Q&A: The Undying Legacy of Dambudzo Marechera

August 29, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Moses Magadza

WINDHOEK, Aug 29 (IPS) – Legendary and controversial Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera, who once famously told people to let him write and drink his beer, has been dead for 25 years. However, interest in the life and work of the author, who has become a cult icon to aspiring young writers in Zimbabwe and abroad, will not die.His work continues to inspire authors and readers alike.

Emmanuel Sigauke, a Zimbabwean poet and English teacher at Cosumnes River College in the United States, is a student of Marechera’s work. He tells IPS that many people are drawn to the famous author because of the way he exercised his art, the risks he took, and his total commitment to writing.

Indeed, critics hail Marechera as a genius. His most famous book, House of Hunger, won the prestigious Guardian First Book Award in 1979, making Marechera the first and only African to win the award.

After being expelled in the early 1970s from the University of Rhodesia, now known as the University of Zimbabwe, Marechera was admitted to the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. But he was expelled from there too for unruly behaviour.

He died in Zimbabwe at the age of 35 after spending most of the last five years of his life living in the streets, writing furiously but publishing just one more book, Mindblasts.

Now a book on his life, soon to be released in Zimbabwe, provides new and interesting insights into Marechera’s personal and professional relationships.

Dr. Dobrota Pucherova and Julie Cairnie co-edited the book titled “Moving Spirit: The Legacy of Dambudzo Marechera in the 21st Century”. The book, published in Germany in May, is a compilation of essays by various writers that focus on how Marechera continues to inspire others.

“I believe it provides many new insights into Marechera’s relationships with his contemporaries, with other authors, and with his fans and inspirees. For example, Carolyn Hart’s essay explores Marechera’s relationship with African-American postmodern writers, while Katja Kellerer’s piece examines the intertextualities between House of Hunger and Ignatius Mabasa’s Mapenzi,” Pucherova says.

She holds a PhD on southern African writing and studied Marechera’s writing as part of her thesis. She also lectures on his work.

Excerpts of the interview follow.

Q: What drew you to the Marechera phenomenon?

A: Marechera’s writing expresses very well the desire for mental freedom that concerned me when studying southern African authors. He believed that overcoming oppositional identity discourses and freeing the imagination to create space for individual reinvention could achieve true liberation from oppression.

At the same time, Marechera’s vision of the political as sexual and the sexual as political provided new insights into power relationships in colonial and post-colonial conditions. Last, but not least, his flair for language and his infectious humour make his books very pleasurable to read.

Q: What inspired this book?

A: When I was writing my thesis chapter on Marechera, alongside I wrote a play based mainly on (his novel) Black Sunlight. To me, this novel is immensely comical and at the same time sophisticated. I felt that it has been misunderstood due to Marechera’s unwillingness to edit his work, as (leading academic publisher on Africa) James Currey has documented.

In adapting the novel for the stage, I wanted to bring forth its audacity and deeply sophisticated comedy. And so, when I decided to produce the play at Oxford, I felt: ‘Why not organise an entire festival on Marechera?’

The festival, which took place from May 15 to 17, 2009, was an international multi-media event that included film, theatre, fiction, poetry, painting, photography, memoirs and scholarly essays – all inspired by Marechera’s work and life.

The book is the proceedings of the festival, with a few additional pieces. Julie Cairnie, who has co-edited the book with me, was a participant at the Oxford Celebration.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Africa, Book Review, Culture Tagged With: , ,

Select Bibliography on the Global Political Economy

June 15, 2011 by

This bibliography is being refined and revised.   A new more concise and revised version with commentary and specific recommendations may be presented at a later date.


Filed Under: Book Review, Economic Crisis, Economic Policy, Economy Tagged With:

BOOKS-US: Dissecting the Perpetual War Machine

November 8, 2010 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Nov 8, 2010 (IPS) – Andrew J. Bacevich emerged in the first decade of the century as this country’s most widely read and widely respected critic of U.S. militarism and empire.

He has addressed this issue with an intensity that is unprecedented for an academic. With the appearance of "Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War", he has produced six books illuminating these themes in just eight years, writing three previous books – "American Empire" (2002), "The New American Militarism" (2005), and "The Limits of Power" (2008), and editing two other volumes, "The Imperial Tense" (2003) and "The Long War" (2006).

