Notes From a Guantanamo Survivor
Posted on 12 January 2012 | No responses
I left Guantánamo Bay much as I had arrived almost five years earlier – shackled hand-to-waist, waist-to-ankles, and ankles to a bolt on the airplane floor. My ears and eyes were goggled, my head hooded, and even though I was the only detainee on the flight this time, I was drugged and guarded by at least 10 soldiers. This time though, my jumpsuit was American denim rather than Guantánamo orange. I later learned that my C-17 military flight from Guantánamo to Ramstein Air Base in my home country, Germany, cost more than $1 million.
When we landed, the American officers unshackled me before they handed me over to a delegation of German officials. The American officer offered to re-shackle my wrists with a fresh, plastic pair. But the commanding German officer strongly refused: “He has committed no crime; here, he is a free man.”
I was not a strong secondary school student in Bremen, but I remember learning that after World War II, the Americans insisted on a trial for war criminals at Nuremberg, and that event helped turn Germany into a democratic country. Strange, I thought, as I stood on the tarmac watching the Germans teach the Americans a basic lesson about the rule of law.
How did I arrive at this point? This Wednesday is the 10th anniversary of the opening of the detention camp at the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. I am not a terrorist. I have never been a member of Al Qaeda or supported them. I don’t even understand their ideas. I am the son of Turkish immigrants who came to Germany in search of work. My father has worked for years in a Mercedes factory. In 2001, when I was 18, I married a devout Turkish woman and wanted to learn more about Islam and to lead a better life. I did not have much money. Some of the elders in my town suggested I travel to Pakistan to learn to study the Koran with a religious group there.
I made my plans just before 9/11. I was 19 then and was naïve and did not think war in Afghanistan would have anything to do with Pakistan or my trip there. So I went ahead with my trip.
I was in Pakistan, on a public bus on my way to the airport to return to Germany when the police stopped the bus I was riding in. I was the only non-Pakistani on the bus – some people joke that my reddish hair makes me look Irish – so the police asked me to step off to look at my papers and ask some questions. German journalists told me the same thing happened to them. I was not a journalist, but a tourist, I explained. The police detained me but promised they would soon let me go to the airport. After a few days, the Pakistanis turned me over to American officials. At this point, I was relieved to be in American hands; Americans, I thought, would treat me fairly.
I later learned the United States paid a $3,000 bounty for me. I didn’t know it at the time, but apparently the United States distributed thousands of fliers all over Afghanistan, promising that people who turned over Taliban or Qaeda suspects would, in the words of one flier, get “enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life.” A great number of men wound up in Guantánamo as a result.
I was taken to Kandahar, in Afghanistan, where American interrogators asked me the same questions for several weeks: Where is Osama bin Laden? Was I with Al Qaeda? No, I told them, I was not with Al Qaeda. No, I had no idea where bin Laden was. I begged the interrogators to please call Germany and find out who I was. During their interrogations, they dunked my head under water and punched me in the stomach; they don’t call this waterboarding but it amounts to the same thing. I was sure I would drown.
At one point, I was chained to the ceiling of a building and hung by my hands for days. A doctor sometimes checked if I was O.K.; then I would be strung up again. The pain was unbearable.
After about two months in Kandahar, I was transferred to Guantánamo. There were more beatings, endless solitary confinement, freezing temperatures and extreme heat, days of forced sleeplessness. The interrogations continued always with the same questions. I told my story over and over – my name, my family, why I was in Pakistan. Nothing I said satisfied them. I realized my interrogators were not interested in the truth.
Despite all this, I looked for ways to feel human. I have always loved animals. I started hiding a piece of bread from my meals and feeding the iguanas that came to the fence. When officials discovered this, I was punished with 30 days in isolation and darkness.
I remained confused on basic questions: why was I here? With all its money and intelligence, the United States could not honestly believe I was Al Qaeda, could they?
After two and a half years at Guantánamo, in 2004, I was brought before what officials called a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, at which a military officer said I was an “enemy combatant” because a German friend had engaged in a suicide bombing in 2003 – after I was already at Guantánamo. I couldn’t believe my friend had done anything so crazy but, if he had, I didn’t know anything about it.
