Desicritics Category: Politics: Empire

Book review: The Stone Woman by Tariq Ali

Vinod Joseph — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 02:01:59 EDT

The Stone Woman is the third book in Tariq Ali’s Islam Quintet. Set at the turn of the twentieth century as the six hundred year old Ottoman Empire slowly flickers out, the Stone Woman revolves around the family of Iskander Pasha, who live in a remote palace ‘not too distant from Istanbul’. Iskander Pasha is a retired diplomat who had once graced the French court and the salons of Paris and is the descendent of Yusuf Pasha, a courtier at the Ottoman court.

The novel derives its name from an ancient rock in the palace garden, roughly shaped like a veiled woman, probably once worshipped by pagans as a goddess. Ali has each of his main characters make their way to the Stone Woman and pour out their feelings and emotions. In that sense, the Stone Woman is a collection of various personal tales of the various members of the cast. Unlike the first two books in the Islam Quintet, the Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree and the Book of Saladin (, there is no single strand of storyline that runs from beginning to the end.

The Stone Woman gives its readers a feel of Ottoman society as it existed then. Iskander Pasha’s family cannot be classified as commoners, and just as in the case of the Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree , aristocrats and their servants form the main cast. Ali tells us of a dying empire where the Sultan and the mullahs or the ‘beards’ are in control and where innovation is frowned upon. Not just the printing press, but even clocks have been banned. The muezzin’s call to prayer is the only means of knowing the time. The reader is forced to wonder, can this be the same Ottoman Empire which in 1453 captured Constantinople (or Istanbul) from the Byzantines using the most advanced cannon of those times? The Ottomans were definitely the masters of innovation then. Tolerant Sunnis, they managed to run an inclusive empire where Arabs, Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Bedouins, Greeks and Slavs were all invited to the party.

In the course of telling his tale, or rather collection of tales, Tariq Ali makes references to various historical events. The increasing animosity between the Kurds and the Armenians (which would later lead to the massacre of 2 million Armenians during the First World War) is brought out very well. To start with, it’s a simple case of the Armenians having some of the best land and the Kurds coveting the land. The inception of the Young Turks movement is also built into the storyline. A young officer named Kemal Pasha makes a few cameo appearances. The Young Turks have contempt for the decadent Ottomans. They want to create a pure Turkish state where there will be no place for Armenians or Greeks. Some of the minor stories are not really relevant to this story, but they are interesting as well, such as the rivalry and differences between the Ommayads and the Abbasids and the reasons for the defeat of the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683.

The main or rather only the problem I have with this story is the same problem I had with the Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree and the Book of Saladin . In this story, Ali’s cast lead a life that would be called ‘liberal’ by even modern-day standards. Iskander Pasha’s brother Mehmed and his gay partner, a German Baron, have an open relationship. Iskander’s third wife is Sara, a Jewish woman. Sara was in love with Suleman, another Jew, but could not marry Suleman. After she was betrothed to Iskander, she made sure she became pregnant with Suleman’s child before marrying Iskander. Iskander eventually gets to know of this, but does not really mind, because he is a man for whom ‘blood relations don’t matter in the least’. Iskander loves Sara’s daughter Nilofer as much as any of his biological children. For the same reason, when Iskander gets to know that woman he had an affair with in France (during his diplomat days) had his child, he does not particularly want to meet that child.

Nilofer is allowed to marry Dmitri, a Greek school teacher. Nilofer’s love for Dmitri cools after a few years and she abandons him for her father’s palace. When Nilofer is at the Palace, she has an affair with Selim, the family barber’s son. At that time, Dmitri who is alone in Konya, is killed by Turkish fanatics. Very soon, Nilofer marries Selim (who made an officer in the army by her brother, a senior army officer) and they seem to be all set to live happily ever after. One of Nilofer’s brothers marries a Coptic Christian in Cairo and another brother marries a Shia Muslim. Also, in the course of the story, when Iskander Pasha loses his voice (please read this book to find out how and why) and later regains it, he thanks August Comtẻ and not Allah.

I am not too sure if families as liberal as the one described in this story ever lived in the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the twentieth century. May be they did. If they did, Ali would have done well to have told his readers the source of his information.

