Sounds Mag'

Big blues for 'New Labour'

Paul Kirkness — 2008-05-09T13:40:15Z

Is 'New Labour' a thing from the past?

The excentric Boris Johnson was elected mayor of London on the 4th of May with a significant majority. The man is at best a jester... As Shadow Minister for Higher Education, Johnson was quiet - breaking the silence only in order to make provocative remarks about Islam, homosexuality and even the 'collective mentality' of people in Papua New Guinea ("cannibals" and "chief killers").

I was very sorry to hear about Ken Livingston's defeat in London, a man who has drastically changed his city - most of it for the best. London is almost free of traffic following the imposition of a congestion charge (although the M25, the motorway that surrounds the city, is still the biggest parking lot in the world). Often referred to as 'Red Ken' for his left-wing beliefs, he was nonetheless mayor of a town that with the most millionaires in the world. On the other hand, poverty in London is rampant. Areas like Hackney or Stockwell (where the Brazilian electrician, Jean-Charles de Menezes was killed by police officers) have some of the lowest life expectancies in the UK. If Brixton is now attracting the citie's yuppies, racial segregation is not yet a thing of the past. Finally, the public transport system is really quite pathetic. It is one of the most expensive in the world yet its privatisation has had terrible consequences with lines like the Northern Line being down for for repairs so much of the time.

Livingstone - the man - is, of course, not free of criticism of course - he has been accused of calling a Jewish journalist from the Evening Standard a "German war criminal" and a "concentration camp guard"; he has been examined after charges of corruption were brought against him and he has made strong comments about British foreign policy that were not exactly diplomatic... Ken Livingstone was an active mayor however. He was a man of seeming conviction when it came to making his town a cleaner one. Will Boris Johnson keep up the some of the good work?

It is unlikely. Johnson is frankly a bit of a dubious character. Even Conservative journalists like Simon Heffer have referred to him as an "act" and not a politician. Supported by the British National Party as second choice for the mayoral elections, there is no doubt in my mind that his racist comments about Islam (in particular about getting "18th century on Islam's medieval ass") have made him attractive to Britain's far-right.

This election is important for London but also for the UK. Johnson became mayor only three days after local elections that saw the worst defeat of Labour in over 40 years... The economic situation is of course partially responsible for the downfall of 'New' Labour. It is also likely however that British voters do not recognise the Labour government since the departure of Tony Blair - Gordon Brown is uncharismatic, he has done little since assuming office... In my mind, Gordon Brown is possibly a large part of the problem but it is still unlikely that his departure would change the fact that 'New' Labour is no longer new at all.

Polo

Depleted uranium used once more in Iraq

Christopher Montel — 2003-12-12T15:02:40Z

The British Atomic Energy Authority had concluded in a report given to the government in 1990, before the First Gulf War, that every ton of depleted uranium (DU) left in a given area could foster about a thousand cancers.

It has been estimated in fact that 900 tons of DU dust has been spreading well beyond the area it was initially used in combat- that is the Saudi- Iraqi bordering regions, Kuwait, Baghdad and southern Iraq, which recieved more bombs in six weeks than the entire planet during the second world war. I'll let you do the math.

DU is the waste created during the enrichment process of Uranium. For every ton of enriched uranium produced, there is roughly about 7 tons of DU created. It is estimated that over 700, 000 tonnes of DU are stored in the US, which partly led to its military use by the US Army. DU has been tested since the 1960s because of the many military advantages it offered, as well as the fact that it was a costless by-product of uranium enrichment processing.

DU has been used for civilian purposes, such as in airplanes, despite the fact that it can ignite independently, and that it quickly destroys metal, creating this fine dust and chips which can be obviously inhaled.

It was apparently used the first time in Iraq in 1991. At the time, Saddam's control over Iraq seems to have been so total and complete that the US-led coalition did not find it so difficult to convince the international community that Iraq was the Ba'ath leader's personal arsenal of "Weapons of Mass Destruction".

Saddam indeed did not recognise the individual existence of an Iraqi, stripped him of any real identity except that of a productive unit, a loyal subject and cannon fodder. But the Allied Forces understood quite early how useful and necessary it was to play Saddam's game of dismissing any value an Iraqi life might possible have.

Why? It suited the methods they used to successfully achieve their goals, which were at the time to destroy Iraq's capacity under Saddam Hussein to become the major military and economic powerhouse in the Middle east. After all, the US-led coalition in 1991 chose deliberately not to invade Iraq, letting the Iraqi uprisings against the Saddam regime they had promised to support at the mercy of Baghdad's brutal repression. The Iraqis have obviously not forgotten this betrayal.

As heated controversy arose since the late 1990s, with recent reports that over 1, 400, 000 Iraqis had died because of UN embargo sanctions alone, including 560, 000 children, Madeleine Albright had apparently answered "This is a very hard choice" (To continue the UN embargo), but the price, we think, is worth it."

Today, as the second Gulf War, the one of occupation, rages on into 2004, a new issue has been raised: What exactly is worth, in Albright's terms, the continued use of DU in bullet coats in Iraq since March 2003?

The main answer might be that it supposedly pierces armor, and US officials have justified its use because of its "low" radioactivity. In fact, the Pentagon did not want to publicize the use of DU too much, as it was already aware of the health hazard it constituted.

However, US veterans who have organized their protest, have been denied any form of reparation, apologies, or even a recognition that the DU radioactivity constitutes a true threat. Moreover, militant's homes have been broken into; disks, files, reports were stolen.

