Palestinians Honour Dead from 1976 Clashes with Israeli Army
by Jonathan Cook
Dissident Voice
ARREBEH — Palestinians across the Middle East were due to commemorate Land Day today, marking the anniversary of clashes in 1976 in which six unarmed Palestinians were shot dead by the Israeli army as it tried to break up a general strike.
Although Land Day is one of the most important anniversaries in the Palestinian calendar, sometimes referred to as the Palestinians’ national day, the historical event it marks is little spoken of and rarely studied.
“Maybe its significance is surprising given the magnitude of other events in Palestinian history,” said Hatim Kanaaneh, 71, a doctor, who witnessed the military invasion of his village.
“But what makes Land Day resonate with Palestinians everywhere is that it was the first time Palestinians inside Israel stood together and successfully resisted Israel’s goal of confiscating their land.”
The confrontation took place between the army and a group usually referred to as “Israeli Arabs”, the small minority of Palestinians who managed to remain in their homes during the 1948 war that led to the founding of Israel. Today they number 1.2 million, or nearly one-fifth of Israel’s population.
“We were given citizenship by Israel, but have always been treated as an enemy, perceived of as a threat to the state’s Jewishness,” said Dr Kanaaneh, who last year published his memoir, A Doctor in Galilee, which offers a rare account in English of Palestinian life inside Israel during the Land Day period.
In 1976, Dr Kanaaneh, having completed his medical studies at Harvard University in the United States, was the only physician in Arrabeh.
Israel crushed organised political activity among Israel’s Palestinian citizens between 1948 and 1966, Dr Kanaaneh said. Nonetheless, popular frustration had mounted as the state expropriated privately owned Palestinian land to build new communities for Jewish citizens, many of them recent immigrants.
During military rule, historians have noted, vast swathes of land were taken from Palestinians, both from refugees in exile and from Israel’s own citizens. Jews had bought only six per cent of Palestine by the time of the 1948 war, but today the state has nationalised 93 per cent of Israel’s territory.
“Government policy was explicitly to make the land Jewish – or Judaise it, as it was called,” Dr Kanaaneh said.
The announcement in the mid-1970s of the confiscation of a further 2,000 hectares led to the creation of a new body, the National Committee for the Defence of Arab Lands, which provided a more assertive political leadership.
The minority’s decision to strike, Dr Kanaaneh said, shocked the Israeli authorities, which were not used to challenges to official policy. “Both sides understood the significance of the strike. For the first time we were acting as a national minority, and Israel was very sensitive to anything that suggested we had a national identity or a unified agenda, especially over a key resource like land.”
Although the strike was strictly observed by Palestinians throughout Israel, the focus of the protest were three villages in the central Galilee that faced the loss of a large area of prime agricultural land: Arrabeh, Sakhnin and Deir Hanna.
The prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and his defence minster, Shimon Peres, acted on the eve of the strike.
“What was surprising was that they didn’t send in the police, as you’d expect when dealing with citizens of a country, but the army,” Dr Kanaaneh said.
The government’s original plan, he said, was to break the strike and force employees to go to work, but when villagers began throwing stones, the army imposed a curfew.
“When a neighbour called me to attend to his wife who had gone into labour, I walked out of my house towards an armoured vehicle waving my stethoscope,” Dr Kanaaneh said. “A soldier aimed his rifle straight at me and I hurried back inside.”
Ahmed Khalaila, who was 18 and living in Sakhnin, remembered being woken early by loudspeakers. “Soldiers were calling out that we must not leave the house … We couldn’t even look out of the windows,” he said.
When a neighbour stepped outside her house, she was shot and injured, Mr Khalaila said. He and his older brother, Khader, tried to help the woman. When they were about 50 metres from her, Khader was shot in the head.
“He was still breathing and we hoped he could be saved, but there were checkpoints at all the entrances to the village. We knew no ambulance would be coming for him.”
Eventually the family managed to get him into a car and drove towards the nearest hospital. Held at a checkpoint, Mr Khalaila said, the family watched as Khader bled to death as he lay across his younger brother’s legs on the back seat. Khader was 24 and recently married.
No one ever came to investigate what had happened, or offered the family compensation. “It was as if a bird had died,” he said. “No one was interested; no questions were asked in the parliament. Nothing.”
As well as the six deaths, hundreds more Palestinians were injured and sweeping arrests were made of political activists.
Dr Kanaaneh said the stiff resistance mounted by the villagers eventually forced the government to revoke the expropriation order.
Victory, however, was far from clear cut. The next year, Ariel Sharon, as agriculture minister, announced a programme of new Jewish settlements called “lookouts” in the Galilee “to prevent control of state lands by foreigners”, meaning Israel’s own Palestinian citizens. The three villages were surrounded by the lookout communities, which came to be known collectively as Misgav regional council.
“They were intended to be agricultural communities, but Land Day stopped that,” Dr Kanaaneh said. “Instead they became small bedroom communities, and much of the land we defended was passed to Misgav’s jurisdiction.
“Today the owners of the land pay taxes to the regional council rather than their own municipalities, and Misgav can decide, if it wants, to try to confiscate the land again. We may have got our land back, but it is not really in our hands.”
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). Read other articles by Jonathan, or visit Jonathan's website.
Share This
Tecpatl
Our Word is Our Weapon, if you have anything you would like us to publish please send us an email @ maiz_centeotl_chicomecoatl@riseup.net
Subscribe To Maiz Today!!!!
Posts
All Comments
4/1/09
"Hay que dialogar con los narcotraficantes"
Entrevista a Johan Galtung, politólogo, profesor de Estudios sobre la Paz en la Universidad de Hawái y rector de la Transcend Peace University
Matteo Dean
Proceso
La solución del conflicto entre el gobierno mexicano y los cárteles del narcotráfico pasa por el dialogo entre las partes, afirma el investigador Johan Galtung, quien ha participado en los diálogos de paz y en procesos de mediación en más de 40 conflictos internacionales.
"Esta actitud del gobierno mexicano de no tomar contacto, de que ellos (los narcotraficantes) no merecen ser aceptados como parte de un proceso, no ayuda para nada; es lo mismo que EU está haciendo con Hamas en Palestina, pero hay que tomar contacto, hay que dialogar".
La idea, dice, "es encontrar compatibilidad de objetivos entre las partes". Y pone un ejemplo: "El narcotráfico no quiere que la gente muera. La gente en México quiere lo mismo y quizás esa es una base de partida para un dialogo: evitar la muerte".
En entrevista, Galtung menciona que en México "hay un tipo de triángulo (en el conflicto): los narcos, la gente en la miseria y los militares".
En el triángulo, el gobierno mexicano "se sitúa ahí abajo a la derecha, atrás de los militares".
Según el investigador, la hipótesis "es que comenzamos con la miseria y esta implica al narcotráfico, porque la gente para salir de la pobreza acepta el trabajo que se le ofrece en las actividades ilícitas del narco, y todo esto tiene como efecto la reacción del gobierno, que utiliza a los militares".
Y remata:
"Hay que entender que también los militares son pobres y entonces ellos también aceptan trabajar con el narco, porque pagan mucho mejor que el gobierno", situación que termina con "el clásico círculo vicioso".
El también fundador de International Peace Research Institut y de la red Transcend sostiene que para la solución del conflicto hay que instaurar un diálogo entre las partes.
Primero, explica, "hay que dialogar, para entender mejor las razones que permiten al narcotráfico existir".
Su visión es que una de las causas principales del importante éxito del narcotráfico reside en la existencia "de una enorme miseria en México".
Si la gente tuviera medios sólidos para sobrevivir, agrega, "muchos saldrían del narco".
E insiste: "Si pensamos que una de las razones porque la gente acepta trabajar para los cárteles es la de salir de la miseria, se deben ofrecer válidas alternativas económicas a la población".
En este caso, "el diálogo con la base del narcotráfico podría tener el resultado de demostrarles que hay alternativas para salir de la pobreza", y esto significaría un paso adelante hacia la solución del problema, "porque los líderes (del narcotráfico) no pueden ganar sin el apoyo de la gente de abajo".
Pero no todo el peso recae en México, dice, Galtung ya que "parte de la solución (al problema del narcotráfico) pasa por Estados Unidos", en el sentido de abatir la elevada demanda de drogas que hay en ese país.
Al hacer un análisis de la sociedad norteamericana, el exprofesor de la Columbia University de New York señala es tajante que "los norteamericanos deben entender que si hay una demanda tan elevada en su país, debe de existir una enfermedad social, que puede ser enajenación, competencia excesiva, falta de solidaridad, soledad".
Y lanza una comparación: "La cadena del narcotráfico es como un alfabeto: las A están en México, pero las Z están en Estados Unidos y son ciudadanos norteamericanos. El hueco está a la mitad, en las M y N, en donde hay familias mexicanas pobres dispuestas a llenar ese hueco. Sobre todo con ellas hay que dialogar".
Pero advierte: "En esta crisis económica, la cantidad de desempleados en México y en Estados Unidos va a producir no solamente una alza en la demanda de drogas, sino también potencialmente una alza en el número de empleados por el narco".
Militarización del país
En lo que respecta al rol que la clase política mexicana podría jugar en la llamada "guerra al narcotráfico", el mediador noruego dice que "por lo pronto ésta juega el papel del espectador".
El problema de los políticos, continúa, es que "no quieren abolir a la miseria en México y esto sucede por al menos dos razones: por un lado tienen miedo de que la gente al salir de la miseria les cobre factura de los malos tratos recibidos en años de pobreza, y por el otro lado creen que debe de existir gente pobre y mal pagada para poder echar a andar la máquina económica".
Sobre este punto concluye: "Para ellos el problema principal no es la miseria, sino el narcotráfico, porque ofrece una alternativa a la miseria, de manera que la verdadera tragedia es la falta de iniciativa política para eliminar la miseria más profunda en el país".
Al referirse al actual nivel de militarización, señala que también responde a otras exigencias del gobierno y de la clase política mexicana.
Abunda: "Tienen miedo de 2010. El efecto simbólico que juegan el bicentenario de la Independencia y el centenario de la Revolución puede ser muy elevado".
En este aspecto, Galtung sostiene que "la simbología es importante porque define un intervalo en el tiempo".
Además, dice, el gobierno mexicano "sí tiene miedo de una revolución, pero también de una secesión en el sur del país, de los estados de origen maya, como Chiapas y Yucatán".