Bernie, You Touched Me

temporal — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 08:00:13 EDT

I did not know you Bernie. Can I call you Bernie?

Were you married? Did you celebrate your 20th or 25th anniversary? Did you have children? Were you a good father? Were you good friend?

If I do some research I can find out more about you. But that would be later. Here in this park I can only guess.

You must have had your share of cloud nine days just as you would have had pit days.

****

The full moon peaked through the clouds and the waves in Lake Ontario near Lock 1 of the Welland canal reflected the peek-a-boo moon. the light house of the St. Catharines Marina warned the sailors. Sitting under a weeping willow, just east of Jones Beach, the distant lights of Whitby and Oshawa visible over the horizon, a sense of calm prevailed.

It was an unreal calm that for a few moments pushed the headlines mentioning Georgia, Russia, Kashmir, Occupied Palestine, Musharraf far away.

Few moments? Try 3:30 am! Next morning….er….afternoon, after brunch we headed out to a local bird sanctuary and zoo. In the pond a turtle crept up on a rock and was philosophically musing about the world around. A flock of Canada Geese rested in the shade. Past the pond a sign read Nature Trail. I thought, nature does not trail, we do.

There were weeping willows, oaks, maples, birches on this trail. At the end of this short trail we entered a well manicured small park: a memorial to the 47 Canadians who were killed in the twin tower collapse.

Trees found in Eastern Canada were planted and a plaque in front of each tree mentioned the names – Cynthia Connolly, Albert Alfie William Elmarry, Colin Macarthur…

I stopped at Bernard Mascrenhas, born Karachi, 1950.

****

I don’t know you Bernie. Your life was extinguished at a ripe age by the dastardly act of a former CIA golden boy Osama bin Laden. He did not know or care that you were on the 97th floor of the North Tower.

After the fall of former USSR, the US desperately wanted an opponent and 9/11 created that opportunity. At the cost of innocent civilian lives like yours and the others whose misfortune it was to be in the twin towers that day, they nearly succeeded in creating an enemy group that could fill the vacuum of the erstwhile bi-polar world. It found willing accomplices in Islamophobes organizations and states.

Whether Osama still sings to Langley, Va. tunes is open to conjectures.

At lock 1, of the Welland Canal I saw BBC Elbe pass through. I could have touched it. It appeared huge, almost 12 stories high. Later I saw it in Lake Ontario, still big, then growing smaller before fading from view. You will always be close to those who love you, even though you have faded from the memory of others.

I am against the loss of a single civilian life at the hands of a deluded individual, an organization or a state. Not knowing you personally I mourn you. May you be peaceful wherever you are. And may the tree planted in your honour thrive.

The Russia-Georgia Conflict - The Bear's Power

Ashish — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:56:13 EDT

The Soviet Union was once a mighty empire, controlling large chunks of land in Europe and Asia, and giving the West a mighty enemy. Then it all fell apart; the individual states (many of them incorporated by force) wanted their freedom, and Boris Yeltsin wanted his own Russia to rule, and so the Soviet empire ended. Then began the decline. Then rose a strongman out of all this, one who had the blood of the all-powerful intelligence agency KGB running through him. On his own he could not do anything; however, he was lucky. Russia had large tracts of oil and gas, and had turned into a large exporter of these, bringing in revenue, and helping regrow the power.

However, in the midst of all this, the world did not stay still. Many of the former Soviet republics did not stay still, moving towards the West (and seemingly away from the clutches of their former all-powerful dictatorial landlord), striking closer relationships with them. At the same time, like any major power (and one that remembers all too well how powerful it is), Russia grew increasingly resentful of this emergence of the West in an area that it treats as its backyard (a close equivalent would be if Mexico suddenly became more hostile to the US and very very friendly towards Russia or China).

This may well seem normal for a powerful country to treat its immediate neighbors as its areas of influence, but not so for the country so dominated. Ask Finland, that has fought wars with Russia in the past over this dominance, and ask Afghanistan that does not like being called as an area of Pakistani influence, as if it has no identity of its own.