DU has been in continued use since 1991, and was used in the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia. High levels of radioctivity (40 times the normal level) were reported in Bulgaria, Hungary and Greece, which can only suggest again that DU dust likes to travel.

In Iraq, residues of DU have been found near residential areas, in wastelands left by the war where chidren frequently go to play. Many areas have been restricted by the US occupation army, with warning signs in Arabic. Moreover, the airproof suits the Marines wore during the invasion in 2003 was officially to prevent exposure from Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction. But these suits were in fact necessary to prevent Allied exposure to their own army's chemitoxic and radiotoxic weaponry.

The US have introduced a terrifyingly cheap and accessible kind of radioactive warfare on the international scene. Ever since the Atomic bomb in 1945, the US have had this habit. The only problem is that DU can be easily obtained to fabricate the dreaded dirty bombs.

The Laka Foundation Report, September 1999. It includes tables classifying the reported effects of DU on humans, animals and food, as well as the different types of diseases that were reportedly contracted by Allied and Iraqi veterans and the Iraqi civilians.
Depleted Uranium: A Post-War Disaster for Environment and Health

Software Patents

arthur — 2003-12-12T13:33:33Z

The adventure is set in Europe, it has a dark beginning and a happy ending, or is it a happy middle bit? The subject is the patenting of software. So far, software is being used under copyright laws. European legislators now want it to rule in the happy land of patents. And that is a grave danger to this extremely important production/art/tool.

The ability of patenting computer software, means that the simplest mecanisms used by software (what you click on when you use your computer) can have its use restricted. It would render void the use of copyright (currently used for software). This type of evolution would mean that as you could previously patent a mousetrap you could now patent any "means of trapping mamals". Do you get the gist?

A list of dump yet dangerous patents that have emerged from this approach to software can be found here. Just a few example we like : the icon of a "shopping cart" in ecommerce, changing the color of the mouse arrow when on a similar color, upgrading software using the internet, etc...

So how does this story go in Europe? It already exists in the US so obviously Europe and the industrial lobby is pretty keen to get even. The EPO - European Patent Organisation, illegaly is accepting more than 30 000 software patents even before any kind of legislation allows it. The majority of these are deposited by American companies. The text makes its way to European deputies with a happy following mass of lobbyest (the principal way the European parliament works...). The word gets around in the "free software" community, and being threatenned as it was, it rose to confront the future legislation. Letters are sent, petitions are set up, protests appear on the web and on the streets, organisations representatives go to brussels to have a word with deputies. The idea of the danger to liberties slowly makes its way in the minds. A small number of policital parties openly take sides, such as the Green Party.

You could now say : "Maybe small enterprise and individuals can benefit of this system for their inventions in software". Think again : the average cost of patent in Europe amounts to 29800 euros.

So how does is this a danger to all, an infrigement of personnal liberties? This is a primordial question in this debate, particularly since not many people care about computer, or are familiar with the concept of "free software", free as in "speech" not "beer". It will create monopolies and control of information for the corporations, who are the only ones that have enough economical weight to use the patenting system. That means that they will be able to control how the way the computer systems that manage your banks, your payroll, your social security, your medical coverage, your news feed, your entertainment, etc...

Former socialist Prime Minister Michel Rocard says in an article published in Liberation (link) that it is a directive that has had almost the most lobbying done for, emails, letters and petitions, industrial pressures, and citizen pressure. And that this has massivelly influenced the decisions. This effect is present because computer people are hooked up to the internet even before having breakfast. This citizen's participation to a democratic procedure sets this accomplishment even higher. We all know that activist networks have greatly benefited from the new communication medium that is the internet. And we see everyday initiatives that tend to increase a citizen approach of politics with this ease of communication. And according to this example, the politics seem to be listenning.

Europe is not a "power". It is an integrated space governed by law. It has the size of make world law. On an essential problem that is, for a half billion citizens, to be able to use freely all the ressources of the computer language without depending on the global control of a few multinationals, Europe has just shown that it can be a major organisation and that it can defend democracy.

I'm not as pro-Europe as this extract might seem, but I think that we should cherish the little good news that we have as far as the people's struggles is concerned, instead of always being driven by contestation and criticism. To divert a commercial slogan : "It's a sprig of goodness in a world of shit"

So have YOU been productive?

arthur — 2003-11-26T00:00:00Z

Last month, as I was towards the end of a relatively stressful period of time, I decided to leave town and go to the countryside for a while. Doesn't this make sense? It's even rather banal. Well... In the beloved society we live in, facts seem to indicate the contrary.

This affirmation comes from observations of people around me as I told them about my intentions, that I wanted to go to the countryside on my own for a period of a month. At first I was hesitating between this and traveling for a while to places like Eastern Europe. I talked about these intensions to a number of people, and got unexpected reactions.

"Man, you're going to get bored!", "Just shoot yourself here in Paris, no need to go to the countryside", "On your own?", "Are you going religious?", "Why would you do that?", "So that's what you finally chose, instead of traveling? Just because you don't have a passport?" (as of matter of fact I didn't have a passport at the time, I can tell you it was expired -in case the French police is looking for some stinking foreigners to kick out and ended up here). The more people were considering this as a "freak" idea, the more it attracted me. I have a pure childish contradiction complex.

After a few of these remarks I realized that I needed to justify myself, for doing such a "weird" thing. Obviously I could just say, explain or tell, but I use the term justify in an abrupt manner to emphasize my point. People reacted differently when I told them about the many ideas and projects I wanted to do. But the fact that I had to justify myself got me thinking.