Entonces, "la presencia del narcotráfico también puede ser un pretexto para mantener militarizado al país, como en Colombia, donde con el pretexto del narcotráfico, se conduce la guerra en contra de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC)".
La presencia de militares en la sociedad, sugiere el noruego, responde a las necesidades de "acostumbrar a la gente a esa presencia, de comunicar a posibles revolucionarios: 'estamos preparados', y finalmente de acostumbrar a los mismos militares a estar en las calles, en la sociedad".
50 años: 100 conflictos
Johan Galtung, quien estuvo presente en calidad de mediador en más de 40 conflictos a lo largo de los últimos 50 años, recuerda que hubo éxitos en su obra de mediación, pero también algunos fracasos, aunque "prefiero llamarles no éxitos, en lugar de fracasos, porque en este ámbito hay que pensar en el largo plazo, no en el corto".
Sobre las recientes declaraciones de exponentes de la administración de Barack Obama, en el sentido de que en Afganistán es necesario encontrar un diálogo con la parte moderada de los rebeldes talibanes, Galtung dice que no cree que Estados Unidos quiera realmente dialogar, "más bien creo que quieren hacer lo que hicieron en Iraq, es decir, corromper a grupos (de poder) para que no maten a estadounidenses".
Es un plan que quiere aparentar que Estados Unidos gana, "pues para ellos es muy importante ganar". Y cuenta que en 2001, inmediatamente después de la invasión ordenada por George W. Bush a Afganistán, "había políticos afganos que decían que sin talibanes no se puede gobernar en el país".
Los mismos políticos afganos decían que "sin talibanes iban a tener heroína y corrupción". Y lo hicieron sin ellos, y ahí está: heroína y corrupción". Entonces, "la solución es un gobierno de coalición, porque los talibanes son los únicos que tienen cierta fibra moral en el país".
Respecto del conflicto en la exYugoslavia, el también exdirector de la Universidad Internacional de Dubrovnik (en el sur de Croacia) afirma haber participado muy activamente en los diálogos de paz: "La única situación realmente resuelta es la de Eslovenia", donde la independencia fue inmediatamente reconocida por el entorno internacional y su economía apoyada de inmediato por la comunidad internacional, además de que se impidieron las llamadas limpiezas étnicas".
En los demás países, afirma, no hay soluciones. "Se podía solucionar creando una federación. Esa era la única solución, pues son territorios multinacionales y no se puede insistir en lo contrario".
Luego habla de Kosovo, donde hace pocas semanas se festejó el primer año de independencia:
"Lo de Kosovo es una locura. Fui partidario de una solución de independencia, pero no se puede utilizar a un estado unitario para la represión hacia los serbios. Entonces, la solución sería un Kosovo con una constitución parecida a la suiza, en la que se reconocen la distintas minorías, a las que se les otorga cierta autonomía".
Sobre el caso palestino, Galtung afirma haber tenido "mucha experiencia en ese conflicto", pues "mi primera intervención de mediador fue en 1964".
Explica: "Creo que es necesario crear a una comunidad multinacional regional que incluya a Israel, y esto se debe realizar gracias a la mediación de la Unión Europea".
Israel, afirma, "tiene que dejar la idea del sionismo y con un Israel más modesto algo se podrá hacer".
Y apunta que en su calidad de mediador ha hablado con todos los protagonistas del conflicto, inclusive Hamas. "Les pregunté si hay algún tipo de Israel que ellos podrían reconocer. Me dijeron que sí y señalaron a un Israel parecido al de antes del 4 de junio de 1967 (la guerra de los seis días), pero con algunos elementos distintos, como es una dinámica más constante de ofrecimientos mutuos.
"Hamas tiene una visión de futuro mucho más amplia que los gobernantes de Tel Aviv".
Y sobre la reciente crisis en la Franja de Gaza, afirma que "lanzar esos cohetes fue una tontería absoluta, una expresión emocional que se puede comprender, pero fue un error político grave. El derecho a defenderse entonces era legítimo por parte de Israel, y Hamas tuvo su derecho a defenderse de la ocupación a su vez".
Ahí "la solución es política y pasa por el reconocimiento a Hamas en cuanto uno de los actores del diálogo", dice, y pregunta: "¿Estados Unidos quiere un gobierno único para toda Palestina? Si siguen empujando por esa vía, va a salir un gobierno único, pero en manos de Hamas. Los palestinos están en favor de Hamas, sin duda, más ahora después de la masacre de Gaza".
Paz positiva
Johan Galtung, reconocido internacionalmente por sus pensamientos teóricos acerca de los temas de la paz y la violencia, dice que existen dos tipos de paz a nivel internacional: la paz negativa (ausencia de conflicto armado) y la paz positiva (colaboración y buenas relaciones internacionales).
"Hay muchas paz positiva en el mundo. El problema es que los medios retoman solamente los hechos de violencia y los conflictos".
Puntualiza: "El núcleo de los conflictos son las metas incompatibles, no las personas incompatibles. Por eso la solución de los conflictos pasa por hacer compatibles a los objetivos".
Para alcanzar la paz positiva en el mundo, continúa el investigador, "hay que hacer nada más pequeños cambios en la estructura y equilibrios mundiales".
Sobre el papel de la Organización de las Naciones Unidas, afirma que "desgraciadamente el embajador que Barack Obama designó a la ONU, Susan Rice, tiene la misma visión negativa de ese organismo de las administraciones anteriores: Estados Unidos quiere seguir utilizando a la ONU para sus fines".
Y explica: "En realidad, creo que lo que pasa es la caída del imperio estadounidense, y frente a esta caída, lo que crece no son la Naciones Unidas, sino los poderes regionales fuertes".
En este sentido, Galtung explica que una región importante es América Latina, "esa es la nueva realidad para el gobierno de Obama, quien es bastante inteligente para entender que ya no puede pelear con los países de la región latinoamericana".
E insiste que, como la conocemos, "la ONU parece cada vez más una reliquia del pasado", por eso tenemos que liberarnos de ese tipo de estructura y crear nuevas instancias internacionales.
Y concluye así la entrevista: "Hubiera sido fantástico que México tuviese un papel de mediador entre Cuba y Estados Unidos", pero "no lo veo posible con el actual presidente (Felipe Calderón)".
Matteo Dean
Proceso
La solución del conflicto entre el gobierno mexicano y los cárteles del narcotráfico pasa por el dialogo entre las partes, afirma el investigador Johan Galtung, quien ha participado en los diálogos de paz y en procesos de mediación en más de 40 conflictos internacionales.
"Esta actitud del gobierno mexicano de no tomar contacto, de que ellos (los narcotraficantes) no merecen ser aceptados como parte de un proceso, no ayuda para nada; es lo mismo que EU está haciendo con Hamas en Palestina, pero hay que tomar contacto, hay que dialogar".
La idea, dice, "es encontrar compatibilidad de objetivos entre las partes". Y pone un ejemplo: "El narcotráfico no quiere que la gente muera. La gente en México quiere lo mismo y quizás esa es una base de partida para un dialogo: evitar la muerte".
En entrevista, Galtung menciona que en México "hay un tipo de triángulo (en el conflicto): los narcos, la gente en la miseria y los militares".
En el triángulo, el gobierno mexicano "se sitúa ahí abajo a la derecha, atrás de los militares".
Según el investigador, la hipótesis "es que comenzamos con la miseria y esta implica al narcotráfico, porque la gente para salir de la pobreza acepta el trabajo que se le ofrece en las actividades ilícitas del narco, y todo esto tiene como efecto la reacción del gobierno, que utiliza a los militares".
Y remata:
"Hay que entender que también los militares son pobres y entonces ellos también aceptan trabajar con el narco, porque pagan mucho mejor que el gobierno", situación que termina con "el clásico círculo vicioso".
El también fundador de International Peace Research Institut y de la red Transcend sostiene que para la solución del conflicto hay que instaurar un diálogo entre las partes.
Primero, explica, "hay que dialogar, para entender mejor las razones que permiten al narcotráfico existir".
Su visión es que una de las causas principales del importante éxito del narcotráfico reside en la existencia "de una enorme miseria en México".
Si la gente tuviera medios sólidos para sobrevivir, agrega, "muchos saldrían del narco".
E insiste: "Si pensamos que una de las razones porque la gente acepta trabajar para los cárteles es la de salir de la miseria, se deben ofrecer válidas alternativas económicas a la población".
En este caso, "el diálogo con la base del narcotráfico podría tener el resultado de demostrarles que hay alternativas para salir de la pobreza", y esto significaría un paso adelante hacia la solución del problema, "porque los líderes (del narcotráfico) no pueden ganar sin el apoyo de la gente de abajo".
Pero no todo el peso recae en México, dice, Galtung ya que "parte de la solución (al problema del narcotráfico) pasa por Estados Unidos", en el sentido de abatir la elevada demanda de drogas que hay en ese país.
Al hacer un análisis de la sociedad norteamericana, el exprofesor de la Columbia University de New York señala es tajante que "los norteamericanos deben entender que si hay una demanda tan elevada en su país, debe de existir una enfermedad social, que puede ser enajenación, competencia excesiva, falta de solidaridad, soledad".
Y lanza una comparación: "La cadena del narcotráfico es como un alfabeto: las A están en México, pero las Z están en Estados Unidos y son ciudadanos norteamericanos. El hueco está a la mitad, en las M y N, en donde hay familias mexicanas pobres dispuestas a llenar ese hueco. Sobre todo con ellas hay que dialogar".
Pero advierte: "En esta crisis económica, la cantidad de desempleados en México y en Estados Unidos va a producir no solamente una alza en la demanda de drogas, sino también potencialmente una alza en el número de empleados por el narco".
Militarización del país
En lo que respecta al rol que la clase política mexicana podría jugar en la llamada "guerra al narcotráfico", el mediador noruego dice que "por lo pronto ésta juega el papel del espectador".
El problema de los políticos, continúa, es que "no quieren abolir a la miseria en México y esto sucede por al menos dos razones: por un lado tienen miedo de que la gente al salir de la miseria les cobre factura de los malos tratos recibidos en años de pobreza, y por el otro lado creen que debe de existir gente pobre y mal pagada para poder echar a andar la máquina económica".
Sobre este punto concluye: "Para ellos el problema principal no es la miseria, sino el narcotráfico, porque ofrece una alternativa a la miseria, de manera que la verdadera tragedia es la falta de iniciativa política para eliminar la miseria más profunda en el país".
