as your schedule will permit (this especially applies to extended fasts). Short naps are helpful as well. Walking a mile or two each day at a moderate pace is acceptable for a person in good health, and on a juice fast. However, no one on a water fast should exercise without the supervision of a fasting specialist.
Although fasting is primarily a spiritual discipline, it begins in the physical realm. You should not fast without specific physical preparation.
If you plan on fasting for several days, you will find it helpful to begin by eating smaller meals before you abstain altogether. Resist the urge to have that "last big feast" before the fast. Cutting down on your meals a few days before you begin the fast will signal your mind, stomach, and appetite that less food is acceptable.
Some health professionals suggest eating only raw foods for two days before starting a fast. I also recommend weaning yourself off caffeine and sugar products to ease your initial hunger or discomfort at the early stages of your fast.
MAINTAINING NUTRITIONAL BALANCE
I know the prospect of going without food for an extended period of time may be of concern to some. But there are ways to ensure that your body is getting the nutrients it needs so you can remain safe and healthy during your fast.
For an extended fast, I recommend water and fruit and vegetable juices. The natural sugars in juices provide energy, and the taste and strength are motivational to continue your fast. Try to drink fresh juices, if possible. Off-the-shelf juice products are acceptable, as long as they are 100% juice with no sugar or other additives.
If you are beginning a juice fast, there are certain juices you may wish to avoid and certain ones that are especially beneficial. Because of their acid content, most nutritionists do not advise orange or tomato juice (these are better tolerated if mixed with equal portions of water). The best juices are fresh carrot, grape, celery, apple, cabbage, or beet. They also recommend "green drinks" made from green leafy vegetables because they are excellent "de-toxifiers."
Fruit juices are "cleansers" and are best taken in the morning. Since vegetable juices are "restorers" and "builders," they are best taken in the afternoon.
I usually dedicate a portion of my 40-day fast to a special liquid formula, which I have found to be effective over many years. A few recipes and my comments are on this page, as well as a helpful schedule.
One gallon distilled water
1-1/2 cup lemon juice
3/4-cup pure maple syrup
1/4-teaspoon cayenne pepper.
The lemon juice adds flavor and vitamin C, the maple syrup provides energy, and the cayenne pepper-an herb-acts to open small blood vessels which, I believe, helps the body as it cleanses itself of stored toxins. (A word of caution: although I use this formula with no ill effects, cayenne pepper could cause severe physical reactions in persons with a specific allergy to this herb.)
My favorite juice is a mixture of 100% pure white grape juice and peach juice. The juice is available in frozen cans under the Welch label. Most knowledgeable nutritionists recommend:
* Watermelon-just put it in the blender without adding water.
* Fresh apple juice
* Green juice-blend celery, romaine lettuce, and carrots in equal proportions. (Vegetable juices like this one are important, for they supply the electrolytes necessary for proper heart function!)
Some nutritionists recommend warm broth, especially if you live in a colder climate. You may find their recipes helpful:
Boil sliced potatoes, carrots, and celery in water. Do not add salt
After about a half-hour, drain off the water and drink.
Gently boil three carrots, two stalks of celery, one turnip, two beats, a half head of cabbage, a quarter of a bunch of parsley, a quarter of an onion, and a half clove of garlic
Drain off the broth and drink up to two or three times daily.
You may find the following daily schedule helpful during your fast. I recommend you print it and keep it handy throughout your fast.
# 5:00 a.m. - 8:00 a.m.
Fruit juices, preferably freshly squeezed or blended, diluted in 50 percent distilled water if the fruit is acid. Orange, apple, pear, grapefruit, papaya, grape, peach or other fruits are good.
# 10:30 a.m. - noon
Green vegetable juice made from lettuce, celery, and carrots in three equal parts.
# 2:30 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Herb tea with a drop of honey. Make sure that it is not black tea or tea with a stimulant.
# 6:00 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
Broth from boiled potatoes, celery, and carrots (no salt).
I suggest that you do not drink milk because it is a pure food and therefore a violation of the fast. Any product containing protein or fat, such as milk or soy-based drinks, should be avoided. These products will restart the digestion cycle and you will again feel hunger pangs. Also, for health reasons, stay away from caffeinated beverages such as coffee, tea, or cola. Because caffeine is a stimulant, it has a more powerful effect on your nervous system when you abstain from food. This works both against the physical and spiritual aspects of the fast.
Another key factor in maintaining optimum health during a fast is to limit your physical activity. Exercise only moderately, and rest as much as your schedule will permit (this especially applies to extended fasts). Short naps are helpful as well. Walking a mile or two each day at a moderate pace is acceptable for a person in good health, and on a juice fast. However, no one on a water fast should exercise without the supervision of a fasting specialist.
Being a mother is a tough job, but wonderful too
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
My children are my gold, and far from draining my selfhood, they fill it, and give it substance
Monday, 3 March 2008
My mother, Jena, died on this day exactly two years ago, as winter was finally giving way. Her last months were desolate and she was starving herself so she could get faster to her maker. All that was left was a skeletal waif, her eyes somewhere far away or looking pleadingly at us. I longed for the woman who was my mother – lively, funny, intensely affectionate, optimistic, feisty, demanding, obstinate, and manipulative. I miss her so much. I need to talk to her, quarrel with her, stroke her still lovely skin.She loved Mother's Day but rejected gifts: "Waste of money. Flowers die, have too much chocolate already, don't need another bloody cardie". Instead, she implored: "Stay with me today, the whole day, make me happy". But I resented her for demanding more time when she knew how much I had to do.
Now times flaps around me, like a too big shirt. Balzac wrote: "A mother's heart is an abyss at the bottom of which there is always forgiveness". So true. Mum forgave me though I didn't understand her needs, the unbearable tenderness and gnarling knottiness of being a mother.
I do now. I found myself saying to my daughter on Saturday: "I don't want presents, don't need things, I want you to show me you care about me."
She will not heed the cry; kids can't, I didn't. Mum had to raise children in the fifties in Uganda with an unreliable husband who found regular work and family life much too tedious. She kept loan sharks at bay and struggled to provide for us – cooking, sewing, teaching and tending infants. Her burdens were unimaginably heavy. Millions of women around the world, and here too, are still weighed down by poverty and responsibilities. Education liberated me and give me the chances she never had. As a modern working woman, I have financial independence and a good man. Both help reduce the stresses of motherhood. Work/life balance is getting better and gender equality – though still to be achieved – is no longer an argument. It is still incredibly hard to be a mother and even harder to point out this truth.
I don't mean the guilt and the exhaustion of trying to pack it all in, but the vulnerability and intense, unique co-dependence between a mother and child.
Just as they never tell you about the agony of childbirth, so there is a conspiracy of silence about how tough is the business of mothering from birth to death. The childcare expert, Penelope Leach, for example, wrote: "Fun for him is fun for you. Fun for you creates more for him and the more fun you have the fewer will be your problems". Groan.