As the month spent alone was reaching its end, people asked me: "So have you been productive?" The use of the word "productive" stuck to me... it contains the word "product" doesn't it? For some "productive" was used as a way for asking me if I was happy about things I had done. But if I had, it was not as products. Even people who were critical about productivist values slipped into the comfort of using that term. Part of it is because I went there telling people I wanted to do all the things I didn't really have the time to do during the busy year.

It would seem that I'm overreacting and twisting things my way, but I believe that someone once thought this evolution up and crime pays. I believe we are shaped every day to think and express ourselves in those very well chosen terms.

Mexico and NAFTA today

Christopher Montel — 2003-11-26T00:00:00Z

A World Bank draft report on Mexico stated this year that NAFTA had brought "significant economic and social benefits to the Mexican economy." In her 11/19 article of the NY Times, Celia Dugger mentions the Carnegie Endowment Report issued on November 18th, which presents a much bleaker picture of the Mexican economy today.

The unilateral liberalisation that the Mexican government has been endorsing in the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement has proved nowadays its limits to bring prosperity and stability in Mexico.

During the end of the 1990s, the triumph of the liberal reforms led to Vincente Fox's victory in the Mexican presidential elections of 2000, the same year his "close friend" Georges W Bush sneaked into office in Washington DC. Fox promised 6% growth rates and a trickle-down effect of the wealth generated by privatised companies on the bulk of Mexican society. What Mexico got instead was the full-blown consequences of the US recession since March 2000.

Today, several studies support the widespread impression that NAFTA and the auxilliarisation of Mexico on the US economy have been either insufficient to bring Mexico out of its series of crises in the 1980s, or have been downright negative for the Mexican economy and society.

According to the Carnegie Endowment report, NAFTA has failed to bring substantial employment growth, and has generally disrupted the socio-economic fabric of Mexico's agricultural sector. The independent research institute reports moreover that NAFTA hardly helped employment growth in the US, but its purpose is also to discard the idea that NAFTA has relocated jobs from the US to Mexico.

This report was issued as discussions to extend a free-trade zone between all american continents will soon be held in Miami, between trade ministers from 34 states. Several journalists, including producer Ana Noguiera from the US Democracy now! syndicated radio and TV program, were arrested during security actions against the demonstrations held in Miami on November 25th protesting against the trade talks.

The benefits that NAFTA was acclaimed to bring included the levelling of income disparities between Mexico and the US, and a subsequent decline in the immigration towards the US.

Today, the disparities of income within Mexico and between both countries have never been higher. Wages are now lower than their level when NAFTA was introduced in 1993. As a result of this, poverty and high emigration rates towards the US still plague the Mexican economy and society.

NAFTA has been particularly disruptive for Mexico's rural economy. On the one hand, the Mexican government opened its domestic agricultural market to US competition faster than the agreement actually required. With the subsequent decrease in food market prices, local farming for crops such as corn have been abandoned. On the other hand, export-oriented industrial farming, based on water and ground polluting agro-chemicals are transforming the Mexican rural society into a proletariat of industrial farm workers.

Exports from Mexico have been increasing by 20% since 1994, and have progressed from primary-based products, which are the most subjected to arbitrary prices on the world market, to manufactured products. But why should this make any sense if you consider that most plants producing these export-oriented manufactured goods belonging to transnational companies? What good is the wealth created if it is not reinvested on the national market, by national industries?

Professor Albert Fishlow, from UC Berkeley, explains both positive and negative consequences of NAFTA on Mexico in terms of the country's ongoing dependency to the US economy. During the 1990s US growth, which is the longest registered since the 1950s, Mexico indeed enjoyed some scraps of the wealth generated by US companies and reinvested abroad. But by the time recession hit the US in March 2000, substantial growth or development that would have helped Mexico face the consequences of this recession on its own economy had been thwarted by the NAFTA agreements and their zealous implementation by the Mexican government.

Professor Fishlow is amongst many who argue that long-term economic and industrial policy in Mexico must be based more on multilateral exchanges, and should focus on regional development and trade with its Central and Latin American neighbours. Its doubtful the US would let this happen too easily in Miami in the coming weeks, but the golden days are over for NAFTA.

Read the summary of Professor Fishlow's 2003/3/13 conference on "Mexican Development in the Long-Term: Is NAFTA sufficient?"

Read also the November 18th Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Report on Mexico

Hate crimes in the US

Christopher Montel — 2003-11-23T16:24:49Z

"When the President of the United States can bomb a country because he perceives it to be a threat, then what moral authority does that government have to tell the bully on the street that he cannot beat on somebody because he perceives a threat?"
Bhairavi Desai, Director of the NY Taxi Workers alliance

This week, Nabeel Siddiqui, 24, a computer science major who had just graduated from New Jersey Institute of Technology, has died from a recent attack perpetrated in Orange, New Jersey, by three teenagers who beat him on the head with a baseball bat. The teenagers were apprehended and charged with assault, and not unsurprisingly were caught with a weapon. Two 17 year old and one 16 year old, armed, who believed they were doing right killing a man.

What kind of social and cultural system led to such conclusions in these kids' minds? What conversations did they hear, on TV or at the dinner table, that made them believe they could commit such a vicious and deliberate murder?