Al referirse al actual nivel de militarización, señala que también responde a otras exigencias del gobierno y de la clase política mexicana.
Abunda: "Tienen miedo de 2010. El efecto simbólico que juegan el bicentenario de la Independencia y el centenario de la Revolución puede ser muy elevado".
En este aspecto, Galtung sostiene que "la simbología es importante porque define un intervalo en el tiempo".
Además, dice, el gobierno mexicano "sí tiene miedo de una revolución, pero también de una secesión en el sur del país, de los estados de origen maya, como Chiapas y Yucatán".
Entonces, "la presencia del narcotráfico también puede ser un pretexto para mantener militarizado al país, como en Colombia, donde con el pretexto del narcotráfico, se conduce la guerra en contra de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC)".
La presencia de militares en la sociedad, sugiere el noruego, responde a las necesidades de "acostumbrar a la gente a esa presencia, de comunicar a posibles revolucionarios: 'estamos preparados', y finalmente de acostumbrar a los mismos militares a estar en las calles, en la sociedad".
50 años: 100 conflictos
Johan Galtung, quien estuvo presente en calidad de mediador en más de 40 conflictos a lo largo de los últimos 50 años, recuerda que hubo éxitos en su obra de mediación, pero también algunos fracasos, aunque "prefiero llamarles no éxitos, en lugar de fracasos, porque en este ámbito hay que pensar en el largo plazo, no en el corto".
Sobre las recientes declaraciones de exponentes de la administración de Barack Obama, en el sentido de que en Afganistán es necesario encontrar un diálogo con la parte moderada de los rebeldes talibanes, Galtung dice que no cree que Estados Unidos quiera realmente dialogar, "más bien creo que quieren hacer lo que hicieron en Iraq, es decir, corromper a grupos (de poder) para que no maten a estadounidenses".
Es un plan que quiere aparentar que Estados Unidos gana, "pues para ellos es muy importante ganar". Y cuenta que en 2001, inmediatamente después de la invasión ordenada por George W. Bush a Afganistán, "había políticos afganos que decían que sin talibanes no se puede gobernar en el país".
Los mismos políticos afganos decían que "sin talibanes iban a tener heroína y corrupción". Y lo hicieron sin ellos, y ahí está: heroína y corrupción". Entonces, "la solución es un gobierno de coalición, porque los talibanes son los únicos que tienen cierta fibra moral en el país".
Respecto del conflicto en la exYugoslavia, el también exdirector de la Universidad Internacional de Dubrovnik (en el sur de Croacia) afirma haber participado muy activamente en los diálogos de paz: "La única situación realmente resuelta es la de Eslovenia", donde la independencia fue inmediatamente reconocida por el entorno internacional y su economía apoyada de inmediato por la comunidad internacional, además de que se impidieron las llamadas limpiezas étnicas".
En los demás países, afirma, no hay soluciones. "Se podía solucionar creando una federación. Esa era la única solución, pues son territorios multinacionales y no se puede insistir en lo contrario".
Luego habla de Kosovo, donde hace pocas semanas se festejó el primer año de independencia:
"Lo de Kosovo es una locura. Fui partidario de una solución de independencia, pero no se puede utilizar a un estado unitario para la represión hacia los serbios. Entonces, la solución sería un Kosovo con una constitución parecida a la suiza, en la que se reconocen la distintas minorías, a las que se les otorga cierta autonomía".
Sobre el caso palestino, Galtung afirma haber tenido "mucha experiencia en ese conflicto", pues "mi primera intervención de mediador fue en 1964".
Explica: "Creo que es necesario crear a una comunidad multinacional regional que incluya a Israel, y esto se debe realizar gracias a la mediación de la Unión Europea".
Israel, afirma, "tiene que dejar la idea del sionismo y con un Israel más modesto algo se podrá hacer".
Y apunta que en su calidad de mediador ha hablado con todos los protagonistas del conflicto, inclusive Hamas. "Les pregunté si hay algún tipo de Israel que ellos podrían reconocer. Me dijeron que sí y señalaron a un Israel parecido al de antes del 4 de junio de 1967 (la guerra de los seis días), pero con algunos elementos distintos, como es una dinámica más constante de ofrecimientos mutuos.
"Hamas tiene una visión de futuro mucho más amplia que los gobernantes de Tel Aviv".
Y sobre la reciente crisis en la Franja de Gaza, afirma que "lanzar esos cohetes fue una tontería absoluta, una expresión emocional que se puede comprender, pero fue un error político grave. El derecho a defenderse entonces era legítimo por parte de Israel, y Hamas tuvo su derecho a defenderse de la ocupación a su vez".
Ahí "la solución es política y pasa por el reconocimiento a Hamas en cuanto uno de los actores del diálogo", dice, y pregunta: "¿Estados Unidos quiere un gobierno único para toda Palestina? Si siguen empujando por esa vía, va a salir un gobierno único, pero en manos de Hamas. Los palestinos están en favor de Hamas, sin duda, más ahora después de la masacre de Gaza".
Paz positiva
Johan Galtung, reconocido internacionalmente por sus pensamientos teóricos acerca de los temas de la paz y la violencia, dice que existen dos tipos de paz a nivel internacional: la paz negativa (ausencia de conflicto armado) y la paz positiva (colaboración y buenas relaciones internacionales).
"Hay muchas paz positiva en el mundo. El problema es que los medios retoman solamente los hechos de violencia y los conflictos".
Puntualiza: "El núcleo de los conflictos son las metas incompatibles, no las personas incompatibles. Por eso la solución de los conflictos pasa por hacer compatibles a los objetivos".
Para alcanzar la paz positiva en el mundo, continúa el investigador, "hay que hacer nada más pequeños cambios en la estructura y equilibrios mundiales".
Sobre el papel de la Organización de las Naciones Unidas, afirma que "desgraciadamente el embajador que Barack Obama designó a la ONU, Susan Rice, tiene la misma visión negativa de ese organismo de las administraciones anteriores: Estados Unidos quiere seguir utilizando a la ONU para sus fines".
Y explica: "En realidad, creo que lo que pasa es la caída del imperio estadounidense, y frente a esta caída, lo que crece no son la Naciones Unidas, sino los poderes regionales fuertes".
En este sentido, Galtung explica que una región importante es América Latina, "esa es la nueva realidad para el gobierno de Obama, quien es bastante inteligente para entender que ya no puede pelear con los países de la región latinoamericana".
E insiste que, como la conocemos, "la ONU parece cada vez más una reliquia del pasado", por eso tenemos que liberarnos de ese tipo de estructura y crear nuevas instancias internacionales.
Y concluye así la entrevista: "Hubiera sido fantástico que México tuviese un papel de mediador entre Cuba y Estados Unidos", pero "no lo veo posible con el actual presidente (Felipe Calderón)".
ICE Forced Same-Sex Couple to Separate
Sing Tao Daily
SAN FRANCISCO – Shirley Tan and her same-sex partner Jay Mercado have lived together for 23 years and raised their 12-year-old twin boys. The Sing Tao Daily reports U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently raided their house and arrested Tan, a Filipino, because although she married Mercado, a U.S. citizen, in 2004 at San Francisco City Hall, federal law does not allow immigrants to obtain family-based legal status through their same-sex spouses. According to the newspaper, Congresswoman Jackie Speier said she would support legislation to give same-sex couples immigration rights. Others point out that such a law would make immigration fraud easier. Because of the immigration issues, many same-sex couples have moved out of the United States to live in other countries.
SAN FRANCISCO – Shirley Tan and her same-sex partner Jay Mercado have lived together for 23 years and raised their 12-year-old twin boys. The Sing Tao Daily reports U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently raided their house and arrested Tan, a Filipino, because although she married Mercado, a U.S. citizen, in 2004 at San Francisco City Hall, federal law does not allow immigrants to obtain family-based legal status through their same-sex spouses. According to the newspaper, Congresswoman Jackie Speier said she would support legislation to give same-sex couples immigration rights. Others point out that such a law would make immigration fraud easier. Because of the immigration issues, many same-sex couples have moved out of the United States to live in other countries.
3/30/09
La clase política y sus vínculos con el narcotráfico
Gobernador y candidatos vinculados al narco
Isai Lara
Semanario Zeta
Conforme a las negaciones de Beatriz Paredes y la clase política sobre “cualquier nexo con el narcotráfico”, salen a la luz cada vez más declaraciones vinculando a políticos en tales hechos. El PRI y el PAN han lanzado en Colima personajes señalados de sostener vínculos con el narcotráfico. Sobresalen los señalamientos al gobernador del Estado Silverio Cavazos y el alcalde de la capital, Mario Anguiano.
Nos obstante, aseguran especialistas, las infiltraciones del narcotráfico en las esferas del poder público no es cosa nueva: “Todos saben que existen alcaldes, diputados locales, legisladores federales y gobernadores presuntamente implicados con el narco; que las campañas electorales en regiones bajo control del narco están fuertemente influidas por las bandas criminales”, plantea el editorial de un diario mexicano.
Las ejecuciones a funcionarios y a sus familiares que se han registrado en los primeros meses del año han dañado la imagen de los partidos políticos, restando credibilidad a las declaraciones de “blindaje electoral”. En la última semana de marzo se encontraron cinco personas asesinadas en Guerrero de las cuales tres son familiares de un diputado local del PRD, Catalino Duarte. Un comando armado incendió dos casas y siete vehículos propiedad del padre del actual Síndico y de un ex alcalde, Marcial Cárdenas Sánchez, ambos perredistas. Días después se encontró el cuerpo sin vida del secretario municipal de Tancítaro, Michoacán, también del PRD. En lo que va del año y en los últimos meses del 2008 al menos nueve ex presidentes y presidentes municipales, la mayoría priístas, han sido víctimas al perecer por ajustes de cuentas. El caso más reciente fue el de Villahermosa, Michoacán, Octavio Carrillo del PRI, a finales de febrero; fue el tercer edil ejecutado en el Estado.
En Petatlán, Guerrero Francisco Rodríguez, perredista y ex priísta, fue ultimado en el Zócalo de la ciudad con rifles AK47 cuando volvía del 56 Batallón de Infantería en Acapulco, donde se presentó a pedir razón de su hijo que días antes fue detenido por el ejército junto con otras ocho personas.