Mother's Day ribbons and flowers bring joy, but also add further gloss over reality, the complicated relationship between children and the women who gave them life, carried and delivered them, their flesh fused then torn asunder. When your children are in pain, you feel it on your skin, almost physical; when they hurt you, you feel a toxic shock as if your own body is attacking itself. You are the one they turn to, yet fight, the one who has to absorb their frustration before Papa comes in and sweetness is restored. Fathers, when they do get involved, are seen as heroes by the children and society. There are days when I want to run away from it all, but how can you run away from yourself? Hard feminists deplore such confessions of weakness. Theirs – understandably – has been a battle against victimhood and pathetic femininity. Equal rights means never having to say you are tired or laid low.
We are supposedly like most men, hard and invincible. Only we are not. Post feminist men aren't either, but they aren't programmed, as are females, to bear the emotional excesses of their children. These days, new pressures have been added on to make us feel even more wretched. We must look forever young and sexy, pretend that motherhood makes no difference to our bodies, that there is no depletion of energy, no sudden reprioritisation with the arrival of a child. Websites to help mums in crises are proliferating. Thousands of users are apparently suicidal. And yet the assumption is that when things go wrong, mum will take care of everything. I look around and see that most disabled children are cared for by lone mums and even devoted fathers scarper when the going gets tough.
My children are my gold, and far from draining my selfhood, they fill it, give it substance, my existence meaning. They love me passionately. My 14-year-old daughter cries when she thinks of Bambi's shot mum.
Neither realises death will take me away and it is only then they will understand how they made me feel, how hard it was to be their mum and how wonderfully joyous too. Too late.
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Friday 29 February 2008
Johann Hari: Do I really need this artificial happiness?
I belong to the first generation of people who have been antidepressed all our adult lives. I started taking the antidepressant Seroxat when I was 17. I come from the Chernobyl of nuclear families, and it had finally imploded; and together with it, so had my neuroses. I couldn't get out of bed in the morning except in a tearful, uncomprehending rage. A familiar story passed in the suburbs once I had my pills: the toxic black fog of depression parted; it was like wearing glasses for the first time and discovering you had been half-blind since birth. Life went from being a muggy minefield to being a bouncy castle. Now - a decade later - I do not know what life would be like without it, and I am starting to wonder and to worry.
There are millions of people like this, scattered across the developed world, with their blue and yellow and white pills making their minds cleaner, or clearer, or more tolerable to live in. Most of them wonder too if, amidst the glories, there are drawbacks.
For the first few years, I was extremely defensive about any criticism of my beloved antidepressants. I became fond of quoting the writer Andrew Solomon, who in his gargantuan study of depression, The Noonday Demon, compares his need for anti-depressants to a diabetic's need for insulin. "If you discover somebody is diabetic at a party, you don't pat them on the shoulder and say, 'I hope you're off it soon', so why should you do it to somebody on antidepressants?" he asked. Depression, he said, was caused by malfunctioning neurotransmitters. It's an engineering problem in the brain, and SSRIs - the family of antidepressants created in the 1980s - are the crew sent in to fix it.
I was even tempted by the arguments of Dr Peter Kramer, whose book Listening to Prozac argued that SSRIs are actually a way to enhance the human species. He interviewed hundreds of people who had seen their bad tempers or obsessive fears dissolved by the drugs, and concluded that SSRIs are like antiseptic steel knives that cleanly, painlessly slice off the ugly parts of your character, leaving a fresher, more efficient person behind. He called this "cosmetic neuropharmacology", and recommended it even for the non-depressed.
But doubts began to poke through this Promethean optimism a few years ago. I have never regretted taking the anti-depressants to lift me out of depression, and never will, but I began to wonder if they were really a lifetime companion rather than a long fling. I sensed somewhere that they had drawbacks, but I could never really articulate what they were - until I recently read the book Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class by Dr Ronald W Dworkin, which has been causing a chemical stir in the US.
He doesn't buy into the hysteria about Seroxat causing suicide, and nor do I: most metastudies show that suicide rates have fallen dramatically in countries after the introduction of SSRIs. No, he has a very different objection. He says that anti-depressants quite quickly create a state of artificial happiness, where your life and your mind slip out of synch. The ordinary signals that you receive from the world - I don't like that, I like this - become blunted, because you feel pretty good no matter what happens. Just as people who lose physical sensation become extremely vulnerable to being burned or bruised without noticing it, people who lose the mental sensations of unhappiness become vulnerable to social damage that they can't feel is happening to them.
Dworkin illustrates this by talking about a fortysomething friend called Kenny who became depressed because every night he would head to bars to chat up beautiful 20-year-old girls, only to find they were no longer interested in him. He would slope home alone at the end of the night feeling rejected and dejected, and began to show the symptoms of mild depression - weepiness, listlessness, despair.
Kenny went to his doctor, who explained that his neurotransmitters clearly weren't functioning properly, and gave him an SSRI prescription. As a result, Kenny kept going to the bars and he kept getting rejected - only now it didn't really hurt. He's still there, still objectively miserable, except with a sweet foam of Prozac to draw the sting.
Dworkin says people like Kenny "don't feel the unhappiness they need to feel in order to move forward with their lives. Sometimes people need a critical mass of unhappiness to push them out of a bad life situation. Artificially happy people lose this impulse to change. When I read this, I recognised handfuls of my SSRI-taking friends, like the smart 27-year-old guy I know still living with his parents, unemployed, in a miserable situation, but kept happy - and stuck - by Seroxat, because he never felt miserable enough to change.
And, I admitted after a few months of jabbing the thought away, it applied to me too. Dworkin believes antidepressants are useful tools for lifting people out of chronic depression, and I suspect he would have supported my initial prescription. But after my depression was soaked up, I kept taking it. All sorts of things came along, as they do in every life, that would have made me miserable and forced me to change if I hadn't been antidepressed: a bad relationship, swollen debts, over-eating. All continued far longer than they needed to because they didn't really make me feel really bad; nothing did.
Yes, I think Dworkin overstates his case. At points he presents the antidepressed as almost alien people, disconnected from the world, conscienceless, "incapable of empathy", people who "don't know what kindness is" - not features I think apply to me or to the dozens of other antidepressed people I know.
But his book - and my sweet decade-long romance with Seroxat that I know now must end - has taught me that although depression is a disease, unhappiness is not. On the contrary, it is an essential state, a signal we all need from time to time to show us when our lives are going wrong. Stripped of that signal, it is easy to lose your way - as many, many people who take antidepressants for too long do. Don't get me wrong: I'm not some Calvinist (or sadist) who believes unhappiness is a good thing, a morally enriching experience. I'm not even a Stoic, who believes unhappiness should be piously endured; I believe maximising happiness is and should be the most basic goal of human ethics.
But we can only steer ourselves towards real happiness if we know when we are going off the road - and an adult lifetime on antidepressants clouds the windshield. That's why I have decided, with one last synthetic tear, to bid the antidepressants goodbye.
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There are millions of people like this, scattered across the developed world, with their blue and yellow and white pills making their minds cleaner, or clearer, or more tolerable to live in. Most of them wonder too if, amidst the glories, there are drawbacks.
