Desicritics Author: C R Sridhar

Wall Street - Cold, Flat, and Broke

C R Sridhar — Mon, 6 Oct 2008 11:40:33 EDT

“Dreamed about AIG and the stock market, woke up with the urge to stock up on canned goods and shotguns.” - Michele Catalano of Long Island, an angry blogger.

The month of September was cruel for Wall Street. Stormy winds blew away the venerable institutions of Wall Street and they collapsed one by one like a pack of cards. Lehman Brothers, the 158-year investment global investment bank, went belly up. Merrill Lynch was swallowed up by Bank of America. American International Group (AIG), a $1 trillion insurance company, had to be rescued by $85 billion dollar deal by the Federal Government on the ground that it was too big to fall. Capturing the mood of panic in Wall Street Mike Whitney, a widely quoted freelance writer, wrote ‘Lehman gone; Merrill Lynch swallowed up; AIG Going… Who’s Next for Madam Defarge?’¹

Madam Defarge and the tumbrels were kept busy while heads rolled in the basket in a grisly fashion. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the biggies of Mortgage lenders, became terminally ill requiring a massive bail out at a cost estimated to be in the region of $5.3 trillion. Washington Mutual went bust followed by Wachovia. Earlier in March, Bear Stearns became insolvent after bad bets turned into bad debts requiring Fed intervention. The concept of Wall Street investment banking was blown sky high when the remaining Goliaths Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs haemorrhaged sustaining huge losses and took the unprecedented step to covert themselves into low risk and tightly regulated commercial banks. The pervasive mood of despair and anger of Main Street was reflected by the black humour on Wall Street, one of the most popular being-“Question-What is the difference between a pigeon and an investment banker? Answer- Only a pigeon can make a deposit on a BMW.”

The dour looking, Harvard educated economist Nouriel Roubini was one of the early sceptics to predict the financial meltdown in Wall Street when he dropped the bombshell way back in 2006 that US would be heading towards the most serious financial and banking crisis since the Great Depression. His dark prophecies were met with derision and disbelief earning him the epithet- the prophet of doom. But Roubini had the last laugh when the US financial system melted down as he had predicted and he became an instant celebrity on media channels.

A bipartisan blunder

One of the contributing factors for the financial meltdown was the reckless financial deregulation that led to financial concentration and inefficient markets. The perception of regulation as hampering the animal magnetism of Wall Street bankers was a dangerous delusion that fostered the irrational drive to take unacceptable risks. As the economist Arthur MacEwan explains-“When financial firms are not regulated, they tend to take on more and more risky activities. When markets are rising, risk does not seem to be very much of a problem; all—or virtually all—investments seem to be making money. So why not take some chances? Furthermore, if one firm doesn’t take particular risk—put money into a chancy operation—then one of its competitors will. So competition pushes them into more and more risky operations.”²

Moreover, the extent of deregulation reached dangerous levels with the repeal of Glass- Steagall Act of 1933, which was passed after the financial debacle of 1929. This act separated investment banking from commercial banking and protected the investors from risky speculation of investment banking. Thus a commercial bank could not be in both insurance and/or investment business.

Hectic lobbying for Wall Street by Phil Gramm -the Republican Senator from Texas and the economic advisor for John McCain - and Robert Rubin in the Clinton administration were the guiding forces for the repeal of the act. This repeal became law when it received President Clinton’s assent in 1999. In 2000 another nail was driven in the regulatory coffin when Gramm introduced the Commodity Futures Modernisation Act, which excluded the scrutiny of counter derivatives, credit derivatives, credit defaults, and swaps, by regulatory agencies. Many economists hold the view that the repeal of the Glass –Steagal Act was instrumental in causing the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis.

The crucial point is to note that Wall Street enjoyed the support of both the Republicans and the Democrats for the repeal of the act. Even today both the presidential candidates Obama and McCain receive campaign money from Wall Street bankers and executives. This prompted Ralph Nader, the consumer activist, to acidly comment that there are no significant differences between Democrats and Republicans on major issues pertaining to Wall Street.

A flawed business model

The reward system is skewed in favour of brokers who make money for their Wall Street employer and not how well the client portfolios perform. As Pam Martens, an insider of Wall Street, says “A Wall Street broker receives remuneration that rises from approximately 30 to 50 per cent of the gross commission based on their cumulative trading commissions with zero regard to how well the clients’ accounts have done.” This attitude is responsible in her words for “ the industry to be irreconcilably incentivized to corruption just as brokers have been socialized to silence.” This is on account of the fact that the broker receives more commission on investing junk bonds in client portfolios rather than investing in safe treasuries.

The other questionable practice is housing a trading desk inside the same company that is supposed to give unbiased research to the public. As Pam Martens points out “For example, let’s say that XYZ Brokerage buys a big stake in ABC Company on its proprietary trading desk (the desk that trades for profits for the firm) on Wednesday afternoon. On Thursday afternoon, it could almost guarantee profits for itself by issuing a research report upgrading the stock. Conversely, it could short the stock on Wednesday and issue a negative report to drive down the price on Thursday, also guaranteeing itself a profit. Other than a fictional Chinese Wall, there is absolutely nothing to stop this type of public looting.”³

Perils of a casino economy

While greed, corruption, and an excessively deregulated financial market offer interesting explanations about the systemic collapse of Wall Street, they remain unsatisfactory as they not explain or explore the deeper malaise afflicting the US economy. For a rigorous and conceptually sound analysis, one must turn to the series of extraordinary essays written by Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy in Monthly Review during 1970 and 1980’s.

The main thrust of the articles was to show that the general economic tendency of mature capitalism is toward stagnation. The main challenge of capitalist economy is surplus capital, which has diminishing opportunities for profitable investment. Deploying investment in the mature productive economy yields fewer returns as the markets are saturated. A number of strategies such as military spending, government spending, consumer spending, exploitation of third world economies as sources of cheap labour, raw materials and markets are used to counter stagnation in capitalist economies but do not resolve the problem of stagnation. As the authors point out “The tendency to stagnation is inherent in the system, deeply rooted and in continuous operation. The counter-tendencies, on the other hand, are varied, intermittent, and (most important), self-limiting.”⁴

The problem of surplus capital finding suitable avenues for profitable return is sometimes solved by key inventions and technologies, which provide economic stimuli. The invention of automobile in the “early twentieth century led eventually to huge developments that transformed the U.S. economy, even aside from the mass ownership of automobiles: the building of an extensive system of roads, bridges, and tunnels; the need for a network of gas stations, restaurants, automotive parts and repair shops; the efficient and inexpensive movement of goods from any location to any other location.” But the new information technologies such as computers, software, and the Internet do not appear to provide the same epoch making long-term economic stimuli as automobiles did.⁵

In the productive economy, money is used to purchase raw materials, machines, and labour to produce commodities, which are sold, with the capitalist receiving back money (M-C-M). While in speculation, money makes more money directly, represented as M–M. A significant change in the way banks and financial institutions operate today as opposed to the past lies in the fact that the massive borrowed money goes into speculative finance and very little is invested in the productive economy. There is practically no stimulatory effect on the economy as there are few jobs created as there are relatively fewer people employed in the speculative economy. The profits generated by speculation are rarely invested in factories or the service sector but finds its way for financing more risky financial schemes creating speculative bubbles.

This sorry state of affairs is evident when one examines the failed financial institutions of Wall Street. One common denominator linking these institutions is that all were under capitalised and over leveraged. As Mike Whitney points out “when Bear Stearns went down, it was levered at a ratio of 26 to 1. When Carlyle capital blew up, it was levered at 32 to 1. And when Fannie and Freddie were finally taken over by the US Treasury; the two behemoths were levered at 80 to 1, which is to say that they had a one dollar cushion for every $80 they had loaned out.”

With huge quantity of money sloshing around the world and being invested into financial speculation there has been an explosion of speculation. One mind-boggling figure is “the daily trading on the world currency markets, which has gone from $18 billion a day in 1977, to the current average of $1.8 trillion a day! That means that every twenty-four days the dollar volume of currency trading equals the entire world’s annual GDP!” Moreover, “Today financial analysts frequently pretend that finance can levitate forever at higher and higher levels independently of the underlying productive economy. Stock markets and currency trading (betting that one nation’s currency will change relative to another) have become little more than giant casinos where the number and values of transactions have increased far out of proportion to the underlying economy.”⁶

This flight of investment from the productive economy to the casino economy is made worse by the availability of easy credit to persons who are least credit worthy. Many Americans who had little financial stability to buy houses took on mortgages, which were attractive on the face of it but carried a heavy debt burden. As real wages declined for the American household, it took on more debts for meeting the consumption needs. Total household debt stood at the end of March 2006 at 11.8 trillion.

Prudence in lending money to credit worthy persons was thrown to the winds as the banks encouraged people to borrow more and spend more. As the report in Wall Street Journal says “The banks are more aggressive because they rarely keep the loans they make. Instead, they sell them to others, who then repackage, or securitize, the loans and sell them to investors in exotic-sounding vehicles, such as CLOs, or collateralized-loan obligations. Every week brings announcements of billions of dollars in new CLOs, created by traditional money-management and hedge funds, which then sell them to other investors.”⁷

The toxic power of optimism

The belief in alchemy led mankind in the futile quest of converting base metal into gold. The bankers and traders in Wall Street were the practitioners of the alchemy of finance, which was the elusive quest of converting junk bonds into real wealth. There was an incorrigible optimism and conviction that ordinary people were meant to be rich. There was also goodwill for the captains of finance whose investment schemes were magic wands to transport investors to prosperity. Such a feeling of trust, as Galbraith reminds us, is essential for the boom.

The media played its role by lulling us into a false feeling of comfort by assuring that the fundamentals of the economy was strong and invincible. Critical views were suppressed in debates as the effusions of malcontents. A financial disaster was merely technical correction and there was more money to be made in depressed stock prices. As the financial pillars collapsed in Wall Street last month, a pie hit the glum faces of the financial analysts. The malcontents were right. As Galbraith again reminds us wisely-“when people are cautious, questioning, misanthropic, suspicious, or mean, they are immune to speculative enthusiasms.”⁸ In the aftermath of the melt down, the sceptics were rehabilitated quickly and became instant celebrities on talk shows. They taught us an important lesson, which the financier Bernard Baruch learned during the Great Depression: “ Any one taken as a individual is tolerable sensible and reasonable- as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.”

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

From the financial bubbles of the Mississippi scheme and South-Sea Bubble to the delusions of Tulip mania and the Great Depression nothing much has changed. As Charles Mackay says in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds, “Money, again, has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper.”

But there is very little that one learns from speculative disasters, as human memory is short and unreliable. The Great Depression taught the American public the perils of unregulated market and the elected representatives passed the Glass- Steagal Act to protect the ordinary investors from financial ruin. The Act was repealed in 1999 when the memory dimmed about the Great Depression. Then another financial disaster hit Wall Street. Now there is talk of imposing controls on financial markets again.

“Wall Street”, a cynic once said, “ is a Street with a river at one end and a graveyard at the other.” Perhaps it would be appropriate to inscribe on the tombstone the words, Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The inscription in French simply means, the more things change, the more they're the same.

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1 The Tumbrils Roll at Dawn- Mike Whitney
2 The Greed Fallacy- Arthur MacEwan-Dollars & Sense.
3 The Wall Street Model: Unintelligent Design- Pam Martens- Counterpunch.org
4 Stagnation and the Financial Explosion- Monthly Review Press.
5 The explosion of debt and speculation- Fred Magdoff- Monthly Review
6 The explosion of debt and speculation- Fred Magdoff- Monthly Review
7 Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2006.
8 The Great Crash 1929-J.K.Galbraith- Pelican Book.

The Nexus of Corruption: Reliance and Government

C R Sridhar — Tue, 9 Sep 2008 00:58:19 EDT

‘A government, for protecting business only, is but a carcass, and soon falls by its own corruption and decay.’ - Amos Bronson Alcott, American Educator.

One of the common myths circulated in Indian mainstream media is about the inherent dynamism of the Private sector, which offers a refreshing contrast to the venal, corrupt and mendacious class of politicians and government officials. The Captains of Industries are sympathetically portrayed as dynamic, hard working and enterprising people who are thwarted by soul stifling regulation imposed by the Government. Unlike the moribund Public Sector, say the business friendly media, the Private Sector is efficient and creates a big pie in the economy. But unfortunately, like all myths, it has elements of truth but deceives us by not presenting the whole picture.