So, when Ukraine tried to show itself as more hostile towards Russia, there was a sudden crippling blockade of the oil and gas it gets from Russia; and now Georgia. Ever since President Mikheil Saakashvili came to office and had a campaign of getting back the pro-Russian provinces of South Ossetia and a second separatist area, Abkhazia, Russia has been seething. It already knows that it is much more powerful. The US wants its support in the initiatives against Iran and North Korea, and cannot afford to antagonize Russia. And the Georgian leader gave Vladimir Putin just that chance. He tried to take one of the provinces, South Ossetia back, and met such overwhelming Russian force (without any check by any other party) that Western leaders were worried that Putin may be trying to gain more geographic control inside Georgia.

Right now, things are moving towards a cease-fire, but Russia must have intended this as a show of force to Georgia and others, that they are truly helpless when faced with this great bear.

Book Review : The Lady in Blue by Javier Sierra

Shantanu Dutta — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 00:33:15 EDT

The Lady in Blue is a book that is part history, part fantasy and part mysticism set in the framework of fiction. The fiction is not all that great but this is another book that sells a chunk of history that one could easily pass over. The context is the seventeenth century and the locale shifts from Rome and the Vatican, the Rio Grande region of New Mexico and Los Angeles. The backdrop is the unusual conversion rates among certain Indian tribes in the area.

The conversions have been apparently aided by apparitions of a lady in blue - who has been appearing to the Indians and urging them to welcome the Roman Catholic missionaries when they come to their lands and has thereby been helping the work of evangelization by spreading the seed. This by itself is not new - Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, an indigenous Mexican had reported an apparition of the Virgin Mary as Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1531 and so there was a precedent.

But the lady in blue unlike the earlier apparitions at Guadalupe had appeared to masses of people and several people had claimed to see them leading to an investigation by the Church authorities. The apparitions were largely attributed to a cloistered nun named Sister Maria Jesus de Agreda who it would seem appeared to Indians in the Southwest, but she never left her home in Spain. So how did she do it ? Enter the realm of miracles, mysticism and miracles. The nun in question had apparently the gift of bilocation – the ability to “transport” her body to great distances while still remaining within the gift of the nunnery. Apparently this was aided by a particular harmony of sound produced during a religious chant, although she had mystic abilities since birth. It would appear that “María paid more than 500 spiritual visits, sometimes two or three a day, to the Indians, she said. She instructed them in the fundamentals of the Faith, speaking to them in their own language. Her spirit carried rosaries from her cell to give to her charges. She healed the sick. She won converts. She urged them to contact Franciscan friars at the missions of the Río Grande pueblos and to solicit the construction of new missions for other tribes. If necessary, she would give her life, she said, to save a single Indian soul.

Church intrigue of the Roman Catholic variety abounds in the book, with the author recounting the rivalry between the many Catholic priestly orders to curry favor with King Philip IV of Spain so that they could obtain sole concessions in the newly discovered territories – both to harvest souls as well as to exploit natural resources and mines in the territories.

The book also shifts to the twentieth century as a bunch of Vatican scientists aided by the CIA attempt to recreate conditions in which Maria Jesus de Agreda “bilocated”, so that the techniques could be used for military purposes – similar apparitions could then be “Parachuted” into enemy lines for spying not conventionally possible. The scientists also look at techniques like “chronovision”, a method to apparently make it possible to visit the past and photograph events of past days and record sounds also from the past.

The historical bits of the novel are good – a nun by the name of Maria Jesus de Agreda did exist and it was said of her that she was the “lady in blue” who appeared to Indian tribes for several years and was in fact investigated by the church for complicity in witchcraft. But the other pieces set in modern times – with priests, scientists and the CIA trying to reproduce ancient miracles in modern times – well that bit comes through as nothing more than a lot of mumbo jumbo. The book is fit only to read as an illumination of a spot of history and no more.

India Shining - The Death of Angrezi Hatao

Shantanu Dutta — Wed, 2 Jul 2008 14:48:49 EDT

Angrezi Hatao! or "Down With English!" was once a very potent slogan in the fifties and the sixties. It was part of a political campaign which made the destiny of many politicians of the time on either side of the language divide. Prominent names who come to mind as leaders in the Hatao movement are Ram Manohar Lohia and former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, then with the Bharatiya Jan Sangh. The country had gained independence from the British and the English language was considered the most visible symbol of that rule and one that needed to be abolished as quickly as possible. Indeed, the constitution itself stipulated that English would be in use as a transitional measure for fifteen years and from Republic Day, 1965, Hindi was to be the sole official language.