For the first few years, I was extremely defensive about any criticism of my beloved antidepressants. I became fond of quoting the writer Andrew Solomon, who in his gargantuan study of depression, The Noonday Demon, compares his need for anti-depressants to a diabetic's need for insulin. "If you discover somebody is diabetic at a party, you don't pat them on the shoulder and say, 'I hope you're off it soon', so why should you do it to somebody on antidepressants?" he asked. Depression, he said, was caused by malfunctioning neurotransmitters. It's an engineering problem in the brain, and SSRIs - the family of antidepressants created in the 1980s - are the crew sent in to fix it.
I was even tempted by the arguments of Dr Peter Kramer, whose book Listening to Prozac argued that SSRIs are actually a way to enhance the human species. He interviewed hundreds of people who had seen their bad tempers or obsessive fears dissolved by the drugs, and concluded that SSRIs are like antiseptic steel knives that cleanly, painlessly slice off the ugly parts of your character, leaving a fresher, more efficient person behind. He called this "cosmetic neuropharmacology", and recommended it even for the non-depressed.
But doubts began to poke through this Promethean optimism a few years ago. I have never regretted taking the anti-depressants to lift me out of depression, and never will, but I began to wonder if they were really a lifetime companion rather than a long fling. I sensed somewhere that they had drawbacks, but I could never really articulate what they were - until I recently read the book Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class by Dr Ronald W Dworkin, which has been causing a chemical stir in the US.
He doesn't buy into the hysteria about Seroxat causing suicide, and nor do I: most metastudies show that suicide rates have fallen dramatically in countries after the introduction of SSRIs. No, he has a very different objection. He says that anti-depressants quite quickly create a state of artificial happiness, where your life and your mind slip out of synch. The ordinary signals that you receive from the world - I don't like that, I like this - become blunted, because you feel pretty good no matter what happens. Just as people who lose physical sensation become extremely vulnerable to being burned or bruised without noticing it, people who lose the mental sensations of unhappiness become vulnerable to social damage that they can't feel is happening to them.
Dworkin illustrates this by talking about a fortysomething friend called Kenny who became depressed because every night he would head to bars to chat up beautiful 20-year-old girls, only to find they were no longer interested in him. He would slope home alone at the end of the night feeling rejected and dejected, and began to show the symptoms of mild depression - weepiness, listlessness, despair.
Kenny went to his doctor, who explained that his neurotransmitters clearly weren't functioning properly, and gave him an SSRI prescription. As a result, Kenny kept going to the bars and he kept getting rejected - only now it didn't really hurt. He's still there, still objectively miserable, except with a sweet foam of Prozac to draw the sting.
Dworkin says people like Kenny "don't feel the unhappiness they need to feel in order to move forward with their lives. Sometimes people need a critical mass of unhappiness to push them out of a bad life situation. Artificially happy people lose this impulse to change. When I read this, I recognised handfuls of my SSRI-taking friends, like the smart 27-year-old guy I know still living with his parents, unemployed, in a miserable situation, but kept happy - and stuck - by Seroxat, because he never felt miserable enough to change.
And, I admitted after a few months of jabbing the thought away, it applied to me too. Dworkin believes antidepressants are useful tools for lifting people out of chronic depression, and I suspect he would have supported my initial prescription. But after my depression was soaked up, I kept taking it. All sorts of things came along, as they do in every life, that would have made me miserable and forced me to change if I hadn't been antidepressed: a bad relationship, swollen debts, over-eating. All continued far longer than they needed to because they didn't really make me feel really bad; nothing did.
Yes, I think Dworkin overstates his case. At points he presents the antidepressed as almost alien people, disconnected from the world, conscienceless, "incapable of empathy", people who "don't know what kindness is" - not features I think apply to me or to the dozens of other antidepressed people I know.
But his book - and my sweet decade-long romance with Seroxat that I know now must end - has taught me that although depression is a disease, unhappiness is not. On the contrary, it is an essential state, a signal we all need from time to time to show us when our lives are going wrong. Stripped of that signal, it is easy to lose your way - as many, many people who take antidepressants for too long do. Don't get me wrong: I'm not some Calvinist (or sadist) who believes unhappiness is a good thing, a morally enriching experience. I'm not even a Stoic, who believes unhappiness should be piously endured; I believe maximising happiness is and should be the most basic goal of human ethics.
But we can only steer ourselves towards real happiness if we know when we are going off the road - and an adult lifetime on antidepressants clouds the windshield. That's why I have decided, with one last synthetic tear, to bid the antidepressants goodbye.
Messenger on the move. Text MSN to 63463 now!
Wednesday 27 February 2008
Election Madness
There’s a man in Florida who has been writing to me for years (ten pages, handwritten) though I’ve never met him. He tells me the kinds of jobs he has held—security guard, repairman, etc. He has worked all kinds of shifts, night and day, to barely keep his family going. His letters to me have always been angry, railing against our capitalist system for its failure to assure “life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness” for working people.
Just today, a letter came. To my relief it was not handwritten because he is now using e-mail: “Well, I’m writing to you today because there is a wretched situation in this country that I cannot abide and must say something about. I am so enraged about this mortgage crisis. That the majority of Americans must live their lives in perpetual debt, and so many are sinking beneath the load, has me so steamed. Damn, that makes me so mad, I can’t tell you. . . . I did a security guard job today that involved watching over a house that had been foreclosed on and was up for auction. They held an open house, and I was there to watch over the place during this event. There were three of the guards doing the same thing in three other homes in this same community. I was sitting there during the quiet moments and wondering about who those people were who had been evicted and where they were now.”
On the same day I received this letter, there was a front-page story in the Boston Globe, with the headline “Thousands in Mass. Foreclosed on in ’07.”
The subhead was “7,563 homes were seized, nearly 3 times the ’06 rate.”
A few nights before, CBS television reported that 750,000 people with disabilities have been waiting for years for their Social Security benefits because the system is underfunded and there are not enough personnel to handle all the requests, even desperate ones.
Stories like these may be reported in the media, but they are gone in a flash. What’s not gone, what occupies the press day after day, impossible to ignore, is the election frenzy.
This seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us. It is a multiple choice test so narrow, so specious, that no self-respecting teacher would give it to students.
And sad to say, the Presidential contest has mesmerized liberals and radicals alike. We are all vulnerable.
Is it possible to get together with friends these days and avoid the subject of the Presidential elections?
The very people who should know better, having criticized the hold of the media on the national mind, find themselves transfixed by the press, glued to the television set, as the candidates preen and smile and bring forth a shower of clichés with a solemnity appropriate for epic poetry.
Even in the so-called left periodicals, we must admit there is an exorbitant amount of attention given to minutely examining the major candidates. An occasional bone is thrown to the minor candidates, though everyone knows our marvelous democratic political system won’t allow them in.
No, I’m not taking some ultra-left position that elections are totally insignificant, and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral purity. Yes, there are candidates who are somewhat better than others, and at certain times of national crisis (the Thirties, for instance, or right now) where even a slight difference between the two parties may be a matter of life and death.
I’m talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.
But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.
Let’s remember that even when there is a “better” candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore.