In attracting a broad readership to his critique of U.S. militarism, Bacevich has transcended both the arid tone of most academic writing on the history of foreign and military policy and the right-left divide over social and political values. As a former army officer, a Catholic and a social conservative from the Midwest, he has appealed to both conservatives and progressives unhappy with the militarised pursuit of power abroad and the encouragement of unlimited individual self-gratification at home.

He has argued that the all-volunteer army is the nexus between these twinned developments in U.S. society and global policy. As if to confirm the crucial importance of the all-voluntary army to the system of U.S. militarism, former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson has just recounted in the Washington Post Oct. 29 the strong negative reaction of military officers at a recent dinner to the idea of restoring the draft. The military elites believe it must have the mission of fighting terrorism "even when our attention lags or turns inward", because "They are not like the rest of America…."

In "Washington Rules", Bacevich offers a series of ruminations on how and why the United States has come to what he calls "a condition approximating perpetual war…." He begins by positing a consensus held firmly by the U.S. political, business, foreign policy and media elite ever since the end of World War II consisting of what he calls "the sacred trinity" of principles: global U.S. military presence, global power projection and global interventionism.

Bacevich argues that the "socialisation" of the political and intellectual elite into this catechism has been so complete that U.S. citizens "have essentially forfeited any capacity to ask first-order questions about the fundamentals of national security policy". He cites as exhibit one in his case for such vacuous discourse on the subject of national security the dismissive treatment of Dennis Kucinich (on the left) and Ron Paul (on the right) because of their refusal to endorse the catechism during the 2008 presidential primaries.

Because of the absence of any serious challenge to this catechism of global exertion of U.S. power over the decades, Bacevich argues, the U.S. populace had come by the turn of this century to "accept the use of force as routine". That was the deeper shift in attitudes that allowed the Bush administration to capitalise so easily on the 9/11 terrorist attacks to take the United States into the present situation of "permanent war".

This book marks a new analytical approach to the problem which his riveted him these past several years. In "The New American Militarism", Bacevich had sought explanations for the militarism of the post-Vietnam period in the right-wing reaction to Vietnam-era radicalism, the rise of the Christian right, and the "cultural and intellectual currents emblematic of the postindustrial or postmodern mood" ("the end of history", globalisation, virtual reality, the CNN effect, etc.). In "Washington Rules", however, he probes more deeply the nature of the national security state itself in search of causation.

Bacevich cites as a "partial explanation" for the John F. Kennedy administration’s obsession with Cuba the way in which domestic U.S. politics provide incentives for presidents to rely on force merely to inoculate themselves from criticism by the opposition (either from the opposing party or within the Republic party itself) for being "weak". That same factor obviously applies to a wide range of presidential decisions on military and foreign policy.

But Bacevich gives even more attention to the personal and institutional interests of the military and civilian national security elites in creating their own "empires". In sketches of the roles played by CIA director Alan Dulles and commander of the Strategic Air Command Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay during the Cold War, Bacevich observes that both those pivotal figures lobbied the White House for policies (covert operations and investments in massive numbers of bombers and nuclear weapons, respectively) that benefited their institutions and conferred prestige and power on them personally.

Of LeMay, Bacevich writes that his "concern for the well- being of the United States blended seamlessly with his devotion to the well being of the institution he led."

In making that point, Bacevich has aligned his perspective on the U.S. national security state with two seminal works on the national security state – Richard Barnet’s "Roots of War" (1971) and Morton Halperin’s "National Security Policymaking" (1975) – both of which argued that national security officials automatically conflate the interests of their national security organisation with those of the nation.

That conflation of interests is the key to the problem of errant U.S. military policies, because it allows national security officials to pursue policies and programmes that are sharply at odds with the interests of the U.S. public without the slightest discomfort.

In discussing the U.S. descent into the Vietnam imbroglio, Bacevich eschews single-factor explanation, referring to a litany of personal, political, perceptual and cultural factors that impinged on U.S. policy.

But he also invokes a structural factor with broader explanatory power: the determination of the Cold War policymakers and their respective institutions to maintain "Washington rules" rather than allow them let them to be supplanted by alternative approaches to national security – approaches that would require less power, prestige and resources for themselves and their agencies.

"To those whose interests were served by preserving that strategy, this was an intolerable prospect," writes Bacevich.

In his concluding chapter, Bacevich returns to this pivotal concept of personal and institutional self-interest as a driving force in the militarisation of U.S. policy but broadens it even further.

