Beyond the Pale

Beyond the Pale

John Maxwell

Katherine Dunham, who died last week at 97, was one of the most important figures of twentieth century culture. The daughter of a black father and a French Canadian mother, she immersed herself in scholarly explorations of African/Caribbean cultures, particularly among the Maroons of Jamaica and the people of Haiti. She even became a voudun ‘priestess’ while completing her masters degree in anthropology.

Katherine Dunham’s life was a century of struggle to restore the dignities of the peoples who resided in her soul. She was not only a major figure and powerful influence in modern dance but was, at the same time a leader in the struggle for civil rights in the United States and in Haiti. Fourteen years ago, at the age of 82, she survived a seven week hunger strike in protest at her government’s treatment of Haiti.

She must have died of a broken heart.

There are eight million Haitians in a country turned into a concentration camp. Their leader was stolen from them and transported as cargo to the heart of darkness where he was no doubt expected to to be killed and perhaps, eaten.

After two years of brutal repression – supervised by the United Nations Security Council on behalf of the civilised world – the people of Haiti have been reduced to a condition in which they are less free than they were 200 years ago. Their legitimate leaders are in exile or in jail, and the civilised world looks on approvingly as these uppity blacks are starved and coerced into good behaviour. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which they were among the original signatories, 60 years ago, obviously cannot apply to them.

They have elected a President, under rules set by people who don’t believe in rules and scorn elections.

The omniscient and all wise President of the United States, Mr Bush says the Haitians are not entitled to freedom and his judgment is backed up by that certified black intellectual, Dr Condoleezza Rice and by Mr Annan, the world’s Commissioner of Police cum Ombudsman – also a black person, and a citizen of Ghana. These two, who undoubtedly benefited from the struggles of Katherine Dunham and people like Martin Luther King and Marcus Garvey, provide American racism with all the legitimacy it needs to cancel the human rights of the Haitian people and millions of others.

It was the Haitian people after all, who were the first nation in the world, before the Americans, the French and the British, to proclaim and promulgate the universal rights of all human beings, whatever their sex, race or economic condition, to democratic equality.

Cultures of Abuse

The Haitians were, of course, premature and presumptuous. As William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, famously said 90 years ago: “Imagine! Niggers speaking French!” That, plus their democratic pretensions, was enough to damn them forever.

Some people have rights; most of us have nothing more than the illusion of freedom. It’s been obvious for five hundred years, long before Kipling write about ‘lesser breeds without the law’.

Generalissimo von Rumsfeld put everything into perspective three years ago as platoons of looters ravaged the history of civilisation, stealing to order, priceless artefacts protected over 8,000 years by the people of Iraq. They too were presumptuous. The free market rules – or as the generalissimo said: “Stuff happens.”

Stuff happens.

On my computer filed on March 15, 2006, under ‘War crimes/Massacres’ is a Reuters story “US accused of killings, Saddam urges resistance” in which it is reported: “ Iraqi police accused U.S. troops of killing five children in a raid on an al Qaeda suspect on Wednesday as ousted leader Saddam Hussein used his televised trial to call on people to "resist the invaders".

It is an odd story, because details of a massacre are entangled with a report of an incident at the trial of Saddam Hussein. But the story is clear enough”

‘[Iraqi] Police and witnesses said 11 members of one family were killed in a U.S. raid overnight in Ishaqi, a town in Saddam's home province north of Baghdad. The U.S. military said two women and a child died as troops arrested an al Qaeda militant.

A senior Iraqi police officer said autopsies on the bodies, which included five children, showed each had been shot in the head. Community leaders said they were outraged.

Television footage showed the bodies of five children, two men and four women in the Tikrit morgue. One infant had a gaping head wound. All the children seemed younger than school age’.

The American press has just this week discovered this story, which is strange, since it was carried in the New York Times a day after the Reuters story. In a bylined piece by Jeffrey Gettleman the incident was relocated to Balad:

“American soldiers demolished a farmhouse near the Sunni Arab town of Balad on Wednesday after encountering unexpectedly heated resistance from insurgents, killing a number of civilians in the process.

The American military said that only three civilians had been killed, while Iraqi officials said an entire 11-member family — from a 75-year-old grandmother to a 6-month-old baby — had died in the attack.

Maj. Tim Keefe, a military spokesman, said American troops were on their way to capture an insurgent in a rural area north of Baghdad when insurgents opened fire from the farmhouse.

Coalition forces returned fire, utilizing both air and ground assets," Major Keefe said.

The results were devastating, according to images broadcast on Arab TV: dead cows, scorched cars, a smashed house and 11 bodies rolled up in blankets.”

This week the US media ‘discovered’ the story. What has obviously happened is that the Iraqi ‘government’ has been raising a stink about the incident to the point where the US Army has been pushed to arrest several soldiers and is charging them with murder.

As in previous cases, only ordinary servicemen are charged, only ordinary ‘grunts’ – no officers, although it is clear from both stories that a Major Keefe was involved.

This replicates the pattern of Abu Ghraib where it was clear that senior officers, including General Jeffrey Miller and the senior commander in Iraq, General Sanchez, must have been involved. A number of grunts are serving time for their aberrant behaviour at Abu Ghraib. One wonders if any of them speak French, like Haitians.

We don’t do torture, President Bush has said. American soldiers do not commit atrocities; except of course for a few underprivileged peasants from places like West Virginia who obviously got into the army on false pretences.