Hate-crimes against Arabs, Muslims and south Asians have risen sharply in the US since September 2001.The number of anti-Islamic biased crimes had officially risen from 36 in 2000 to 554 in 2001, and with the war in Irak is expected not to decline. There has been nevertheless a decrease in hate-crimes against ethnic Arab and South-Asian groups, from 1500 in 2001 to more than 600 in 2002. More recent figures are to be published by independent agencies, but the problem underlined by these agencies are that despite the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990, not all attacks are registered. Even if sometimes the victims tend not to declare the aggression, another reason is that the 1990 Act does not register attacks if there are no witnesses or if the case relies only on the victim's testimony.

Apart from murder, these categories suffer physical attacks, daily harassment, a deep sense of exclusion and fear, as well as an infringement on their constitutional rights. Recently, the Special Registration, enforced today and for an undefinite period of time as a policy, requires that most South-Asian and Arab Americans be fingerprinted, photographed, interrogated, detained, sometimes eventually to be deported.

There are two levels of discrimination against these categories. One is institutional and is part of the preemptive and "rational discrimination" methods of security and police agencies. About 1000 individuals are estimated to be detained by the US federal judiciary without any charges, and with no access to legal protection.Also, Arab Americans have suffered many side-effects of interrogation. A family which owned an Egyptian restaurant in Ohio saw its business plummet when news had spread about the recent detention and interrogation of its members by the FBI, which had confirmed by the way their total innocence.

The second level of discrimination is not directly related to government policies in the US, but is closely correlative to it. Arab and South-Asian Americans are the target of the nation's new-founded paranoia. Coupled with the deep-rooted american tradition of individual self-defense, the climate of fear, used by the government for reasons of internal security, has played an obvious part in influencing these teenagers to assassinate Nabeel Siddiqui.

In the following days and weeks of the terrorist attacks on the WTC towers Georges W Bush had given a clear statement to the nation which heavily condemned hate-crimes against real or percieved Arab-Americans, but its policies in general are inconsistent with these declarations. The authorities do not condemn clearly enough acts of popular hate-crime, and the climate of fear and paranoia they have instilled in the country can only encourage this old, very old american viral tradition of popular lynching and witch-hunting to manifest itself with such virulence and violence.

Reaction to consumerism

arthur — 2003-11-23T13:16:15Z

There I am, unfortunately, shopping in a large super/hypermarket, over here is France. A father is shopping for food with his 3 year old son. I go past them as I choose my cereal.

Father - "So which cereal do you want ?"
Son - "Hmmmm.... That one." Pointing to a branded chocolate cereal.
Father - "Which one is it ?"
Son - "The one with the troll on it."

As I look down to the cereal packet he is going for, you can barely see what product you are buying, more than half of the packet is covered with "Lord of the Rings" goodies. It is one of the only packets that seems to have a toy in it.

The father obviously worried about the fact that the kid is going to get the cereal, extract the toy, and not eat the rest of the packet, wants to make sure it's really the CEREAL he wants and not the TOY. So he points at the vague representation of the cereal that you can barely see at the very bottom of the front of the packet.

Father - "Are you sure, it is this cereal you want ? You're not getting it to get the troll figure ?"
Son - After a quick look to cereal, reassures his father "Yes it's that one."

As they start cruising to the next highly marketed product range, I think of the marketing people think of how to best target age ranges of 3 years old to 12 years old. I feel physically sick. When I see kids, they see consumers. It's only thanks to Bill Hick's humoristic approach of marketing people that the sick feeling in my stomach goes.

The other day I heard the average pocket money in France for kids between 10 and 13 is 75 euros. It's a booming market. I'm 22 now, how will we prevent our kids from being consumers from that early age?

Iraqi resistance fueled by economic plundering, repressive rule

Christopher Montel — 2003-11-20T00:00:00Z

The ongoing war in Iraq is portrayed as an ideological war between cultures and civilisations, between the Occident and the Arab world, and for a radical minority on both sides, between Christianity and Islam. This "Clash of Civilisations" is the best pseudo-intellectual trash the present US administration has used to explain and thus justify its present occupation of Iraq, its ressources and its economy.

In June 2003, the United States Labor Against the War (USLAW), the International Liaison Committee of Workers and Peoples (ILC) and the International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions (ICATU) officially decided to send a delegation to Iraq in October to inform the International Labour Organisation, which seemingly was not doing the job done itself, of the economic conditions of the Iraqi population under the US-led occupation.

This delegation reported in Chicago on October 25th about the impending misery of the Iraqi population and the catastrophic economic situation of the country. The unemployment rate in Iraq has reached 70%, and labor activism is tightly controlled by the Occupation Authority. None of the labor unions which have regrouped since the collapse of Hussein's regime have been recognised by the OA. Worst of all, the OA refuses to abrogate and continues to enforce the 1987 Iraqi law which forbids Labor Unions in the public service. In other words, 60% of the workers and employees in Iraq have today no right to unionize.

The official reason is of course that this law must be maintained as a precaution measure against terrorism and social unrest. But there are many other advantages for the OA to prevent the Iraqi workers to regroup and defend their economic and professional interests in the reorganisation of the country.

The leading national industries of this state-led economy are in the process of being subjected to foreign investment by multinationals, and the Iraqi labour has lost one of the rare advantages of working under Saddam's regime: job security, as well as meager but stable jobs. Iraq was a rich, developed society by material standards before the first Gulf war and the human disaster of the UN embargo which followed brought it to its knees.

In Irak, clean water and electricity are not functioning regularly or often not even available. Schools and hospitals are desperately trying not to shut down. British journalist Robert Fisk estimates that about 1,000 Iraqis are dying every week since the occupation. And a recently leaked CIA intelligence report indicates that this situation will probably get worse.