"Who benefits from the perpetuation of the Washington rules?" he asks. In answering that question, he describes a socio-political-bureaucratic system that delivers "profit, power and privilege to a long list of beneficiaries: elected and appointed officials, corporate executives and corporate lobbyists, admirals and generals, functionaries staffing the national security apparatus, media personalities and policy intellectuals from universities and research organizations."

Although Bacevich does not develop this explanatory approach in detail, his emphatic statement of the thesis that a powerful and broadly-defined self-interested elite is now driving the system of "permanent war" offers hope for a U.S. political movement to curb this militarism.

A central weakness of that movement in the past has been the absence of a common analysis of the problem. Bacevich’s embrace of this new paradigm of self-interest of the national security state and the political and private sector elites associated with it could provide the juice for a stronger and more effective campaign at a time when the system is more vulnerable politically than ever before.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2010.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Book Review, Budget, Conflict, Geopolitics, Politics, United States Tagged With: ,

Churchill Denied Relief to Bengal Famine Victims, Book Says

October 25, 2010 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Sananda Sahoo

WASHINGTON, Oct 25, 2010 (IPS) – A new book on the Indian famine of 1943, also known as the Bengal famine named after the specific region where it occurred, has squarely put the responsibility for the famine on then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

The famine killed roughly three million people and devastated the countryside of then undivided Bengal as World War II raged on the eastern flanks of the Indian subcontinent. Early in 1942, Japan took over Burma, a major rice exporter, and the British government reacted by buying up rice supplies and thereby denying it to the people in Bengal, another major rice-producing region.

The British government in London, the book says, turned away from sending relief to the famine victims even when it was evident that people were dying of hunger. According to archival materials, the Bengal government controlled by the British was also hoarding rice for its employees in Calcutta, the seat of the government in eastern India, and was buying up grains for Allied soldiers fighting the war in Middle East and Africa, says author Madhusree Mukerjee in her new book "Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II".

Hoarding, rice denial to the people, and inflationary financing of war efforts by printing money to pay for the goods the government was buying, coupled with the panic in government ranks when they realised there wasn’t enough grain, all perpetuated the famine. It raged on for nearly a year before coming to an end thanks to Bengal’s own rice harvest.

Mukerjee’s research also shows Churchill’s contempt for the lives of ordinary Indians that helped him ignore pleas for help.

"If it was someone else other than Churchill, I believe relief would have been sent, and if it wasn’t for the war the famine wouldn’t have occurred at all," Mukerjee told IPS from Frankfurt. "Churchill’s attitude toward India was quite extreme and he hated Indians mainly because he knew India couldn’t be held for very long. One can’t escape the really powerful, racist things that he was saying."

While a vast body of literature exists on the famine, Mukerjee’s book explores whether it was possible to send relief to the victims.

"It certainly was possible to send relief but for Churchill and the War Cabinet that were hoarding grain for use after the war," Mukerjee said.

The British government had drawn up the Indian Famine Codes during the 1880s to help avoid famine and food scarcity following natural disasters. In October 1942, when there were signs of food scarcity following a cyclone, these codes were not invoked. As economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen have said earlier in their book, the famine was "simply not declared" by the British government.

The role of Indian political leaders during the famine also reveals the British government’s unwillingness to intervene.

A regional rebel government – the Tamluk National Government – tried to distribute grains to farmers and residents but its reach wasn’t wide enough to make a significant impact.

It was also during this period that almost 90,000 political activists and leaders of the National Congress Party from across the country were behind bars on sedition charges for calling for independence from the British.

"Many of them requested the government that they be freed to help the famine victims but their plea was not granted," Mukerjee said. "There was nothing the Congress Party could do."

The local government, led by the Muslim League party, was also tied by restrictions imposed on them. Chief Minister Fazlul Huq, who had repeatedly warned that rice denial would lead to starvation deaths and famine, was forced to resign.

Private traders, many acting on behalf of the government, controlled food supply to the public. In one instance, a local company which happened to be owned by the chief financier of the Muslim League was paid millions of rupees to buy grains from the market and hold it for the British government.

The media was slow to react, too, because of censorship. Vernacular newspapers in Bengal started reporting on the famine long before the major newspaper of the region, The Statesman, picked up the story in the summer of 1943.

The government, Mukerjee says, had destroyed 5,000 copies of Hungry Bengal, a collection of images and articles on the famine.