The unprecedented policies of the New Deal—Social Security, unemployment insurance, job creation, minimum wage, subsidized housing—were not simply the result of FDR’s progressivism. The Roosevelt Administration, coming into office, faced a nation in turmoil. The last year of the Hoover Administration had experienced the rebellion of the Bonus Army—thousands of veterans of the First World War descending on Washington to demand help from Congress as their families were going hungry. There were disturbances of the unemployed in Detroit, Chicago, Boston, New York, Seattle.
In 1934, early in the Roosevelt Presidency, strikes broke out all over the country, including a general strike in Minneapolis, a general strike in San Francisco, hundreds of thousands on strike in the textile mills of the South. Unemployed councils formed all over the country. Desperate people were taking action on their own, defying the police to put back the furniture of evicted tenants, and creating self-help organizations with hundreds of thousands of members.
Without a national crisis—economic destitution and rebellion—it is not likely the Roosevelt Administration would have instituted the bold reforms that it did.
Today, we can be sure that the Democratic Party, unless it faces a popular upsurge, will not move off center. The two leading Presidential candidates have made it clear that if elected, they will not bring an immediate end to the Iraq War, or institute a system of free health care for all.
They offer no radical change from the status quo.
They do not propose what the present desperation of people cries out for: a government guarantee of jobs to everyone who needs one, a minimum income for every household, housing relief to everyone who faces eviction or foreclosure.
They do not suggest the deep cuts in the military budget or the radical changes in the tax system that would free billions, even trillions, for social programs to transform the way we live.
None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the Sixties. We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism.
So we need to free ourselves from the election madness engulfing the entire society, including the left.
Yes, two minutes. Before that, and after that, we should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
For instance, the mortgage foreclosures that are driving millions from their homes—they should remind us of a similar situation after the Revolutionary War, when small farmers, many of them war veterans (like so many of our homeless today), could not afford to pay their taxes and were threatened with the loss of the land, their homes. They gathered by the thousands around courthouses and refused to allow the auctions to take place.
The evictions today of people who cannot pay their rents should remind us of what people did in the Thirties when they organized and put the belongings of the evicted families back in their apartments, in defiance of the authorities.
Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war.
Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.
Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States,” “Voices of a People’s History” (with Anthony Arnove), and most recently, “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.”
Just today, a letter came. To my relief it was not handwritten because he is now using e-mail: “Well, I’m writing to you today because there is a wretched situation in this country that I cannot abide and must say something about. I am so enraged about this mortgage crisis. That the majority of Americans must live their lives in perpetual debt, and so many are sinking beneath the load, has me so steamed. Damn, that makes me so mad, I can’t tell you. . . . I did a security guard job today that involved watching over a house that had been foreclosed on and was up for auction. They held an open house, and I was there to watch over the place during this event. There were three of the guards doing the same thing in three other homes in this same community. I was sitting there during the quiet moments and wondering about who those people were who had been evicted and where they were now.”
On the same day I received this letter, there was a front-page story in the Boston Globe, with the headline “Thousands in Mass. Foreclosed on in ’07.”
The subhead was “7,563 homes were seized, nearly 3 times the ’06 rate.”
A few nights before, CBS television reported that 750,000 people with disabilities have been waiting for years for their Social Security benefits because the system is underfunded and there are not enough personnel to handle all the requests, even desperate ones.
Stories like these may be reported in the media, but they are gone in a flash. What’s not gone, what occupies the press day after day, impossible to ignore, is the election frenzy.
This seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us. It is a multiple choice test so narrow, so specious, that no self-respecting teacher would give it to students.
And sad to say, the Presidential contest has mesmerized liberals and radicals alike. We are all vulnerable.
Is it possible to get together with friends these days and avoid the subject of the Presidential elections?
The very people who should know better, having criticized the hold of the media on the national mind, find themselves transfixed by the press, glued to the television set, as the candidates preen and smile and bring forth a shower of clichés with a solemnity appropriate for epic poetry.
Even in the so-called left periodicals, we must admit there is an exorbitant amount of attention given to minutely examining the major candidates. An occasional bone is thrown to the minor candidates, though everyone knows our marvelous democratic political system won’t allow them in.
No, I’m not taking some ultra-left position that elections are totally insignificant, and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral purity. Yes, there are candidates who are somewhat better than others, and at certain times of national crisis (the Thirties, for instance, or right now) where even a slight difference between the two parties may be a matter of life and death.
I’m talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.
But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.
Let’s remember that even when there is a “better” candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore.
The unprecedented policies of the New Deal—Social Security, unemployment insurance, job creation, minimum wage, subsidized housing—were not simply the result of FDR’s progressivism. The Roosevelt Administration, coming into office, faced a nation in turmoil. The last year of the Hoover Administration had experienced the rebellion of the Bonus Army—thousands of veterans of the First World War descending on Washington to demand help from Congress as their families were going hungry. There were disturbances of the unemployed in Detroit, Chicago, Boston, New York, Seattle.
In 1934, early in the Roosevelt Presidency, strikes broke out all over the country, including a general strike in Minneapolis, a general strike in San Francisco, hundreds of thousands on strike in the textile mills of the South. Unemployed councils formed all over the country. Desperate people were taking action on their own, defying the police to put back the furniture of evicted tenants, and creating self-help organizations with hundreds of thousands of members.
Without a national crisis—economic destitution and rebellion—it is not likely the Roosevelt Administration would have instituted the bold reforms that it did.
Today, we can be sure that the Democratic Party, unless it faces a popular upsurge, will not move off center. The two leading Presidential candidates have made it clear that if elected, they will not bring an immediate end to the Iraq War, or institute a system of free health care for all.
They offer no radical change from the status quo.
They do not propose what the present desperation of people cries out for: a government guarantee of jobs to everyone who needs one, a minimum income for every household, housing relief to everyone who faces eviction or foreclosure.
They do not suggest the deep cuts in the military budget or the radical changes in the tax system that would free billions, even trillions, for social programs to transform the way we live.
None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the Sixties. We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism.
So we need to free ourselves from the election madness engulfing the entire society, including the left.
Yes, two minutes. Before that, and after that, we should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
For instance, the mortgage foreclosures that are driving millions from their homes—they should remind us of a similar situation after the Revolutionary War, when small farmers, many of them war veterans (like so many of our homeless today), could not afford to pay their taxes and were threatened with the loss of the land, their homes. They gathered by the thousands around courthouses and refused to allow the auctions to take place.
The evictions today of people who cannot pay their rents should remind us of what people did in the Thirties when they organized and put the belongings of the evicted families back in their apartments, in defiance of the authorities.
Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war.
Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.
Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States,” “Voices of a People’s History” (with Anthony Arnove), and most recently, “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.”
The Most Wanted List
They called him "one of the U.S. and Israel's most wanted men". He was "superseded on the most-wanted list by Osama bin Laden" after 9/11 and so ranked only second among "the most wanted militants in the world." Really?
NOAM CHOMSKY
On February 13, Imad Moughniyeh, a senior commander of Hizbollah, was assassinated in Damascus. "The world is a better place without this man in it," State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack said: "one way or the other he was brought to justice." Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell added that Moughniyeh has been "responsible for more deaths of Americans and Israelis than any other terrorist with the exception of Osama bin Laden."