Indeed with towering figures like Gandhiji and Pandit Nehru wanting Hindi too, it would not have been difficult to impose Hindi and displace English. That it did not happen and indeed the Official Languages Act of 1963 was enacted allowing English to continue was primarily because of one man and one movement, the Tamil Nadu based DMK and the Dravidian movement which loathed Hindi and the North Indian domination that they associated the language with.

With a violent anti-Hindi agitation taking a separatist turn, and the DMK coming to power in 1967, on a largely anti Hindi platform, English was finally given some place under the sun as an associate official language with the clear understanding that one day an atmosphere would be created that would allow Hindi to be the sole official language. But the Dravidian parties have held continuous sway since that election victory in 1967 and kept up their unrelenting opposition to Hindi and gradually the fire to impose Hindi died out.

Hindi, however, enjoyed state patronage in the cow belt, as did the various regional languages in their respective states, thus gradually chipping away at English by restricting its use in official correspondence, reducing its importance in school syllabi and glorification of the mother tongue.

The turning point for English probably came with Rajiv Gandhi, a man very visibly more comfortable with English than with Hindi. Although he just lived to serve one term, the changes he set in motion outlived him. The next regime to last a full term after his – that of Narasimha Rao - brought in reforms that English more or less indispensable. The last nail on the Angrezi Hatao campaign was nailed by Atal Behari Vajpayee, one of the earliest war horses of the anti English movement when he ran an election campaign based largely on an English slogan “India Shining” and introduced reforms and policies that have for the moment at least, made English virtually irreplaceable.

All these years however, the Hindi states continued to promote Hindi, even as savvy states like Gujarat and slow moving behemoths like the Left Front in Bengal gradually abandoned the emphasis on the mother tongue they had hitherto promoted. Their interest was in playing catch up with the Southern States which promoted English instead of Hindi and where knowledge economy businesses began to flow naturally. Present chief minister Mayawati’s decision to introduce English in schools from Class I itself is in that sense the end of an era with states like Uttar Pradesh, which earlier eschewed English, having done a 180-degree switch, realizing that it is increasingly the only way to transact with a wider world.

Today, Mulayam Singh Yadav is the only known figure still to favor Angrezi Hatao and is known to hold the conviction that English has been the major stumbling block in the development of regional languages in the country. He has gone to the extent of terming it as "the language of destruction, which has had a telling impact on the economy of the country". But considering his principal lieutenants like Amar Singh are silent on the subject and are themselves quite comfortable in English, it is not known how much of Mulayam’s polemics is for the gallery.

Come what may, with the silent decline and death of the anti-English movement, which was once an extremely emotive issue has definitely come to an end. And probably very few are even noticing its passing.

Stooges, Machismo-Driven Nationalism and Self-Reliance

Shantanu Dutta — Tue, 1 Jul 2008 15:03:27 EDT

One of the views that has been bandied about over the last months as we swing this way and that about the nuclear deal is that signing it will mean that the government would have sold itself as an American stooge and vassal. That is what the leftists are saying. Since then I have been ruminating on the words stooge and vassal – I mean is it such a bad thing after all, apart from the derogatory sounds of the words themselves. Now after listening to a Skype webcast, I am convinced that the nuances are far more complex and that provocative words hide much more than they reveal.

There are two kinds of stooges if we insist on using the word. The Skype webcast that I listened to was dominated by a man from Iraq - a very angry man indeed who is upset that his country is run by brown Americans masking as Iraqis. As a nation of immigrants, the United States has the advantage of producing individuals of every ethnicities and in an occupation situation as prevails in Iraq and Afghanistan, they come handy. They are their master’s voice and because they speak the language and some what understand the culture are useful viceroys. These are the real stooges that every one should be talking about.

Then there are those who believe that their national interests are best served by aligning to a particular power and therefore do so. After all the primary purpose of the government of any nation is to ensure peace and prosperity for their people and achieve it through globally acceptable legitimate means. In the Soviet era, the original Mrs. Gandhi, felt that India’s national interests at that time was best served by aligning with the Soviet block. Many sneered at her and called her a client state or pretty close to being one. But of course she didn’t give a damn and did what she considered right.