El temor ante el peligro de que el narcotráfico intervenga en las próximas elecciones se ha concentrado en crear estrategias para que el dinero de la droga no financie campañas electorales. Pero parece que la filtración ilícita al poder se está consolidando por redes de impunidad ya establecidas.
El gobernador de Colima, de extracción priísta, es señalado por sus vínculos con el narcotráfico e intentará dejar en su puesto a su cercano colaborador del mismo partido, Mario Anguiano, precandidato a la gubernatura y actual alcalde con licencia de Colima y, también acusado de tener nexos con el crimen organizado.
Uno más catalogado en el equipo de “narcopolíticos” priístas es el diputado local y candidato a diputado federal, Roberto Chapula; quien presta sus servicios de litigante a clientes acusados por narcotráfico. Y por el PAN, con los mismos referentes, la candidata a la presidencia municipal de Manzanillo, Esmeralda Cárdenas.
A los dos hermanos del gobernador se les identifica como operadores directos de “El Chapo Guzmán”, procesados por la PGR . En el 2007, Cavazos, siendo ya mandatario del estado, intercedió por medio del senador priísta, Rogelio Rueda Sánchez, también actual precandidato al gobierno estatal para la liberación anticipada de uno de los hermanos de Mario Anguiano, sentenciado a diez años de prisión por crímenes contra la salud. Igualmente un primo hermano del gobernante fue consignado por tráfico de drogas en la Unión Americana por dirigir la organización criminal llamada “Los Anguiano” y vinculada con los hermanos Amezcua “Los reyes de la metanfetaminas”.
Priístas como el Procurador del Estado, el director de Tránsito y Vialidad, el titular de Licencias del Municipio y hasta el presidente de la Canacintra en Colima, entre otros, son relacionados con el crimen y las drogas. “El PRI en Colima tiene un gran equipo”, dice entusiasmado un militante.
Isai Lara
Semanario Zeta
Conforme a las negaciones de Beatriz Paredes y la clase política sobre “cualquier nexo con el narcotráfico”, salen a la luz cada vez más declaraciones vinculando a políticos en tales hechos. El PRI y el PAN han lanzado en Colima personajes señalados de sostener vínculos con el narcotráfico. Sobresalen los señalamientos al gobernador del Estado Silverio Cavazos y el alcalde de la capital, Mario Anguiano.
Nos obstante, aseguran especialistas, las infiltraciones del narcotráfico en las esferas del poder público no es cosa nueva: “Todos saben que existen alcaldes, diputados locales, legisladores federales y gobernadores presuntamente implicados con el narco; que las campañas electorales en regiones bajo control del narco están fuertemente influidas por las bandas criminales”, plantea el editorial de un diario mexicano.
Las ejecuciones a funcionarios y a sus familiares que se han registrado en los primeros meses del año han dañado la imagen de los partidos políticos, restando credibilidad a las declaraciones de “blindaje electoral”. En la última semana de marzo se encontraron cinco personas asesinadas en Guerrero de las cuales tres son familiares de un diputado local del PRD, Catalino Duarte. Un comando armado incendió dos casas y siete vehículos propiedad del padre del actual Síndico y de un ex alcalde, Marcial Cárdenas Sánchez, ambos perredistas. Días después se encontró el cuerpo sin vida del secretario municipal de Tancítaro, Michoacán, también del PRD. En lo que va del año y en los últimos meses del 2008 al menos nueve ex presidentes y presidentes municipales, la mayoría priístas, han sido víctimas al perecer por ajustes de cuentas. El caso más reciente fue el de Villahermosa, Michoacán, Octavio Carrillo del PRI, a finales de febrero; fue el tercer edil ejecutado en el Estado.
En Petatlán, Guerrero Francisco Rodríguez, perredista y ex priísta, fue ultimado en el Zócalo de la ciudad con rifles AK47 cuando volvía del 56 Batallón de Infantería en Acapulco, donde se presentó a pedir razón de su hijo que días antes fue detenido por el ejército junto con otras ocho personas.
El temor ante el peligro de que el narcotráfico intervenga en las próximas elecciones se ha concentrado en crear estrategias para que el dinero de la droga no financie campañas electorales. Pero parece que la filtración ilícita al poder se está consolidando por redes de impunidad ya establecidas.
El gobernador de Colima, de extracción priísta, es señalado por sus vínculos con el narcotráfico e intentará dejar en su puesto a su cercano colaborador del mismo partido, Mario Anguiano, precandidato a la gubernatura y actual alcalde con licencia de Colima y, también acusado de tener nexos con el crimen organizado.
Uno más catalogado en el equipo de “narcopolíticos” priístas es el diputado local y candidato a diputado federal, Roberto Chapula; quien presta sus servicios de litigante a clientes acusados por narcotráfico. Y por el PAN, con los mismos referentes, la candidata a la presidencia municipal de Manzanillo, Esmeralda Cárdenas.
A los dos hermanos del gobernador se les identifica como operadores directos de “El Chapo Guzmán”, procesados por la PGR . En el 2007, Cavazos, siendo ya mandatario del estado, intercedió por medio del senador priísta, Rogelio Rueda Sánchez, también actual precandidato al gobierno estatal para la liberación anticipada de uno de los hermanos de Mario Anguiano, sentenciado a diez años de prisión por crímenes contra la salud. Igualmente un primo hermano del gobernante fue consignado por tráfico de drogas en la Unión Americana por dirigir la organización criminal llamada “Los Anguiano” y vinculada con los hermanos Amezcua “Los reyes de la metanfetaminas”.
Priístas como el Procurador del Estado, el director de Tránsito y Vialidad, el titular de Licencias del Municipio y hasta el presidente de la Canacintra en Colima, entre otros, son relacionados con el crimen y las drogas. “El PRI en Colima tiene un gran equipo”, dice entusiasmado un militante.
A Historical Roadmap for Liberating the Cuban Five
Gesture For Gesture
By JOSÉ PERTIERRA
CounterPunch
Recent declarations by President Raúl Castro reveal a willingness to engage the United States in negotiations that, if successful, could mean the return of the Cuban Five. Responding to reporters´ questions last December, Raúl revealed a willingness to free some prisoners currently held in Cuba in response to a gesture from the United States to free the Cuban Five. Gesto a gesto, he called it: gesture for gesture.1
Gibbon said that the only way to judge the future is by the past. And history gives us the lantern that illuminates a possible political solution to one of the thorniest issues that still mars relations between the United States and Cuba: prisoners.
There is historical precedent for a mutual release of prisoners on the basis of unilateral, but reciprocated, gestures. It is little known, but thanks to US government-declassified documents, we can now learn about the delicate negotiations that led to a mutual release of important prisoners thirty years ago.
In September of 1979, the United States unilaterally released four Puerto Rican nationalists, and ten days later Cuba reciprocated by releasing four United States citizens who were in prison in Cuba.2
It is curious to note that the phrase gesto-a-gesto that Raúl is now using to urge the release of the Cuban Five is the same one that his brother, Fidel, used in 1978, when he told US diplomats Robert Pastor and Peter Tarnoff,
US government documents confirm that discussions between the U.S. and Cuban governments occurred during 1978 and 1979 regarding an exchange of prisoners. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski said in a letter in 1979 to the Justice Department:
At the time of their release in 1979, the Puerto Ricans, Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Irving Flores Rodríguez, and Oscar Collazo, had been in prison in the United States for over 24 years. The Americans who Cuba released ten days later, Lawrence Lunt, Juan Tur, Everett Jackson, and Claudio Rodriguez—had spent more than 10 years in Cuban prisons.
One of the most interesting of the declassified documents is a memorandum written by National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in early 1979 to John R. Standish, Department of Justice Pardon Attorney. In the memo, Brzezinski recommends that the US government commute the sentences of the four Puerto Ricans.
The Obama Administration could well learn from the Brzezinski memo the benefits of a gesture-for-gesture negotiation that, if used now, could reap diplomatic benefits for both countries. In his memo to the Department of Justice, Brzenzinski pointed out that the continued imprisonment of the Puerto Ricans lends fuel to critics of US policy, and that commuting their sentences would be welcomed as a compassionate and humanitarian gesture. Brezenzinski goes on to argue that:
Robert Pastor makes a similar point in a memorandum dated September 26, 1978. After conducting a cost-benefit analysis of the situation, Pastor concludes:
Critics of US policy today point to the case of the Cuban Five as an example of American double-standards: the terrorists are allowed to roam free in Miami and those who went to Miami to protect Cuba against the terrorists are thrown in jail. The Cuban Five are part of a team of agents that Cuba sent to Miami to gather evidence against those guilty of orchestrating a campaign of terror against civilian targets in the island: a campaign of terror that has claimed over 3,000 lives. The team infiltrated Cuban-American terrorist groups in Miami, and using the evidence that the Five gathered Cuba provided the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) with the names and whereabouts of the terrorists. Rather than arrest and prosecute the terrorists, the FBI learned that Cuba had penetrated the Miami-based terrorist network and arrested the Cuban Five in 1998. On June 8, 2001, they were convicted and sentenced to four life sentences and 75 years collectively.
The United States Supreme Court is expected to rule sometime this year whether the Court in Miami that convicted and sentenced them erred by forcing their trial in a Miami consumed with hostility and prejudice against Cuba. Ten Nobel Prize winners have submitted amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs asking the Supreme Court to review the case. The Nobel laureates are joined by hundreds of parliamentarians around the world, including two former Presidents and three current Vice Presidents of the European Parliament, as well as numerous US and foreign bar associations and human rights organizations.
The United Nations Human Rights Commission noted that a climate of bias and prejudice in Miami surrounded their trial, and the Commission’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions concluded that the trial did not take place in the climate of objectivity and impartiality that is required to conform to the standards of a fair trial.7
However, even if the Cuban Five were to win their case before the United States Supreme Court, their case would be far from over. Instead, it would mean the beginning of a new trial in a jurisdiction other than Miami. A far more elegant and swifter solution to their continued imprisonment would be a Presidential Order of Executive Clemency that would permit their immediate return to Cuba.
One important point of diplomatic disagreement between the two countries is that to Cuba they are political prisoners, whereas to the United States the Five are common criminals.
Innocent of the conspiracy charges against them, Cuban officials maintain the Five were convicted in a biased and hostile environment in violation of their constitutional rights.