A couple of weeks later, I was told I had a visit from a lawyer. They took me to a special cell and in walked an American law professor, Baher Azmy. I didn’t believe he was a real lawyer at first; interrogators often lied to us and tried to trick us. But Mr. Azmy had a note written in Turkish which he had gotten from my mother, and that made me trust him. (My mother found a lawyer in my hometown in Germany who heard that lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights represented Guantánamo detainees; the center assigned Mr. Azmy my case.) He did not believe the evidence against me and quickly discovered that my “suicide bomber” friend was, in fact, alive and well in Germany.
Mr. Azmy, my mother and my German lawyer helped pressure the German government to secure my release. Recently, Mr. Azmy made public a number of American and German intelligence documents from 2002 to 2004 that showed both countries suspected I was innocent. One of the documents said American military guards thought I was dangerous because I had prayed during the American national anthem.
Now, five years after my release, I am trying to put my terrible memories behind me. I have remarried and have a beautiful baby daughter. Still, it is hard not to think about my time at Guantánamo and to wonder how it is possible that a democratic government can detain people in intolerable conditions and without a fair trial.
LA’s Worst Transit Decision
Posted on 19 December 2011 | No responses
What if Los Angeles had a Monorail? It almost happened back in 1963. http://www.monorails.org/tmspages/LA1963.html
Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators: Nick Hanauer
Posted on 4 December 2011 | 1 response
By Nick Hanauer
Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) — It is a tenet of American economic beliefs, and an article of faith for Republicans that is seldom contested by Democrats: If taxes are raised on the rich, job creation will stop.
Trouble is, sometimes the things that we know to be true are dead wrong. For the larger part of human history, for example, people were sure that the sun circles the Earth and that we are at the center of the universe. It doesn’t, and we aren’t. The conventional wisdom that the rich and businesses are our nation’s “job creators” is every bit as false.
I’m a very rich person. As an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, I’ve started or helped get off the ground dozens of companies in industries including manufacturing, retail, medical services, the Internet and software. I founded the Internet media company aQuantive Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. in 2007 for $6.4 billion. I was also the first non-family investor in Amazon.com Inc.
Even so, I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.
That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.
Theory of Evolution
When businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it is like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it’s the other way around.
It is unquestionably true that without entrepreneurs and investors, you can’t have a dynamic and growing capitalist economy. But it’s equally true that without consumers, you can’t have entrepreneurs and investors. And the more we have happy customers with lots of disposable income, the better our businesses will do.
That’s why our current policies are so upside down. When the American middle class defends a tax system in which the lion’s share of benefits accrues to the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.
And that’s what has been happening in the U.S. for the last 30 years.
Since 1980, the share of the nation’s income for fat cats like me in the top 0.1 percent has increased a shocking 400 percent, while the share for the bottom 50 percent of Americans has declined 33 percent. At the same time, effective tax rates on the superwealthy fell to 16.6 percent in 2007, from 42 percent at the peak of U.S. productivity in the early 1960s, and about 30 percent during the expansion of the 1990s. In my case, that means that this year, I paid an 11 percent rate on an eight-figure income.
One reason this policy is so wrong-headed is that there can never be enough superrich Americans to power a great economy. The annual earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times greater than those of the average American, but we don’t buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff. My family owns three cars, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. Like everyone else, I go out to eat with friends and family only occasionally.
It’s true that we do spend a lot more than the average family. Yet the one truly expensive line item in our budget is our airplane (which, by the way, was manufactured in France by Dassault Aviation SA), and those annual costs are mostly for fuel (from the Middle East). It’s just crazy to believe that any of this is more beneficial to our economy than hiring more teachers or police officers or investing in our infrastructure.
More Shoppers Needed
I can’t buy enough of anything to make up for the fact that millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans can’t buy any new clothes or enjoy any meals out. Or to make up for the decreasing consumption of the tens of millions of middle-class families that are barely squeaking by, buried by spiraling costs and trapped by stagnant or declining wages.
If the average American family still got the same share of income they earned in 1980, they would have an astounding $13,000 more in their pockets a year. It’s worth pausing to consider what our economy would be like today if middle-class consumers had that additional income to spend.
It is mathematically impossible to invest enough in our economy and our country to sustain the middle class (our customers) without taxing the top 1 percent at reasonable levels again. Shifting the burden from the 99 percent to the 1 percent is the surest and best way to get our consumer-based economy rolling again.