Come to think of it, India has its small share of stooges in the neighborhood though having not much to offer, it is losing them pretty rapidly. One of our concerns in Nepal is that the incoming government is likely to be more ambivalent in its relationship with India unlike the monarchy which was beholden to India. Arguably, it was a stooge Sikkim Assembly that passed the resolution to accede to India. Bhutan has no independent foreign policy independent of India and being a land locked country finds it to be in its national interest to remain so.

So what is the problem with being a stooge or a client state of the United States? Looking around, I see that they have done pretty well for some themselves, unless they are plagued by chronic bad governance like the Philippines. But that is an exception. For the prototype, look at Singapore. Look at Thailand. Look at South Korea—and just to compare, look too at North Korea. To look at an even bigger contrast, look at Japan, vanquished and brought to its knees by American nuclear bombs but today one of its strongest allies in Asia.

We need to get rid of a culture of machismo-driven nationalism that talks of self reliance, global domination and ideological neutrality; best exemplified by the so called non aligned movement in which every one right down to the last member was fully aligned. The government’s jobs is to ensure peace, prosperity and security for its people; that is why people it there. At one point of history ensuring peace for India meant being a Soviet stooge; today it might mean being an American stooge. And of course let us get words like stooge which sound so uncouth out of our vocabulary. Then we our self esteem and self respect would not be so badly wounded.

Book Review : Speaking of Empire and Resistance by Tariq Ali

Shantanu Dutta — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 07:07:11 EDT

Tariq Ali is one of the most articulate leftist and secularist thinkers to have come out of Pakistan and has been living in exile in London since the 1960s when he began to speak out against the country’s first military dictators. Nearly fifty years later, he has lost none of his fire and has consistently spoken out against imperialism, colonialism, religious fundamentalism. In his book Speaking of Empire and Resistance conducted as a series of interviews with dissident thinker, David Barsamanian, the focus is on Anglo – American engagement in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Arab world.

In this extremely readable and extremely articulate book, Tariq Ali, reaches way back into history to recreate the history of imperialist involvement in the world- both the overt, in your face British imperialism, and the comparatively overt American imperialism. For instance Tariq talks about the nature of British imperialism – viceroys and governors ET all all imported from the mother country – and the American version where they simply bought off purchasable allies willing to do their bidding. King Hussein of Jordan, Suharto, the Pakistani generals, the Shah of Iran, the several Gulf Sheikhs Emirs is cited as examples.

There are also examples from India too – Tariq for instance mentions that except for World War II, when the country served as a transit point for Allied troops headed East, at no point did the British ever have more than 36,000 troops of their own in the huge territory of undivided India; yet they were able to retain control, by buying off the allegiance of the rulers of the princely states as well as the landed gentry and aristocracy. The Americans refined the process and bought off the leadership of countries en masse.

Some observations in the book are quite poignant. Citing numerous instances, Tariq Ali establishes how during the cold war era, in the name of suppressing communism, the secular elements of the polity of many nations were either weakened or completely eliminated. Indonesia which once had the world’s largest communist party outside the socialist countries is one example where Suharto’s brutal repression wiped the nation of a secular, non sectarian voiced. Afghanistan is another example cited where a secular government was first destabilized prompting Soviet intervention and then once the Red Army moved in, reactionary Islamic fundamentalists were intentionally marshaled, trained and then coaxed to fight the godless infidels. The vacuum left by the destruction of these secular forces has now been filled by the rabidly religious, for which the US and its allies alone are to blame.

The book has been written in the context of 9/11 and the subsequent interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan and has that anti war focus, but surprisingly enough does not appear to be biased. Tariq Ali traces out the many failings in the early communist states – particularly the Soviet Union and points out that their own failings were also largely responsible for socialism losing popular support and subsequently collapsing.

Tariq Ali’s consistently anti American stand may not be popular with those who support the American foreign policy and the actions of the current Bush Administration in particular; but so potent and well researched are his arguments going far back into history and tracing many of today’s burning issues to their very roots, that it would take back breaking research to counter his extremely logically argued point of view. And ultimately of one thing we can be sure; no matter what view point we hold- this book will make the reader sit up and take note that there is another way to go- even if it is a path hardly ever trodden.