The issue of classifying the Five as political prisoners is particularly thorny, since President Obama will certainly reject the implication that the US is holding political prisoners. Yet, President Barack Obama has consistently called for Cuba to release its political prisoners, before any normalization of relations.
Cuba, in turn, claims that its own prisoners are serving sentences on the island for violations of the law and that they are not political prisoners.
A direct prisoner exchange runs the risk of the public equating the crimes, but a unilateral gesture that is followed by a gesture from the other side softens the criticisms.
Again, history illuminates our way out of political gridlock. Prior to the mutual exchange of prisoners in 1979, both Cuban and American negotiators initially tripped over the use of the adjective political to describe the prisoners. That is why they shied away from a direct prisoner exchange that would have been seen as a tacit acceptance of the notion that each country was holding political prisoners.
In a letter to Congressman Benjamin Gillman in 1979, Brzezinski said “we want to avoid making any connection between the two cases, and certainly the appearance of equating their crime.8 And in a memorandum immediately after release of the Puerto Rican nationalists, Brzezinski said:
The key to a mutual release of prisoners is therefore to avoid a linked prisoner exchange and instead engage in gesture-for-gesture negotiations.
If the Obama Administration extended a gesture to Cuba and unilaterally released the Cuban Five, what reciprocal gesture could Cuba offer? What prisoners could it free and send to the United States?
Miami’s El Nuevo Herald recently cited the cases of several prisoners in Cuba that may be of particular interest to the United States, including some of those who were arrested in March of 2003 and convicted in Cuba for working under the direction and control of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, as well as other Cuban citizens imprisoned for espionage in Cuba.10
Through diplomatic channels, the United States can signal which of Cuba’s prisoners are a priority. That is not a problem.
The power to commute a sentence is the President’s alone. It is not a pardon. It simply reduces the period of incarceration. The President need not comment on the convictions, or on the alleged crimes. He need not condition the commutation of sentences on another country’s actions. He simply orders that the prisoners’ sentences be reduced.
First as a candidate and now as President, Barack Obama has let it be known that he is interested in improving relations with Cuba through direct diplomacy. The case of the Cuban Five is a major stumbling block to any rapprochement between the two countries.
If President Obama extends executive clemency to the Cuban Five and commutes their long prison sentences, thus facilitating their return to Cuba and to their families, it would be quite a significant gesture and, after reciprocal gestures from Cuba, could eventually lead to the normalization of relations between the two countries.
José Pertierra is an attorney. He represents the government of Venezuela in the extradition case involving Luis Posada Carriles. His office is in Washington, DC.
Notes.
1 Raúl Castro marca su lógica a Washington, por Patricia Grogg, IPS, 20 de diciembre de 2008.
2 See TIME Magazine, Monday October 1, 1979. “A diplomatic issue involving Cuba was resolved last week when Havana released four Americans from its prisons. For four years, Fidel Castro had said that they would be freed if the US released four Puerto Rican nationalists who were in prison for trying to assassinate President Truman and House leaders in the 1950s. Carter granted them clemency two weeks ago. . . . On arrival in Miami, one of the former prisoners in Cuba, Lawrence Lunt . . . readily admitted that he had been spying for the CIA.”
3 That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: the United States and the Cuban Revolution, by Lars Schoultz, the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2009 at page 324.
4 Undated letter from Zbigniew Brzezinski to John R. Standish, Pardon Attorney, for the Department of Justice. Found on pages 267 and 268 of volume 2 of Futuros Alternos (Documentos Secretos) Edited by Jaime Rodríguez Cancel and Juan Manuel García Passalacqua, EMS, 2007.
5 Ibid.
6 Memorandum from Robert Pastor of the National Security Council to Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Aaron regarding Lolita Lebron, dated September 26, 1978. Futuros Alternos, Ibid, at pages 228 and 229.
7 Grupo de Trabajo sobre la detención arbitraria (Naciones Unidas), Opinión No. 19-2005. Opinión adoptada el 27 de mayo de 2005.
8 Letter to Congressman Benjamín Gillman, US House of Representatives, from Zgigniew Brzezinski. See Futuros Alternos at page 213.
9 Memorandum from Zbigniew Brzezinski to Frank Moore regarding US Prisoners in Cuba, See Futuros Alternos at page 214.
10 Abogados de espías cubanos no descartan “negociación política”, por Wilfredo Cancio Isla, El Nuevo Herald, 25 de enero de 2009.
By JOSÉ PERTIERRA
CounterPunch
Recent declarations by President Raúl Castro reveal a willingness to engage the United States in negotiations that, if successful, could mean the return of the Cuban Five. Responding to reporters´ questions last December, Raúl revealed a willingness to free some prisoners currently held in Cuba in response to a gesture from the United States to free the Cuban Five. Gesto a gesto, he called it: gesture for gesture.1
Gibbon said that the only way to judge the future is by the past. And history gives us the lantern that illuminates a possible political solution to one of the thorniest issues that still mars relations between the United States and Cuba: prisoners.
HISTORICAL PRECEDENT
There is historical precedent for a mutual release of prisoners on the basis of unilateral, but reciprocated, gestures. It is little known, but thanks to US government-declassified documents, we can now learn about the delicate negotiations that led to a mutual release of important prisoners thirty years ago.
In September of 1979, the United States unilaterally released four Puerto Rican nationalists, and ten days later Cuba reciprocated by releasing four United States citizens who were in prison in Cuba.2
It is curious to note that the phrase gesto-a-gesto that Raúl is now using to urge the release of the Cuban Five is the same one that his brother, Fidel, used in 1978, when he told US diplomats Robert Pastor and Peter Tarnoff,
I do not understand why you are so tough on the Puerto Ricans. The U.S. could make a gesture and release them, and then we would make another gesture—without any linkage—just a unilateral humanitarian gesture.3
US government documents confirm that discussions between the U.S. and Cuban governments occurred during 1978 and 1979 regarding an exchange of prisoners. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski said in a letter in 1979 to the Justice Department:
Castro and his representatives have said publicly and told us privately that, if we release the four Puerto Ricans, they will, after an appropriate interval, release the four United States citizens imprisoned in Cuba. . . . . while we should not accept nor even consider an exchange, the fact that a positive decision by the U.S. is likely to lead to a positive decision by Cuba to release U.S. citizens is a welcome prospect. 4
THE PRISONERS WHO WERE FREED
At the time of their release in 1979, the Puerto Ricans, Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Irving Flores Rodríguez, and Oscar Collazo, had been in prison in the United States for over 24 years. The Americans who Cuba released ten days later, Lawrence Lunt, Juan Tur, Everett Jackson, and Claudio Rodriguez—had spent more than 10 years in Cuban prisons.
THE BRZEZINSKI AND PASTOR MEMOS
One of the most interesting of the declassified documents is a memorandum written by National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in early 1979 to John R. Standish, Department of Justice Pardon Attorney. In the memo, Brzezinski recommends that the US government commute the sentences of the four Puerto Ricans.
The Obama Administration could well learn from the Brzezinski memo the benefits of a gesture-for-gesture negotiation that, if used now, could reap diplomatic benefits for both countries. In his memo to the Department of Justice, Brzenzinski pointed out that the continued imprisonment of the Puerto Ricans lends fuel to critics of US policy, and that commuting their sentences would be welcomed as a compassionate and humanitarian gesture. Brezenzinski goes on to argue that:
the release of these prisoners will remove from the agenda of the United nations, the Non-Aligned Movement, and other international fora, a propaganda issue which is used each year to criticize the U.S., and is increasingly used as an example of the inconsistency of our human rights policy.5
Robert Pastor makes a similar point in a memorandum dated September 26, 1978. After conducting a cost-benefit analysis of the situation, Pastor concludes:
I have come to believe that the risks of releasing (the Puerto Rican nationalists) unconditionally are minimal, while the benefits, as a humanitarian, compassionate gesture, are considerable. I also believe that the President would obtain considerable political benefit in Puerto Rico as there is widespread support for such a move there.6
THE CASE OF THE CUBAN FIVE
Critics of US policy today point to the case of the Cuban Five as an example of American double-standards: the terrorists are allowed to roam free in Miami and those who went to Miami to protect Cuba against the terrorists are thrown in jail. The Cuban Five are part of a team of agents that Cuba sent to Miami to gather evidence against those guilty of orchestrating a campaign of terror against civilian targets in the island: a campaign of terror that has claimed over 3,000 lives. The team infiltrated Cuban-American terrorist groups in Miami, and using the evidence that the Five gathered Cuba provided the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) with the names and whereabouts of the terrorists. Rather than arrest and prosecute the terrorists, the FBI learned that Cuba had penetrated the Miami-based terrorist network and arrested the Cuban Five in 1998. On June 8, 2001, they were convicted and sentenced to four life sentences and 75 years collectively.
The United States Supreme Court is expected to rule sometime this year whether the Court in Miami that convicted and sentenced them erred by forcing their trial in a Miami consumed with hostility and prejudice against Cuba. Ten Nobel Prize winners have submitted amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs asking the Supreme Court to review the case. The Nobel laureates are joined by hundreds of parliamentarians around the world, including two former Presidents and three current Vice Presidents of the European Parliament, as well as numerous US and foreign bar associations and human rights organizations.
The United Nations Human Rights Commission noted that a climate of bias and prejudice in Miami surrounded their trial, and the Commission’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions concluded that the trial did not take place in the climate of objectivity and impartiality that is required to conform to the standards of a fair trial.7
However, even if the Cuban Five were to win their case before the United States Supreme Court, their case would be far from over. Instead, it would mean the beginning of a new trial in a jurisdiction other than Miami. A far more elegant and swifter solution to their continued imprisonment would be a Presidential Order of Executive Clemency that would permit their immediate return to Cuba.
POLITICAL PRISONERS?
One important point of diplomatic disagreement between the two countries is that to Cuba they are political prisoners, whereas to the United States the Five are common criminals.
Innocent of the conspiracy charges against them, Cuban officials maintain the Five were convicted in a biased and hostile environment in violation of their constitutional rights.
The issue of classifying the Five as political prisoners is particularly thorny, since President Obama will certainly reject the implication that the US is holding political prisoners. Yet, President Barack Obama has consistently called for Cuba to release its political prisoners, before any normalization of relations.
Cuba, in turn, claims that its own prisoners are serving sentences on the island for violations of the law and that they are not political prisoners.