While there appears to be no dearth of books praising the virtues of Business Magnates, there are few books documenting the corrupt nexus between Big Business and Big Government. One of the most remarkable books to emerge in the Indian publishing scene in recent times is Reliance- The Real Natwar written by Arun K. Agrawal. This book is an unflattering study of the behemoth Reliance Group and its alleged loot of public money with the connivance of politicians and bureaucrats in the government.

The spotlight of the book is on the alleged involvement of Reliance Petroleum Limited (RPL) in the Iraq oil-for-food scam. As the author says in his book,

‘This book has its origin, in the compulsion, born of exasperation, experienced by the author to record the failure- or, more accurately, the self-serving refusal – of the Indian political and administrative system to investigate the award of extremely lucrative oil contracts under the United Nations- administered Oil- for-Food programme in Iraq to RPL in transactions manifestly driven by kickbacks/ bribery and bipartisan political patronage.’

Mr Agrawal, a lawyer and activist, has impressive credentials to his credit having exposed corporate-government scams in the past. He filed a PIL against the 1000MW Cogentrix Power Project in Karnataka alleging that the company with a capital of only forty lakh was awarded the power project by the government of Karnataka without any competitive bidding. When the game was up Cogentrix abandoned the project, which had inflated capital costs, saving the Indian public crores of Rupees. He was also instrumental in preventing the transfer of the highly profitable Alamatti Power Project in Karnataka to the Private sector, which was built with public money. As a consultant to Prasar Bharati, he unearthed the cricket telecast scam which saved twenty crores for Prasar Bharati. Justifiably, the author concentrates his ire on government policies, which bills costs to the public while the profits are pocketed by the private sector.

The Oil-for-Food scam

The lingering public memory of this scam as a political fallout of the Volcker Report involving Mr Natwar Singh, his son Jagat Singh, family friend Andaleeb Sehgal, Asad Khan (son of Congress politician) and the Andaleeb-owned Hamdaan Exports Limited is a distorted picture which is complicated by the alleged involvement of the Congress Party named as non-contractual beneficiary in the Volcker Report. But the prime beneficiary of the scam was Reliance Petroleum Industry, which got off scot-free without any investigation whatsoever.

Perhaps it would be necessary to have an historical perspective on the Oil for Food scam to understand the full ramification of the scam. The story begins with the military misadventure of Saddam Hussein in Kuwait. Even though a cease-fire was agreed by Iraq in February 1991, after her expulsion from Kuwait, the Security Council kept in place one of the cruelest sanctions, which caused untold hardship to the Iraqi people. As the International public opinion mounted against the UN sanctions, the UN Security Council decided to lessen the hardship of the sanction by establishing Food for oil programme in 1995 under resolution no. 986 as a temporary measure to provide for the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people.

The Oil for Food programme allowed Iraq to export oil to parties registered with UN and the use of the proceeds of oil sale by UN to pay for the food and medicines imported by Iraq, after deducting reparation, war compensation and commission. The programme started from 1996 and completed 13 phases until Saddam was toppled in 2003.

However the Oil for Food programme became a hotbed of corruption involving many highly placed UN officials who turned a blind eye to the irregularities of the programme, which led to the skimming off huge sums of money to the relatives of UN officials, Iraqi officials and oil companies all over the world.

The opportunity of corruption lay in the fact that the Iraqi Oil was sold at a price less than international rates. The difference in pricing of amounts actually paid to UN and the prevailing international price of oil was split between Iraqi officials (bribes/ surcharge), political allottees (commission) and the balance of profits to the traders and financiers.

The lid was blown off the scam when a Committee was appointed to go into the murky dealing of the UN programme. This Committee was headed by Paul Volcker who was former Chairman of Federal Reserve (US). The report of the Committee opened the Pandora’s box as Table III of the report identified three non-contractual beneficiaries, which had paid bribes/ surcharge to the Iraqi officials. The fourth beneficiary Mr Bhim Singh was absolved, as he did not lift even a single barrel of oil. In the report the Natwar–Congress combine lifted 2.93 million barrels, while Reliance lifted 15.78 million barrels for which it paid a bribe of US$3.57 million. 1

The patsy

Making scapegoats of lesser criminals is a national pastime while bigger fish go scot-free. In fierce parliamentary debates that followed the disclosure, there were fingers pointed at Sonia Gandhi who had just recovered from the whiff of cordite fumes of Bofors Guns. The BJP targeted the Congress Party for paying bribes and demanded its resignation. Other members asked for a through probe and made impassioned speeches for the punishment of the guilty. As the top leaders of the Congress Party felt jittery a plot was hatched to make a scapegoat of Mr Natwar Singh who was a Minister for External Affairs. In a damage control operation the Congress party appointed Mr R.S. Pathak, an eminent jurist, who served as the Chief Justice of India and also as a judge in the International Court of Justice at The Hague to institute an enquiry into the Oil for Food programme. The terms of reference of the R.S Pathak Inquiry Authority was restricted to two non-contractual beneficiaries, namely, the Congress Party and Mr Natwar Singh. The significant omission was Reliance Petroleum Limited, which was the largest beneficiary of Oil for Food scam.

Mr Natwar Singh whose wrongdoing was minor when compared to Reliance Petroleum Limited was sacrificed on the altar of expediency, as he was not a fundraiser for the Congress party unlike the Reliance Group, which had friends in high places. The commission of 70 lakhs of rupees made by Andaleeb Sehgal certainly involved Natwar Singh who could be accused of using his political connections to favour his son and his crony Andy by providing letters of introduction to the Iraqi authorities. The paltry gain for which Natwar Singh damaged his political future astounded political observers in Delhi. The fact that Natwar Singh was not given the option of disowning his son and leaving political life in blaze of glory sent tongues wagging in political circles. This was indeed strange given the fact that no part of the commission did end up in the personal bank accounts of Natwar Singh. Apparently it was necessary for the powers in the Congress Party to make an example of Natwar Singh and squelch the scandal. Predictably, the Inquiry fixed the blame on Natwar Singh and he was forced to resign.

Parliamentary cover up

In the speeches made by Members of Parliament, the name of Reliance Petroleum Limited never figured in the controversy. If it was mentioned in passing that could be attributed to Mr Sitaram Yechury who to his credit raised the involvement of Reliance in the Oil for Food scam. But even the left party flattered to deceive. At a press conference Prakash Karat of the Left did mention the role of Reliance in the bribery scandal, but there were no coordinated efforts on the part of the Left to bring Reliance within the purview of the Inquiry Commission. There were also reports suggesting that Mukesh Ambani met with the Left leaders but what transpired between them is a matter of conjecture.

All the speeches of the house were directed against the Congress party and Natwar Singh but Reliance Petroleum was spared the attention. A careful transcript of the speeches made at the floor of the Parliament reveals this fact. The Finance Minister, PC Chidambaram carefully avoided any reference to Reliance Petroleum Limited and blew smoke rings. The performance of the seasoned lawyer Kapil Sibal was masterly in suppressing critical facts about the involvement of Reliance in the scam. The BJP also adroitly sidestepped the Reliance issue and harmlessly indulged in verbal pyrotechnics. There was a strange unity among political parties to protect Reliance Petroleum from legal proceedings.2

Tip of the iceberg

The Oil for Food scam was not an isolated instance of Reliance Petroleum Limited walking away from corruption unscathed. There are also other scandals involving the Reliance Group. One of which was the deal involving Panna-Mukta- oil fields - given to Reliance during the Congress government by Captain Satish Sharma who was the Minister of oil and Natural Gas and a close friend of Rajiv Gandhi. The deal was sweetened to benefit Reliance on the specious plea that ONGC’s cost of exploration was inefficient when compared to the exploration costs of the private sector. Further, the royalty payment was on the basis of fixed rate instead of ad valorem rates, which would be beneficial to the government. This is evident as oil is a non-renewable asset and subject to upward revision of prices. The loss to the national exchequer was to the tune of thirty billion US dollars if the price of the barrel is fixed at US$80 with reserves at around 120 MMT. If the additional gas reserves of 1.9 trillion cubic are calculated then there is another staggering loss of about another 10 billion dollars.

The Comptroller and Auditor General adversely commented on the decision, saying no in depth analysis was carried out by the Ministry to arrive at such conclusions. Satish Sharma was later subject to a CBI probe, which said that there was a prima facie case indicating assets disproportionate to known sources of income

For future deals such as KG basin the Royalty payments were changed from fixed rate to ad valorem rates of 5% to 10% of sale realisation. As a result of absurdly low rates of royalty charged the government lost heavy revenues to the tune of over one hundred billion dollars, which was handed on a platter to Reliance as windfall profits.

Other controversies have dogged Reliance such as jacking up capital costs from $1.5 billion (2002) to $8.4 billion in 2006 with respect to the Krishna- Godavari project. The amount represented a massive scam, as gold plating of costs would be recovered before sharing of any production with the government.

The Reliance Group has also shown ingenuity in alleged tax evasion of customs duty of 120 crores in its illegal import of machinery for its PTA plant. The matter has been pending in the courts for over twenty years and has not seen the light of the day.

As the author sums up, the secret of Reliance Group becoming the largest conglomerate in the country could be attributed to,

‘financial engineering, propping up of its own shares, issuing shares of new companies at premium to the public and then merging the companies and, of course, the oil bonanza handed over to it by the government.’3

A dangerous collusion

When the interests of Big business coincide with the personal interests of politicians and bureaucrats of the government, then it can be safely assumed that public good or national interest would be in an irreversible terminal decline. As Timothy P. Carney in his book The Big Rip-off: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money says,

‘Today's largest corporations have mastered the art of working with government officials at every level to stifle market competition. They reap billions through a complex web of higher taxes, stricter regulations, and shameless government handouts.’

He adds ominously that when the players in big business and big government unite, the end result is one of consumer misfortune, where prices are artificially inflated, fewer substitutes are available for sale and there are huge barriers to market entry for small businesses entrepreneurs signifying the death of free competitive markets.4

Apart from creating a stifling monopoly, which destroys competition, the coffers of the state dry up when it hands out national resources for a song and forgoes opportunity to collect revenues. When the state is not able to fulfill its constitutional obligation on account of paucity of resources, it loses its legitimacy in the eyes of the people and becomes inherently unstable.

The important achievement of Arun Agrawal’s book, Reliance - The Real Natwar is to show that it is bad economic policy to substitute the invisible hand of the market with the greased palm of corruption. For this reason alone this book should be read and reread without the ideological blinkers in our mind.

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1 For more details refer to Chapter 1 - Scam - pages 23-49-Reliance The Real Natwar- Arun Agrawal- Manas Publications- edition 2008.
2 Refer to chapters 8 and 9 at pages 127 –251 covering parliamentary debates.
3 For details on oil related scams of Reliance refer to chapter 7- the Reliance Saga on pages 89-126
4 Human Events.com- "New book reveals Big Business scams"-Ms Evans- 20/07/2006

The Russia-Georgia Conflict - Stoking The Embers Of The Cold War

C R Sridhar — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:18:40 EDT

On 7th August 2008, Friday, Georgia, which became independent of the Soviet Union in 1991 began an offensive on Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia. Fashioned along the lines of a blitzkrieg, the Georgian military launched a heavy rocket and artillery fire and air strikes, killing hundreds of innocent civilians. An American witness Joe Mestas who was living in South Ossetia at the time of the military offensive said ‘I thought that since U.S. is supporting Georgia there would be some control over the situation in South Ossetia and that there would be a peaceful solution to the conflict. But what is happening there now it’s not just war, but war crimes. George Bush and [Georgian president] Mikhail Saakashvili should answer to the crimes that are being committed – the killing of innocent people, running over by tanks of children and women, throwing grenades into cellars where people are hiding.’¹

The Russian response was swift and bloody. Russia sent tanks and troops into the province and carried out series of air strikes on Georgian military targets. By Saturday the Russian air force pounded the nearby town of Gori. The Russian troops went deep into Georgian territory and the battered Georgian forces had to be pulled back to defend its capital, Tbilisi. The massive show of force by Russia was understandable as South Ossetia has close to 90% of the citizens having Russian citizenship. Moreover, the province broke away from Georgia in the nineties when it declared itself independent. South Ossetia has closely aligned itself with Russia.