Significant tax increases on the about $1.5 trillion in collective income of those of us in the top 1 percent could create hundreds of billions of dollars to invest in our economy, rather than letting it pile up in a few bank accounts like a huge clot in our nation’s economic circulatory system.
Consider, for example, that a puny 3 percent surtax on incomes above $1 million would be enough to maintain and expand the current payroll tax cut beyond December, preventing a $1,000 increase on the average worker’s taxes at the worst possible time for the economy. With a few more pennies on the dollar, we could invest in rebuilding schools and infrastructure. And even if we imposed a millionaires’ surtax and rolled back the Bush- era tax cuts for those at the top, the taxes on the richest Americans would still be historically low, and their incomes would still be astronomically high.
We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years. Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Middle-class consumers do, and when they thrive, U.S. businesses grow and profit. That’s why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for both the middle class and the rich.
So let’s give a break to the true job creators. Let’s tax the rich like we once did and use that money to spur growth by putting purchasing power back in the hands of the middle class. And let’s remember that capitalists without customers are out of business.
This Is What Revolution Looks Like
Posted on 15 November 2011 | No responses
by: Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed
Occupy Wall Street protesters react and wave copies of the court order allowing them back into Zuccotti Park as police block them from re-entering, in New York, November 15, 2011. Hundreds of police officers arrested about 200 demonstrators early Tuesday in an operation to clear the nearly two-month-old camp.
Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress but they cannot lead. They can steal but they cannot share. They can talk but they cannot speak. They are as dead and useless to us as the water-soaked books, tents, sleeping bags, suitcases, food boxes and clothes that were tossed by sanitation workers Tuesday morning into garbage trucks in New York City. They have no ideas, no plans and no vision for the future.
Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland and New York with their baton-wielding cops into a fool’s paradise. They think they can clean up “the mess”—always employing the language of personal hygiene and public security—by making us disappear. They think we will all go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America, including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth protecting or preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of millions of dollars are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of collective wealth, human capital and natural resources, a nation where the poor do not eat and workers do not work, a nation where the sick die and children go hungry, a nation where the consent of the governed and the voice of the people is a cruel joke.
Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in 24-hour cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system of popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be thankful for the scraps we toss. Chant back to us our phrases about democracy, greatness and freedom. Vote in our rigged political theater. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide corporations with huge profits. Stand by mutely as our bipartisan congressional super committee, either through consensus or cynical dysfunction, plunges you into a society without basic social services including unemployment benefits. Pay for the crimes of Wall Street.
The rogues’ gallery of Wall Street crooks, such as Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs, Howard Milstein at New York Private Bank & Trust, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers and Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase & Co., no doubt think it’s over. They think it is back to the business of harvesting what is left of America to swell their personal and corporate fortunes. But they no longer have any concept of what is happening around them. They are as mystified and clueless about these uprisings as the courtiers at Versailles or in the Forbidden City who never understood until the very end that their world was collapsing. The billionaire mayor of New York, enriched by a deregulated Wall Street, is unable to grasp why people would spend two months sleeping in an open park and marching on banks. He says he understands that the Occupy protests are “cathartic” and “entertaining,” as if demonstrating against the pain of being homeless and unemployed is a form of therapy or diversion, but that it is time to let the adults handle the affairs of state. Democratic and Republican mayors, along with their parties, have sold us out. But for them this is the beginning of the end.
The historian Crane Brinton in his book “Anatomy of a Revolution” laid out the common route to revolution. The preconditions for successful revolution, Brinton argued, are discontent that affects nearly all social classes, widespread feelings of entrapment and despair, unfulfilled expectations, a unified solidarity in opposition to a tiny power elite, a refusal by scholars and thinkers to continue to defend the actions of the ruling class, an inability of government to respond to the basic needs of citizens, a steady loss of will within the power elite itself and defections from the inner circle, a crippling isolation that leaves the power elite without any allies or outside support and, finally, a financial crisis. Our corporate elite, as far as Brinton was concerned, has amply fulfilled these preconditions. But it is Brinton’s next observation that is most worth remembering. Revolutions always begin, he wrote, by making impossible demands that if the government met would mean the end of the old configurations of power. The second stage, the one we have entered now, is the unsuccessful attempt by the power elite to quell the unrest and discontent through physical acts of repression.