A direct prisoner exchange runs the risk of the public equating the crimes, but a unilateral gesture that is followed by a gesture from the other side softens the criticisms.
Again, history illuminates our way out of political gridlock. Prior to the mutual exchange of prisoners in 1979, both Cuban and American negotiators initially tripped over the use of the adjective political to describe the prisoners. That is why they shied away from a direct prisoner exchange that would have been seen as a tacit acceptance of the notion that each country was holding political prisoners.
In a letter to Congressman Benjamin Gillman in 1979, Brzezinski said “we want to avoid making any connection between the two cases, and certainly the appearance of equating their crime.8 And in a memorandum immediately after release of the Puerto Rican nationalists, Brzezinski said:
we rejected the possibility of a prisoner exchange since we did not consider the Puerto Ricans political prisoners . . . Now that President Carter has decided to commute the sentences of the Puerto Ricans, it occurs to us that it is Castro’s turn to fulfill his promise.9
The key to a mutual release of prisoners is therefore to avoid a linked prisoner exchange and instead engage in gesture-for-gesture negotiations.
THE PRISONERS IN CUBA
If the Obama Administration extended a gesture to Cuba and unilaterally released the Cuban Five, what reciprocal gesture could Cuba offer? What prisoners could it free and send to the United States?
Miami’s El Nuevo Herald recently cited the cases of several prisoners in Cuba that may be of particular interest to the United States, including some of those who were arrested in March of 2003 and convicted in Cuba for working under the direction and control of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, as well as other Cuban citizens imprisoned for espionage in Cuba.10
Through diplomatic channels, the United States can signal which of Cuba’s prisoners are a priority. That is not a problem.
THE POWER OF EXECUTIVE CLEMENCY
The power to commute a sentence is the President’s alone. It is not a pardon. It simply reduces the period of incarceration. The President need not comment on the convictions, or on the alleged crimes. He need not condition the commutation of sentences on another country’s actions. He simply orders that the prisoners’ sentences be reduced.
CONCLUSION
First as a candidate and now as President, Barack Obama has let it be known that he is interested in improving relations with Cuba through direct diplomacy. The case of the Cuban Five is a major stumbling block to any rapprochement between the two countries.
If President Obama extends executive clemency to the Cuban Five and commutes their long prison sentences, thus facilitating their return to Cuba and to their families, it would be quite a significant gesture and, after reciprocal gestures from Cuba, could eventually lead to the normalization of relations between the two countries.
José Pertierra is an attorney. He represents the government of Venezuela in the extradition case involving Luis Posada Carriles. His office is in Washington, DC.
Notes.
1 Raúl Castro marca su lógica a Washington, por Patricia Grogg, IPS, 20 de diciembre de 2008.
2 See TIME Magazine, Monday October 1, 1979. “A diplomatic issue involving Cuba was resolved last week when Havana released four Americans from its prisons. For four years, Fidel Castro had said that they would be freed if the US released four Puerto Rican nationalists who were in prison for trying to assassinate President Truman and House leaders in the 1950s. Carter granted them clemency two weeks ago. . . . On arrival in Miami, one of the former prisoners in Cuba, Lawrence Lunt . . . readily admitted that he had been spying for the CIA.”
3 That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: the United States and the Cuban Revolution, by Lars Schoultz, the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2009 at page 324.
4 Undated letter from Zbigniew Brzezinski to John R. Standish, Pardon Attorney, for the Department of Justice. Found on pages 267 and 268 of volume 2 of Futuros Alternos (Documentos Secretos) Edited by Jaime Rodríguez Cancel and Juan Manuel García Passalacqua, EMS, 2007.
5 Ibid.
6 Memorandum from Robert Pastor of the National Security Council to Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Aaron regarding Lolita Lebron, dated September 26, 1978. Futuros Alternos, Ibid, at pages 228 and 229.
7 Grupo de Trabajo sobre la detención arbitraria (Naciones Unidas), Opinión No. 19-2005. Opinión adoptada el 27 de mayo de 2005.
8 Letter to Congressman Benjamín Gillman, US House of Representatives, from Zgigniew Brzezinski. See Futuros Alternos at page 213.
9 Memorandum from Zbigniew Brzezinski to Frank Moore regarding US Prisoners in Cuba, See Futuros Alternos at page 214.
10 Abogados de espías cubanos no descartan “negociación política”, por Wilfredo Cancio Isla, El Nuevo Herald, 25 de enero de 2009.
El ombudsman mexicano insta a retirar al ejército de tareas de seguridad
Alejandro Pacheco
Púlsar
El titular de la Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos de México (CNDH), José Luis Soberanes Fernández, instó al gobierno mexicano a fijar un plazo determinado para que las policías locales regresen a sus funciones.
El Ombudsman de México, José Luis Soberanes, exhortó al mandatario Felipe Calderón a definir las estrategias para que las fuerzas castrenses dejan de participar en labores de seguridad publica.
La recomendación llegó ante el incremento de las denuncias por violaciones a los Derechos Humanos por parte de efectivos militares.
El Presidente de la CNDH llamó al Gobierno Federal a fijar un plazo límite para que los cuerpos de seguridad locales reciban una capacitación adecuada y, de este modo, retornen a sus labores.
Soberanes Fernández destacó que una de las funciones esenciales del Estado es construir un entorno social pacífico y tranquilo.
Explicó que este entorno social “no es el de la paz de los sepulcros, sino el de la vida social ordenada y regida por leyes que se respetan”.
Púlsar
El titular de la Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos de México (CNDH), José Luis Soberanes Fernández, instó al gobierno mexicano a fijar un plazo determinado para que las policías locales regresen a sus funciones.
El Ombudsman de México, José Luis Soberanes, exhortó al mandatario Felipe Calderón a definir las estrategias para que las fuerzas castrenses dejan de participar en labores de seguridad publica.
La recomendación llegó ante el incremento de las denuncias por violaciones a los Derechos Humanos por parte de efectivos militares.
El Presidente de la CNDH llamó al Gobierno Federal a fijar un plazo límite para que los cuerpos de seguridad locales reciban una capacitación adecuada y, de este modo, retornen a sus labores.
Soberanes Fernández destacó que una de las funciones esenciales del Estado es construir un entorno social pacífico y tranquilo.
Explicó que este entorno social “no es el de la paz de los sepulcros, sino el de la vida social ordenada y regida por leyes que se respetan”.
Neoliberalism, Education and the Politics of Disposability
Hard Lessons
By HENRY A. GIROUX
CounterPunch
In spite of the almost unprecedented financial and credit crises gripping the United States, the legacy of jaded excess lives on as both a haunting memory and an ideological register that continues to shape contemporary politics. After all, it was only a few years ago when it was widely recognized, if not celebrated, that the New Gilded Age and its updated “‘dreamworlds’ of consumption, property, and power” had returned to the United States with a vengeance.1 The exorbitantly rich along with their conservative ideologues publicly invoked and lionized that bygone period in nineteenth-century American history when corporations ruled political, economic, and social life and an allegedly heroic entrepreneurial spirit brought great wealth and prosperity to the rest of the country. Even with the economic blowout and its now visible register of corruption and greed on the part of Wall Street bankers and traders, the dominant press cannot relinquish its love affair with the super-rich, regardless of how greedy they appear. How else to explain stories about how the rich are going through hard times as exemplified in their either moving out of their high-priced mansions into more modest million-dollar condos or being forced to give up riding in limos for more discreet modes of transportation? In some cases, these high-flying entrepreneurs of the now devalued Gilded Age are celebrated because of their unmitigated belief in the gospel of wealth and their sheer courage to spend in tough times. Or, as the New York Times puts it, “When the times get tough, the smart spend money.”2 And while tent cities are emerging all over the country, the ultra-rich provide a lesson in what it means to be “smart,” capitalizing on their spending habits by buying $14-million condos in New York City, dishing out $3000 at the Goldbar Lounge for a bottle of Louis XIII Cognac, or paying $656,000 for a Rolls Royce Phantom convertible.3 What these stories often forget to mention is the legacy of corporate swindling, corruption, and financial adventurism that was responsible for bankrupting the country.
There is more at work in these examples of Gilded Age excess than a predatory narcissism, a zany hubris, and a neofeudal world view in which self-interest and the laws of the market are seen as the only true measure of politics. There is also an attack on the idea of the social contract—the state’s provision of minimum guarantees of security—and the very notion of democratic politics. Moreover, in this free-wheeling, deregulated market society, the citizen is reduced to a consumer or if labeled as a flawed consumer rendered as excess, redundant, and disposable. Rampant greed, market deregulation, and cut-throat individual competition, lauded in this world of free-market fundamentalism, have produced over the last thirty years an unparalleled degree of social inequality in the United States along with massive dislocations in the basic foundations of society. Clearly, any understanding of the present financial crisis and its disastrous effects has to include a consideration of free-market fundamentalism or neoliberalism and the ideologies, cultural formations, and modes of political irresponsibility that produced it. Discussions about the economic meltdown are largely focused on economics or as Paul Krugman puts it “the market mystique–the magic of the financial marketplace and [the fraudulent and corrupt] wizards who perform that magic.”4 Almost nothing is said about the public values, ideologies, modes of rationality, and commonsense assumptions that produce both neoliberal beliefs and the subjects who unquestionably accept such views. Characteristic of many current critiques of the financial crisis is a disconnect between analyses of the destruction produced by the economic meltdown and a silence regarding the market-driven values underlying its sordid vision of the world. Neoliberalism has not only altered economic agendas throughout the world but has also transformed politics, restructured social relations, and produced an array of reality narratives and disciplinary measures that normalize its perverted view of citizenship, the state, and the supremacy of market relations. Clearly, the crisis of free-market fundamentalism and the economic Darwinism that functions as its counterpart are as much educational issues as they are economic and political problems.
The varied populations suffering and made increasingly disposable under neoliberalism can attribute their oppression to a reactionary politics in which the categories of "citizen" and "democratic representation," once integral to national politics, are no longer recognized. In the past, people who were marginalized by class and race could at least expect a modicum of support from the social state, either through an array of limited social provisions or from employers who recognized that they still had some value as part of a reserve army of unemployed labor. This is no longer true. Under the ruthless dynamics of free-market fundamentalism, there has been a shift away from the goals of living a life of dignity and working for economic independence to the much more deadly task of struggling to stay alive—or keeping one step away from becoming part of the growing army of humans considered utterly disposable and redundant.