No roses for Mr. Putin

The simmering discontent between Georgia and Russia arose over an event, which was called the Rose Revolution of 2003. This was a bloodless coup, which saw the ouster of President Eduard Shevardnadze. Mikheil Saakashvili who entered the Parliamentary building interrupting a speech of Shevardnadze forcing him to escape with his bodyguards. Eduard Shevardnadze finally stepped down on November 23, 2003 to avoid civil war. The new ruling elites- Mikhail Saakashvili, Nino Burdzhanadze and Zurab Zhvania- took control of power in Georgia.

Mikheil Saakashvili who is now the President of Georgia is a graduate of George Washington University and studied law at Columbia Law School. He is known to support US role in the Caucasus. He has publicly supported Bush in his global commitment to expand democracy and has extolled the virtues of real market economy. This sent alarm bells ringing in the Kremlin as Putin and his political advisors saw the hand of U.S. in the Rose Revolution. The alarm of Kremlin was perhaps justified as the Wall Street reported on November 24, 2003 ‘the three politicians [Saakashvili, Burdzhanadze and Zhvania] are backed by a raft of nongovernmental organizations that have sprung up since the fall of the Soviet Union. Many of the NGOs have been supported by American and other Western foundations, spawning a class of young, English-speaking intellectuals hungry for pro-Western reforms.’²

The relationship between Georgia and Russia also soured because Mikheil Saakashvili lobbied hard for Georgia to become a member of NATO with the active support of U.S. The Russians perceived the situation as potentially dangerous as they saw Georgia as becoming a NATO outpost posing a threat to Russian territorial interests. Vladimir Putin- the Russian President- voiced his strong protests accusing U.S and NATO as gradually encroaching Russian space.

The Politics of Oil

In a detailed article titled ‘Oil intrigue and US Realpolitik heighten tensions in the Caucasus’ the authors say ‘The US-backed coup in Georgia and Washington’s subsequent diplomatic sabre-rattling have nothing to do with the spread of democracy or similar clichés. Georgia, strategically situated between the Black Sea and the oil-rich Caspian, has long been a focus of intrigue and conflict between the great powers. Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, the goal of weakening Russian influence and achieving US domination of Georgia and the rest of the Caucasus became a central preoccupation of US imperialist policy.’³

The U.S. interest in Georgia lies in its geographical position. As Dr Alexey Muraviev, strategic affairs analyst in his article says ‘the control of Georgia gives access to the oil and gas rich areas of the Caspian Sea and former Soviet Central Asia. It allows firming up control over the Turkish Straits, a critically important shipping point. And further, it reduces Russia and its influence in some critical areas such as the Balkans, the Mediterranean and the Middle East.’⁴

Another event of great importance to understand the cold war rivalry surfacing between U.S and Russia is building of the Baku pipeline (BTC), which was completed in May 2005. Costing 3.6 billion dollars, it is one of the most expensive oil projects. The interests in this massive project involves BP. The other partners are Unocal (US) and Turkish Petroleum Inc. The oil is pumped through pipelines and shipped via the Turkish port Ceyhan on the Mediterranean. Significantly, Ceyhan is located near to the US air base Incirlik. The pipeline project had top-heavy advisors who held extremely senior positions in the government of US. Some of the important officials - Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, James Baker III, Brent Scowcroft, and Dick Cheney- have shaped US strategic oil interests in the region.⁵

The battle lines and emerging power blocs

Since the breaking up of the Soviet Union, the politics of the Caspian region has become complex, volatile and dangerous, as there is scramble for the oil-rich resources of the Caspian from the United States. In this scenario, power blocs have emerged with opposing strategies-‘ On the one side is an alliance of US-Turkey-Azerbaijan and, since the Rose Revolution, Georgia, that small but critical country directly on the pipeline route. Opposed to it, in terms of where the pipeline route carrying the Caspian oil should go, is Russia, which until 1990 held control over the entire Caspian outside the Iran littoral. Today, Russia has cultivated an uneasy but definite alliance with Iran and with Armenia, in opposition to the US group.’⁶ The geopolitical strategy of U.S has been to bring regime changes friendly to US interests in countries (earlier Soviet bloc), which are located in pipeline routes from the Caspian Sea. The scramble for oil by these power blocs would provide flashpoints for conflicts in these regions.

The Georgia-US-Israeli Nexus

The US interest in Georgia is shaped by the scramble for oil in the region. The Western media such as BBC, CNN and other electronic media simplify complex issues pertaining to the present conflict by defining it as big power such as Russia intimidating a small country.

What the mainstream media did not report is the extensive involvement of US-NATO in the planning of the military offensive against South Ossetia which is at the cross roads of strategic oil and gas pipeline routes. US has provided extensive military aid to Georgia with transport planes (US) assisting the redeployment of 2000 Georgian forces in Iraq back to the country to fight. It is also believed that US provided logistical support to Georgia to move 11 tons of military cargo. In the past, Israel has also supplied military equipment to Georgia. As Peter Hirschberg reports ‘In recent years, ties have also taken on a military dimension, with military industries in Israel supplying Georgia with some $200 million worth of equipment since 2000. This has included remotely piloted planes, rockets, night-vision equipment, other electronic systems, and training by former senior Israeli officers.’⁷

Israel is also an interested party to get the oil from the Caspian region. ‘What is envisaged is to link the BTC pipeline to the Trans-Israel Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline, also known as Israel’s Tip line, from Ceyhan to the Israeli port of Ashkelon. Turkey and Israel are negotiating the construction of a multi-million-dollar energy and water project that will transport water, electricity, natural gas and oil by pipelines to Israel, with the oil to be sent onward from Israel to the Far East’⁸

The Seeds of Cold War

The Russian perspective on this issue is best summarized by Komerzant, Moscow, 14 July 2006) ‘[The BTC pipeline] considerably changes the status of the region’s countries and cements a new pro-West alliance. Having taken the pipeline to the Mediterranean, Washington has practically set up a new bloc with Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey and Israel.’ A fact, which would be resisted by Russia, as she perceives the threat of the encirclement of countries friendly to US. This was made amply clear by the sharp violent response to Georgia’s military attack on South Ossetia.

Even though cease-fire has been declared between Russia and Georgia, there has been an uneasy peace. Is this a lull before the storm? Is the recent conflict in the Caucasus a dress rehearsal for the more serious conflicts to break out between US and Russia? With Russia flush with oil money and flexing its nationalist muscles the future holds the fear of a sharpened cold war. A war that we thought lay buried in the memories of history.

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1 This is Genocide: American Witness Says U.S. and Georgia to answer for violence - Russia Today - Monday, Aug 11, 2008.
2 Georgia's "rose revolution"; made in America coup- Barry Grey and Vladimir Volkov, wsws.org
3 Oil intrigue and U.S. Realpolitik- Barry Grey and Vladimir Volkov, wsws.org
4 US plays a shadowy hand in Georgian conflict- Dr Alexey Muraviev, strategic affairs analyst, Crikely.com
5 Colour Revolutions, Geopolitics and the Baku pipeline-F. William Engdahl-Global Research- June 25,2005.
6 Colour Revolutions, Geopolitics and the Baku pipeline-F. William Engdahl-Global Research June 25,2005.
7 Israeli Arms Sales to Georgia Raise New Concerns- Peter Hirschberg - anti-war.com
8 War in the Caucasus: Towards a broader Russia-US Military confrontation?-Michel Chossudovsky- Global Research

Nuclear Power - The Seduction of Mephistopheles

C R Sridhar — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:32:24 EDT

‘MEPHISTOPHELES, in the Faust legend, the name of the evil spirit in return for whose assistance Faust signs away his soul.’- Classic Encyclopaedia.

The trope of Nuclear Energy as Mephistopheles is rooted in history. The dropping of the Atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 by the Americans exposed to the world the destructive power of the Atom. The belief that nuclear energy was a benign genie in service of humankind received a rude jolt when accidents occurred in nuclear plants, one of which was the accident at Chernobyl in 1986 in Ukraine when Unit Four of the plant exploded spewing radioactive fission products into the environment. The fallout of radioactivity from Chernobyl had horrific medical and ecological consequences. It is estimated that nearly 10000 persons of 6,50,000 involved in the clean up operation died prematurely. The long radioactive tail reached large areas of the breadbaskets of the Ukraine and Byelorussia contaminating the soil. The fallout also affected other countries such as Austria, Germany, France, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Italy, Baltic states and other countries in the Northern Hemisphere. The incidence of cancer increased significantly among the population living in areas close to the nuclear plant.

The long radioactive tail of Mephistopheles

Before the Chernobyl accident, there was another accident that rocked the complacency of nuclear Industry who said that the chances of a meltdown happening were the same as a bolt of lightening striking a person dead in a parking lot. On March 28, 1979, a nuclear power plant at the Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania had a meltdown on account of a mechanical failure causing the core reactor to overheat. Soon large amounts of radioactivity escaped into the atmosphere. Radioactive water was also released into Susquehanna River, which drains into Chesapeake Bay, a major fishing location. Hundreds of people reported nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding from the nose, hair loss and skin rash. There were also reported deaths of farm animals and there were fears that the cows were radiated contaminating the milk supply. Official studies on the impact of radiation on health and the increased incidence of cancer among people living near the plant were not conducted raising the suspicion that the government friendly to the nuclear lobby were hushing up the bad news about the radiation and its effects.1

It would be short sighted on our part to view Chernobyl and Three Mile Island as isolated incidents not warranting a caveat on the use of nuclear energy. There were other incidents such as the accident at the Davis-Besse reactor (Ohio), which occurred in 2002. The inspectors found a cavity in the reactor pressure vessel. The stainless steel liner had not ruptured and a major tragedy was averted. The risks of such accidents would increase as the reactors are aging with the bulk of the reactors moving into the old age cycle. The near misses would dangerously increase as the years go by.

The bad news about nuclear safety does not go away. As recently as last month there were radioactive leaks in France. The Guardian (UK) reported ‘Last month an accident at the treatment centre during a draining operation saw liquid containing untreated uranium overflow out of a faulty tank. About 75kg of uranium seeped into the ground and into the Gaffiere and Lauzon rivers which flow into the Rhône.’ This is not the end of the story. As the Guardian again reports ‘But in recent days there have been other, lesser incidents at nuclear sites. In Romans-sur-Isère, north of Tricastin, at another site run by an Areva subsidiary, officials discovered a burst underground pipe which had been broken for years and did not meet safety standards.’ The environment minister, Jean-Louis Borloo, said there were 86 level-one nuclear incidents in France last year and 114 in 2006. More than 80% of France's electricity is generated by the country's 58 nuclear reactors - the world's highest ratio.2

Nuclear Renaissance

In spite of dangers associated with the use of nuclear energy, the seduction of Mephistopheles remains as potent as ever. With Bush – Cheney in US and Sarkozy in France pushing for nuclear energy as an alternative to oil, there appears to be a sort of nuclear renaissance emerging in the wake of oil crisis. The prospects for the nuclear industry seem bright after languishing in doldrums throughout the end of the Twentieth Century as result of environmental movements and protests.

The Nuclear Energy Institute - a propaganda wing of the Nuclear Industry - has spent millions of dollars in spreading highly misleading messages that Nuclear Energy is cheap, clean and green. The ads that reinforce the image of nuclear as a benign force show children gambolling in green grass. The caption at the top of the ad reads - Nuclear Electricity & Clean Air Today & Tomorrow.

Blunting the PR blitz

The propaganda of the Nuclear Industry has not gone unchallenged. In her book Nuclear Power is not the Answer, Dr. Helen Caldicott, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and a leading spokesperson for the anti-nuclear movement, subjects the ‘clean and green’ argument of nuclear energy to withering criticism. She accused the Nuclear Industry of hiding significant facts from the public and peddling nuclear energy with the same ethical disregard to truth as a snake oil salesman.

According to the author, nuclear power ‘is not clean and green’, because large amounts of traditional fossil fuels are required to mine and refine the uranium needed to run nuclear power reactors, to construct the massive concrete reactor buildings, and to transport and store the toxic radioactive waste created by the nuclear process. Moreover, the burning of this fossil fuel emits significant quantities of carbon dioxide (CO2)- the primary greenhouse gas- into the environment. In addition, large amounts of the now banned CFC are emitted during the enrichment of uranium. CFC is more dangerous than CO2 in creating the greenhouse gas and is also a potent destroyer of the ozone layer.