The New Jahanpanahs

Shantanu Dutta — Fri, 16 May 2008 12:03:18 EDT

When India got independence from the British in 1947, the hard line communists made a derisive comment yeh azadi jhoothi hai and were derided for it. The communist thought that power had merely changed hands from one set of imperialists to another- that the white rulers had been exchanged for rulers of another color – brown.

Looking at the Supreme Court’s disdainful dismissal of a PIL brought by the Peoples’ Union for Civil Liberties that sought to bring judges of the apex court and high courts under the purview of Right to Information Act, it looks in hind sight that the communists were right after all. The Supreme Court armed to the teeth with the Contempt of Court, at least under the current Chief Justice at least seems to keep a scornful and arrogance distance from commoners as an elite group.

The reluctance of the Chief Justice to subject the court and its justices to scrutiny under the Right to Information Act, especially in the matter of declaration of assets is otherwise beyond comprehension. Even more incomprehensive is the Chief Justice’s smug assertion that Judges declare their assets to him. If that were enough than every departmental head could be authorized to handle their subordinate’s affairs and there would be no need to maintain vigilance departments any where !

The modern Indian judicial system has its origins in the Calcutta High Court.

The High Court at Calcutta, formerly known as the High Court of Judicature at Fort William, was brought into existence by the Letters Patent dated 14th May, 1862, issued under the High Court's Act, 1861, which provided that the jurisdiction and powers of the High Court were to be defined by Letters Patent. The High Court of Judicature at Fort William was formally opened on 1st July, 1862, with Sir Barnes Peacock as its first Chief Justice.Appointed on 2nd February, 1863”

Like most institutions the British left behind , be it the civil service or the military or the judiciary or even the Government of India Act 1935 which to a large extent forms the backbone of the constitution, Jawaharlal Nehru who reportedly once described himself as the last Englishman to rule India; he left them unchanged. And because the changes in these institutions were not intentionally made, they remained frozen in time or actually degenerated into grotesque caricatures like when you see those turbaned and liveried waiters serving in the Rashtrapati Bhavan and Raj Bhavan functions, with the viceroy’s crest replaced by the Ashoka Chakra. To see Brown Sahebs and Babus soaking it all in after being sworn to uphold the Constitution of India which still describes India as a Socialist Republic among other things, positively reeks.

The interesting thing is that in that very fountain had of imperialism, the United Kingdom, things are changing as public pressure builds up. By agreeing to pay income taxes, giving up the royal yacht, changing some royal rules, and limiting the number of royals receiving government money, the Queen has sought to placate growing public criticism of the monarchy. Closer home, in Bhutan voluntarily and in Nepal involuntarily , monarchies and feudal cultures are being dismantled. But in India, “their lordships” that sit in judgment over affairs pertaining to a billion plus people and determine their fate in some small measure at least will bear no scrutiny on their actions and conduct through the common man’s scrutiny conducted through lawful means permitted through the law of the land. They are the new jahanpanahs and will not tolerate any lese majeste!

Why Neither India nor Pakistan Should Rely on America: Part I - Who Really Runs America?

Ruvy — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:02:57 EDT

This series of articles is written as an object lesson for you as to why you cannot trust the United States government as any kind of partner. This is as true for Pakistanis as it is for Indians, Sri Lankans, Nepalis, Bangladeshis or any other residents of the Indian sub-continent.

The series has three parts.

This article examines how the United States got to the apex it did. The second uses Israel as an example of American duplicity regarding its supposed "friends" or "allies". The third views what might have happened and how the world would be different if indeed the United States supported the State of Israel as one-sidedly as so many charge.

These articles is not written in an attempt to "inform" you of events in Israel, the Levantine or the Arab world. Unless you have relatives or business interests here, you probably have no reason to care.

The point of this series is to allow you to apply the sad lesson we provide of how a great power double-crosses a small one. There are many such examples of this, but I can speak as a resident of the victim. Indeed, not only Jews in Israel have been victims of this double-cross, but Arabs as well.