Disposable populations have historically been relegated to the frontier zones of society, as part of an ongoing effort to hide them from public view. Until recently, such populations were warehoused in schools that resemble boot camps,5
dispersed to dank and dangerous workplaces far from the enclaves of the tourist industries, incarcerated in prisons that privilege punishment over rehabilitation, and consigned to the status of the permanently unemployed. But such populations now seem to be an everyday part of the American landscape, glaringly visible in the burgeoning tent cities, revealed as the dominant media report wrenching stories about families being evicted from their homes, and evident in cars and RVs that now line up in parking areas and serve as many people’s only shelter. Rendered redundant as a result of the collapse of the welfare state, a pervasive racism, a growing disparity in income and wealth, and a set of take-no-prisoners market principles, an increasing number of individuals and groups are suffering from what Orlando Patterson in his discussion of slavery called “social death.” The young, working poor, unemployed, disabled, and homeless increasingly share a common fate as more and more people become victims of the socially strangulating culture of hyper-individualism, self-interest, corporate corruption, and a viral consumerism that now governs the political sphere as well as the realm of everyday life in accordance with the organizing principles of free-market fundamentalism.6
Under neoliberalism, social problems such as poverty become utterly privatized and removed from public discourse. Principles of communal responsibility are derided in favor of narrowly defined individual satisfactions, largely measured through the acquisition and disposability of consumer goods. In this highly privatized universe, visions of the good society are cast aside, replaced by “the perpetual search for bargains”7 and maximum consumer satisfaction. The consequences involve not only the undoing of social bonds and the dismissal of shared responsibilities but also the endless reproduction of the much-narrowed registers of character and individual self-reliance as substitutes for any rigorous analyses of the politics, ideologies, and mechanisms of power at work in the construction of socially created problems. All problems are now laid on the doorstep of the individual, regardless of how unlikely they might been involved in creating them. This makes it more socially acceptable to blame the poor, homeless, uninsured, jobless, and other disadvantaged individuals and groups for their problems, while reinforcing the merging of the market state with the punishing state. This is the central discourse of Fox News, which apparently believes that the mortgage crisis was due to grasping home buyers and not the unabashed greedy of the deregulated banking and mortgage industries.
What is often ignored by studies conducted on the rise of neoliberalism in the United States is that it is not only a system of economic power relations but also an educational project, intent on producing new forms of subjectivity and on sanctioning particular modes of conduct.8 We get a sense of what kind of conduct is promoted by neoliberalism from an insight provided by the British media theorist Nick Couldry, who insists that “every system of cruelty requires its own theater,” one that draws upon the rituals of everyday life in order to legitimate its norms, values, institutions, and social practices.9 Neoliberalism represents one such system of cruelty that is reproduced daily through a regime of common sense and that now serves as a powerful pedagogical force, shaping our lives, memories, and daily experiences while attempting to erase everything critical and emancipatory about history, justice, solidarity, freedom, and the meaning of democracy. Undoubtedly, neoliberal norms, practices, and social relations are being called into question to a degree unwitnessed since the 1930s. Yet despite the devastating impact of a financial meltdown, neoliberalism’s potent market-driven ideology is far from bankrupt and is still a powerful cultural and educational force to be reckoned with—how else could one explain the lack of critical discourse about the expanding number of mainstream public institutions that legitimate and normalize the values underpinning free-market fundamentalism?
Under the George W. Bush administration, democracy was viewed with contempt; young people were not considered worthy investments; and the rich were given $2-trillion in tax breaks. For many young people and adults today, the private sphere has become the only space in which to imagine any sense of hope, pleasure, or possibility. Culture as an activity in which young people actually produce the conditions of their own agency through dialogue, community participation, public stories, and political struggle is being eroded. In its place, we are increasingly surrounded by a “climate of cultural and linguistic privatization” in which the only obligation of citizenship is to consume and shop. While an unfolding economic crisis should discredit the language of the free market, there is nothing yet to substitute in its place. It is imperative that we develop a new language, especially for young people, one that recognizes how individual problems are related to social concerns. Living in a real democracy means finding collective ways of dealing with the most pressing problems facing future generations, including ecological destruction, poverty, economic inequality, racism, and the necessity for a vibrant social state. We need to reclaim the meaning of democracy and give it some substance by recognizing, as Bill Moyers points out, that democracy is not just about the freedom to shop, formal elections, or the two-party system: it is about discovering “the means of dignifying people so they become fully free to claim their moral and political agency.”10 The problems currently faced by the United States are not merely economic, but also political and educational, and demand solutions that can address the combination of forces that have produced a rampant culture of neoliberalism to the detriment of democratic public life.
In order to strengthen the public sphere, we must use its most widespread institutions, undo their degeneration into means of commodification and control, and reclaim them as democratic spaces. Schools, colleges and universities come to mind—because of both their contradictions and their democratic potential, their reality and their promise, though of course they are not the only sites of potential resistance. This democratic transformation must involve more than a simple appeal to thoughtfulness, critique, and dialogue; it must assert what kind of education matters to a democracy and restate a commitment to public and higher education in terms of its value for political culture and democratic public life. One of the most important challenges facing education in the Obama era is the reintroduction of educational policies, values, and social practices that help produce civic identifications and commitments, teach young people how to participate in and shape public life and exercise critical judgment, and provide the pedagogical conditions that enable them to exercise civic courage. The Obama administration to date has been of little help here and largely supports a notion of education that is tied to a business culture, one that validates charter schools, high-stakes testing, students defined less as citizens than as potential workers, and profit incentives to reward student achievement—a model of education not unlike what the Bush administration supported. The shortcomings of Obama’s philosophy of education and its uncritical acceptance of neoliberal values, especially in light of his vociferous indignation over Wall Street corruption and bonuses, are difficult to understand. Nowhere is the disconnect between Obama’s call for change and his love of markets more pronounced than in his educational policies.11
If we are to move beyond the limited strategy and language of bailouts—a code word for helping the wealthy and asking the poor to make more sacrifices—the larger public dialogue needs to focus on how we view, represent, and treat young people and others marginalized by class, race, disability, and age. It needs to be about how to imagine and struggle for a democratic future. The potential for a better future further increases when critical education and democratically inspired modes of literacy become central to any viable notion of politics. Education in this instance becomes both an ethical and a political referent: it furnishes an opportunity for adults to provide the conditions for themselves and young people to become critically engaged social agents who value democratic values over market values and who take seriously the notion that when human beings recognize the causes of their suffering they are in a better position to bring the misery caused by market fundamentalism and other anti-democratic tendencies to a halt. Similarly, it points to a future in which a critical education, in part, creates the conditions for each generation of youth to struggle anew to sustain the promise of a democracy that must be continuously expanded into a world of new possibilities and opportunities for keeping justice and real hope alive. This may sound a bit utopian given the political and economic crisis we are facing in both the United States and Canada, but we have few choices if we are going to fight for a future that does a great deal more than endlessly repeat the present. I think it is all the more crucial to take seriously Hannah Arendt’s admonition that living in dark times requires believing that history never reaches an endpoint and the space of the possible is always larger than the one on display.
Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. His most recent books include: Take Back Higher Education (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (2007) and Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed (2008). His newest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?" will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009.
1. Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, “Introduction,” Evil Paradises (New York: The New Press, 2007), p. ix.
2. Christine Haughney and Eric Konigsberg, “Despite Tough Times, Ultrarich Keep Spending,” New York Times (April 14, 2008), p. A1.
3. Ibid.
4. Paul Krugman, “The Market Mystique,” New York Times (March 27, 2009), p. A27.
5. Kenneth Saltman and David Gabard, eds., Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools (New York: Routledge, 2003).
6. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).
7. Zygmunt Bauman, “Happiness in a Society of Individuals,” Soundings (Winter 2008), p. 21.
8. Thomas Lemke, “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique,” Rethinking Marxism 14:3 (Fall 2002), pp. 49–64.
9. Nick Couldry, “Reality TV, or the Secret Theater of Neoliberalism,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 30:1 (January–March 2008), p. 1.
10. Bill Moyers, “A Time for Anger, A Call to Action,” Common Dreams (February 7, 2007). Online at: http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0322-24.htm.
1111. I take this issue up in great detail in Henry A. Giroux, “Obama’s Dilemma; Postpartisan Politics and the Crisis of American Education,” Harvard Educational Review (July 2009, in press)
By HENRY A. GIROUX
CounterPunch
In spite of the almost unprecedented financial and credit crises gripping the United States, the legacy of jaded excess lives on as both a haunting memory and an ideological register that continues to shape contemporary politics. After all, it was only a few years ago when it was widely recognized, if not celebrated, that the New Gilded Age and its updated “‘dreamworlds’ of consumption, property, and power” had returned to the United States with a vengeance.1 The exorbitantly rich along with their conservative ideologues publicly invoked and lionized that bygone period in nineteenth-century American history when corporations ruled political, economic, and social life and an allegedly heroic entrepreneurial spirit brought great wealth and prosperity to the rest of the country. Even with the economic blowout and its now visible register of corruption and greed on the part of Wall Street bankers and traders, the dominant press cannot relinquish its love affair with the super-rich, regardless of how greedy they appear. How else to explain stories about how the rich are going through hard times as exemplified in their either moving out of their high-priced mansions into more modest million-dollar condos or being forced to give up riding in limos for more discreet modes of transportation? In some cases, these high-flying entrepreneurs of the now devalued Gilded Age are celebrated because of their unmitigated belief in the gospel of wealth and their sheer courage to spend in tough times. Or, as the New York Times puts it, “When the times get tough, the smart spend money.”2 And while tent cities are emerging all over the country, the ultra-rich provide a lesson in what it means to be “smart,” capitalizing on their spending habits by buying $14-million condos in New York City, dishing out $3000 at the Goldbar Lounge for a bottle of Louis XIII Cognac, or paying $656,000 for a Rolls Royce Phantom convertible.3 What these stories often forget to mention is the legacy of corporate swindling, corruption, and financial adventurism that was responsible for bankrupting the country.