While it is true that nuclear electricity produces one-third of the CO2 emitted from a similar sized conventional gas generator, this is a transitory phase. Soon as the uranium ore declines in grade, more ores are required to be mined by using more fossil fuels. It is estimated that within ten to twenty years nuclear reactors will produce no net energy because of the massive amounts of fossil fuels required to mine and to enrich the poor grades of uranium ores. The tech-fix solution of obtaining large quantities of uranium by reprocessing radioactive spent fuel is not a pragmatic option as it is expensive, extremely hazardous for the workers and releases large amount of radioactive material into the air. In the long run the nuclear plants would emit the same amounts of greenhouse gasses and air pollution as conventional power plants.

Safe running of the nuclear plants do not guarantee they would be emission free. Government regulations allow the nuclear plants to emit thousands of curies of radioactive gasses and material into the air. There is also radioactive waste in accumulating in the cooling pools in the nuclear plants in the world. As the author warns, ‘this waste contains extremely toxic elements that will inevitably pollute the environment and human food chains, a legacy that will lead to epidemics of cancer, leukaemia, and genetic disease in population living near nuclear power plants or radioactive waste facilities for many generations to come.’3

A white elephant

Contrary to the optimistic pronouncement of the Nuclear Industry that nuclear electricity is cheap in as much as it costs only 1.7 cents per kilowatt hour when compared to coal costing 2 cents and gas fired power costing 5.7 cents it is actually exorbitant. The estimates are misleading as they are based on the operational costs of existing plants. Moreover as the author points out ‘ They represent a classic omission of capital costs from a pricing equation.’4 Once realistic construction and running costs are considered, the price of nuclear electricity rises from an estimated 3 pence per kilowatt hour (5 cents in US) to 8.3 pence (14 cents). The capital costs of new plants are very high whereas the costs of running old reactors are not that high. When other costs are added such as subsidies received out of tax payers money, managing pollution, health costs in the event of radiation and its treatment and costs of maintaining nuclear plants secure from terrorist attacks, nuclear energy loses its appeal as a cheap source of electricity.

The road to Perdition

Apart from the disadvantages of high cost and high risk, nuclear energy also opens the Pandora’s box of proliferation of atomic weaponry. Every nuclear power plant has the potential of being an atom bomb factory. A 1000-megawatt nuclear reactor manufactures 500 pounds of plutonium a year; normally ten pounds of plutonium is fuel for an atom bomb. A bomb made from the plutonium could easily devastate a city making the world an unsafe place. Any non-nuclear weapon state could easily acquire a nuclear plant and have the ability to make nuclear bombs.

With technology becoming simpler and information becoming available on the Internet, the technology to make bombs with nuclear material is not an esoteric skill, which is beyond the means of any rogue state.

In the Indian sub-continent both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons. It is estimated that India has 65 nuclear weapons, Pakistan has 30 to 50 weapons and China has 400 weapons. To add to the dangerous scenario, India is being positioned by US to contain China’s rise to super power status. The simmering tension between India and China could worsen in the times to come. The uneasy relationship between India and Pakistan does not augur well for peace in the sub-continent. The prospect of nuclear Armageddon is not science fiction but a case of fiction becoming reality.

A more sustainable energy policy

Electricity is generated when heat boils water converting into steam, which turns turbine-producing electricity. From the energy perspective ‘a nuclear reactor’ - in the words of Helen Caldicott - ‘ is just a very sophisticated and dangerous way to boil water - analogous to cutting a pound of butter with a chain saw.’5

Globally, coal supplies about 64% of the world’s electricity, hydro and nuclear each provide 17%, and renewable energy provide 2%. But recent studies indicate that solar power could supply clean electricity to 100 million people living in the sunny parts of the world by 2025. Tidal and Wind power could provide up to 20% of the UK’s current electricity needs. An integrated energy plan using a mix of wind power, cogeneration, geothermal energy, biomass, and tidal/ wave power combined with energy conservation could displace existing reliance on nuclear power. And with the shift of resources in the form of billions of dollars given as subsidies to the nuclear industry to renewable energy the dream of a clean world environment would be realised.

Individuals need not be mere pawns in the game that big energy corporations play for their own ends. They could play an important role in measures promoting energy conservation – simple acts as not driving fuel guzzling SUV’s, not leaving lights burning all over the house, relying less on air conditioners and heaters by allowing the sweat glands to work more or wearing heavy sweaters in times of winter. Some lifestyle changes are painful but necessary. But self- sacrifice and nobility also motivate human beings. As Helen Caldicott aptly says in the last chapter of her remarkable book, ‘These are the qualities that will lead the world toward sanity and survival.’6

Also hopefully, end the fatal seduction of Mephistopheles once and for all.

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1 Nuclear Power is not the Answer- Helen Caldicott- Books for Change- pages 65-74.
2 Accidents tarnish nuclear dream-environment- The Guardian.
3 Nuclear Power is not the Answer- Helen Caldicott- Introduction- page ix.
4 Nuclear Power is not the Answer- page 19.
5 Nuclear Power is not the Answer- page xii.
6 Nuclear Power is not the Answer- page 183.

'Mommy Dearest' - The Controversial Legacy of Mother Teresa

C R Sridhar — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:31:46 EDT

‘Saints, should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent.’
-George Orwell.

Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, also known as Mother Teresa, captured the media attention of the world for her pious service of the poor and abandoned children of Calcutta. Born in Skopje – now capital of Macedonia- on 26th of August, she was raised by her strict Albanian mother to be a staunch Roman Catholic .At the age of eighteen she joined the sisters of Loreto as a missionary and came to India in the year 1929. In the year 1950 the Vatican gave permission to Mother Teresa to start the diocesan congregation that would become the Missionaries of Charity. The mission of the charity was a noble one as it was to take care of the homeless, the destitute and the unwanted people. The order, Missionaries of Charity, had thirteen members, which grew to more than four thousand nuns running orphanages, hospices for the care terminally ill and Aids patients. In 1952 Teresa converted an abandoned Hindu temple into the Kalighat home for the dying. The order opened the Nirmala Shishu Bhavan, the Children's Home of the Immaculate Heart, as a haven for orphans and homeless youth. The charitable activities of the order established organisations in other parts of India and also worldwide, especially, in Venezuela, Asia, Africa, US and Europe.¹

The Extraordinary career of Mother Teresa

The brief curriculum vitae of Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu does not do adequate justice to the extraordinary career of Mother Teresa. In public and in the media, her wizened body and her wrinkled face radiated a quiet compassion, which could only be seen on saints' faces as they calmly served the wretched of the earth. The media revelled in showing photographs of starving babies in Mother Teresa’s hands. Other photos revealed Mother Teresa in a saintly light as she hugged the dying who were vulnerable in their last moments of life. She became an icon of service to humanity and international recognition poured in first as trickle and then as flood. She won Padma Shri (India), Order of Merit, Golden Honour of the Nation (Albania), culminating in the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded to her in 1979. As an international celebrity, Teresa became a brand ambassador of the Vatican espousing the controversial policies of the Roman Catholic Church with regard to abortion, divorce and contraception.

When she died in 1997 the Holy See began a process of beatification towards declaring Mother Teresa as a saint. For canonizing Mother Teresa it was necessary to establish two miracles unless the Pope dispensed it. The first miracle- the healing of a tumour in the abdomen of an Indian woman, Monica Besra, following the application of a locket containing Mother Teresa's picture- was mired in controversy as the medical doctors attending on her and her husband claimed that the tumour was cured by conventional medicine.

A devil’s advocate

Christopher Hitchens, an author and journalist, who declared Mother Teresa as a pious fraud, challenged the beatification and canonization of Mother Teresa. He said ‘her intention was not to help people’ but ‘she was working to expand the number of Catholics.’ His objections were overruled by the Roman Curia who saw no obstacle to the canonization of Mother Teresa. Hitchens alleged that there was no examination of the witnesses who claimed that Monica Besra was not cured by a miracle but by prescription medicine. It was also alleged that Monica Besra had tubercular cyst not malignant tumour as claimed by her order. All these claims were perfunctorily examined without critical scrutiny raising doubts that the standards were deliberately lowered to put the canonization of Mother Teresa on a fast track.²

But the Vatican was in a quandary - if the scrutiny process was diluted and divine intervention in human affairs is too promiscuously recognized, the church exposes itself to skeptical questions that if one leper can be cured by divine help then why not other lepers? Does the Lord show preference in not eradicating infant leukemia and mass poverty? If so, is such a God biased in saving some souls but not the others? Such questions relentlessly open the floodgates of critical challenge lowering the credibility of the Faith. This unease was reflected in some cardinals who objected to the fast track canonization of Mother Teresa. However the beatification of Mother Teresa took place on 19th October 2003 and the title ‘Blessed’ was conferred on her. This placed her firmly in the ante- room of sainthood.

A spanner in the hagiography

In a cynical age such as ours, where the highest form of human endeavour are self-seeking individuals working for the maximization of personal advantage, it is not surprising that tales of personal sacrifice bring tears to the eyes. The reputation of Mother Teresa as a saviour of the poor received a turbo boost when Malcolm Muggeridge filmed Mother Teresa’s work in Calcutta titled Something Beautiful for God, which was shown on BBC. He wrote a book with the same title, which sold more than 300,000 copies sold, reprinted 20 times and translated into 13 languages. There was no looking back for the obscure Albanian Nun who catapulted to world celebrity. The hagiography industry churned out books with titles helper of the poor, protector of the sick, and friend of the friendless, which established the icon status of Mother Teresa as a living example of a saint.

It must be said to the credit of Hitchens that he initiated the critical process of challenging the status of Teresa and the hagiography industry devoted to the sanctimonious humbug of deifying Teresa. In 1994 he produced a documentary film called Hell’s Angel, which was broadcast on Channel 4. The film was vilified and the author was subjected to abuse. Undeterred, Hitchens meticulously researched the life of Mother Teresa and published a book called The Missionary Position. In this book, Hitchens rakes up controversial issues about Teresa and calls into question the credulous nonsense written about the saviour of the poor.

In bad company

In a broadside delivered against the uncritical adulation of Mother Teresa, Hitchens asks inconvenient questions- what was Mother Teresa of Calcutta doing in the presence of the hated family of Baby Doc Duvalier who was the ruthless dictator of Haiti? The event referred to by Hitchens was the visit of Mother Teresa to Haiti in 1981 to accept the Legion d'Honneur. In a magazine called L’Assaut, a propaganda organ for the Duvalier family, there are photos of Mother Teresa holding the bangled hand of Michele Duvalier (wife of Baby Doc) and gazing at her with respect and reverence. The magazine quotes Teresa as having said, ‘Madame President is someone who feels, who knows, who wishes to demonstrate her love not only with words but also with concrete and tangible actions.’ Whether the oppressed people of Haiti who were murdered, raped and pillaged by the Duvalier family for generations, echoed her sentiments is not known, as they were not quoted in the magazine. Her pious endorsement of the Duvalier family was in line with the extreme Right wing and conservative faction of the Vatican hierarchy supporting the Duvalier oligarchy.³

While it would be tempting to view Mother Teresa’s Haiti visit as a social faux pas not worthy of criticism, there is overwhelming evidence that she supported repressive dictators and regimes in Central and South America. She gave support to the Reagan administration by her participation in the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which was awarded to her inside the White House in 1985, when right wing death squads embroiled the administration in a scandal relating to the murder of four American nuns and the Archbishop of San Salvador in Central America. Her admonition of the Sandinista Revolutionary Party gave support to the contras, a vicious mercenary army actively funded by the Reagan government to bomb schools and hospitals in Nicaragua, raised serious doubts about her political neutrality.

During the suspension of civil liberties in India by Indira Gandhi in 1975, the Mother uttered no words of criticism. She purred beatifically-‘ People are happier. There are more jobs. There are no strikes.’ Her friendly relationship with Mrs Gandhi and the Congress party played an important role in silencing the criticism. ‘Mother Teresa’ says Michael Parenti, ‘is a paramount example of the kind of acceptably conservative icon propagated by an elite-dominated culture, a saint who uttered not a critical word against social injustice, and maintained cosy relations with the rich, corrupt, and powerful.’⁴

Money has no smell

Other controversies dogged Mother Teresa. One of the most serious scandals to affect her reputation was her financial involvement with one of the biggest frauds known in American history - Charles Keating. The savings and loan scam of Keating swindled $252 million, mainly from small and poor depositors. A staunch Catholic he gave Teresa $1,250,000 in cash and the use of a private jet. In return Mother Teresa gave a glowing character certificate and pleaded for his clemency during the trial. The Deputy District Attorney for LA, Paul Turley in a tersely worded letter addressed to Teresa asked her to return the money stolen by Keating. Mother Teresa did not return the money. No action was taken by the court for its recovery. It appears that saints are immune from coercive proceedings.⁵

The theology of suffering

At the heart of suffering lies a deception, which must be examined rationally to understand the theory and practice of Mother Teresa. At a 1981 press conference she was asked: "Do you teach the poor to endure their lot?" She replied: ‘I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.’⁶ Her reply made her critics accuse her of loving suffering more than the sufferers. The spectacle of suffering was beneficial for faith as only in pain one thought of the Lord. The alleviation of pain of dying patients was not an important objective.