Before continuing further, I want to make clear several things. First; I live in Israel, in Samaria to be precise. While I reside in Israel. I am not a Zionist. The word "Zionism" was originally invented by English Christian theologians in the 17th Century; as a Jewish idea, it was originally expounded upon by rabbis from Serbia and Russia in the early 19th Century (though not called by this name), and was made palpable and real by secular Jews who wanted little to do with ritual, religion, or even with G-d. The creation of Zionism, the State of Israel, has been a success until recent years. The essential goal of Zionism, bringing the majority of Jews in the world back to the homeland, has nearly been completed. It is evident to anyone who lives here that the closer we come to that basic goal, the weaker the movement to achieve it becomes, and the weaker the apotheosis of Zionist ideology, the State, becomes as well.

Second; even though I live in Israel, I was born and raised in the United States and lived there for several decades before coming home to Israel. My field of study was political science and public administration, and I added to these subjects comparative government and linguistics. In addition, I was active in politics in the United States in both major political parties. This gave me a good grasp of the American political system and how it evolved.

Finally; I'm not slamming the people who inhabit the United States, the average folks known as Joe Sixpack. Americans, by and large, are a decent, generous and kind people, even if they are too Amero-centered for their own good. Perhaps they are too naïve at times. But the decency of the average American should never ever be in question.

The government of the United States, now in the hands of an oil and banking establishment for some eight decades, is a very different story. In this article, when talking about "America", I'm not talking about her decent inhabitants; I'm talking about her evil régime.

One last point. Credit for much of what you see in this article goes to Joel Bainerman, an Israeli investigative journalist, economist and publisher. My errors in relaying the data he has taught me and others is my responsibility alone.

And now to business.

The first three words of the American Federal Constitution of 1787 are "We the People" and if you ask most Americans, "who runs America?" that is the most likely answer you will get. The people.

If it were only true.

It isn't. It probably never was.

First of all, the United States were not designed to be a democracy at all, but a federation of states with a republican form of government. While the word "republic" comes from the Latin rex publica (one sees the root in the Russian word respublik) meaning "the people rule", and in spite of the fact that modern Greece is called Ελληνική Δημοκρατία ('Ellinikí Dhimokratía) which is translated as "the Hellenic Republic", the two words "democracy" and "republic" do not have the precise same meaning in English.

A republic connotes a form of government which is not monarchical in nature. Thus, the Republic of Florence, where Niccolo Machiavelli was a mid-level bureaucrat, was not a state where the average Florentine had a real voice in government. Only a small class of Florentines had any voice at all, and they ruled the country.

But the Principality of Florence, which succeeded the Republic upon its fall, was a monarchy, with the son supposedly succeeding the father. Machiavelli's book, De Principatus, "The Prince", was in essence, his curriculum vitae submitted to the man who had exiled him to his estate after overthrowing the republic. While the book has long outlasted the la famiglia Medici that Machiavelli was trying to impress, Machiavelli did not get his job back.

When first established in 1776, the various states restricted voting to white males only, usually only Christians who owned property. So voting was restricted somewhat for several decades. For all of this, the states that comprised the United States did move closer towards popular rule, and the American republic did edge towards democracy in the 1800's.

But a business oligarchy took the country over after its civil war in 1865, and controlled its industrialization. As the 19th Century progressed to a close, the rich men who built huge industries out of the steel plants of the Midwest, the railways, the ships, the meat packing plants and the like realized that competition was not "rational", so they bought each other out, building huge monopolies known in America as "trusts" and "rationalizing" the industries they controlled. This is the kind of stuff most American kids skip over in school, because it is so damnably boring, but it is precisely these events in America that provided the model for the concentration of wealth in the succeeding decades.

What American teachers tend to focus on is not the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, but the efforts of the American government to combat that concentration of wealth, known as "trust busting". To make a long story short, American businessmen felt stymied in building monopolies in the States and looked out at the wide world instead, and started investing money in it in the early 1900's.

They invested all over the world; Germany, Turkey, Russia, France, as well as China, Cuba and Latin America. And when a world war broke out in 1914, the profits of many firms went right down the tubes.

This had consequences. One consequence was that rich American businessmen determined that they would not be burned again in another world war. They examined the Treaty of Versailles that crippled post-war Germany, the Russian Revolution, and the way people were buying Henry Ford's affordable "Model T" and made their moves.