The Occupation Authority froze wages to 6 dollars an hour, but cut on all incentive bonuses, profit-sharing, as well as food and housing subsidies, which has led inevitably to further impoverishment of the Iraqi population. The US administration is not "liberalising" the Iraqi economy, it is redirecting Iraqi national wealth towards its own interests. Indeed, the OA recently issued a decree, Public Order 39, allowing 100% foreign ownership of Iraqi companies, and the repatriation of profits to multinational headquarters. All extraction industries are planned to be privatized.

Confronted to these illegal, criminal procedures and methods, the Iraqi population will undoubtedly not tolerate full-blown expropriation of their ressources, their economy and their society. After 10 years of living under the embargo, it may be resoluted enough to face these new hardships. If the US administration continues to fuel the resistance by its continued authoritarian and repressive rule in Iraq, it will face a long-lasting war. Nowadays we can hear a lot about a "second Vietnam", but this war has more Palestinian overtones.

The war in Iraq today is being portrayed by our governments and official media the same way as Palestine: it's not a war, and indeed its unprecedented parameters does not give it the features of a regular war. The war as it is understood has ended in May, yet since the end of October more US soldiers were killed during the occupation than in the military invasion. And still the military and administrative authorities in Iraq and Washington DC assure the public that the constant guerilla and suicide attacks are "terrorist activities".

The truth is, the Iraqi population is being forced to endorse Resistance groups whose prerogatives may indeed not be that commendable. But the reason why these groups exist in the first place, as they have been for half a century in Palestine, lies in the repressive rule of the Occupation Authority, the legal screen administration behind which Iraq is being reconfigured to suit the needs of industrial and financial globalisation.

Thus, by reducing the social unrest in Iraq to a simple problem of "terrorism", by highlighting the power of religious shiite leaders, by associating the suicide attacks against the UN in Baghdad in October 2003 with "International terrorism", the US are not even granting the Iraqi population the right to be recognised as victims as a whole.

Victims of an authoritarian administration backed up by a foreign military, which is sacrificing their incomes, their resources and their country to foreign interests.

The Iraqi population is indeed not presented in Europe, and certainly not in the US or in Asia, as victims. The analysis in most TV and newspaper reports stops at the anger of the Iraqi population, but cannot afford to mention the roots of this anger. There is practically no information given on the social and economic realities of Iraq, or the daily hardships of its population.

But daily reports of terrorising work conditions, such as underpaid workers being constantly aimed at the workplace by the guns of US marine guards, add to the indiscriminate brutality demonstrated by the US army as the war of occupation nestles in, and which is caused by this climate of terror they help to feed.

This allows the official line in Washington or at Fox News to explain the guerilla war in Iraq in terms of "International Terrorism". And play the very dangerous game that Israel has chosen in its own war of occupation.

Goerges W Bush has included in his list of ennemies in Iraq members of the Al Qaeda terrorist group which were according to him and his administration operating in Iraq. A commander of the 82nd airborne division, Maj Gen Charles Swannak, declared however his men were fighting Iraqi insurgents from the former regime.

Peace and prosperity in Iraq can only be possible if the bulk of the population is given minimum social and civic rights. The Occupation Administration and Colin Powell must have realised that long ago, I am not sure about the others. But even if its a known fact for everyone in Washington and Baghdad, it simply isn't a sizeable argument next to the enormous profits that will be engendered for the benefit of the US economy.

An international labor delegation from the USLAW led Campaign will travel to Geneva in the coming weeks in November to deliver its conclusions and its appeal to the ILO officials.

It demands that several ILO conventions be immediately implemented in Irak, such full trade union rights in Iraq, the immediate nullification of the 1987 Hussein law banning unions in public enterprises and for the repeal of any other restriction on the full exercise of labor rights. Others include ILO Conventions 87, 98 and 138, guaranteeing the rights to organize and bargain collectively and prohibiting child labor.

Go to the USLAW website to learn more about US labor against the war in Irak and to support the delegation in November 2003.

American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century

Christopher Montel — 2002-01-14T00:00:00Z

Today, the academic value of Gary Gerstle's American Crucible could seem at first severely jeopardized. It was published in 2001, evidently before September 11th, when in its immediate aftermath the issues of race, nation were brought back to the forefront of national debate and policy-making. American Crucible was not updated, since the approach deliberately overlooks the last quarter of the 20th century, to emphasize on the far reaching legacy of the American nation-building process triggered in the 1890s.

As a professor of History at the University of Maryland, Gary Gerstle stays faithful to a particular American scholarly tradition which emphasizes on the anecdotal and relies on individual perspectives of history (In this case, Theodore Roosevelt) as a support base for its arguments. This certainly does not work against the analysis, as the author manages to assemble a wide variety of sources and case-studies, such as film productions, illustrations or individual writings. The style is moreover not overtly narrative, since the perspective Gary Gerstle chose to take is clearly laid out and adequately structured throughout his analysis.

The author presents in his introduction and suggests in his opening chapter the main paths of his analysis, by bringing out above all the importance of Theodore Roosevelt's legacy in the shaping of American 20th century nation-building and nationalist discourse. The "Rooseveltian nation" and legacy, he argues, and the internal contradictions it had developed, between "racial nationalism" and "civic nationalism", had a deep and sustained impact on American political debates and policy-making in the first half of the 20th century until the 1960s.