There is a memorable anecdote about her attitude to suffering. A patient was approached by Mother Teresa who dished out theological platitudes instead of providing painkillers to the patient. ‘You are suffering like Christ on the cross,’ Mother Teresa allegedly told the patient. ‘So Jesus must be kissing you.’ The patient is said to have replied, ‘Then please tell him to stop kissing me.’⁷

This bizarre attitude to suffering was reflected in her hospices and orphanages. ‘In 1991, Dr. Robin Fox, then editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, visited the Home for Dying Destitute in Calcutta and described the medical care the patients received as "haphazard". He observed that sisters and volunteers, some of whom had no medical knowledge, had to make decisions about patient care, because of the lack of doctors in the hospice. Dr. Fox specifically held Teresa responsible for conditions in this home, and observed that her order did not distinguish between curable and incurable patients, so that people who could otherwise survive would be at risk of dying from infections and lack of treatment.’⁸

Moreover, the formulary at the facility Fox visited lacked strong analgesics. Fox also wrote that needles were rinsed with warm water, which left them inadequately sterilised, and the facility did not isolate patients with infectious diseases. There have been a series of other reports documenting inattention to medical care in the order's facilities. Some former volunteers who worked for Teresa’s order have also expressed similar points of view. Mother Teresa herself referred to the facilities as "Houses of the Dying”

The orphanages where abandoned children were housed showed shocking lapses of care so strongly advertised in the media all over the world. Donal MacIntyre - a reporter and documentary-maker for Channel 5 Television who worked undercover was astonished at what he saw-

‘ I saw children with their mouths gagged open to be given medicine, their hands flaying in distress, visible testimony to the pain they were in. Tiny babies were bound with cloths at feeding time. Rough hands wrenched heads into position for feeding. Some of the children retched and coughed as rushed staff crammed food into their mouths. Boys and girls were abandoned on open toilets for up to 20 minutes at a time. Slumped, untended, some dribbling, some sleeping, they were a pathetic sight. Their treatment was an affront to their dignity, and dangerously unhygienic.’9

The donations, which poured from all parts of the world, were not invested in buying drugs and medical equipment for the care of the sick and dying. Instead, it was diverted to the Vatican Bank for general use. But when it came to her own treatment ‘Teresa checked into some of the costliest hospitals and recovery care units in the world for state-of-the-art treatment.’¹⁰

Conservative agenda

The Vatican under Pope Paul II used the popularity of Mother Teresa to support controversial issues on abortion, divorce, and contraception. The Roman church remained implacably hostile to abortion even if was necessary to save the life of the mother or in instances where women were raped and requested abortion. Its views on divorce and contraception were steeped in medieval values. The dogma of the Roman Catholic Church with respect to contraception is well known and has invited protests from all over the world.

Mother Teresa lobbied hard on the referendum to lift the constitutional ban divorce in Ireland in 1995. Her position was that of a hardliner opposing the removal of the ban on divorce. In her meeting with Margaret Thatcher in the year 1988 the main discussion centred on Abortion instead of the plight of the city’s homeless. In Spain she lobbied hard on behalf the clerical forces to prevent legislation liberalising abortion, divorce and birth control. At a open- air mass in Knock (Ireland) in 1992, she addressed the devout with the following words-‘Let us promise Our Lady who loves Ireland so much that we will never allow in this country a single abortion. And no contraceptives.’¹¹

In her Nobel Peace Prize speech in 1979, Mother Teresa famously said -‘ I think that today peace is threatened by abortion, too, which is a true war, a direct killing of a child by its own mother. Today, abortion is the worst evil, and the greatest enemy of peace. Because if a mother can kill her own child, what will prevent us from killing ourselves, or one another? Nothing.’¹²

Sums up Susan Jacoby,‘Teresa never showed any concern, in India or elsewhere, about the root causes of poverty -- including lack of education, corrupt dictatorships, inequitable distribution of wealth, bigotry against social, ethnic, or religious under classes, and contempt for women.’¹³

Selecting Saints

Any Institution such as the Roman Catholic Church, which has a relationship of trust with its devotees, must maintain high standards of moral probity to retain the trust and confidence of its members. Such confidence should not be diluted in the name of political expediency. In the past, the Church crushed dissent and heresy through the office of the Inquisition to retain power. In modern times, such powers do not exist. Its legitimacy lies in moral persuasion, which is exercised through the proper selection of saints who epitomise all that is best and pure about the Church.

During the 26-year papacy of Paul II, the Pope had canonised 483 individuals to sainthood. Among the less savoury individuals selected for the honour of beatification was the reactionary Msgr. José María Escrivá de Balaguer, supporter of fascist regimes in Spain and elsewhere, and founder of Opus Dei, a powerful secretive ultra-conservative movement feared by many as a sinister sect within the Catholic Church. Other selections for beatification, which raised eyebrows, were Pius IX, who reigned as pontiff from 1846 to 1878, and who referred to Jews as dogs and Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, the leading Croatian cleric who welcomed the Nazi and fascist Ustashi takeover of Croatia during World War II and openly supported the Croatian fascist regime that exterminated hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma. ¹⁴

Mother Teresa was a mild reactionary when compared to the egregious examples of Msgr. José María Escrivá de Balaguer, Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, and Pius IX but certainly not an inspiring example for the Church. More worthy persons such as Archbishop Oscar Romero who spoke against Right wing death squads for oppressing the people of El Salvador received shabby treatment at the hands of Pope Paul II. The death squad murdered the Archbishop for speaking out his mind against tyranny and oppression. The people of El Salvador venerated him as a saint. But Pope Paul II used his authority to ban any discussion for his beatification for a period of 50 years. No protests were made by the Pope to condemn the murder. The Pope merely murmured –‘Tragic’ when asked for his comments. The ground swell of support for the martyred priest made the Pope to relent: the ban was cut down to 25 years. The Archbishop was put on a slow boat to sainthood.

The Byzantine intrigue of the Vatican in selecting its saints would make a cynic say in mock wonder, ‘The ways of the Vatican are indeed mysterious.’ And that sense of mystery only deepens when one considers the extraordinary beatification of an Albanian nun called Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu.

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1 Wikipedia- Mother Teresa.
2 The fanatic, fraudulent Mother Teresa- Christopher Hitchens- Slate Magazine.
3 The Missionary Position- Christopher Hitchens- Verso- pages 3-6.
4 Mother Teresa, John Paul II, and the Fast-Track Saints- Micheal Parenti.
5 The Missionary Position, Christopher Hitchens- Verso- pages- 68-70.
6 The Missionary Position, Christopher Hitchens- Verso- page- 11.
7 Mother Teresa and her order come under criticism- By Clark Morphew / Knight-Ridder Newspapers.
8 Dr Robin Fox- Lancet 17th September 1994- extracts published in The Missionary Position, Christopher Hitchens- Verso- pages- 38-39.
9 "The squalid truth behind the legacy of Mother Teresa" - Donal MacIntyre- New Statesman- 22 August 2005.
10 "Mother Teresa, John Paul II, and the Fast-Track Saints"- Micheal Parenti
11 "The Missionary Position"- Christopher Hitchens- Verso- page- 58
12 The illusory Vs Real Mother Teresa- Dr. Michael Hakeem- free thought today- August 1996.
13 Road to Sainthood Paved with Good Publicity- Susan Jacoby- On faith.
14 Mother Teresa, John Paul II, and the Fast-Track Saints- Micheal Parenti.

Book Review: The Global Food Economy by Tony Weis

C R Sridhar — Mon, 19 May 2008 08:28:57 EDT

The corporate images of the food economy are full of deceptive advertisements of a mythical cornucopia of contented animals waiting for their disposal as someone else’s meal. The other images, which reinforce the intrinsic ‘fun and plenty’ of the food economy, are of supermarkets catering to the affluent sections of society, with food products stacked in shelves procured from far off places.

Beneath the illusion of plenty, there are other contradictory images of starved babies with distended bellies in famine stricken Africa, coexisting obscenely with obese people from the developed world. Starved farmers in agriculturally dependent economies who eke out a miserable living out of cash crop economy offer a harsh contrast to the bon vivant life style of CEOs of Transnational Corporations.

Tony Weis, an Assistant Professor of Geography teaching at the University of Western Ontario- Canada, has written a book called The Global Food Economy, which is a searing indictment of Big Agri-businesses destroying small farmers and the delicate eco-systems devastated by modern capital-intensive modes of production. Going beyond the platitudes of corporate PR, the author ‘examines the human and the ecological cost of what we eat.’

At the heart of the problem, the author argues, lies the role of TNC agribusiness, especially the grain-livestock complex, in adopting industrial methods, which are inimical to the eco-systems and the condition of human beings in general.

Ecological footprint

The ecological footprint left by Industrial Agriculture is a negative one and exacts a mounting toxic burden. In the past the long-term viability of farms depended on a sensitive relationship with respect to the ecological limits of growing food. It was recognized that there must be functional diversity in crops, soil species, trees, animals and insects to maintain ecological balance and nutrient cycles. This was maintained in traditional farming methods by multi-cropping, rotational patterns, green manure, fallowing land, careful seed selection and the integration of small animal populations.

In contrast modern farming transformed by capitalism and industralisation represented ‘a movement toward the radical simplification of the natural ecological order in the number of species found in an area and the intricacy of their interconnections’. This was made possible by the development and rising use of synthetic fertilizers, agro-chemicals, enhanced seed varieties/genetically modified seeds, farm machinery, concentrated feedstuffs, animal antibiotics and hormones, and the expansion of irrigation systems, which allowed industrial techniques to override previous ecological constraints. Moreover, embedded in industrialized farming is the new dependence upon fossil fuel consumption in the twentieth century, not only on transportation costs involved in bringing the food from the place where it is grown to the plate of the consumer and the demands of the machinery used for agriculture instead of animals, but with the petroleum demands of proliferating synthetic fertilizers and agro-chemicals. With the price of oil reaching $120 per barrel (expecting to touch $200 per barrel) it is certain that food prices would shoot upwards.

Rejecting simplistic notions that the industrial transformation in agriculture has resulted in high yielding crops, which are also yield stable, the author points out the inconvenient truth that it leads to chronic toxicity. This is evident as crops grown in industrial monocultures are prone to pest infections- a threat that is suppressed by the use of pesticides leading to greater pest resistance to the pesticides and involving greater use of pesticides in a never-ending cycle. The excessive use of pesticides results in pesticide poisoning which afflicts nearly three million suffering every year leading to 2,50,000 deaths. The other problems that arise with mechanized tillage are that the soil is drained off its nutritive power. The quick fix in the form of technology is a mere illusion as more and more use of inputs serves to mask the problems while creating fresh ones, one of which is the increasing use of fresh water for agricultural purposes, which is becoming scarce and a flash point of conflict.

Hoof prints left by livestock

The increased meatification of diet offers fresh challenges to the eco-systems as the increased demand for consumption of meat products leads to large-scale supply from feedlots. There are also health problems associated with increased meat intake as it increases the risk of strokes and cardio-vascular diseases.

In the factory, the dense livestock population is the major consumer and polluter of water. It is calculated that in excess of 3000 litres of water go into producing a single kilogram of US beef while a factory farmed pig requires about 132 litres of water for drinking and flushing of its wastes. A typical slaughterhouse in US uses in a day the water used by 25000 people.

The faecal matter of the cattle and pigs creates problems of waste disposal, as it is a gigantic task to get rid of 1.4 billon tons of animal manure (US) without polluting the rivers and streams. Added to the problems of sink function, there are health hazards arising out of over crowding of poultry birds in production factories which exposes the public to the dangers of a virulent strain of H5N1 which is capable of mutating and jumping the species barrier to human beings. The WHO warning led to hundreds of millions of birds getting culled in China, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. The feeding of neural tissues, bone meal and blood from cattle carcass to essentially herbivorous cattle created the mad cow disease (BSE), which could transmit to humans when they eat the infected meat. Thus the hoof prints left by livestock production leaves an intolerable burden on eco-systems and public health.