Their first presumption was that there would be a rematch between Germany and Britain or the United States. They set up a triumvirate of banks - one was the Thyssen Bank in Germany, the second was the Union Bank in New York, and the third was a bank in the Netherlands. The idea was that the Netherlands would probably be neutral in this coming war, and that Germany and America would be on opposite sides. That is what had happened in the first war, and so they expected the pattern would hold.

If the Germans won this second world war, then the rich businessmen would be compensated for their losses in America through the Thyssen bank "looting" the assets of the Union Bank (and presumably others). If the Americans won the second world war, the rich businessmen would be compensated through the Union Bank "looting" the assets of the Thyssen Bank. In either case, the Dutch bank was supposed to e the intermediary.

It didn't exactly work that way, but these rich businessmen had foresight.

They also had the brains to make sure that they would have some level of control over who ran the governments. In America, they set up a "Council on Foreign Relations" to infiltrate the State, War, Navy and Commerce departments of the American government with their employees. The idea was to provide a pool of "respectable" professors and administrative types who would watch over their interests. They did the same thing in the United Kingdom. These councils still exist today, and in either the United Kingdom or the United States, if you do not have ties to the respective councils, you get nowhere fast. Note how Ron Paul was locked out of the national debate before McCain sewed up the nomination.

Investing in overseas political control was a bit trickier.

One act of these businessmen was to invest in the Soviet Union in an attempt to bring it to stability. This might have been their first act, persuading Lenin to introduce the New Economic Plan (NEP) in the early twenties; but Lenin had the temerity to die, and his successor, Joe Stalin, was a xenophobe.

The next move was to try and find someone who could be controlled in the Weimar Republic that had succeeded the German Empire. These businessmen found an ambitious young man originally from Austria, and they invested in him, building him a fancy house. This turned out to be a better investment - Adolf Hitler eventually became Reichskanzler in 1933, and continued his business ties with his American investors, attempting to use them to get some foothold in the American economy. And as these businessmen had foreseen, there was another world war, and they made sure that they were compensated for their German investments through the Dulles brothers, one of whom was an attorney on the Allied War Compensation Board set up after the war.

The final big move was to invest in a source of fuel for the "Model T" and its successors, and to lay the groundwork for a continuing fortune. This came by investing some money in the wastes of Arabia, arming the ibn Saud clan to the teeth, and supporting them as they stole Makka and Medina from the Hashemi family, its traditional guardians for centuries. The Hashemi family had to be satisfied with emirates in Mesopotamia and "Transjordan"- the eastern two thirds of the territory the British had allotted for a Jewish national home. The money wasn't a gift to the ibn Sauds. It was a deal. American and British oil companies got to control the oil under the ground. The ibn Sauds - now "Saudis" - got the sand. At least that's how it looked in the 1920's.

Thus is was that bit by bit, the oil and banking companies came to dominate America. One of the key parts of winning their dominion over America came from getting rid of trolley cars and replacing them with buses; getting rid of trains, and replacing them with trucks. These two moves guaranteed the dominion of oil over all other fuels. Gradually, the American State Department became the pliable tool of American corporations. Much of the Japanese drive for empire was a drive to control oil, and the same was true for the Germans. Americans never thought of using alcohol to fuel tanks, as did the Germans. They never had to.

With the Germans and Japanese broken and defeated by August 1945, the American oil and banking establishment bestrode the world like a colossus. And Americans, living the best lives that could be imagined at the time, never even dreamt that their country and that their democracy had been stolen from them.

Poetry: smiling crocodile

temporal — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 08:45:49 EDT

in the parched marshes
crocodiles have stopped
shedding tears
at the never ending
deir yassins as sleeping
dieties from
the past are invoked
they have to feed too
in darfur there are
no crocodiles left
we eagerly await
a saharan ronnie
kasrils to discover
fahimi zidan
conscience is the biggest
crocodile of all
bigger than most gods
                    asleep
as we tuck our kids
with a kiss on the
                    forehead
after the bed time
stories we look
under our beds
for hidden reptiles
and satisfied go
                    to sleep
before the jaw closes
once i want to ask
the crocodile if
i can have a word
                    with his god