Joy was unconstrained in Israel too, as "one of the U.S. and Israel's most wanted men" was brought to justice, the London Financial Times reported. Under the heading, "A militant wanted the world over," an accompanying story reported that he was "superseded on the most-wanted list by Osama bin Laden" after 9/11 and so ranked only second among "the most wanted militants in the world."
The terminology is accurate enough, according to the rules of Anglo-American discourse, which defines "the world" as the political class in Washington and London (and whoever happens to agree with them on specific matters). It is common, for example, to read that "the world" fully supported George Bush when he ordered the bombing of Afghanistan. That may be true of "the world," but hardly of the world, as revealed in an international Gallup Poll after the bombing was announced. Global support was slight. In Latin America, which has some experience with U.S. behavior, support ranged from 2% in Mexico to 16% in Panama, and that support was conditional upon the culprits being identified (they still weren't eight months later, the FBI reported), and civilian targets being spared (they were attacked at once). There was an overwhelming preference in the world for diplomatic/judicial measures, rejected out of hand by "the world."
Following the Terror Trail
In the present case, if "the world" were extended to the world, we might find some other candidates for the honor of most hated arch-criminal. It is instructive to ask why this might be true.
The Financial Times reports that most of the charges against Moughniyeh are unsubstantiated, but "one of the very few times when his involvement can be ascertained with certainty [is in] the hijacking of a TWA plane in 1985 in which a U.S. Navy diver was killed." This was one of two terrorist atrocities the led a poll of newspaper editors to select terrorism in the Middle East as the top story of 1985; the other was the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro, in which a crippled American, Leon Klinghoffer, was brutally murdered,. That reflects the judgment of "the world." It may be that the world saw matters somewhat differently.
The Achille Lauro hijacking was a retaliation for the bombing of Tunis ordered a week earlier by Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. His air force killed 75 Tunisians and Palestinians with smart bombs that tore them to shreds, among other atrocities, as vividly reported from the scene by the prominent Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk. Washington cooperated by failing to warn its ally Tunisia that the bombers were on the way, though the Sixth Fleet and U.S. intelligence could not have been unaware of the impending attack. Secretary of State George Shultz informed Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir that Washington "had considerable sympathy for the Israeli action," which he termed "a legitimate response" to "terrorist attacks," to general approbation. A few days later, the UN Security Council unanimously denounced the bombing as an "act of armed aggression" (with the U.S. abstaining)."Aggression" is, of course, a far more serious crime than international terrorism. But giving the United States and Israel the benefit of the doubt, let us keep to the lesser charge against their leadership.
A few days after, Peres went to Washington to consult with the leading international terrorist of the day, Ronald Reagan, who denounced "the evil scourge of terrorism," again with general acclaim by "the world."
The "terrorist attacks" that Shultz and Peres offered as the pretext for the bombing of Tunis were the killings of three Israelis in Larnaca, Cyprus. The killers, as Israel conceded, had nothing to do with Tunis, though they might have had Syrian connections. Tunis was a preferable target, however. It was defenseless, unlike Damascus. And there was an extra pleasure: more exiled Palestinians could be killed there.
The Larnaca killings, in turn, were regarded as retaliation by the perpetrators: They were a response to regular Israeli hijackings in international waters in which many victims were killed -- and many more kidnapped and sent to prisons in Israel, commonly to be held without charge for long periods. The most notorious of these has been the secret prison/torture chamber Facility 1391. A good deal can be learned about it from the Israeli and foreign press. Such regular Israeli crimes are, of course, known to editors of the national press in the U.S., and occasionally receive some casual mention.
Klinghoffer's murder was properly viewed with horror, and is very famous. It was the topic of an acclaimed opera and a made-for-TV movie, as well as much shocked commentary deploring the savagery of Palestinians -- "two-headed beasts" (Prime Minister Menachem Begin), "drugged roaches scurrying around in a bottle" (Chief of Staff Raful Eitan), "like grasshoppers compared to us," whose heads should be "smashed against the boulders and walls" (Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir). Or more commonly just "Araboushim," the slang counterpart of "kike" or "nigger."
Thus, after a particularly depraved display of settler-military terror and purposeful humiliation in the West Bank town of Halhul in December 1982, which disgusted even Israeli hawks, the well-known military/political analyst Yoram Peri wrote in dismay that one "task of the army today [is] to demolish the rights of innocent people just because they are Araboushim living in territories that God promised to us," a task that became far more urgent, and was carried out with far more brutality, when the Araboushim began to "raise their heads" a few years later.
We can easily assess the sincerity of the sentiments expressed about the Klinghoffer murder. It is only necessary to investigate the reaction to comparable U.S.-backed Israeli crimes. Take, for example, the murder in April 2002 of two crippled Palestinians, Kemal Zughayer and Jamal Rashid, by Israeli forces rampaging through the refugee camp of Jenin in the West Bank. Zughayer's crushed body and the remains of his wheelchair were found by British reporters, along with the remains of the white flag he was holding when he was shot dead while seeking to flee the Israeli tanks which then drove over him, ripping his face in two and severing his arms and legs. Jamal Rashid was crushed in his wheelchair when one of Israel's huge U.S.-supplied Caterpillar bulldozers demolished his home in Jenin with his family inside. The differential reaction, or rather non-reaction, has become so routine and so easy to explain that no further commentary is necessary.
Car Bomb
Plainly, the 1985 Tunis bombing was a vastly more severe terrorist crime than the Achille Lauro hijacking, or the crime for which Moughniyeh's "involvement can be ascertained with certainty" in the same year. But even the Tunis bombing had competitors for the prize for worst terrorist atrocity in the Mideast in the peak year of 1985.
One challenger was a car-bombing in Beirut right outside a mosque, timed to go off as worshippers were leaving Friday prayers. It killed 80 people and wounded 256. Most of the dead were girls and women, who had been leaving the mosque, though the ferocity of the blast "burned babies in their beds," "killed a bride buying her trousseau," and "blew away three children as they walked home from the mosque." It also "devastated the main street of the densely populated" West Beirut suburb, reported Nora Boustany three years later in the Washington Post.
The intended target had been the Shi'ite cleric Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, who escaped. The bombing was carried out by Reagan's CIA and his Saudi allies, with Britain's help, and was specifically authorized by CIA Director William Casey, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's account in his book Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987. Little is known beyond the bare facts, thanks to rigorous adherence to the doctrine that we do not investigate our own crimes (unless they become too prominent to suppress, and the inquiry can be limited to some low-level "bad apples" who were naturally "out of control").
"Terrorist Villagers"
A third competitor for the 1985 Mideast terrorism prize was Prime Minister Peres' "Iron Fist" operations in southern Lebanese territories then occupied by Israel in violation of Security Council orders. The targets were what the Israeli high command called "terrorist villagers." Peres's crimes in this case sank to new depths of "calculated brutality and arbitrary murder" in the words of a Western diplomat familiar with the area, an assessment amply supported by direct coverage. They are, however, of no interest to "the world" and therefore remain uninvestigated, in accordance with the usual conventions. We might well ask whether these crimes fall under international terrorism or the far more severe crime of aggression, but let us again give the benefit of the doubt to Israel and its backers in Washington and keep to the lesser charge.