An Uneven Playing field

The human cost of the food economy is a heavy burden disproportionately resting on developing countries- where overwhelmingly large sections of the rural people depend on agriculture for livelihood. TNC Agri-businesses, which are subsidised by rich developed countries (especially US) flood the world market with cheap grains/ cereals, driving the poor farmers of the developing world out of the market leading to destitution and poverty. They are driven to cities in search of jobs in Urban areas, where they constitute the under class found in Urban ghettos living in abject poverty and filth. Most of the poorer countries are still trapped in neo-colonial relationship with centers of Metropolitan capital as they increasingly depend on cash crops grown for export to the affluent people of the world and face the daunting prospect of not able to feed themselves out of their dwindling export earnings. The producing countries simply do not control the international price for their commodities- they take what they get. The export earnings are insufficient to buy finished goods from the developed countries and they face the dreary prospect of increasing the volume of export of cash crops without increasing the value, which is just not enough to pay for the imports.

The author’s book is a sane and compassionate plea to reorder the global food economy to serve human needs and not the diktat of corporate agriculture with its obsession of profit maximization. In the last chapter of his book called the future of farming, he passionately calls for moving agricultural systems off the chemical and fossil energy treadmill and towards lower-input, labour-centered intensification and more bio-diverse agriculture. That this vision is not that of a Luddite who wants to turn the clock back to a romantic past, is borne out by the fact that there is an urgent need for agro-science to be shaped by more scientific research for more humane ends like empowering the small farmer and not for mindlessly enriching the corporate coffers of the few.

For people of India, especially the middle class, who are enthralled by the IT service economy, it may be a wake up call to know that even today two-thirds of its one billion plus population still depend on agriculture as source of income. The author’s book, which pleads for a socially just, ecologically rational and humane food economy, should find a place in our bookshelf.

Bardolatory - William Shakespeare's Legacy

C R Sridhar — Fri, 2 May 2008 00:41:13 EDT

"I am more easily bored with Shakespeare, and have suffered more ghastly evenings with him, than any dramatist I know."

Peter Brook

"Let's all raise a flagon of ale and wish a happy 444th to one of our favorite playwright and poet." said one of the admirers of Shakespeare. Indeed, as the BBC news reports, the crowds in Stratford-upon-Avon enjoyed street theatre, dancing, plays and music over the weekend marking his birth - believed to be 23 April 1564. Last week hundreds of people celebrated William Shakespeare’s 444th birth anniversary, including some wearing Elizabethan costumes, took part in the traditional procession on Saturday. A spokesperson for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, said the weekend was "a celebration, not only of the world's greatest poet and playwright but also of tradition, the arts and Stratford-upon-Avon."¹

India was conspicuous by its absence at the 444th birth anniversary celebrations of The Bard of Avon at his birthplace. The reason for India’s absence was indeed strange as only last year former High Commissioner Kamalesh Sharma had raised the tricolour at Stratford-upon-Avon. “But the Indian diplomatic absence may be easily explained, if not easily understood.” says Rashmee Roshan Lall tetchily in her column ‘Shakespearewallah fails to show up.’² It appears that as the Indian High Commissioner and his diplomatic officials were preoccupied with the untidy events of the Maoists coming to power in Nepal, they could not participate in the anniversary festivities in the Bard’s birthplace. The columnist’s irritation was perhaps justified, as after 200 years of pillage and plunder, the enduring legacy of Britain to India has been Shakespeare and Cricket.

Shakespeare’s literary foes

The effusive praises for the Bard conceal some dissenting voices that have challenged the greatness of Shakespeare as a literary figure. His harshest critic was the Great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy who wrote such masterpieces as ‘War and Peace’ and ‘Anna Karenina’. Tolstoy marshaled his formidable creative power to fire a salvo at the Bard.

In Shakespeare and the Drama, published in 1906, Tolstoy declared that he had always experienced feelings of repulsion, weariness, and bewilderment on reading Shakespeare's plays. "Now," he says "before writing this article, as an old man of seventy-five wishing once more to check my conclusions, I have again read the whole of Shakespeare . . . and have experienced the same feelings still more strongly, no longer with perplexity but with a firm and unshakeable conviction that the undisputed fame Shakespeare enjoys as a great genius - which makes writers of our time imitate him, and readers and spectators, distorting their aesthetic and ethical sense, seek nonexistent qualities in him - is a great evil, as every falsehood is."³

Tolstoy stirred a bitter controversy in literary circles when he claimed “Shakespeare cannot be admitted to be either a writer of great genius or even an average one." He filleted the Bard by examining one of his critically acclaimed plays King Lear. Tolstoy found the play to be overrated and not meeting the basic standards of art. He argued that the play was filled with characters that were stilted, speaking a language that was affected, pretentious, pompous far removed from the real people of the World. The play had no sense of proportion, claimed Tolstoy, and the contents reflected a vulgar view of life, which fawned on the mighty and treated the poor with contempt. Tolstoy also controversially claimed that King Lear was a plagiarized version of a far superior play King Leir authored by an unknown playwright. Moreover, the Weltanschauung of the Bard was that of a status quo-ist without the humanitarian impulse of trying to change the order of an iniquitous society. All the major flaws found in King Lear, Tolstoy concluded, could be found in his other plays.

Tolstoy’s antipathy to Shakespeare rose from irreconcilable differences as to the purpose of Art. For Art to be a meaningful, said Tolstoy, it must be rooted in reason and conscience. Tolstoy passionately denounced the movements such as the Decadents and Symbolists, which idealized beauty, truth, and goodness. For Tolstoy a purely aesthetic appreciation of the holy Trinity symbolized by beauty, truth, and goodness represented the effusions of counterfeit Art. All great works of art, he contended, are great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone. As examples of great Art Tolstoy selected Schiller's 'The Robbers', Hugo's 'Les Miserables' and 'Les Pauvres Gens', Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities', 'A Christmas Carol', and 'The Chimes', Harriet Beecher Stowe's 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', Dostoevsky's 'The House of the Dead', and George Eliot's 'Adam Bede' as manifestations of love of God and man.

A Shavian Salvo

Tolstoy’s criticism of Shakespeare and the credo Art for Art’s sake found sympathy in George Bernard Shaw who held the view that Great Art should be harnessed to the purpose of changing humankind for the better. On the so called Greatness of Shakespeare Shaw agreed with Tolstoy and said “ I have striven hard to open English eyes to the emptiness of Shakespeare’s philosophy, to the superficiality and second-handedness of his morality, to his weakness and his incoherence as a thinker, to his snobbery, his vulgar prejudices, his ignorance, his disqualifications of all sorts for the philosophic eminence claimed for him.” But Shaw disagreed with Tolstoy and said that the Bard had great literary power, which made him a great artist. ⁴

The Paradox

The popularity of Shakespeare remains a paradox, as he was never considered as a great playwright amongst his peers Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben Jonson and others during the Elizabethan Age. Until the end of the Eighteenth Century Shakespeare remained relatively obscure in England. It was Goethe who praised Shakespeare and later taken up by German Literary scholars who praised Shakespeare’s plays. As Tolstoy says his reputation “originated in Germany, and thence was transferred to England.” There were special circumstances favouring the Bard as German Drama was trapped in its mediocrity and French classical literature was ossified into a sterile rigidity. The Germans were captivated by Shakespeare’s clever development of scenes and his literary reputation grew steadily. The infatuation with Shakespeare has lasted ever since.⁵ Thus the spell of Shakespeare could be attributed to ‘epidemic suggestion’ induced by Germanic scholars whose enthusiasm for the Bard spread to England. The reputation of Shakespeare became solid during the Eighteenth Century as the Bard’s plays represented a return to safety before all the upheavals of the French Revolution and he symbolized solid English values such as Monarchy.

Porters of Colonial Legacy

When the British left India after 200 years of colonial rule, they left a dubious cultural legacy: Shakespeare. Gary Taylor in his irreverent book ‘Reinventing Shakespeare’ challenges the inherited assumption of Shakespeare’s greatness, preferring to see his current status as the fruit of centuries of public relations on the part of British Imperialism, “which propagated the English Language on every continent.”

In post-Independence India, Shakespeare and Rudyard Kipling, the icons of British imperialism became required reading in schools and Universities teaching English Literature. The upper middle classes of Indian society lapped up courses on Shakespeare creating divisions between high art and popular entertainment. The plays in vernacular languages and native cinema became popular with the masses. The uncomfortable questions raised by Tolstoy beg for our attention- Why not shape our literary consciousness by delving deeply into our folklore and the study of epics, which are part of our cultural milieu? Why not draw inspiration from diverse native tradition for our Art? What, if any, is the relevance of Shakespeare in India where many do not speak English?

For the porters of colonial legacy, these troubling questions cast long shadows on their path as they make their journey to a far of place called Stratford-upon-Avon.

Notes:
1. BBC News, 26 April 2008 12:20 UK
2. "View from London- Shakespearewallah fails to show up"- TOI-April 29, 2008.
3. "What is art? - Introduction to Tolstoy's writings"- Ernest J Simmons.
4. "New concerted attack on the fame of Shakespeare"- New York Times-December 9, 1906, Sunday.
5. "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool"- George Orwell

Tibet - The Myth of Shangri-La

C R Sridhar — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:46:42 EDT

‘We ought not suffer ourselves to be deluded by unfounded theory or specious argument.’ -Abbe Felice Fontana.

The recent uprising in Tibet, which was crushed by China, reopened old wounds of the Tibetan struggle for independence from China. The international media was quick to highlight the traumatic events of the Chinese crackdown in 1959 in Tibet, which led to the exile of Dalai Lama to India. The international condemnation of the tough action taken on the Tibetan protesters was embarrassing to China as she was to play the host in the Beijing 2008 Olympics. The bad publicity came at an inopportune time and blunted the PR exercise mounted by China as an emerging Super Power.

The international coverage of the uprising was to a large extent uniform expressing moral outrage at the Chinese oppression but simplified the complex historical events of the Sino-Tibetan struggle. In the simplification lay the romantic notion that the Lamas (the priestly class) ruled wisely and with compassion. As the Dalai Lama himself stated that "the pervasive influence of Buddhism" in Tibet, "amid the wide open spaces of an unspoiled environment resulted in a society dedicated to peace and harmony. We enjoyed freedom and contentment.”¹

Hollywood version of Tibet

The romantic notion of idyllic Tibet where men, women and children lived in perfect harmony was reinforced in the West by Hollywood movies produced by talented directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha (1993) and Martin Scorsese's Kundun (1997) and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Seven Years in Tibet. In these excellently directed and lavishly produced films there are powerful messages suggesting ‘exaggerated reverence, with heavy-handed depictions of Tibetans, especially Tibetan monks, as solemn, holy and kind instead of as ordinary people who quarrel and joke around.’ The Western World also idealized Tibetan culture as pure and otherworldly. As Jamyang Norbu, a Tibetan immigrant and writer living in Tennessee, said: ''In the West, the response to Tibetan culture is so worshipful and romantic. There are elements in Tibetan culture that have all this magical, medieval stuff that Westerners love. The New Age thing. The Tibetan thing has style -- the color, the costumes. To a great extent, we exist only in the imagination of Western fantasists.''²

The slavish adoration of all things Tibetan finds articulation in the novel Lost Horizon, written by James Hilton who popularized Shangri-La – a place of perfect serenity. The novel tells a story of some Englishmen whose plane crashed in the Himalayas found peace and tranquility in the company of lamas who engaged them with philosophical conversation over endless cups of tea. This myth of Tibet – a veritable Shangri-La - entered Western consciousness and struck a sympathetic chord. This impression of Tibet as a Utopian world untainted by greed or corruption excited the imagination of western people and formed the basis of public opinion supporting the Tibetan struggle against China.