Emaciated figures were pouring into the streets of Calcutta from the countryside during the latter half of 1943. But it wasn’t enough to raise alarm over the famine outside Bengal.

"Dehydration was a major problem; people who had taken to the road had few serviceable utensils or containers," Mukerjee quotes a Calcutta resident who lived through the period as saying. "[T]hey would try to carry water in cupped hands or leaves, or in rags stretched tight, back to loved ones who had fallen by the wayside – but it would all dribble through."

This was just one story of the desperate struggle to survive amid others of hunger that went on to claim, by conservative estimates, 3.8 million lives in Bengal.

A commission was set up in 1944 to investigate causes of the famine but its findings remain controversial to this day due to missing or destroyed files.

As a follow-up to her latest book, Mukerjee wants to look into hunger in modern day India.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2010.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Book Review, History Tagged With: , , , ,

Book: What if We Took Economics Seriously?

April 30, 2010 by

Dean Baker’s new book strips away the ideology and applies the basics of economics to some of the most pressing issues of the day.

For Immediate Release: April 30, 2010
Contact: Alan Barber 202-293-5380 x115

Washington, D.C.- What would policy look like if we took basic principles of mainstream economics and applied them consistently? What if we looked past ideology and tried to find the policies that make the most sense and work towards an economy for everyone? These are the questions answered in Dean Baker’s latest book,"Taking Economics Seriously."

Baker takes three issues – the free market, malpractice, and the big banks -  and walks the reader through a fascinating Econ 101 that exposes the faulty arguments and misdirections that dominate economic policy, all the while demonstrating how shifting the terms of debate might benefit us all.

Elizabeth Warren, Chair of the Congressional Oversight panel and Leo Gottlieb Professor of law, Harvard Law School says, " A terrific book! Dean Baker deconstructs the myth that big corporations have any interest in the free market and deregulation."

Simon Johnson, Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship, MIT Sloan School of Management, and former chief economist of the IMF writes, " Baker’s analysis is always insightful and his proposals entirely reasonable. Read this book only if you are worried about where the United States is heading."

"Taking Economics Seriously" uses policy ideas and concepts that should be basics for any economist and applies them to make informed recommendations on some of the most discussed issues of our time. Baker does so in a manner that is easily accessible to everyone, whether a recent econ grad headed into the real world or just someone with a sincere concern about our nation’s future. "Taking Economics Seriously" is published by MIT Press and is available online and at select bookstores.


Filed Under: Book Review, Economy Tagged With:

BOOKS-US: Soldiers Who Just Say No

August 17, 2009 by

Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IPS

By Jon Letman

KAUAI, Hawaii, Aug 17 (IPS) – Six months into Barack Obama’s presidency, the U.S. public’s display of antiwar sentiment has faded to barely a whisper.

Despite Obama’s vow to withdraw all combat forces from Iraq before September 2011, he plans to leave up to 50,000 troops in "training and advisory" roles. Meanwhile, nearly 130,000 troops remain in that country and more than 50,000 U.S. soldiers occupy Afghanistan, with up to an additional 18,000 approved for deployment this year.

So where is the resistance?

In independent journalist Dahr Jamail’s "The Will to Resist: Soldiers who refuse to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan" (Haymarket Books), Jamail profiles what may ultimately prove to be the United States’ most effective anti-war movement: the soldiers themselves.

During the early years of the Iraq war, Jamail traveled to Iraq alone and reported as an unembedded freelance journalist. Over four visits, Jamail documented the war’s effects on Iraqi civilians in "Beyond the Green Zone" (2007).

Although he is a fierce critic of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of the U.S. mainstream media which he says served as a "cheerleader" for war, Jamail admits he was raised to admire the military. However, after covering the war from Iraq between 2003 and 2005, Jamail was enraged by what he calls "the heedless and deliberate devastation [he] saw [the U.S. military] wreak upon the people of Iraq."

Back in the U.S., traveling the country speaking out against the war, Jamail met scores of soldiers who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan and found that he shared with them a "familiar anguish" which drove him to further explore their motivations as soldiers. In doing so he opens the door to a growing subculture of internal dissent that is increasingly bubbling up and spilling over the edge of an otherwise ultra-disciplined, highly-controlled military society.

"The soldiers I spoke with while working on this book are some of the most ardent anti-war activists I have ever met," Jamail told IPS. "Having experienced the war firsthand, this should not come as a surprise."