These are a few of the thoughts that might cross the minds of people elsewhere in the world, even if not those of "the world," when considering "one of the very few times" Imad Moughniyeh was clearly implicated in a terrorist crime.
The U.S. also accuses him of responsibility for devastating double suicide truck-bomb attacks on U.S. Marine and French paratrooper barracks in Lebanon in 1983, killing 241 Marines and 58 paratroopers, as well as a prior attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63, a particularly serious blow because of a meeting there of CIA officials at the time.
The Financial Times has, however, attributed the attack on the Marine barracks to Islamic Jihad, not Hizbollah. Fawaz Gerges, one of the leading scholars on the jihadi movements and on Lebanon, has written that responsibility was taken by an "unknown group called Islamic Jihad." A voice speaking in classical Arabic called for all Americans to leave Lebanon or face death. It has been claimed that Moughniyeh was the head of Islamic Jihad at the time, but to my knowledge, evidence is sparse.
The opinion of the world has not been sampled on the subject, but it is possible that there might be some hesitancy about calling an attack on a military base in a foreign country a "terrorist attack," particularly when U.S. and French forces were carrying out heavy naval bombardments and air strikes in Lebanon, and shortly after the U.S. provided decisive support for the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which killed some 20,000 people and devastated the south, while leaving much of Beirut in ruins. It was finally called off by President Reagan when international protest became too intense to ignore after the Sabra-Shatila massacres.
In the United States, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is regularly described as a reaction to Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorist attacks on northern Israel from their Lebanese bases, making our crucial contribution to these major war crimes understandable. In the real world, the Lebanese border area had been quiet for a year, apart from repeated Israeli attacks, many of them murderous, in an effort to elicit some PLO response that could be used as a pretext for the already planned invasion. Its actual purpose was not concealed at the time by Israeli commentators and leaders: to safeguard the Israeli takeover of the occupied West Bank. It is of some interest that the sole serious error in Jimmy Carter's book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid is the repetition of this propaganda concoction about PLO attacks from Lebanon being the motive for the Israeli invasion. The book was bitterly attacked, and desperate efforts were made to find some phrase that could be misinterpreted, but this glaring error -- the only one -- was ignored. Reasonably, since it satisfies the criterion of adhering to useful doctrinal fabrications.
Killing without Intent
Another allegation is that Moughniyeh "masterminded" the bombing of Israel's embassy in Buenos Aires on March 17, 1992, killing 29 people, in response, as the Financial Times put it, to Israel's "assassination of former Hizbollah leader Abbas Al-Mussawi in an air attack in southern Lebanon." About the assassination, there is no need for evidence: Israel proudly took credit for it. The world might have some interest in the rest of the story. Al-Mussawi was murdered with a U.S.-supplied helicopter, well north of Israel's illegal "security zone" in southern Lebanon. He was on his way to Sidon from the village of Jibshit, where he had spoken at the memorial for another Imam murdered by Israeli forces. The helicopter attack also killed his wife and five-year old child. Israel then employed U.S.-supplied helicopters to attack a car bringing survivors of the first attack to a hospital.
After the murder of the family, Hezbollah "changed the rules of the game," Prime Minister Rabin informed the Israeli Knesset. Previously, no rockets had been launched at Israel. Until then, the rules of the game had been that Israel could launch murderous attacks anywhere in Lebanon at will, and Hizbollah would respond only within Israeli-occupied Lebanese territory.
After the murder of its leader (and his family), Hizbollah began to respond to Israeli crimes in Lebanon by rocketing northern Israel. The latter is, of course, intolerable terror, so Rabin launched an invasion that drove some 500,000 people out of their homes and killed well over 100. The merciless Israeli attacks reached as far as northern Lebanon.
In the south, 80% of the city of Tyre fled and Nabatiye was left a "ghost town," Jibshit was about 70% destroyed according to an Israeli army spokesperson, who explained that the intent was "to destroy the village completely because of its importance to the Shi'ite population of southern Lebanon." The goal was "to wipe the villages from the face of the earth and sow destruction around them," as a senior officer of the Israeli northern command described the operation.
Jibshit may have been a particular target because it was the home of Sheikh Abdul Karim Obeid, kidnapped and brought to Israel several years earlier. Obeid's home "received a direct hit from a missile," British journalist Robert Fisk reported, "although the Israelis were presumably gunning for his wife and three children." Those who had not escaped hid in terror, wrote Mark Nicholson in the Financial Times, "because any visible movement inside or outside their houses is likely to attract the attention of Israeli artillery spotters, who… were pounding their shells repeatedly and devastatingly into selected targets." Artillery shells were hitting some villages at a rate of more than 10 rounds a minute at times.
All of this received the firm support of President Bill Clinton, who understood the need to instruct the Araboushim sternly on the "rules of the game." And Rabin emerged as another grand hero and man of peace, so different from the two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, and drugged roaches.
This is only a small sample of facts that the world might find of interest in connection with the alleged responsibility of Moughniyeh for the retaliatory terrorist act in Buenos Aires.
Other charges are that Moughniyeh helped prepare Hizbollah defenses against the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, evidently an intolerable terrorist crime by the standards of "the world," which understands that the United States and its clients must face no impediments in their just terror and aggression.
The more vulgar apologists for U.S. and Israeli crimes solemnly explain that, while Arabs purposely kill people, the U.S. and Israel, being democratic societies, do not intend to do so. Their killings are just accidental ones, hence not at the level of moral depravity of their adversaries. That was, for example, the stand of Israel's High Court when it recently authorized severe collective punishment of the people of Gaza by depriving them of electricity (hence water, sewage disposal, and other such basics of civilized life).
The same line of defense is common with regard to some of Washington's past peccadilloes, like the destruction in 1998 of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. The attack apparently led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, but without intent to kill them, hence not a crime on the order of intentional killing -- so we are instructed by moralists who consistently suppress the response that had already been given to these vulgar efforts at self-justification.
To repeat once again, we can distinguish three categories of crimes: murder with intent, accidental killing, and murder with foreknowledge but without specific intent. Israeli and U.S. atrocities typically fall into the third category. Thus, when Israel destroys Gaza's power supply or sets up barriers to travel in the West Bank, it does not specifically intend to murder the particular people who will die from polluted water or in ambulances that cannot reach hospitals. And when Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of the al-Shifa plant, it was obvious that it would lead to a humanitarian catastrophe.Human Rights Watch immediately informed him of this, providing details; nevertheless, he and his advisers did not intend to kill specific people among those who would inevitably die when half the pharmaceutical supplies were destroyed in a poor African country that could not replenish them.
Rather, they and their apologists regarded Africans much as we do the ants we crush while walking down a street. We are aware that it is likely to happen (if we bother to think about it), but we do not intend to kill them because they are not worthy of such consideration. Needless to say, comparable attacks by Araboushim in areas inhabited by human beings would be regarded rather differently.
If, for a moment, we can adopt the perspective of the world, we might ask which criminals are "wanted the world over."
NOAM CHOMSKY
On February 13, Imad Moughniyeh, a senior commander of Hizbollah, was assassinated in Damascus. "The world is a better place without this man in it," State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack said: "one way or the other he was brought to justice." Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell added that Moughniyeh has been "responsible for more deaths of Americans and Israelis than any other terrorist with the exception of Osama bin Laden."