I have seen my share of revolts, insurgencies and revolutions, from the guerrilla conflicts in the 1980s in Central America to the civil wars in Algeria, the Sudan and Yemen, to the Palestinian uprising to the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania as well as the wars in the former Yugoslavia. George Orwell wrote that all tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but that once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force. We have now entered the era of naked force. The vast million-person bureaucracy of the internal security and surveillance state will not be used to stop terrorism but to try and stop us.
Despotic regimes in the end collapse internally. Once the foot soldiers who are ordered to carry out acts of repression, such as the clearing of parks or arresting or even shooting demonstrators, no longer obey orders, the old regime swiftly crumbles. When the aging East German dictator Erich Honecker was unable to get paratroopers to fire on protesting crowds in Leipzig, the regime was finished. The same refusal to employ violence doomed the communist governments in Prague and Bucharest. I watched in December 1989 as the army general that the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had depended on to crush protests condemned him to death on Christmas Day. Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak lost power once they could no longer count on the security forces to fire into crowds.
The process of defection among the ruling class and security forces is slow and often imperceptible. These defections are advanced through a rigid adherence to nonviolence, a refusal to respond to police provocation and a verbal respect for the blue-uniformed police, no matter how awful they can be while wading into a crowd and using batons as battering rams against human bodies. The resignations of Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s deputy, Sharon Cornu, and the mayor’s legal adviser and longtime friend, Dan Siegel, in protest over the clearing of the Oakland encampment are some of the first cracks in the edifice. “Support Occupy Oakland, not the 1% and its government facilitators,” Siegel tweeted after his resignation.
There were times when I entered the ring as a boxer and knew, as did the spectators, that I was woefully mismatched. Ringers, experienced boxers in need of a tuneup or a little practice, would go to the clubs where semi-pros fought, lie about their long professional fight records, and toy with us. Those fights became about something other than winning. They became about dignity and self-respect. You fought to say something about who you were as a human being. These bouts were punishing, physically brutal and demoralizing. You would get knocked down and stagger back up. You would reel backwards from a blow that felt like a cement block. You would taste the saltiness of your blood on your lips. Your vision would blur. Your ribs, the back of your neck and your abdomen would ache. Your legs would feel like lead. But the longer you held on, the more the crowd in the club turned in your favor. No one, even you, thought you could win. But then, every once in a while, the ringer would get overconfident. He would get careless. He would become a victim of his own hubris. And you would find deep within yourself some new burst of energy, some untapped strength and, with the fury of the dispossessed, bring him down. I have not put on a pair of boxing gloves for 30 years. But I felt this twinge of euphoria again in my stomach this morning, this utter certainty that the impossible is possible, this realization that the mighty will fall.
Grassroots Campaign: Max Skolnik
Posted on 8 November 2011 | No responses
Max Skolnik loves his neighborhood, his community and wants to make real change – grassroots style.
Job Description: Servant of the People
Posted on 31 October 2011 | 1 response
It sounds trite, even naïve. But it isn’t. It’s a brutal concept. It demands discipline, concentration, humility and courage. And honesty. Our leaders were supposed to be our servants. They were elected “to serve”. We call it “service”. It’s one of the primary reasons our forefathers spilt all that blood. Not to mention they conceived that at some point each of us (who was at all capable and 99% of us are) was to set down the plow (or spread sheet) and for awhile do our duty to run that government that was doing all this serving.
I’m not claiming the thing ever worked perfectly, but who among us now even imagines that our representatives serve any of us that isn’t a millionaire, billionaire or that new form of “people” (thanks to the Supreme Court) – the corporations.
How did we get into this topsy-turvy house of mirrors? How do we get ourselves out? I think we have to start by more of us becoming those servants ourselves (the most realistic place to start is in local government). Are you unemployed; a student with no prospects? Are you working part time or retired?
Run for office. Or help someone you trust run. Why not?
And we have to stop getting sucked in by the media hype that anyone at the top is better than the rest of us. (Another reason our forefathers spilt so much blood – hatred of royalty.) And being rich, famous, going to an Ivy League or figuring out how to bilk pension funds does NOT make you royalty. Being greedy and lying doesn’t make you royalty. In fact nothing makes you special. A superior class was a lot of nonsense from the start and George Washington et al knew it.
Our leaders were meant to serve us. Plain and simple.