Three years ago I wrote in one of these columns:

‘It is the contempt that is so obvious, and so offensive. The total disregard of public opinion, the failure to make even a gesture toward the norms of civilised behaviour. Even more amazing, is the disrespect for their own Anglo-American traditions, norms and law.

‘It is the absolute setting aside of any idea of a duty to act according to law, or custom, or convention; the arrogation of authority to do, and to try to get away with, whatever one wishes to do; to do whatever is necessary to get one’s way; to impose one’s will, to kill, to destroy, to humiliate, and finally, to abrogate the human and property rights of others.

‘Dexter Filkins of the New York Times, reporting on March 29,[2003] provided a vivid picture of the Allied mind-set:

‘ “At the base camp of the Fifth Marine Regiment here, two sharpshooters, Sgt. Eric Schrumpf, 28, and Cpl. Mikael McIntosh, 20, sat on a sand berm and swapped combat tales. The marines said they had little trouble dispatching their foes, most of whom they characterized as ill-trained and cowardly. "We had a great day," Sergeant Schrumpf said. "We killed a lot of people.... We dropped [sic] a few civilians," Sergeant Schrumpf said, "but what do you do?" [In one incident], he recalled watching one of the women standing near [an] Iraqi soldier go down. "I'm sorry," the sergeant said. "But the chick was in the way."’

It is as if the Marine was apologising for running over a cat in the road.”

I wrote that on April 12, 2003.

I reprint it here because it is so easy to say that you knew that all the time. I reprint it to demonstrate that not only did we ‘know’ about these abuses, we wrote about them. And no one did anything. We heard the lies, the transparent pretexts, knew about the subhuman savages transported to Guantanamo Bay, straight-jacketed, blindfolded, gagged and shackled to the bare floor of the C-130 transport planes to prevent them chewing their way their way through the plane’s hydraulic lines; about the German Arab whose fortuitous liberation enabled him to tell of his kidnapping, torture, rape and imprisonment as a suspected terrorist. We know of the gulags where ‘invisible’ prisoners’ brains are systematically turned to blancmange; we know about people too demoralised to want to live , choosing not to eat but force- fed like Strasbourg geese. All in a place described by a British High Court judge as a ‘law-free zone’ presided over by the President of the United States. We know about the leveling of Fallujah, destroyed in order to save it from the insurgents. And we have now heard about the massacre in Haditha.

We know about the Palestinians in their concentration camp, essaying democracy, only to be told that they can have any government they may choose, as long as they do not choose the one they want. We know that Israel claims the right to kill whomsoever it chooses and has defied more UN resolutions than all other countries put together.

So, why are we whining about a few more dead Iraqis. Half a million babies died in the run up to the war, hundreds of thousands were maimed or died from the effects of depleted uranium so that the civilised world may be assured of oil for air conditioning, for ATVs, SUVs and cruise shipping and the US vice president can be guaranteed against loss from his public service.

What is all the fuss about 24 dead Iraqis in Haditha? They were killed by young men who thought they were doing their duty, scared out of their wits by the knowledge that insurgents were everywhere, coming out of the woodwork – unable to distinguish between friend and foe when everybody is on the other side. The US military insists that these are all isolated incidents. The troops are to be lectured on “core values” – Loyalty, Duty, Respect and Iraqi cultural values.

A few will be court-martialed as an example to the others and life and war will go on, as after Abu Ghraib and all the other ‘few, isolated incidents.’

Stuff happens!

So! What else is new?

Why, there is the huge story about the Americans deigning to offer the Iranians the chance to talk to Mr John Bolton, the American Ambassador to the United Nations. The Americans and their noble allies in the rest of the civilised world are offering the Iranians a choice between the most delicious carrot and the most punishing stick, a choice usually offered only to donkeys. The US will talk to the Iranians if the Iranians surrender, in advance, their right to process uranium fuel for power generation. It is, according to the US media, a hugely significant breakthrough.

The Americans don’t believe the Iranians only want to generate power. They believe the Iranians want to go much further, to produce nuclear weapons of mass destruction. In this, they resemble the Cubans, whose biochemical industry is not geared to produce medicine according to Mr Bolton, but to manufacture bio-terrorist materials. The Iranians have, as the Americans calculated, rejected the carrot and the stick. The Americans and their noble allies can now proceed to Stage Two – designing an elaborate pavane to lead Iran to the punishment table, and if possible, to the fate of Iraq.

Nearly a decade ago General Lee Butler, head (1992-94)of the US Strategic Air Command, declared that it was "dangerous in the extreme that in the cauldron of animosities that we call the Middle East, one nation [Israel] has armed itself, [with] nuclear weapons, perhaps numbering in the hundreds, and that inspires other nations to do so. An October 1998 "Memorandum of Agreement" between the US and Israel, upgrading their military and strategic relationship, was widely interpreted to mean that the US regards Israel's nuclear arsenal "not only as a positive factor in the regional balance of power, but also as one it should support and enhance" (Foundation for Middle East Peace – Special Report, Winter 1999)

It is such a pity that people like the Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians, Hamas and the Iranians persist in believing that universal human rights apply to them, that justice is for all and that people like John Bolton, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George Bush are not prophets of God.

Five hundred years of history have obviously taught them nothing. As my grandmother used to say: “If you can’t hear, you must feel”.

Copyright ©2006 John Maxwell

jankunnu [at] yahoo.com