Exploitative class structure

But did the popular opinion about Tibet as a Shangri-La have any basis in reality? Were there any historical records to support the claim that it was Shangri-La ruled by the wise lamas? A careful and scrupulous reading of Tibetan History reveals a radically different picture. Far from being a Shangri-La Tibet was crushed from within by a viciously exploitative class structure. “Until 1959, when the Dalai Lama last presided over Tibet,” writes Michael Parenti, “ most of the arable land was still organized into manorial estates worked by serfs. “³ Even a writer sympathetic to the old order allows that "a great deal of real estate belonged to the monasteries, and most of them amassed great riches . . .. In addition, individual monks and lamas were able to accumulate great wealth through active participation in trade, commerce, and money lending."⁴

In old Tibet, there were a number of small farmers who eked out a living under extremely difficult circumstances. These were the lucky ones as they were free peasants. The middle class was in the region of ten thousand comprising small traders, merchants, and shopkeepers. Thousands were beggars and some slaves who owned nothing. But staggering parts of the population - some 700000 out of 1250000 were serfs.⁵ The serfs and other poor peasants had no education or medical care. They slaved for the lama and the secular landed aristocracy. They had no rights and were subject to the whims of the lords. The plight of the serfs is chronicled in the Timely Rain: Travels in New Tibet and also in other scholarly books such as Tom Grunfeld’s The Making of Modern Tibet, M.E. Sharpe, 1996; Anna Louise Strong, Tibetan Interviews, Peking New World Press, 1929.

Hell on Earth

The exploitative regime of the Lamas was enforced through terror and wide spread use of torture. For runaway serfs and thieves the summary punishments were given such as eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation. Notes Parenti “ In 1959, Anna Louise Strong visited an exhibition of torture equipment that had been used by the Tibetan overlords. There were handcuffs of all sizes, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, and breaking off hands. There were instruments for slicing off kneecaps and heels, or hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disemboweling.”⁶ The testimonies of the victims of torture are heart rending as they are enduring chronicles of man’s inhumanity to man.

The religious teaching of Karma was used to keep the iniquitous social order in place. The pernicious doctrine taught that the poor had themselves to blame as they justly suffered for their sins committed in past lives. The rich enjoyed the affluence and prosperity as a reward for their virtuous deeds in the past. This religious dogma prevented any challenge to the social order and preserved a status quo for the benefit of the Lama elites.

Enter the Red Dragon

In 1950 the Chinese communists occupied Tibet and crushed the ill-equipped Tibetan army. In 1951 the Seventeen Point agreement was signed and Tibet was officially incorporated into the People's Republic of China. Dalai Lama was given self- government in Tibet with the Chinese government retaining control over military and foreign relations. In Eastern Kham and Amdo (Quingai) considered being outside the purview of the Tibetan Government, the Chinese initiated land reforms. Most lands there were taken away from noblemen and monasteries and re-distributed to serfs. This aroused resentment among the landed class in Tibet. The Chinese accusation was that Tibet under the Dalai Lama was regressive in nature and opposed all attempts to modernize a serf society. The Chinese abolished serfdom and introduced social reforms by reducing usurious interest rates and built hospitals and roads. “Contrary to popular belief in the West," writes Goldstein, the Chinese "took care to show respect for Tibetan culture and religion. No aristocratic or monastic property was confiscated, and feudal lords continued to reign over their hereditarily bound peasants.”⁷

Meanwhile the relationship between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese communists worsened. In Eastern Kham and Amdo(Qinghai) the landed class with the monks started a rebellion in June 1956, which eventually spread to Lhasa. The Chinese crushed the Tibetan resistance with extreme violence in 1959. After the Lhasa rebellion in 1959, the Chinese government lowered the level of autonomy of Central Tibet, and implemented full-scale land redistribution in all areas of Tibet.

Tibet as a pawn in the Cold War

The American involvement in the Tibetan struggle arose due to geopolitical concerns about the ideology of communism that was hostile to interests of capitalism. American foreign policy strategists, less inspired by thoughts of benevolence, saw a golden opportunity to halt the spread of communism by actively supporting Dalai Lama. The CIA involvement with the bands of Tibetan fighters dates back to 1956 when the Tibetan fighters attacked the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army. The CIA gave this group military training, support camps in Nepal and supply of arms. A propaganda unit called the American Society for a Free Asia – a CIA front- espoused the cause of free Tibet.

The Dalai Lama’s eldest brother, Thubtan Norbu, played an active role in this society.⁸ The CIA bankrolled the exiled Tibetan community throughout the sixties to the tune of $1.7 million a year according to the documents released by the State Department in 1998. The CIA also gave the Dalai Lama annual payments of $186000. These facts were reported in the Los Angeles Times (15-9-1998) and also in New York Times (1-10-1998) by the publication of the article ‘CIA Gave Aid to Tibetan Exiles in '60s, Files Show’ written by Jim Mann. The documents released by the State Department are also analysed in a book written by Morrison titled The CIA's Secret War in Tibet.

The armed resistance movement petered out in 1972 when the CIA abruptly withdrew support. Both President Nixon and Dr. Henry Kissinger saw that rapprochement with China served US geopolitical interests. The Tibetans were left high and dry. There is another important reason, not discussed in mainstream media, why the resistance failed: because large sections of Tibetan society who were serfs did not join the armed struggle against the Chinese. Unlike other liberation struggles against imperial invasions, the Tibetan resistance was confined to the land owning aristocracy and monks who lost the most during the Chinese occupation. The non- involvement of the class of peasants/ serfs spelt the death knell of the resistance.⁹

The bitterness of the 14th Dalai Lama was evident, as he knew that the US involvement in Tibet was a game to thwart the expansion of Communist China. It had nothing to do with the plight of the Tibetan people. While thanking the CIA for its support in the Tibetan struggle he told John Kenneth Knaus, an ex-CIA official, that “the U.S. Government had involved itself in his country's affairs not to help Tibet but only as a cold war tactic to challenge the Chinese.''

Today the financial support for Dalai Lama flows from the National Endowment for Democracy and other conduits. The US Congress has allotted annually a sum of $2 million for Tibetans in India with additional budget of millions for the democratic activities for the Tibetan Exile Community. Heather Cottin, in "George Soros, Imperial Wizard," CovertAction Quarterly no. 74 (Fall 2002) has also alleged that the Dalai Lama also gets money from financier George Soros, who now runs the CIA-created Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and other institutes.

Writing on the Wall

Beneath the smiling face of the 14th Dalai Lama that we see on TV interviews and at public functions there is a worried man. The worries of Dalai Lama are founded on painful realities confronting Tibet. In recent times the Han Chinese constituting 95% of the immense Chinese population have settled in large numbers dominating the Tibetan economy. The Han Chinese views the Tibetans with contempt. The economic levers are in the hands of the Chinese, which has aroused the antagonism of the local Tibetans. The culture of Tibet is in danger of being effaced by the demographic shift in favour of the Han Chinese.

The dark shadow cast by China as an emerging super power has blunted the bargaining power of Tibet in her quest for independence. In recent times China has meshed with the globalised economy as a supplier of low cost goods to US and the world. With US slipping into recession and real wages declining, the flood of cheap goods to meet declining purchasing power in US may stem the consumer protest in that country. Hence, apart from posturing and making rhetorical speeches, the US establishment may find no reason to rock the Chinese boat. The US occupation of Iraq against international law, which has cost precious lives, has turned public opinion against military intervention in general. Moreover, the financial crisis in US and declining dollar has limited the capacity of US to militarily intervene in Tibet. The Government in exile of Dalai Lama has no support in US to overthrow the Chinese from Tibet and risk the prospect of a third world war.

The option of Dalai Lama is restricted to negotiate with China for autonomy while being a part of China. The conciliatory efforts made by the Dalai Lama to the Chinese leadership in Beijing would be the best step forward to ensure that the freedom of worship and human rights are restored in the best traditions of democracy.

“For every complicated problem,” said Mencken, “there is a solution that is simple, direct, understandable, and wrong.” For the people who support the Free Tibet movement the myth of the Shangri-La must be laid to rest and there must be international pressure to model Tibet as a democracy. Few Tibetans would like the return of the corrupt aristocratic clans who fled with the Dalai Lama in 1959. Many Tibetan farmers would not like to give up the land distributed to them during the Chinese land reforms. Slaves who suffered terribly under the feudal overlords would not like the return to slavery. These voices must be heard and respected. Otherwise the freedom loving people of Tibet would be replacing the yoke of Chinese Occupation with the yoke of theocratic despotism of the Lamas. A fate that must be avoided at any cost.

----------

1 Dalai Lama quoted in Donald Lopez Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998), 205.

2 Tibet (Hold the Shangri-La)- BARBARA STEWART Published: March 19, 2000- the New York Times.

3 Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth- Michael Parenti.

4 Pradyumna P. Karan, The Changing Face of Tibet: The Impact of Chinese Communist Ideology on the Landscape (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 64.

5 Stuart Gelder and Roma Gelder, The Timely Rain: Travels in New Tibet (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964) page 110.

6 Anna Louise Strong, Tibetan Interviews (Peking: New World Press, 1929) quoted in Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth.

7 Melvyn C. Goldstein, The Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), page 52.

8 Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison, The CIA's Secret War in Tibet (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2002); 9 Hugh Deane, "The Cold War in Tibet," CovertAction Quarterly (Winter 1987).

Lead India - A Corporate-Sponsored Circus

C R Sridhar — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 00:54:02 EST

Splashed on the front page of the Times of India (11th Feb 2008) is the photograph of the winner of the Lead India contest R.K. Misra playing a drum and surrounded by his friends, relatives and admirers. Gushed TOI, an English daily, known for its unabashed support for Corporate India ‘Misra emerged winner after overcoming 63 other contestants and 10 gruelling rounds of scrutiny. Besides winning the favour of most voters, he got 6 of 7 jury votes.’ Implicit in the report was the subliminal message that the sternest natural selection was at work in the Lead India Contest weeding out the weak and the inefficient contestants and selecting the brightest and the best as political leaders for India.

The euphoria generated by the glitzy media event attended by corporate honchos, opinion makers and politicians was heady and infectious. It smacked of a closely held private club whose members swore by the ideals of meritocracy and sound governance. Spotted in the distinguished gathering was the CEO of a private bank, which had the dubious distinction of using goons to collect debts. Whether such practices constituted good corporate governance is a matter of opinion argue the corporate class beguiled by the seduction of moral relativism. Recently the Apex court declared such methods as illegal awarding exemplary damages against the bank.

Squeaky-clean leadership

The assumption of Lead India that Corporate India provides examples of squeaky-clean leadership requires a leap of faith and dollops of naivety. And it is not borne out by facts. While it is tempting for the middle class to lament about the bad corrupt politicians and the parasitic government servants who thwart the developmental goals of the nation, such a view is far from truth. For in the equation of corruption lies the role of big business. The nexus of big business with corrupt government officials and politicians offers us a vantage view of the complexity of Indian corruption. Mr. Shanti Bhusan, former law minister, in a foreword to the book Reliance - The Real Natwar written by Arun Agrawal, admirably sums up the position not only with respect to Reliance but the corporate sector as a whole, ‘It is the thesis of Arun Agarwal that all political parties get huge financial help from Reliance which is why they remain silent even at the most egregious violations of law by Reliance.’ Further Mr. Bhusan adds significantly, ‘Bulk of the media too compromises and remains silent.’

Other examples such as collapse of banks like Global Trust and the stock market scams by Harshad Mehta involving big private banks explodes the myth that lays the blame entirely on the Government. We must forcibly remind ourselves that the loot of public money is a collaborative effort of Big business and Government. The corporate sector as providing clean no nonsense leaders is mere fantasy as it is a part of the problem and not part of the solution.

The myth of superior governance of the corporate sector is again a self-perpetuating illusion spread by TOI and the financial daily Economic Times. Dinned into our collective consciousness is the mantra of efficiency of the private sector over public sector. The pages of the Economic Times are replete with instances of corporate honchos making rather overblown claims that they offer far superior leadership to the moribund public sector. This received wisdom that is bandied about freely in corporate dominated media deserves scrutiny. ‘One assumption underlying the dogma,’ says T.T. Ram Mohan who teaches at IIM (Ahmedabad) ‘that public sector enterprises are doomed to inefficiency, and that competitive market forces can be relied on to make firms more efficient once they are privatized.’ (Privatization in India - Going Beyond Economic Orthodoxy)

But is this really true?

Combining rigorous data analysis with case studies to provide a balanced evaluation of the process of deregulation and privatization within the overall context of economic reforms, the author demonstrates, remarkably, that, contrary to the prevailing view, private sector firms do not outperform public sector firms across all sectors.

Apples to horses

Moreover, the assertion made in the contest that people who manage their business well can also be good in government service is an extremely shaky proposition. It is like comparing apples to horses. Government service calls for different priorities such as public good while business aims at profits. Public good is often described as an unruly horse, which involves complex decision making for the public servant to satisfy the stakeholders with unequal purchasing power who cannot be turned away on the ground that they cannot pay.