The disillusions brought about by political corruption and lawlessness in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Vietnam war and the apparent failure of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to ensure social and economic equality for the Black American population, challenged "(…) the moral integrity of the American state and the American nation. The antiwar movement, as a result, speeded the collapse of the Rooseveltian nation."

The epilogue, which attempts to summarize in less than thirty pages the entire Reaganite and Clintonian political legacies which dominated American policy-making in the 1980s and 1990s, brings out the analysis' shortcomings, which evidently gives too much emphasis on Theodore Roosevelt's civic nationalism as a legacy permeating American national politics throughout the 20th century.

"The Rooseveltian Nation"

Theodore Roosevelt is according to Gary Gerstle probably the most decisive historical figure of early 20th century America and its later developments. He managed, both through his personal political credentials and the different political platforms and parties he headed as president or presidential candidate, to properly respond to the imperatives of nation-building in America. He inspired and embodied the development of an openly civic and affirmative form of nationalism, which could resolve real or perceived situations of social and political crises American policy-makers had inherited in the 1890s from unbridled corporate industrialisation and urbanisation, as well as unsupervised mass immigration policies.

The author argues the Rooseveltian legacy introduced a sense of transformative nationalism which theoretically compelled all American residents to fully embrace their American identity by relinquishing their personal origins. This was the basis for recognising their rights of citizenship guaranteed and protected by a growing federal state, but also their duties to conform and accept the WASP-dominated political culture and values.

The racial boundaries of participative democracy in early 20th century America could moreover only be extended according to Theodore Roosevelt to all Euro-Americans, even the ostracized eastern and southern European immigrant communities, but no further. Rooseveltian civic nationalism needed to be rigorously controlled in racial terms: it retained the racial boundaries fixed by early 20th century common sense: the deep-grounded conviction that "distinctive" ethnic minorities could not fully assume the responsibilities of citizenship.

In practical terms, however, Rooseveltian nationalism had been based on a relatively hazy definition of the American nation and citizenship, oscillating between "the hardening of the boundaries of the nation", in terms of race, religion and political affiliation, and the necessity to rally and incorporate increasingly wider segments of American immigrants and ethnic minorities, to consolidate and strengthen the political community (as well as the electorate), and more importantly as a policy for mobilisation in times of war.

American Crucible explains relatively clearly the persistence of this duality in the Rooseveltian Nation throughout the first half of the 20th century, and the ways each branch of its nationalist creed, racial or civic, was used by different political actors in America until the late 1960s to forward specific and sectarian political goals and demands. In other words Gerstle asserts that most, if not all, of American mainstream political history during this period was determined by the particular language and authority of Rooseveltian nationalism.

The contradictory trends of racial discrimination laws on the one hand, such as the 1920s restrictionist immigration Acts or the continued legal discrimination of blacks in Southern States until 1964, and governmental policies aiming at widening the boundaries of citizenship and participative democracy to ethnic and religious minorities on the other, were able both to refer to the precepts of the Rooseveltian nation to legitimate their demands and actions.

The increasing tension between racial and civic forms of nationalism, which Theodore Roosevelt initially had not managed to resolve in his political platform and which had both radicalized through non-governmental action and legislature, eventually brought the downfall of the American modern nationalist experience.

"The bonds of nationhood had weakened, and the Rooseveltian program of nation-building that had created those bonds in the first place had been repudiated. A nationalist era that had begun in the early decades of the twentieth century had come to a stunning end."

Are Civic and Racial Nationalism distinct?

Gary Gerstle regularly approaches racial and civic nationalist movements as two separate entities, but highlights as well how both in many ways had managed to coexist until the demands for immediate civic and economic equality became too bearing. Generally speaking, the author argues that even if progressive civic nationalism increasingly opposed itself to overt and institutional discrimination on the basis of race or creed since the 1920s, it nevertheless systematically relied on traditional forms of racial sense of belonging to express itself, even in its most liberal and pluralist phase during Franklin Roosevelt's presidency.

The author points out the persistence of the Nordic Scandinavian ideal-type in propaganda art of the NRA and the Unions in the 1930s, as well as the refusal to include black Americans or any other distinctive ethnic group in illustrations supposed to represent the American workforce. The emblematic photo Migrant Mother is understood here as the reproduction of such stereotypes and the refusal to show a multiethnic reality of the United States.

Migrant Mother, 1936, Dorothea Lange

One could consider however that because of her Nordic features the Migrant Mother symbolises the fact that the Great Depression encompassed all racial, social or religious barriers. This confirms the author's argument that as a deep and profound national crisis, the Great Depression brought to the Americans a common experience, which was positive as it forged new forms of solidarity and a sense of urgency for progressive reforms.

The author contends that the Rooseveltian civic nationalism had proved hostile, reluctant, but always powerless to bring peacefully, and through legislature, tangible and immediate tokens of socio-economic equality and civic freedom to all Americans. This incapacity of the Rooseveltian Nation to effectively eradicate racial-based discrimination is closely related to the conformist and unilateral cultural model it had instilled on American political life.

Gerstle stresses that the main reason for the downfall of the Rooseveltian nation-state indeed lies in its coercive and conformist nature. It had led several cultural wars against diversity and plurality(the anti-Semitic and racist features of the Red Scare rhetoric in the early 1920s, The Dies Commission in the 1930s, or McCarthyism in the 1950s), as much in domestic affairs as in its foreign policy.