In "The Will to Resist", Jamail profiles individual acts of resistance that he envisions as the possible seeds of a broader anti-war movement. The book is filled with stories of soldiers who refuse missions deemed "suicidal", go AWOL, flee abroad, refuse to carry a loaded weapon, even arranging to be shot in the leg – and those who in a final act of desperation commit suicide.

Soldiers who refuse to deploy or follow orders risk court-martial, prison time, dishonourable discharge and loss of veteran’s medical benefits, yet an increasing number of active duty soldiers and veterans are willing to do so.

Rather than accept a mission almost certain to bring death, some troops simply refuse to follow orders. Jamail describes soldiers in Iraq on "search and avoid" missions who grew adept at giving the appearance of going out on patrol when, in fact, they were lying low, catching up on sleep and trying to avoid being killed.

Jamail quotes one Marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan as saying, "Dissent starts as simple as saying ‘this is bullshit. Why am I risking my life?’"

Soldiers tell Jamail that incidents of refusing orders are unremarkable and "pretty widespread," to which he responds, "It is also understandable why the military does not want more soldiers or the public to know about them."

"Army Specialist Victor Agosto, who served a year in Iraq, has recently publicly refused orders to deploy to Afghanistan," Jamail told IPS, "and the Army, due to the threat of more soldiers and the broader public learning of this, backed away from giving Agosto the harshest court-martial possible, to one of the lightest."

Jamail also dedicates two chapters to soldiers who stand up to systemic misogyny and homophobia in the military. Extensive interviews with female soldiers detail a pervasive culture of institutionalised "command rape," harassment, abuse and assault which, in a number of high-profile cases (and many more unknown) end in ostracism, coercion, demotion, suicide and murder.

Citing studies from professional medical journals that offer a grim assessment of sexual intimidation and abuse within the U.S. military, Jamail writes, "According to the group Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, one in six women in the United States will be a victim of sexual assault in her lifetime. In the military, at least two in five will. In either case, at least 60 percent of the cases go unreported."

As Jamail recounts horrific cases of violence toward women in the military, he notes the irony of frequent claims that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are "liberating" women of those Muslim countries.

Like female soldiers, gay and lesbian service men and women are targeted for harassment and abuse. Jamail meets soldiers who, under the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy, must conceal their true identity, falsely posing as straight while battling internal conflicts about their own roles in the military.

In the blunt language of the soldiers, Jamail describes the military experience as a process of dehumanisation. "The primary objective appeared to be to mistreat and dehumanise your guys [fellow soldiers]," one Marine says. "I could not do it, not to my men and not to those people. I like the Iraqis, I like the Afghanis. Why were we treating them like shit?…That is when I really started questioning what the hell was going on."

For many soldiers however, the pain of war is simply too much to bear and so they choose their own final discharge: suicide. In an emotionally exhausting chapter, Jamail cites statistics from the Army Suicide Event Report which states active duty military suicides have risen to their highest rates since the Army started tracking self-inflicted deaths in 1980, and the numbers are growing.

Documenting the phenomenon of "suicide by cop," Jamail quotes from a Post Traumatic Distress Syndrome (PTSD)-wracked veteran’s pre-"suicide" internet article in which he wrote, "…We come home from war trying to put our lives back together but some cannot stand the memories and decide that death is better. We kill ourselves because we are so haunted by seeing children killed and whole families wiped out."

Contemplating the long-term implications of the more than 1.8 million military personnel who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, Jamail points out that the United States, for many years to come, will be faced with caring for tens of thousands of veterans whose lives are permanently marred by grave physical and traumatic brain injuries, psychological scars, PTSD, and a host of associated problems ranging from divorce and substance abuse to domestic violence, homelessness and run-ins with the law.

Other soldiers manage to cope somehow and, perhaps in a sense, recover. Following their discharge, some veterans profiled by Jamail seek to make peace with themselves by educating others about the realities they experienced in war.

The most successful and constructive of military efforts to resist war are made by those who turn their experiences into teaching tools and therapeutic exercises like music, video, theater, painting, books, blogs, photographic and art exhibitions, performance art and even making paper out of old military uniforms.

In a chapter titled ‘Cyber Resistance,’ Jamail contends the Internet "is probably the first time that we have available to us an inexpensive and extremely inclusive means to communicate and thereby advocate sustained resistance to unjust military action, at an international scale without losing any gestation time."