There is more at work in these examples of Gilded Age excess than a predatory narcissism, a zany hubris, and a neofeudal world view in which self-interest and the laws of the market are seen as the only true measure of politics. There is also an attack on the idea of the social contract—the state’s provision of minimum guarantees of security—and the very notion of democratic politics. Moreover, in this free-wheeling, deregulated market society, the citizen is reduced to a consumer or if labeled as a flawed consumer rendered as excess, redundant, and disposable. Rampant greed, market deregulation, and cut-throat individual competition, lauded in this world of free-market fundamentalism, have produced over the last thirty years an unparalleled degree of social inequality in the United States along with massive dislocations in the basic foundations of society. Clearly, any understanding of the present financial crisis and its disastrous effects has to include a consideration of free-market fundamentalism or neoliberalism and the ideologies, cultural formations, and modes of political irresponsibility that produced it. Discussions about the economic meltdown are largely focused on economics or as Paul Krugman puts it “the market mystique–the magic of the financial marketplace and [the fraudulent and corrupt] wizards who perform that magic.”4 Almost nothing is said about the public values, ideologies, modes of rationality, and commonsense assumptions that produce both neoliberal beliefs and the subjects who unquestionably accept such views. Characteristic of many current critiques of the financial crisis is a disconnect between analyses of the destruction produced by the economic meltdown and a silence regarding the market-driven values underlying its sordid vision of the world. Neoliberalism has not only altered economic agendas throughout the world but has also transformed politics, restructured social relations, and produced an array of reality narratives and disciplinary measures that normalize its perverted view of citizenship, the state, and the supremacy of market relations. Clearly, the crisis of free-market fundamentalism and the economic Darwinism that functions as its counterpart are as much educational issues as they are economic and political problems.
The varied populations suffering and made increasingly disposable under neoliberalism can attribute their oppression to a reactionary politics in which the categories of "citizen" and "democratic representation," once integral to national politics, are no longer recognized. In the past, people who were marginalized by class and race could at least expect a modicum of support from the social state, either through an array of limited social provisions or from employers who recognized that they still had some value as part of a reserve army of unemployed labor. This is no longer true. Under the ruthless dynamics of free-market fundamentalism, there has been a shift away from the goals of living a life of dignity and working for economic independence to the much more deadly task of struggling to stay alive—or keeping one step away from becoming part of the growing army of humans considered utterly disposable and redundant.
Disposable populations have historically been relegated to the frontier zones of society, as part of an ongoing effort to hide them from public view. Until recently, such populations were warehoused in schools that resemble boot camps,5
dispersed to dank and dangerous workplaces far from the enclaves of the tourist industries, incarcerated in prisons that privilege punishment over rehabilitation, and consigned to the status of the permanently unemployed. But such populations now seem to be an everyday part of the American landscape, glaringly visible in the burgeoning tent cities, revealed as the dominant media report wrenching stories about families being evicted from their homes, and evident in cars and RVs that now line up in parking areas and serve as many people’s only shelter. Rendered redundant as a result of the collapse of the welfare state, a pervasive racism, a growing disparity in income and wealth, and a set of take-no-prisoners market principles, an increasing number of individuals and groups are suffering from what Orlando Patterson in his discussion of slavery called “social death.” The young, working poor, unemployed, disabled, and homeless increasingly share a common fate as more and more people become victims of the socially strangulating culture of hyper-individualism, self-interest, corporate corruption, and a viral consumerism that now governs the political sphere as well as the realm of everyday life in accordance with the organizing principles of free-market fundamentalism.6
Under neoliberalism, social problems such as poverty become utterly privatized and removed from public discourse. Principles of communal responsibility are derided in favor of narrowly defined individual satisfactions, largely measured through the acquisition and disposability of consumer goods. In this highly privatized universe, visions of the good society are cast aside, replaced by “the perpetual search for bargains”7 and maximum consumer satisfaction. The consequences involve not only the undoing of social bonds and the dismissal of shared responsibilities but also the endless reproduction of the much-narrowed registers of character and individual self-reliance as substitutes for any rigorous analyses of the politics, ideologies, and mechanisms of power at work in the construction of socially created problems. All problems are now laid on the doorstep of the individual, regardless of how unlikely they might been involved in creating them. This makes it more socially acceptable to blame the poor, homeless, uninsured, jobless, and other disadvantaged individuals and groups for their problems, while reinforcing the merging of the market state with the punishing state. This is the central discourse of Fox News, which apparently believes that the mortgage crisis was due to grasping home buyers and not the unabashed greedy of the deregulated banking and mortgage industries.
What is often ignored by studies conducted on the rise of neoliberalism in the United States is that it is not only a system of economic power relations but also an educational project, intent on producing new forms of subjectivity and on sanctioning particular modes of conduct.8 We get a sense of what kind of conduct is promoted by neoliberalism from an insight provided by the British media theorist Nick Couldry, who insists that “every system of cruelty requires its own theater,” one that draws upon the rituals of everyday life in order to legitimate its norms, values, institutions, and social practices.9 Neoliberalism represents one such system of cruelty that is reproduced daily through a regime of common sense and that now serves as a powerful pedagogical force, shaping our lives, memories, and daily experiences while attempting to erase everything critical and emancipatory about history, justice, solidarity, freedom, and the meaning of democracy. Undoubtedly, neoliberal norms, practices, and social relations are being called into question to a degree unwitnessed since the 1930s. Yet despite the devastating impact of a financial meltdown, neoliberalism’s potent market-driven ideology is far from bankrupt and is still a powerful cultural and educational force to be reckoned with—how else could one explain the lack of critical discourse about the expanding number of mainstream public institutions that legitimate and normalize the values underpinning free-market fundamentalism?
Under the George W. Bush administration, democracy was viewed with contempt; young people were not considered worthy investments; and the rich were given $2-trillion in tax breaks. For many young people and adults today, the private sphere has become the only space in which to imagine any sense of hope, pleasure, or possibility. Culture as an activity in which young people actually produce the conditions of their own agency through dialogue, community participation, public stories, and political struggle is being eroded. In its place, we are increasingly surrounded by a “climate of cultural and linguistic privatization” in which the only obligation of citizenship is to consume and shop. While an unfolding economic crisis should discredit the language of the free market, there is nothing yet to substitute in its place. It is imperative that we develop a new language, especially for young people, one that recognizes how individual problems are related to social concerns. Living in a real democracy means finding collective ways of dealing with the most pressing problems facing future generations, including ecological destruction, poverty, economic inequality, racism, and the necessity for a vibrant social state. We need to reclaim the meaning of democracy and give it some substance by recognizing, as Bill Moyers points out, that democracy is not just about the freedom to shop, formal elections, or the two-party system: it is about discovering “the means of dignifying people so they become fully free to claim their moral and political agency.”10 The problems currently faced by the United States are not merely economic, but also political and educational, and demand solutions that can address the combination of forces that have produced a rampant culture of neoliberalism to the detriment of democratic public life.
In order to strengthen the public sphere, we must use its most widespread institutions, undo their degeneration into means of commodification and control, and reclaim them as democratic spaces. Schools, colleges and universities come to mind—because of both their contradictions and their democratic potential, their reality and their promise, though of course they are not the only sites of potential resistance. This democratic transformation must involve more than a simple appeal to thoughtfulness, critique, and dialogue; it must assert what kind of education matters to a democracy and restate a commitment to public and higher education in terms of its value for political culture and democratic public life. One of the most important challenges facing education in the Obama era is the reintroduction of educational policies, values, and social practices that help produce civic identifications and commitments, teach young people how to participate in and shape public life and exercise critical judgment, and provide the pedagogical conditions that enable them to exercise civic courage. The Obama administration to date has been of little help here and largely supports a notion of education that is tied to a business culture, one that validates charter schools, high-stakes testing, students defined less as citizens than as potential workers, and profit incentives to reward student achievement—a model of education not unlike what the Bush administration supported. The shortcomings of Obama’s philosophy of education and its uncritical acceptance of neoliberal values, especially in light of his vociferous indignation over Wall Street corruption and bonuses, are difficult to understand. Nowhere is the disconnect between Obama’s call for change and his love of markets more pronounced than in his educational policies.11
If we are to move beyond the limited strategy and language of bailouts—a code word for helping the wealthy and asking the poor to make more sacrifices—the larger public dialogue needs to focus on how we view, represent, and treat young people and others marginalized by class, race, disability, and age. It needs to be about how to imagine and struggle for a democratic future. The potential for a better future further increases when critical education and democratically inspired modes of literacy become central to any viable notion of politics. Education in this instance becomes both an ethical and a political referent: it furnishes an opportunity for adults to provide the conditions for themselves and young people to become critically engaged social agents who value democratic values over market values and who take seriously the notion that when human beings recognize the causes of their suffering they are in a better position to bring the misery caused by market fundamentalism and other anti-democratic tendencies to a halt. Similarly, it points to a future in which a critical education, in part, creates the conditions for each generation of youth to struggle anew to sustain the promise of a democracy that must be continuously expanded into a world of new possibilities and opportunities for keeping justice and real hope alive. This may sound a bit utopian given the political and economic crisis we are facing in both the United States and Canada, but we have few choices if we are going to fight for a future that does a great deal more than endlessly repeat the present. I think it is all the more crucial to take seriously Hannah Arendt’s admonition that living in dark times requires believing that history never reaches an endpoint and the space of the possible is always larger than the one on display.
Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. His most recent books include: Take Back Higher Education (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (2007) and Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed (2008). His newest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?" will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009.
1. Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, “Introduction,” Evil Paradises (New York: The New Press, 2007), p. ix.
2. Christine Haughney and Eric Konigsberg, “Despite Tough Times, Ultrarich Keep Spending,” New York Times (April 14, 2008), p. A1.
3. Ibid.
4. Paul Krugman, “The Market Mystique,” New York Times (March 27, 2009), p. A27.
5. Kenneth Saltman and David Gabard, eds., Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools (New York: Routledge, 2003).
6. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).
7. Zygmunt Bauman, “Happiness in a Society of Individuals,” Soundings (Winter 2008), p. 21.
8. Thomas Lemke, “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique,” Rethinking Marxism 14:3 (Fall 2002), pp. 49–64.
9. Nick Couldry, “Reality TV, or the Secret Theater of Neoliberalism,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 30:1 (January–March 2008), p. 1.
10. Bill Moyers, “A Time for Anger, A Call to Action,” Common Dreams (February 7, 2007). Online at: http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0322-24.htm.
1111. I take this issue up in great detail in Henry A. Giroux, “Obama’s Dilemma; Postpartisan Politics and the Crisis of American Education,” Harvard Educational Review (July 2009, in press)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Armas