In the chapter concerning the Civil Rights movement, a political phenomenon which the author unfortunately neglected to thoroughly analyse the developments prior to the 1960s, the frustration, persecution and sense of powerlessness encountered by Black American leaders and activists are highlighted to explain the shift from a civic and universal rhetoric favoured by early 1960s Black Christian Civil Rights Movements, to a racialized, sectarian sense of Black identity. This shift is interpreted in American Crucible as contributing to the overall decline of the "hyper-rational" state-led culture of conformity , based on the Rooseveltian precepts of a racially-controlled and supervised civic nationalism.

In other words, the preservation of the traditional racial order in the United States was partly due to the culture of conformity- ostensibly civic in its form- instilled through coerciveness and periodically through terror campaigns of intimidation on the diverse elements of the American population. This according to the author confirms the interdependency between racial and civic definitions of the nation which persisted under the Rooseveltian nationalist legacy.

The centrality of war in modern American nationalism

Countless studies have been made on the formative and determining effects of war and mobilisation in the development of modern nationalisms throughout the world, but the author tends to argue that Rooseveltian nationalism was particularly reliant on war and the political benefits it bestowed to affirm and develop its own authority in domestic affairs.

The first chapter is a comprehensive analysis of Theodore Roosevelt's interpretation of American history, which Gary Gerstle repeatedly uses as a reference point to explain later developments in American war mobilisation campaigns. This interpretation of national history, grounded in social-Darwinist precepts of nations and races competing for survival and supremacy, understands war as an essential component of the common national experience, one that sustains a "regeneration of the race", and guarantees unity and a sense of national belonging.

This discourse was of course certainly not specific to American politics. However, the way Theodore Roosevelt sanctified war determined the way pro-war parties from the 1890s up to the 1960s justified their demands and policies that the federal government should wage wars as a means to reach "higher standards" of existence, for the benefit of reinvigorating patriotism at home as well as serving the advancement of ideals, perceived to be universal and undisputable, overseas.

The author however argues that war not only contributed most effectively in establishing the 20th century federal state and the modern sense of American nationality, but also precipitated its collapse. The US army had been established on racialist and segregationist principles, which moreover were radicalized in the early 20th century. Yet, the author argues, American immigrants and ethnic minorities, particularly black Americans, benefited collectively from their enrolment in America's 20th century wars.

The need for a massive infantry army which could be relatively quickly set up and operational meant the elevation of sections of the population previously castigated as desperately foreign and inassimilable to the highest levels of the American modern nationalist mythology, namely the "male warrior".

The author correctly points out that the second world war melted the different European minorities, before clearly separated in Rooseveltian terms between a superior Anglo-Saxon race and inferior eastern and southern races, into a hybrid "euro-American fighter", and went as far as recruiting Japanese Americans- in segregated regiments- straight out of the West coast concentration camps.

The immediacy of war also meant the opening of unprecedented opportunities to achieve equal treatment, namely for black American regiments which had participated in all American conflicts since their introduction during the Civil War. In Gerstle terms,

"World War II's stature as the good war, a stature that would only increase with time as Americans grew resentful of Korea and Vietnam, magnified the costs of the government's decision to fight the Axis powers with a segregated military."

Vietnam and the end of 20th century American nationalism

Segregation in the US military was abolished towards the end of the second world war, decades before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. However, the dismantling of the legal edifice of racial discrimination in both military and civilian realms proved illusory for the black American population. In this respect the Vietnam war proved a catalyst for the decline of the rational modern state in the United States. Vietnam is considered in American Crucible above all for the racial issues it helped to exacerbate at home.

The modern Rooseveltian nation state had managed America's wars in the 20th century with the same internal contradictions existing in the civil institutions, a civic sense of duty nevertheless racially-supervised and segregated. These contradictions however did not jeopardize the legitimacy of these wars or the authority of the federal state. The author points out clearly that Vietnam was vilified by millions of American citizens in the 1960s even as it was the first conflict to completely end segregation practices.

The Vietnam war allowed black non-commissioned officers to command multi-ethnic platoons, as well as the development of a new generation of black American career officers in the US army. The author nevertheless balances his point by insisting on the persistence of racial tensions within the military during the Vietnam war, and the development of black separatist ideologies amongst black American soldiers. Most of all, the over-representation of black Americans in front-line infantry regiments can be more accurately explained by a more subtle form of segregation.

The author does not stress enough in my view the incapacity of the US army, and American civic nationalism in general, to properly adapt the Rooseveltian concept of the patriotic fighter to a multi-ethnic reality. Regiments in Vietnam were in every sense multi-ethnic, but the solidarity and sense of camaraderie which may have incurred amongst multi-ethnic platoons did not serve the interests of the state: if anything, Americans fighting in Vietnam developed more than any other section of the American population a sense that state and authority were as absurd as they were criminal. Gerstle supports this argument with the fact that many officers, black and white, were killed during combat by their own subordinates.

The author focuses above all on the decisive impact of Vietnam had on the legitimacy of the US domestic state, more specifically as it triggered a strong rejection of the rational and assimilationist modern state, amongst increasing sections of white liberal and progressive circles. The Civil Rights movement 1960s had also enjoyed relatively significant support from white progressives in the United States. However, these groups were probably more determining in dismantling the undisputed authority of the US state in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Gerstle argues that the origins of the multiculturalist discourse, a product of white university academia, was the late 1960s response of the progressive Left to the impeding crisis on civic nationalism. Castigating civic nationalism as a travesty for the persistence of the racial order established under the Rooseveltian nation, these academic and policy-making groups believed the return to ethnic and racial senses of belonging would ensure a more viable political community. They associated civic forms of allegiance to the nation with the political and cultural supremacy of the WASP elite it had been serving.

