November 14th, 2006
I’ve already given my reactions to the “Borat” film (below). Another consequence of it, for me, was an interesting conversation I had about it at a party this past weekend. After I mentioned having seen the film, a number of people wound up discussing it at some length. Among us were an actor, a writer, a graduate student in history with a focus on political activism, and a graduate student in philosophy with a focus on ethics. It was startling to me how different were the various perspectives each person brought to the subject. It’s not surprising that people with such backgrounds would have different takes on any contentious question, but it was amusing to see everyone playing to type so obviously, and yet with really valuable insights from those different perspectives.
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Categories: Culture, General, Media, News & Current Events, Politics, Privacy, Religion |
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November 14th, 2006
The prospect of being forced to face the colossal collapse of the dreams of a New and Improved American Empire has apparently driven some on the right quite mad with bloodlust:
Americans simply do not wish to suffer, and do not have the senses of patriotism, pride, and honor that buffered such suffering for earlier generations. It is true, I think, that these qualities are less evident now than they were in the past. The ability of a society to see through grinding conflicts like the Philippines Insurrection or the Boer War augers well for its future, lest it lose the mere capacity to conquer, and be susceptible to humiliation by any small power with no advantage save mental fortitude. It is indeed difficult to imagine now the methods that transformed the Philippines for us, and South Africa for the British, from bitter foe to steadfast friend being applied in Iraq. Would that they were. But patriotism, pride, and honor are nonetheless still present in the American character. It is the American political class that lacks them in corresponding measure.
Such an antiseptic little word, “methods”. Here are some methods:
n 1908, Manuel Arellano Remondo, in a book entitled General Geography of the Philippine Islands, wrote: “The population decreased due to the wars, in the five-year period from 1895 to 1900, since, at the start of the first insurrection, the population was estimated at 9,000,000, and at present (1908), the inhabitants of the Archipelago do not exceed 8,000,000 in number.”[26]
U.S. attacks into the countryside often included scorched earth campaigns where entire villages were burned and destroyed, torture (water cure) and the concentration of civilians into “protected zones” (concentration camps). Many of the civilian casualties resulted from disease and famine. Reports of the execution of U.S. soldiers taken prisoner by the Filipinos led to savage reprisals by American forces. Many American officers and soldiers called war a “nigger killing business”.
… From almost the beginning of the war, soldiers wrote home describing, and usually bragging about, atrocities committed against Filipinos, soldiers and civilians alike. Increasingly, such personal letters, or portions of them, reached a national audience as anti-imperialist editors across the nation reproduced them.[27]
Once these accounts were widely reproduced, the War Department was forced to demand that General Otis investigate their authenticity. For each press clipping, he forwarded it to the writer’s commanding officer, who would then convince the soldier to write a retraction.
Private Charles Brenner of the Kansas regiment resisted such pressure. He insisted that Colonel Funston[28] had ordered that all prisoners be shot and that Major Metcalf and Captain Bishop enforced these orders. Otis was obliged to order the Northern Luzon sector commander, General MacArthur, to look into the charge. Brenner confronted MacArthur’s aide with a corroborating witness, Private Putman, who confessed to shooting two prisoners after Bishop or Metcalf ordered, “Kill them! Damn it, Kill them!” MacArthur sent his aide’s report on to Otis with no comment. Otis ordered Brenner court-martialed “for writing and conniving at the publication of an article which… contains willful falsehoods concerning himself and a false charge against Captain Bishop.” The judge advocate in Manila convinced Otis that such a trial could open a Pandora’s box, as “facts would develop implicating many others.”
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And here are some more:
These had originally been set up for refugees whose farms had been destroyed by the British “Scorched Earth” policy (burning down all Boer homesteads and farms). However, following Kitchener’s new policy, many women and children were forcibly moved to prevent the Boers from resupplying at their homes and more camps were built and converted to prisons.
This was not the first appearance of concentration camps. The Spanish used them in the Ten Years’ War that later led to the Spanish-American War, and the United States used them to devastate guerrilla forces during the Philippine-American War. But the concentration camp system of the British was on a much larger scale.
There were a total of 45 tented camps built for Boer internees and 64 for black African ones. Of the 28,000 Boer men captured as prisoners of war, 25,630 were sent overseas. So, most Boers remaining in the local camps were women and children, but the native African ones held large numbers of men as well. Even when forcibly removed from Boer areas, the black Africans were not considered to be hostile to the British, and provided a paid labour force.
The conditions in the camps were very unhealthy and the food rations were meager. The wives and children of men who were still fighting were given smaller rations than others. The poor diet and inadequate hygiene led to endemic contagious diseases such as measles, typhoid and dysentery. Coupled with a shortage of medical facilities, this led to large numbers of deaths — a report after the war concluded that 27,927 Boers (of whom 22,074 were children under 16) and 14,154 black Africans had died of starvation, disease and exposure in the concentration camps. In all, about 25% of the Boer inmates and 12% of the black African ones died (although recent research suggests that the black African deaths were underestimated and may have actually been around 20,000). However the precise number of deaths is unknown. Reports have stated that the number of Boers killed was 18,000-28,000 and no bothered to keep records on the number of deaths of the 107,000 Black Africans who were interned in Concentration Camps.
Any mistakes that happen to occur in the process of such “methods” will, of course, be regretted. But one must keep one’s eye on what is really important: preserving the neo-Con dream of Pax Americana. And, really, aren’t a few tens or hundreds of thousands of non-American lives worth the prize? Think of it: with just a little more torture and a concentration camp here and there, Iraq could be completely remade into a paradise. What could possibly go wrong? Who, aside from the Blame America First crowd and Saddamite dead-enders, could possibly object? Just a little more blood, people, just a little more Iraqi blood and all will be right with the world.
And, remember, they hate us for our freedoms….
Link via Crooked Timber.
Categories: Iraq, Politics, Terrorism, Torture |
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