Otherwise throw ‘em out. You have the vote. Or run yourself, but you better pay attention – you’re a servant to your neighbors, friends, enemies, relatives. No lavish parties (not at this moment in our Republic’s tottering history). No limos with fluttering flags, no special Health Plans just for you. You’re a servant and you’d better be prepared to risk everything (even your life) for those you serve.
And then, ironically, you just might make it to the pinnacle of what it is to be a citizen, a human being. You just might make it into the history books. Or not. It doesn’t matter. You’ll have done what’s right and, frankly, that’s all that counts.
Good luck.
To all of us.
Grassroots Goes to College
Posted on 25 October 2011 | No responses
Grassroots sneak peeks ignite college student’s passion for politics.
More at http://www.grassrootsthefilm.com and https://www.facebook.com/GrassrootsTheFilm
World Becoming Less Violent: Despite Global Conflict, Statistics Show Violence In Steady Decline World More Peaceful
Posted on 23 October 2011 | No responses
By SETH BORENSTEIN
WASHINGTON — It seems as if violence is everywhere, but it’s really on the run.
Yes, thousands of people have died in bloody unrest from Africa to Pakistan, while terrorists plot bombings and kidnappings. Wars drag on in Iraq and Afghanistan. In peaceful Norway, a man massacred 69 youths in July. In Mexico, headless bodies turn up, victims of drug cartels. This month eight people died in a shooting in a California hair salon.
Yet, historically, we’ve never had it this peaceful.
That’s the thesis of three new books, including one by prominent Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Statistics reveal dramatic reductions in war deaths, family violence, racism, rape, murder and all sorts of mayhem.
In his book, Pinker writes: “The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species.”
And it runs counter to what the mass media is reporting and essentially what we feel in our guts.
Pinker and other experts say the reality is not painted in bloody anecdotes, but demonstrated in the black and white of spreadsheets and historical documents. They tell a story of a world moving away from violence.
In his new book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,” Pinker makes the case that a smarter, more educated world is becoming more peaceful in several statistically significant ways. His findings are based on peer-reviewed studies published by other academics using examinations of graveyards, surveys and historical records:
_ The number of people killed in battle – calculated per 100,000 population – has dropped by 1,000-fold over the centuries as civilizations evolved. Before there were organized countries, battles killed on average more than 500 out of every 100,000 people. In 19th century France, it was 70. In the 20th century with two world wars and a few genocides, it was 60. Now battlefield deaths are down to three-tenths of a person per 100,000.
_ The rate of genocide deaths per world population was 1,400 times higher in 1942 than in 2008.
_ There were fewer than 20 democracies in 1946. Now there are close to 100. Meanwhile, the number of authoritarian countries has dropped from a high of almost 90 in 1976 to about 25 now.
Pinker says one of the main reasons for the drop in violence is that we are smarter. IQ tests show that the average teenager is smarter with each generation. The tests are constantly adjusted to keep average at 100, and a teenager who now would score a 100 would have scored a 118 in 1950 and a 130 in 1910. So this year’s average kid would have been a near-genius a century ago. And that increase in intelligence translates into a kinder, gentler world, Pinker says.
“As we get smarter, we try to think up better ways of getting everyone to turn their swords into plowshares at the same time,” Pinker said in an interview. “Human life has become more precious than it used to be.”
Pinker argued his case in a commentary this past week in the scientific journal Nature. He has plenty of charts and graphs to back up his claims, including evidence beyond wartime deaths – evidence that our everyday lives are also less violent:
_ Murder in European countries has steadily fallen from near 100 per 100,000 people in the 14th and 15th centuries to about 1 per 100,000 people now.
_ Murder within families. The U.S. rate of husbands being killed by their wives has dropped from 1.2 per 100,000 in 1976 to just 0.2. For wives killed by their husbands, the rate has slipped from 1.4 to 0.8 over the same time period.
_ Rape in the United States is down 80 percent since 1973. Lynchings, which used to occur at a rate of 150 a year, have disappeared.
_ Discrimination against blacks and gays is down, as is capital punishment, the spanking of children, and child abuse.
But if numbers are too inaccessible, Pinker is more than happy to provide the gory stories illustrating our past violence. “It is easy to forget how dangerous life used to be, how deeply brutality was once woven into the fabric of daily existence,” Pinker writes in his book.