Multiculturalism was in many ways an attempt to preserve social order and prevent urban race riots to undermine even further the rule of law in the United States. As Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive party was meant to replace and subdue more radical criticism of the corporate industrialisation in the United States 50 years before.

Gary Gerstle's emphasis on Theodore Roosevelt's legacy is in itself a most valid perspective to explain mainstream American politics in the last century, but it tends to undermine the more autonomous forms of political expression which cannot be credited to the Rooseveltian nation: The political weight of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s is for example hardly mentioned. Other trends such as the transformation of the status of Jewish Americans since the 1970s are too closely associated with the transformational power of the Rooseveltian nation.

Gary Gerstle's analysis could have benefited in my view from restricting its period of study to the end of the 1960s. In his last chapter on Vietnam, he admits the 50 year experience with the Rooseveltian national model to be the American variant of the worldwide establishment, and eventual decline of the modern developmental state.

Sharon's 2001 victory

Christopher Montel — 2001-05-04T00:00:00Z

These look like uncertain times dear friends... Junior is now head of the most powerful state in the world, and has already used his cool awesome military power against Saddam Husain, by killing more Iraqi civilians in the last recent bombing of Baghdad.

In another country not far from Iraq, and who strangely has the same kind of history as the United States- just replace American Indian native by Palestinian Arab, another right wing maniac has managed to fool the majority of the electorate into making them believe he will set things right...yes, ladies and gentlemen, Ariel Sharon is back in power.

I find it surprising that the Likud party fascists have chosen this-now very old- war criminal as their representative candidate for Israeli elections. Last time Sharon had power-and misused it completely in the Lebanese war in 1982-he forced all his Likud accomplices back in Jerusalem to withdraw from government, under pressure from opposition groups.

Remember...Sharon was finally able, as Chief Commander of the Tsahal (literally defence army), to invade Lebanon a second time in 1982. He led a kind of personal war, taking a series of initiatives which had not been really planned beforehand but supported by Mehanem Begins government, and ended up occupying half of Lebanon, up to Beirut, the capital. After having used several kinds of biological weapons (there is evidence phosphorous bombs were launched against Palestinian fighting groups...and hospitals) to control the chaotic situation in the Lebanese capital, torn between Christian and Muslim factions, the Israeli army and Sharon decided to stay there a while to make sure the Palestinian Liberation Organisation would definitely leave Lebanon for good.

In fact Sharon wanted to replace the Lebanese situation of the time- a divided country living in civil war between confessional groups, in which the main Palestinian military and political organisation had managed to retreat after 1970, by one that better suited his vision of the middle east: A new order in Israel and Lebanon, where the backward Arab Muslim populace would be subjugated by the cilisational power of the Christians and the Zionists. In other words, Sharon, his collaborators, supporters and sympathisers believed peace in Lebanon would be achieved the same way as in Israel: you invade, you impose your rule and sole power over those you invade, and when they start complaining about the fact that they have no freedom or equal opportunities as the people they are ruled by, you destroy them.

You dont exterminate them in one go, otherwise you get problems from the international community. But if you kill bit by bit, progressively, and then say it was legitimate defence, you can hope to have eradicated the Palestinian threat only in a few decades without too many problems or obstacles. You can even get to kill teenage fedayeens with napalm supplied by the United States in the Golan Heights, on an April morning of 1967. Its a very easy and straightforward policy Ariel is offering to his nation and to us in general, no humanitarian blathering, no ethical dead-weights...What is the life of an underdeveloped Arab next to the grandiose scheme of establishing the fascist, neo-Aryan concept of Zionist rule in the middle east? Dont ask Sharon to justify the genocide of the Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Chatila camps in Beirut in September 1982, he answered that this was not Israels war (hundreds of Palestinian refugees of all ages were assassinated by Christian militias on September 15, 1982).

OK, enough irony and bitterness. Now to the facts: Sharon and his Likud party are the major threat of the middle east, more than any bearded fanatic armed with a Kalashnikov and a Quran. It has now been proven statistically that for every Israeli who died since 1947, 50 Palestinians paid with their lives. Sharon called his 1982 operation in Lebanon, Blitzkrieg(Lightning war, which was Hitlers way of baptising his expansionist and extermination campaigns in eastern Europe)...How sick and ironic is that? He plans on blatantly developing more Zionist settlements in Palestinian territory, and will destroy any opposition to the settlements and justify them as preserving peace.

His status as a national hero in Israel does give him more political weigh and presence than the low-profile, Mapai (Israeli labour party) technocrat, Ehud Barak, who had neither the personal charisma, or enough effective power in his hands to make progresses in the peace negotiations or the status of Arabs and Muslims in Israel. This is probably what made him win the elections.

Frightened and ignorant sheep will always vote for the obvious, the ostentatious, the visible, even if it is a cover, an illusion. Is Sharon the selfless servant of the Zionist nation, who will make everything turn miraculously right, as his supporters and voters apparently believe? They should remember, once again, that he made the Likud lose the control of the state after 1982 for some time because of his foolish and criminal conduct during the Lebanese invasion, and made people throughout the world realise that Zionist Israel was not, or no more, the land of the martyrs of European anti-Semitism, but rather the revitalisation of racial supremacism and hate, of which Sharon and his voters were still the victims of half a century ago.