Websites like YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Blogspot and countless alternative news sources have given soldiers and veterans both a voice and the means to connect with those Jamail calls "fence-sitters, members of the silent majority and well-intentioned but resource-less individuals to participate in the promise of a historical transformation."

"While we don’t have an organised GI resistance movement today that is anywhere close to that which helped end the Vietnam war," Jamail said, "the seeds for one are there, and they are continuing to sprout amidst a soil that is becoming all the more fertile by the escalation of troops in Afghanistan, the lack of withdrawal in Iraq, and an increasingly over-stretched military."

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2009.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Book Review, Conflict, United States Tagged With:

BOOKS-US: When Neocons Ruled Washington

December 16, 2008 by

Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IPS

Michael Flynn

GENEVA, Dec 16 (IPS) – In the first two pages of his book on the neoconservative movement, historian Stephen Sniegoski tells us that U.S. Mideast policy during the George W. Bush presidency has been ”colossally erroneous” and ”disastrous to U.S. interests”, that the Iraq War is a ”blunder of colossal proportions”, and that an attack on Iran is a ”highly likely” ”disaster” unless the country ”eschews all elements of the Middle East war policy”.

It is hard to argue with these points. But the book’s relentless, partisan rhetoric serves to confirm what is obvious from its title: ”The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel” is yet another treatise on the pernicious influence of the neocons on foreign policy.

So many studies have been penned on this subject that the noted international relations scholar Robert Jervis, in a 2005 review of a similar book, wrote that ”one may wonder whether more is needed”.

Sniegoski’s contribution is to thoroughly review the mountain of material already published on the neocons to support a thesis held by many war critics — that neocons, abetted by the 9/11 attacks and their supporters within the administration, were able to ”gain control” of U.S. policy.
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Filed Under: Book Review, Geopolitics, History, Politics, United States

POLITICS-ETHIOPIA: Disappointed But Not Defeated

November 20, 2008 by

Global Geopolitics News / IPS

Michael Chebsi

ADDIS ABABA, Nov 20 (IPS) – She fought alongside men in the Ethiopian liberation struggle. She fought for a free and fair society. But today, Yewubmar Asfaw feels that Ethiopia’s revolution has failed to deliver a fair share of political power to women.

In her book, published this year in Amharic, Asfaw, 52, describes how the liberation groups marginalised women fighters during the struggle and after the fall of the military regime in 1991.

A third of the fighters were women. Yet few of them rose to top positions in the ruling party, the Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which pools the four rebel groups.

Among the 547 members of Parliament, only 116 are women, or 22 per cent — although in 2005 the EPRDF said it would reserve 30 per cent of its lists for women.

The Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF), to which Asfaw devoted 25 years as a guerrilla and as a cadre, has not done much better, she told IPS.
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Filed Under: Book Review, History, Politics

POLITICS-US: Swiftboating Obama on the Cheap

September 25, 2008 by

Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IPS
Thursday, September 25, 2008

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

Analysis by Bill Berkowitz*

OAKLAND, California, Sep 25 (IPS) – In 2004, the so-called Swiftboating of Sen. John Kerry’s U.S. presidential campaign changed the course of history by helping defeat the Massachusetts senator, and the tactic appeared to become an instant blueprint for future political campaigns.

Given the success of the Swiftboating formula — a high-impact, mediagenic group of storytellers (Swift Boat Veterans for Truth) clamping on to one very hot-button issue (Kerry’s military record), combined with the financial largesse of opponent George W. Bush’s super-wealthy backers (more than 45 million dollars was put in play), and a message spread by savvy and experienced public relations outfits and advertising enterprises to a controversy-hungry mainstream media — it was anticipated that it would be in play again.

This time around, however, Swiftboating has morphed into serial attacks on the cheap.

Released late last month, Floyd Brown’s latest book, ”Obama Unmasked: Did Slick Hollywood Handlers Create The Perfect Candidate?”, co-authored with Lee Troxler, has not created the buzz of others, like Jerome Corsi’s ”The Obama Nation” and David Freddoso’s ”The Case against Barack Obama” — both of which are still on The New York Times best-seller list.
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Filed Under: Book Review, Commentary, Politics, United States

BOOKS-US: ”A Policy of Deliberate Cruelty”

September 10, 2008 by

Global Geopolitics Net
Wednesday, September 10, 2008

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

Mark Weisenmiller

TAMPA, Florida, Sep 10 (IPS) – Perhaps the most thorough and informative book about the George W. Bush administration’s approval of the use of torture and ”extraordinary renditions” of alleged terrorists to third countries has continued to stay on bestseller lists.