He examines body counts, rapes, sacrifice and slavery in the Bible, using an estimate of 1.2 million deaths detailed in the Old Testament. He describes forms of torture used in the Middle Ages and even notes the nastiness behind early day fairy tales, such as the evil queen’s four gruesome methods for killing Snow White along with a desire to eat her lungs and liver.
Even when you add in terrorism, the world is still far less violent, Pinker says.
“Terrorism doesn’t account for many deaths. Sept. 11 was just off the scale. There was never a terrorist attack before or after that had as many deaths. What it does is generate fear,” he said.
It’s hard for many people to buy the decline in violence. Even those who deal in peace for a living at first couldn’t believe it when the first academics started counting up battle deaths and recognized the trends.
In 1998, Andrew Mack, then head of strategic planning for U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, said a look at the statistics showed the world was becoming less violent. The reaction from his professional peacekeeping colleagues?
“Pffft, it’s not true,” they told Mack, arguing that the 1990s had to be the worst decade in U.N. history. It wasn’t even close.
Joshua Goldstein, a professor of international relations at American University and author of “Winning the War on War,” has also been telling the same story as Pinker, but from a foreign policy point of view. At each speech he gives, people bring up America’s lengthy wars in the Middle East. “It’s been a hard message to get through,” he acknowledged.
“We see the atrocities and they are atrocious,” Goldstein said. “The blood is going to be just as red on the television screens.”
Mack, who’s now with Simon Fraser University in Canada, credits the messy, inefficient and heavily political peacekeeping process at the U.N., the World Bank and thousands of non-governmental organizations for helping curb violence.
The “Human Security Report 2009/2010,” a project led by Mack and funded by several governments, is a worldwide examination of war and violence and has been published as a book. It cites jarringly low numbers. While the number of wars has increased by 25 percent, they’ve been minor ones.
The average annual battle death toll has dropped from nearly 10,000 per conflict in the 1950s to less than 1,000 in the 21st century. And the number of deadliest wars – those that kill at least 1,000 people a year – has fallen by 78 percent since 1988.
Mack and Goldstein emphasize how hard society and peacekeepers have worked to reduce wars, focusing on action taken to tamp down violence, while Pinker focuses on cultural and thought changes that make violence less likely. But all three say those elements are interconnected.
Even the academics who disagree with Pinker, Goldstein and Mack, say the declining violence numbers are real.
“The facts are not in dispute here; the question is what is going on,” John Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.”
“It’s been 21 years since the Cold War ended and the United States has been at war for 14 out of those 21 years,” Mearsheimer said. “If war has been burned out of the system, why do we have NATO and why has NATO been pushed eastward…? Why are we spending more money on defense than all other countries in the world put together?”
What’s happening is that the U.S. is acting as a “pacifier” keeping the peace all over the world, Mearsheimer said. He said like-minded thinkers, who call themselves “realists” believe “that power matters because the best way to survive is to be really powerful.” And he worries that a strengthening China is about to upset the world power picture and may make the planet bloodier again.
And Goldstein points out that even though a nuclear attack hasn’t occurred in 66 years – one nuclear bomb could change this trend in an instant.
Pinker said looking at the statistics and how violent our past was and how it is less so now, “makes me appreciate things like democracy, the United Nations, like literacy.”
He and Goldstein believe it’s possible that an even greater drop in violence could occur in the future.
Goldstein says there’s a turn on a cliche that is apt: “We’re actually going from the fire to the frying pan. And that’s progress. It’s not as bad as the fire.”
Occupy Your Own Backyard
Posted on 18 October 2011 | 3 responses
When did it happen? How? A small gathering in Zuccotti Park? Ten sleeping bags? Or was it Cairo? A different language. Same problem. Even worse. Was it the 2008 Crash? Or the hope of Obama, dashed as the Geithners and Summers swept in after the swearing in? Or was it Reagan sworn in, followed by his parade of massive deregulations, buttressed by Clinton, then Bush, while CEOs salaries skyrocketed and war was (more or less) declared wherever there was oil? And greed became our religion, presided over by a bought and paid-for Congress, White House, Media?
It doesn’t really matter how it happened, because here we are. Something has shifted.
History is back, ready or not, with her massive gears slowly turning. But what does each of us do about it? All those signs in the Occupy-So-Many-Cities-Across-the- Globe, with so many different grievances – why isn’t there some clarity here? Why? Well, because there ARE so many grievances. There ARE so many things to fix.