Joy was unconstrained in Israel too, as "one of the U.S. and Israel's most wanted men" was brought to justice, the London Financial Times reported. Under the heading, "A militant wanted the world over," an accompanying story reported that he was "superseded on the most-wanted list by Osama bin Laden" after 9/11 and so ranked only second among "the most wanted militants in the world."
The terminology is accurate enough, according to the rules of Anglo-American discourse, which defines "the world" as the political class in Washington and London (and whoever happens to agree with them on specific matters). It is common, for example, to read that "the world" fully supported George Bush when he ordered the bombing of Afghanistan. That may be true of "the world," but hardly of the world, as revealed in an international Gallup Poll after the bombing was announced. Global support was slight. In Latin America, which has some experience with U.S. behavior, support ranged from 2% in Mexico to 16% in Panama, and that support was conditional upon the culprits being identified (they still weren't eight months later, the FBI reported), and civilian targets being spared (they were attacked at once). There was an overwhelming preference in the world for diplomatic/judicial measures, rejected out of hand by "the world."
Following the Terror Trail
In the present case, if "the world" were extended to the world, we might find some other candidates for the honor of most hated arch-criminal. It is instructive to ask why this might be true.
The Financial Times reports that most of the charges against Moughniyeh are unsubstantiated, but "one of the very few times when his involvement can be ascertained with certainty [is in] the hijacking of a TWA plane in 1985 in which a U.S. Navy diver was killed." This was one of two terrorist atrocities the led a poll of newspaper editors to select terrorism in the Middle East as the top story of 1985; the other was the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro, in which a crippled American, Leon Klinghoffer, was brutally murdered,. That reflects the judgment of "the world." It may be that the world saw matters somewhat differently.
The Achille Lauro hijacking was a retaliation for the bombing of Tunis ordered a week earlier by Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. His air force killed 75 Tunisians and Palestinians with smart bombs that tore them to shreds, among other atrocities, as vividly reported from the scene by the prominent Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk. Washington cooperated by failing to warn its ally Tunisia that the bombers were on the way, though the Sixth Fleet and U.S. intelligence could not have been unaware of the impending attack. Secretary of State George Shultz informed Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir that Washington "had considerable sympathy for the Israeli action," which he termed "a legitimate response" to "terrorist attacks," to general approbation. A few days later, the UN Security Council unanimously denounced the bombing as an "act of armed aggression" (with the U.S. abstaining)."Aggression" is, of course, a far more serious crime than international terrorism. But giving the United States and Israel the benefit of the doubt, let us keep to the lesser charge against their leadership.
A few days after, Peres went to Washington to consult with the leading international terrorist of the day, Ronald Reagan, who denounced "the evil scourge of terrorism," again with general acclaim by "the world."
The "terrorist attacks" that Shultz and Peres offered as the pretext for the bombing of Tunis were the killings of three Israelis in Larnaca, Cyprus. The killers, as Israel conceded, had nothing to do with Tunis, though they might have had Syrian connections. Tunis was a preferable target, however. It was defenseless, unlike Damascus. And there was an extra pleasure: more exiled Palestinians could be killed there.
The Larnaca killings, in turn, were regarded as retaliation by the perpetrators: They were a response to regular Israeli hijackings in international waters in which many victims were killed -- and many more kidnapped and sent to prisons in Israel, commonly to be held without charge for long periods. The most notorious of these has been the secret prison/torture chamber Facility 1391. A good deal can be learned about it from the Israeli and foreign press. Such regular Israeli crimes are, of course, known to editors of the national press in the U.S., and occasionally receive some casual mention.
Klinghoffer's murder was properly viewed with horror, and is very famous. It was the topic of an acclaimed opera and a made-for-TV movie, as well as much shocked commentary deploring the savagery of Palestinians -- "two-headed beasts" (Prime Minister Menachem Begin), "drugged roaches scurrying around in a bottle" (Chief of Staff Raful Eitan), "like grasshoppers compared to us," whose heads should be "smashed against the boulders and walls" (Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir). Or more commonly just "Araboushim," the slang counterpart of "kike" or "nigger."
Thus, after a particularly depraved display of settler-military terror and purposeful humiliation in the West Bank town of Halhul in December 1982, which disgusted even Israeli hawks, the well-known military/political analyst Yoram Peri wrote in dismay that one "task of the army today [is] to demolish the rights of innocent people just because they are Araboushim living in territories that God promised to us," a task that became far more urgent, and was carried out with far more brutality, when the Araboushim began to "raise their heads" a few years later.
We can easily assess the sincerity of the sentiments expressed about the Klinghoffer murder. It is only necessary to investigate the reaction to comparable U.S.-backed Israeli crimes. Take, for example, the murder in April 2002 of two crippled Palestinians, Kemal Zughayer and Jamal Rashid, by Israeli forces rampaging through the refugee camp of Jenin in the West Bank. Zughayer's crushed body and the remains of his wheelchair were found by British reporters, along with the remains of the white flag he was holding when he was shot dead while seeking to flee the Israeli tanks which then drove over him, ripping his face in two and severing his arms and legs. Jamal Rashid was crushed in his wheelchair when one of Israel's huge U.S.-supplied Caterpillar bulldozers demolished his home in Jenin with his family inside. The differential reaction, or rather non-reaction, has become so routine and so easy to explain that no further commentary is necessary.
Car Bomb
Plainly, the 1985 Tunis bombing was a vastly more severe terrorist crime than the Achille Lauro hijacking, or the crime for which Moughniyeh's "involvement can be ascertained with certainty" in the same year. But even the Tunis bombing had competitors for the prize for worst terrorist atrocity in the Mideast in the peak year of 1985.
One challenger was a car-bombing in Beirut right outside a mosque, timed to go off as worshippers were leaving Friday prayers. It killed 80 people and wounded 256. Most of the dead were girls and women, who had been leaving the mosque, though the ferocity of the blast "burned babies in their beds," "killed a bride buying her trousseau," and "blew away three children as they walked home from the mosque." It also "devastated the main street of the densely populated" West Beirut suburb, reported Nora Boustany three years later in the Washington Post.
The intended target had been the Shi'ite cleric Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, who escaped. The bombing was carried out by Reagan's CIA and his Saudi allies, with Britain's help, and was specifically authorized by CIA Director William Casey, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's account in his book Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987. Little is known beyond the bare facts, thanks to rigorous adherence to the doctrine that we do not investigate our own crimes (unless they become too prominent to suppress, and the inquiry can be limited to some low-level "bad apples" who were naturally "out of control").
"Terrorist Villagers"
A third competitor for the 1985 Mideast terrorism prize was Prime Minister Peres' "Iron Fist" operations in southern Lebanese territories then occupied by Israel in violation of Security Council orders. The targets were what the Israeli high command called "terrorist villagers." Peres's crimes in this case sank to new depths of "calculated brutality and arbitrary murder" in the words of a Western diplomat familiar with the area, an assessment amply supported by direct coverage. They are, however, of no interest to "the world" and therefore remain uninvestigated, in accordance with the usual conventions. We might well ask whether these crimes fall under international terrorism or the far more severe crime of aggression, but let us again give the benefit of the doubt to Israel and its backers in Washington and keep to the lesser charge.