First published in July, ”The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals” (Doubleday) by Jane Mayer is still listed among the top 10 nonfiction best-selling books of 2008 by The New York Times.

In the book, Mayer, a reporter for The New Yorker magazine, shows in detail how high-level officials of the Bush administration, particularly in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, took advantage of the fear and paranoia that gripped the country after the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, 2001 to launch ”an ideological trench war” and ”a policy of deliberate cruelty that would’ve been unthinkable on Sept. 10”.

While Bush supported the overall strategy, he was almost a minor player, Mayer reports. ”President Bush is not typically interested in fine details. He left those to others in the formation of the military commissions, and other areas,” she told IPS.

Arguably, the two administration officials whose post-9/11 policy decisions are most responsible for leaving the United States’ ”reputation as a lead defender of democracy and human rights…in tatters”, in Mayer’s words, were Cheney and his Chief of Staff David Addington, whom Mayer notes the vice president came to rely on heavily for legal advice in prosecuting the ”war on terror”.

In June this year, Addington was subpoenaed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee — along with former Justice Department attorney John Yoo — about detainee treatment, interrogation methods and the limits of executive authority.

Mayer, who was in the room when Addington testified, said ”I?was struck by his utter contempt for both the Congressional panel that was quizzing him, and the gathering press.”

”He evidently thought that hauteur was the way to win the day, which was another example of his astoundingly poor political sense…I think at the moment, it’s a stretch to think that there is the necessary political will to prosecute top administration figures like Addington, who could argue that they were simply doing what they thought was necessary to protect the country.”

Regarding Cheney, she writes in ”The Dark Side” that the vice president lived in such a state of anxiety after the 9/11 attacks that ”…he was chauffeured in an armoured motorcade that varied its route to foil possible attackers. On the back seat behind Cheney rested a duffle bag stocked with a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit.”

Mayer asked repeatedly to interview Addington and Cheney and was refused. A one-paragraph statement by the CIA, regarding the conduct of its agents in the interrogation of alleged terrorists, is on the last page of ”The Dark Side”.

However, she did manage to interview hundreds of sources in and around the Bush White House, as well as sources from the Red Cross, compiling a grim picture of interrogation and abuse of prisoners in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.

The book describes the use of alleged forms of torture by members of a little-known U.S. military programme called SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape). It also explores the CIA’s hiring of psychologists of questionable abilities and morals, who proceeded to encourage the use of interrogation methods that were created decades ago, ironically enough by the former Soviet Union’s KGB secret police agency, and points out how essentially no piece of relevant information has ever resulted from such interrogations.

Mayer also looks at renditions, the transfer of suspected terrorists by U.S. authorities, mainly the CIA, to countries known to employ harsh interrogation techniques and torture. Asked if she believed that renditions were still being done by U.S. government agents, even though the practice has now been exposed by the world’s media, Mayer told IPS, ”After the bad publicity surrounding them, there is likely a greater effort to ensure that they (U.S. government agencies) are not ‘rendering’ mistaken suspects, or sending them to be tortured, in contravention of the law, but the programme exists in a classified realm where this is hard to determine.”

Among the many disturbing incidents recounted in the book is the last night of Manadel al-Jamadi.

He was an Iraqi suspect who was detained outside of Baghdad at approximately four a.m. local time on Nov. 4, 2003. ”An hour later, he was dead. An autopsy performed by military pathologists classified his death as a homicide,” writes Mayer.

She goes on to report that ”Jamadi was driven first to an Army base for debriefing, where the (U.S. Navy special forces unit) SEALs punched, kicked, and struck him with their rifle muzzles for some 20 minutes.” Jamadi was later interrogated by CIA operatives at Abu Ghraib prison, where he was hung up by his wrists, and subsequently killed.

Eight members of the SEALs platoon received administrative punishment for abuse of al-Jamadi and other prisoners, but Mark Swanner, the CIA interrogator, has faced no charges.

”I hope readers (of ”The Dark Side”) come away with a vivid sense of how far from American traditions the Bush administration strayed in choosing to set aside the rule of law, in it’s approach to the war on terror,” noted Mayer. ”There have been other lapses in the past, but as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the late presidential historian told me ‘Nothing has hurt America more (in the world) ever.’.”


Filed Under: Book Review, Human Rights, United States
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