That’s where we are: so many things to fix.
That’s our plight/challenge/curse/blessing. And nobody’s going to do anything about it at the top because they’re fat and happy with their salaries, jobs, private healthcare plans, pensions, private jets, swimming pools and marble bathrooms.
But history is back. So what do we do about it?
Well, we can march and protest and live in sleeping bags and tents. This is completely legal in our country (and in most of Europe). It’s legal. And important. Our forefathers were clear about this. Very, very clear. It’s how it all started with clearing up the British problem.
Marching and protesting are legal in the United States of America.
But marching and protesting only get you so far and we still have a democracy on the books here, so why not use it? Really use it? Why not take a deep breath and…
…RUN FOR OFFICE this election cycle. LOCAL OFFICE. Are you working part time? Are you unemployed? Are you a graduating student and know (finally clearly know ) that there are NO JOBS out there, except for mowing your parent’s lawn (surrounding a house that may soon be sold off)? Or are you that parent, who’s about to lose his/her house, along with your pension?
Why not RUN FOR LOCAL OFFICE? What else have you got to do?
Forget national politics, as Howard Schulz, the CEO of Starbucks, has been urging. Forget it! That’s a billionaire’s chess game. And forget Congress and the Senate. It’s millionaires playing political polo with each other.
The real game in town is in YOUR town — local city councils, town mayors, county commissioners. LOCAL. LOCAL. LOCAL. Are you a returning vet? Run for sheriff. Are you a parent upset about your kids having no computers in school? Run for the school board. A math geek? County treasurer. Take a look at what offices are available in your neighborhood and RUN.
You wanna fight corruption? Look in your own back yard, where the developers and corporate franchises buy and sell the local politicos like hot dogs. Where do your local tax dollars go? You’ll shudder. But stop shuddering; stop complaining; stop being depressed and giving into a sense of mass hopelessness – RUN FOR OFFICE.
Start running now. There’s time. Lots of time and lots of help (more on that later). Democrat? Republican? Independent? It doesn’t matter. Enough of the hate and name-calling.
Stand up for what you believe and do it with grace and at least little confidence (we’re all scared when we try something new). Ask your friends for help – money, time, advice. Ask your parents, your children, your grandparents (or grandchildren) or that rich uncle who can write a big check or the poor uncle (or aunt) who can go door to door.
Let’s take back our democracy one house at a time. It’s time.
History has decreed it, as with our rag-tag forefathers. Let’s get back a little gumption. Let’s swallow down our sense of mass meaninglessness and bring back individual meaning to what can (once again) be a great country and a great back yard.
Occupy Your Own Life…
Posted on 17 October 2011 | 1 response
I finished shooting a TV show late Friday night in NYC. Early Saturday morning I went up to Hartford to show my new film, Grassroots, passing the Occupy Hartford tents on my way from the train station to Trinity College where we were showing the film to students to urge them to run for local office, like the characters in the movie.
We have already shown the film at a number of other colleges, but something has been happening these last few weeks, something one can feel when showing this film, then talking to students afterwards.
Something has happened in a few weeks – a ripple, an edginess, a sense of excitement, disorientation and focus. There was much talk after the screening among the Trinity students about their discomfort with being apathetic and yet this all reminds me of my college years, the strange lurching forward of a movement against a war in the 60s. It wasn’t graceful or easy back then, or anything like what is in the history books that these kids have read.
What I remember happening in the 60s was kind of like what I felt on Saturday night with those students – something starting to move, some slow, seemingly innocuous gear clicking into place.
The point is that I’m kind of back here on this website after a lot of work (TV movie, TV shows). I’m back on this site (promises, promises – or maybe it’s a threat). And the point is that I’m back with this tremulous sense that something is in fact happening here on our planet (and on this website, which started more than two years ago, about asking the question “What’s the point?”)
A point seems to be emerging…
And then yesterday afternoon, back in Manhattan I went down to Occupy Wall Street — this sea of color and hand painted signs at the base of glass gods to steel, stealing and arrogance – humans at the feet of an empire of skyscrapers, starting to speak out, to sing, to chant — young people once again leading the way — graceful, because in some strange way their actions lack grace and instead are informed by something for more precious – human, emotional content, which is perhaps the most graceful thing of all…