In areas such as Health and Education the infusion of the profit motive can be dangerous as it can drive out vulnerable sections of society from seeking education and health facilities. Do we view patients coming for health care as consumers driving business revenue? Do we cut off travel to the poor on the ground that they cannot pay? These are the challenges confronting the government and the mantra of profit and profitability so enamored by the private sector would lead to profitable enterprises not serving the people at large.

Corporate-friendly leaders

The covert agenda of campaigns like Lead India is to spawn corporate friendly leaders who spread the gospel of neo-liberalism. The so-called free market with the invisible hand of demand and supply guiding the destiny of the nation is a figment of corporate fantasy. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winner for economics, points that for public good to be realized there must be a strong government enforcement of anti-trust and consumer laws to foster competition and protection of consumer interest. Without strict enforcement of the government private sector would run amuck mulcting the people. Adam Smith who is endlessly quoted by the corporate class was not such a great devotee of greed and self interest as made out to be. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, he points out virtue and not greed was the most important standard in social life. Adam Smith was quick to point that society should be alive and vigilant to the dangers of ruthless profiteers from holding the society to ransom.

The battle for leadership in India would be fought on the dusty plains of Indian villages. Here majority of the poor Indians live who were betrayed by the state which neglected to deliver them food, shelter and protection from disease. It is this India that would make and break the politicians who failed to deliver them social justice. Here the sound bites of corporate sponsored leaders would have no resonance. The tall claims of the corporate sector that its animal magnetism would be unleashed for the good of the poor would fall on deaf ears and receive the contempt it deserves. It is this Republic of India steeped in ancient inequities that carries both hope and despair in the difficult years to come.

Torture - The Monstrous Deception

C R Sridhar — Sat, 9 Feb 2008 00:18:23 EST

Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself. - James Anthony Froude. (English Historian)

The barbaric ritual of torture is clinically precise. The interrogators lead the suspect to a cold dank room, which is euphemistically called the detention facility. Here the suspect is subjected to the extreme psychological stress of a long wait, allowing him to wallow in his own fear of the uncertain fate that awaits him at the hand of his captors. Then he is asked questions. If the suspect does not crack or if he does not disclose the information required by his interrogators, he experiences sudden and excruciating pain. There is no God for the damned in this room. The walls of the room echo with the shrill and irregular screams of the tortured and the pain never stops unless the suspect breaks down and confesses.

Torture techniques

The mode of torture varies. Even in Western liberal democracies known to espouse humane treatment of prisoners, human rights groups have documented instances of gross abuse of prisoner’s rights under detention. In Northern Ireland a particularly vicious campaign was unleashed against IRA suspects by the British army with the help of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Catholics suspected of being IRA sympathizers were rounded up by the army and subjected to the five techniques. This meant that the suspect would be hooded, made to stand against the wall and assume stressful positions. In addition the suspect would be subject to random loud noises and not allowed to sleep. He was also fed on bread and water. Though the five techniques avoid intense beating of suspects and are believed not to leave physical marks on the body, it was described as a unique and terrifying experience by the victims, which left psychological scars on them for a long time to come.

The US, which is known to aggressively promote human right issues from International forums, has been accused of using torture against Iraqis and Al Qaeda in the notorious Abu Ghraib (Iraq), Bagram and Khandar facilities in Afghanistan. The method of interrogation was simple brutal and terrifying: The suspects were stripped naked in front of their captors and their personal belonging removed heightening the shock of capture, humiliation and fear. ‘ The point is,’ explains the CIA’s KUBARK interrogation manual, ‘that man’s sense of identity depends upon a continuity in his surroundings, habits, appearance…etc. Detention permits the interrogator to cut through these links and throw the interrogatee back upon his own unaided resources.’1 The tactic was to wear down the suspect by keeping him tired and despondent, which was achieved by sensory deprivation (hooding), sleep deprivation and noise (shouting). On many occasions the prisoners were kneed and fisted.

A bizarre and sexually explicit form of humiliation was devised for the inmates of Abu Ghraib prison, where the male prisoners stripped naked were made to crawl on all fours before female guards who held them on leash. Sometimes the inmates were asked to assume degrading sexual positions before the female guards. The aim of this treatment was consistent: to shame and heighten the stress levels of the suspects to break them in interrogations to follow. Other controversial methods included water boarding which Amy Zalman notes as a ‘form of torture in which a bound, gagged prisoner is forced to breathe in water. There are several techniques: a prisoner is strapped to a board, or submerged, or held down and forced to breathe through a water-soaked cloth held over his mouth. All water boarding produces the physical sensation of drowning and a psychological sensation of panic, fear and loss of control.’²

In other countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka - to name a few countries - the use of torture is endemic. Egypt was reported by the US State department to hang prisoners from the ceiling and beat them with whips and metal rods. Jordan was accused of beating the prisoners on the soles of their feet and hanging the prisoners in contorted positions. In Saudi Arabia the suspects had their teeth removed without anesthesia. In Bangladesh a nine-year-old boy had his thumb crushed with pliers by the police who were investigating a case of theft of a mobile handset. Notes Jessica Williams with alarm ‘more than 150 countries allowed torture to be carried out in their countries. That’s two-thirds of the countries of the world.’³

Though the methods of torture vary from physical beating, administration of electric shocks and use of psychotropic and other chemicals to induce pain and suffering in the victims of torture, there appears to be consensus that the aim of torture is ‘(a) the intentional infliction of extreme physical suffering on some non-consenting, defenseless person; (b) the intentional, substantial curtailment of the exercise of the person's autonomy (achieved by means of (a)); (c) in general, undertaken for the purpose of breaking the victim's will.’⁴

No wonder torture is called as the rape of the mind.

An enduring legacy

Viewed from a historical perspective torture is rooted in the chronicles of the past. As George Ryley Scott says ‘Torture, an enduring and seemingly not declining aspect of man's relationship to his fellow man, is an enduring thread through human history.’ ‘Whether it be practiced by primitive people,’ writes Scott ‘ the ancient Greeks or the Catholic Church, whether it be ancient China, Japan, 1930's Germany, or Northern Ireland today, torture is alarmingly systematic and consistent in its methods. Impaling, burning, rack or wheel, mutilation, drawing and quartering, burning or hanging alive in chains.’⁵ This is historically true. For instance, the techniques involving sleep deprivation, prolonged standing, and isolation are not freshly invented barbarisms of the Americans or Russians in recent times as they date back to the barbarism practiced by the church in the thirteenth century.

The earliest handbook on torture titled Directorium Inquisitorum recorded by the Grand Inquisitor Nicolas of Eymeric in the fourteenth-century and another treatise Malleus Malleficarum (The Hammer of the Witches, 1486) written by Sprenger and Kramer became standard textbooks of torture used on witches and heretics in order to obtain confessions from them for the next two hundred years. In these texts all the stress techniques later employed by the Americans after nearly seven hundred years on Al Qaeda suspects featured. A sixteenth-century lawyer Hippolytus de Marsiliis is credited with the invention of sleep deprivation as interrogation technique. He suggested that as soon the prisoner fell asleep out of exhaustion he should be awakened with violent pricks of the needle.⁶ Tormentum Insomniae became standard technique used in interrogating the Al Qaeda prisoners by American personnel in the war against terror.

The international law against the use of torture is contained in Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN on 10th December 1948. Article 5 of the declaration states ‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.’ Since then two important international treaties have been adopted to prohibit the use of torture. These are the United Nations Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions III & IV.

Ticking bomb

Post 9/11, in the war on terror the United States administration under George Bush resorted to semantic quibbling on the issue of torture. The US government took the position that water boarding was not torture and other stress techniques used by US military personnel were defended as Torture lite and not amounting to torture. Some commentators, notably, Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law Professor, ‘have argued that legalised torture could be justified, if the torture in question was restricted to extreme emergency situations and subjected to appropriate accountability mechanisms. Specifically, he has argued for torture warrants of the kind introduced for a time in Israel.’8 As Dershowitz says, "I would talk about non-lethal torture, say, a sterilized needle underneath the nail, which would violate the Geneva accords, but you know that countries all over the world violate the Geneva Accords. They do it secretly…if we ever came close to doing it, I think we would want to do it with accountability and openly and not adopt the way of the hypocrite."

Taking a cue from Dershowitz's justification of the use of torture in one off emergency situations, security experts have put forth a ticking bomb theory seeking to drive home the point that the use of torture is morally justified as it prevents the greater evil of the terrorists from taking innocent lives. Should we not use force to extract valuable information quickly from the terrorist as to where the bomb is located? Should precious time be lost in legally sectioned interrogation methods?

The ticking bomb theory seems reasonable on the face of it but a deeper examination shows that it is mere sophistry.

Firstly, it is by no means certain that information extracted by torture is reliable. In 1764, the Italian philosopher Ceasare Beccaria warned that under extreme torture the detainee would be compelled to tell lies in order to stop the pain and confess to crimes that the captors wanted to hear. Experienced and trained interrogators have challenged the efficacy of brutal tortures to obtain intelligence information. Maj. Gen. Geoffery D Miller, the American commander in charge of detentions and interrogations, stated "a rapport-based interrogation that recognizes respect and dignity, and having very well-trained interrogators, is the basis by which you develop intelligence rapidly and increase the validity of that intelligence.’ Others point out that despite administration claims that water boarding has "disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks", no one has come up with a single documented example of lives saved thanks to torture.’ The failure of justice in the case of Birmingham six calls into question whether confessions obtained under duress are reliable. In this case the suspects were beaten by the police and made to confess for crimes they did not commit. After years of imprisonment the suspects were cleared of any wrong doing when fresh evidence appeared that they were innocent.

Secondly, it is by no means certain that a committed terrorist would confess within a short period of time for the police to diffuse the ticking bomb. A case in point is that of a bomb maker Abdul Hakim Murad who was arrested by the police in Manila and subjected to brutal treatment: his ribs were broken, the police burned him with cigarettes and forced water down his throat. Murad broke after sixty-seven days. It raises doubts about the ticking bomb theory that assumes torture is a sure fire method to extract information in the shortest possible time.

Thirdly, most trained intelligence operatives rarely use violent methods of interrogations to elicit information from the suspect. One of the most successful interrogators in Nazi Germany was Hanns Joachim Scharff Master Interrogator of the Luftwaffe. As Maj. Anthony F. Milavic, USMC (Ret) says ‘This German interrogator purportedly gleaned information from every one of the American and British fighter pilots he interrogated without ever resorting to violence. This is not surprising when you consider… that direct questioning 'works 90 to 95 percent of the time.'

Lastly, the legalization of torture under emergency situations opens the Pandora’s box and raises ethical concerns whether torture would then become institutionalised and self-perpetuating over time and that what was once used for emergency purposes finds more reason to justify its wider use. This has real implication for citizens whose freedom could be endangered by the repressive apparatus of the state.

Monstrous deception

At the heart of the monstrous deception is the belief that the end justifies the means. That a little torture is good as it saves lives and promotes the greater good of the society. But time and again history has shown that violence and repression is often counter productive. The Romans put the early Christian martyrs to the sword and inflicted unspeakable atrocities on the followers of Christianity. The Romans thought that the preservation of the Roman Empire constituted the greater good. Thousands of persecuted Christians chose death and died true to their beliefs. Finally, Rome retreated and Christianity triumphed.

By a sad fate of history, Christianity repeated the same mistakes as Rome and cruelly persecuted the heretics and tortured the witches in a despicable manner. The justification of the Church was that a little burning was good as it saved the soul from eternal damnation. Thousands were senselessly slaughtered. The same madness continues in the present war on terror engaged by the most powerful Christian nation in the world against Islam. The moral justification for torture is again based on the monstrous deception that the best interests of liberal democracies are served by causing a little pain. History, it is said, has a strange way of preserving the ignoble ingenuity of human kind in perpetually deluding itself. Nowhere is this more evident than in the enduring and shameful history of humankind breaking its own on the wheel of pain.

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1 Brainwash, Dominic Streatfield page 371.
2 Amy Zalman, Terrorism Issues.
3 50 facts that should change the world, Jessica Williams
4 Torture, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy-7th Feb 2006.
5 The History of Torture throughout the Ages, George Ryley Scott.
6 Brainwash, Dominic Streatfield page-373-374.