These are a few of the thoughts that might cross the minds of people elsewhere in the world, even if not those of "the world," when considering "one of the very few times" Imad Moughniyeh was clearly implicated in a terrorist crime.
The U.S. also accuses him of responsibility for devastating double suicide truck-bomb attacks on U.S. Marine and French paratrooper barracks in Lebanon in 1983, killing 241 Marines and 58 paratroopers, as well as a prior attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63, a particularly serious blow because of a meeting there of CIA officials at the time.
The Financial Times has, however, attributed the attack on the Marine barracks to Islamic Jihad, not Hizbollah. Fawaz Gerges, one of the leading scholars on the jihadi movements and on Lebanon, has written that responsibility was taken by an "unknown group called Islamic Jihad." A voice speaking in classical Arabic called for all Americans to leave Lebanon or face death. It has been claimed that Moughniyeh was the head of Islamic Jihad at the time, but to my knowledge, evidence is sparse.
The opinion of the world has not been sampled on the subject, but it is possible that there might be some hesitancy about calling an attack on a military base in a foreign country a "terrorist attack," particularly when U.S. and French forces were carrying out heavy naval bombardments and air strikes in Lebanon, and shortly after the U.S. provided decisive support for the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which killed some 20,000 people and devastated the south, while leaving much of Beirut in ruins. It was finally called off by President Reagan when international protest became too intense to ignore after the Sabra-Shatila massacres.
In the United States, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is regularly described as a reaction to Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorist attacks on northern Israel from their Lebanese bases, making our crucial contribution to these major war crimes understandable. In the real world, the Lebanese border area had been quiet for a year, apart from repeated Israeli attacks, many of them murderous, in an effort to elicit some PLO response that could be used as a pretext for the already planned invasion. Its actual purpose was not concealed at the time by Israeli commentators and leaders: to safeguard the Israeli takeover of the occupied West Bank. It is of some interest that the sole serious error in Jimmy Carter's book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid is the repetition of this propaganda concoction about PLO attacks from Lebanon being the motive for the Israeli invasion. The book was bitterly attacked, and desperate efforts were made to find some phrase that could be misinterpreted, but this glaring error -- the only one -- was ignored. Reasonably, since it satisfies the criterion of adhering to useful doctrinal fabrications.
Killing without Intent
Another allegation is that Moughniyeh "masterminded" the bombing of Israel's embassy in Buenos Aires on March 17, 1992, killing 29 people, in response, as the Financial Times put it, to Israel's "assassination of former Hizbollah leader Abbas Al-Mussawi in an air attack in southern Lebanon." About the assassination, there is no need for evidence: Israel proudly took credit for it. The world might have some interest in the rest of the story. Al-Mussawi was murdered with a U.S.-supplied helicopter, well north of Israel's illegal "security zone" in southern Lebanon. He was on his way to Sidon from the village of Jibshit, where he had spoken at the memorial for another Imam murdered by Israeli forces. The helicopter attack also killed his wife and five-year old child. Israel then employed U.S.-supplied helicopters to attack a car bringing survivors of the first attack to a hospital.
After the murder of the family, Hezbollah "changed the rules of the game," Prime Minister Rabin informed the Israeli Knesset. Previously, no rockets had been launched at Israel. Until then, the rules of the game had been that Israel could launch murderous attacks anywhere in Lebanon at will, and Hizbollah would respond only within Israeli-occupied Lebanese territory.
After the murder of its leader (and his family), Hizbollah began to respond to Israeli crimes in Lebanon by rocketing northern Israel. The latter is, of course, intolerable terror, so Rabin launched an invasion that drove some 500,000 people out of their homes and killed well over 100. The merciless Israeli attacks reached as far as northern Lebanon.
In the south, 80% of the city of Tyre fled and Nabatiye was left a "ghost town," Jibshit was about 70% destroyed according to an Israeli army spokesperson, who explained that the intent was "to destroy the village completely because of its importance to the Shi'ite population of southern Lebanon." The goal was "to wipe the villages from the face of the earth and sow destruction around them," as a senior officer of the Israeli northern command described the operation.
Jibshit may have been a particular target because it was the home of Sheikh Abdul Karim Obeid, kidnapped and brought to Israel several years earlier. Obeid's home "received a direct hit from a missile," British journalist Robert Fisk reported, "although the Israelis were presumably gunning for his wife and three children." Those who had not escaped hid in terror, wrote Mark Nicholson in the Financial Times, "because any visible movement inside or outside their houses is likely to attract the attention of Israeli artillery spotters, who… were pounding their shells repeatedly and devastatingly into selected targets." Artillery shells were hitting some villages at a rate of more than 10 rounds a minute at times.
All of this received the firm support of President Bill Clinton, who understood the need to instruct the Araboushim sternly on the "rules of the game." And Rabin emerged as another grand hero and man of peace, so different from the two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, and drugged roaches.
This is only a small sample of facts that the world might find of interest in connection with the alleged responsibility of Moughniyeh for the retaliatory terrorist act in Buenos Aires.
Other charges are that Moughniyeh helped prepare Hizbollah defenses against the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, evidently an intolerable terrorist crime by the standards of "the world," which understands that the United States and its clients must face no impediments in their just terror and aggression.
The more vulgar apologists for U.S. and Israeli crimes solemnly explain that, while Arabs purposely kill people, the U.S. and Israel, being democratic societies, do not intend to do so. Their killings are just accidental ones, hence not at the level of moral depravity of their adversaries. That was, for example, the stand of Israel's High Court when it recently authorized severe collective punishment of the people of Gaza by depriving them of electricity (hence water, sewage disposal, and other such basics of civilized life).
The same line of defense is common with regard to some of Washington's past peccadilloes, like the destruction in 1998 of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. The attack apparently led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, but without intent to kill them, hence not a crime on the order of intentional killing -- so we are instructed by moralists who consistently suppress the response that had already been given to these vulgar efforts at self-justification.
To repeat once again, we can distinguish three categories of crimes: murder with intent, accidental killing, and murder with foreknowledge but without specific intent. Israeli and U.S. atrocities typically fall into the third category. Thus, when Israel destroys Gaza's power supply or sets up barriers to travel in the West Bank, it does not specifically intend to murder the particular people who will die from polluted water or in ambulances that cannot reach hospitals. And when Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of the al-Shifa plant, it was obvious that it would lead to a humanitarian catastrophe.Human Rights Watch immediately informed him of this, providing details; nevertheless, he and his advisers did not intend to kill specific people among those who would inevitably die when half the pharmaceutical supplies were destroyed in a poor African country that could not replenish them.
Rather, they and their apologists regarded Africans much as we do the ants we crush while walking down a street. We are aware that it is likely to happen (if we bother to think about it), but we do not intend to kill them because they are not worthy of such consideration. Needless to say, comparable attacks by Araboushim in areas inhabited by human beings would be regarded rather differently.
If, for a moment, we can adopt the perspective of the world, we might ask which criminals are "wanted the world over."
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