Earlier today, these five members of Congress - all of whom are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus - were arrested for civil disobedience protesting the expulsion of aid workers from the Sudan. These are our champions, people who have dedicated their lives to human rights and justice, who are, in every sense of the word, leaders.
I have spent nearly all of my time lately thinking about how as progressives we should approach governing - and these and the other members of the Progressive Caucus are our strongest allies.
Here in New England, people look forward to April as the days turn longer, and warmer and the first signs of Spring emerge. The young, and young at heart, often recite the old standard, "April showers bring May flowers." Unfortunately, in far too many parts of world, April is not a month to look forward to, as April is well on its way to becoming known as a month of tragedy; one with a strange and deadly history.
Defectors from the Sudanese regime explain their role in the Sudanese Government's planning and execution of mass atrocities in Darfur, implicating members of the regime at the highest level.
I wanted to take a couple of minutes to share an op-ed that I co-aurthored with my friend Howard Salter.
It ran in the Baltimore Sun today (link here) and suggests that the Obama administration use the pending ICC arrest warrant of Omar al-Bashir to push for international action to end the killing in Darfur.
We note that:
The expected warrant also opens a door for Mr. Obama and his talented foreign policy team. They can leverage the arrest warrant to work with influential partners across the globe to stop the killing and solidify a concrete peace agreement. By doing so, Mr. Obama would address a serious human rights crisis at the dawn of his presidency while also sending a clear signal that the U.S. is ready to once again lead by example.
and remind readers of the failure of the last administration:
This is the ongoing story of a species whose leaders have a death wish, and whose members at large mostly don't. Also, sometimes they got to wondering what should be done about a large geopolitical concentration of fellow beings operating under the brand name "China".
(9) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (10) Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. (11) There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow. - Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (NIV)
A centrally planned economy.
Shiver. It's a bogeyman of the hardly-ever-Right that liberals and environmentalists want to foist a centrally planned economy on the US. They point to the Soviets, the Chinese, the human misery caused by perpetual shortages based on miscalculations of demand, the failure of price signals, the inflexibility of industrial response.
Those systems were inefficient, it's true. Consider:
The Great Leap Forward was the name given to the Second Five Year Plan which was scheduled to run from 1959-1965, though the name is now generally limited to the first three years of this period. ... The central idea behind the Great Leap was that rapid development of China's agricultural and industrial sectors should take place in parallel. ... To achieve this, Mao advocated that a further round of collectivisation modelled on the USSR's "Third Period" was necessary in the Chinese countryside where the existing collectives would be merged into huge People's communes. ... At the Politburo meetings in August 1958, it was decided that these people's communes would become the new form of economic and political organization throughout rural China. Astonishingly for such a dramatic social change, by the end of the year approximately 25,000 communes had been set-up, each with an average of 5,000 households.
... On the communes, a number of radical and controversial agricultural innovations were promoted at the behest of Mao. Many of these were based on the ideas of now discredited Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko and his followers.
... With dramatically reduced yields, even urban areas suffered much reduced rations; however, mass starvation was largely confined to the countryside, where as a result of massively inflated production statistics, very little grain was left for the peasants to eat. Food shortages were bad throughout the country; however, the provinces which had adopted Mao's reforms with the most vigor, such as Anhui, Gansu and Henan, tended to suffer disproportionately. Sichuan, one of China's most populous provinces, known in China as "Heaven's Granary" because of its fertility, is thought to have suffered the greatest absolute numbers of deaths from starvation due to the vigor with which provincial leader Li Jinquan undertook Mao's reforms. During the Great Leap Forward, cases of cannibalism also occurred in the parts of China that were severely affected by drought and famine.
... Additionally, this loss in Mao's regime meant that Mao became a "dead ancestor," as he labeled himself: a person who was respected but never consulted, occupying the political background of the Party. Furthermore, he also stopped appearing in public.
... In agrarian policy, the failures of food supply during the Great Leap were met by a gradual de-collectivization in the 1960s that foreshadowed further de-collectivization under Deng Xiaoping. Political scientist Meredith Jung-En Woo argues: "Unquestionably the regime failed to respond in time to save the lives of millions of peasants, but when it did respond, it ultimately transformed the livelihoods of several hundred million peasants (modestly in the early 1960s, but permanently after Deng Xiaoping's reforms subsequent to 1978.)" ...
Even authoritarian China had to reject the disastrous local effects of collectivized mass agriculture. Even a figure such as Mao was brought low by failures that led to the deaths of millions. But now look where they're at today, and also consider this:
This is the ongoing story of a species whose leaders have a death wish, and whose members at large mostly don't. Also, sometimes they got to wondering what should be done about a large geopolitical concentration of fellow beings operating under the brand name "China".
(9) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (10) Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. (11) There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow. - Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (NIV)
We remember the past very selectively. It's certainly true that much of it, for most people, was horrible. And with the American view of history so much informed by the history of the Europeans, which ran heavy in the famine, epidemic and arbitrary gibbeting direction, it could be easy to assume that things were like that everywhere. In some cases, that's also certainly true.
Non-European peoples weren't societies of saints before colonial explorers got there; they had their own problems, their own demons. It isn't necessary to remember them as perfect to understand that what was done to them was wrong. Reserving justice only for the 'deserving' undermines the rule of law, destroys the social compact through alienating and arbitrary corruption, and must be regarded as ethically suspect human-to-human behavior from the perspective of every religious faith I've looked into.
In many cases, the ancestors of the people in what we now regard as the developing world achieved remarkable things that it's easy for us to lose sight of, seeing them as we do through the lens of a present in which their polity has often been through the wringers of some or all of repeated foreign conquest, deliberate cultural erasure, guerrilla warfare, Cold War coups, land dispossession and structural adjustment.
Just because many of them have been brought low, even to the state of the European peasantry of the pre-colonial and colonial eras, it shouldn't eclipse their past works, some of which were bloody amazing. It shouldn't necessarily make us despair for their future. After all, the European peasantry eventually did pretty well for themselves.
Paradise Burned
Nearly 500,000,000 people are being maintained, chiefly upon the products of an area smaller than the improved farm lands of the United States. Complete a square on the lines drawn from Chicago southward to the Gulf and westward across Kansas, and there will be enclosed an area greater than the cultivated fields of China, Korea and Japan and from which five times our present population are fed. - F.H. King, Farmers of Forty Centuries, 1911
For four thousand years the Chinese farmed their countryside and maintained its fertility. They farmed the same countryside, over and over again for generations. If its productivity did not increase, neither did it seem to decrease.
The contrast between the results of the original Chinese model and the European model of commodity extraction applied to the fertile Americas could not be more stark:
The forest became drastically reduced because of profligate cutting practices. The soil was progressively eroded and exhausted by European-style agriculture. Evidentally the settlers and their descendants mistook a temporary gift of nature for a permanent one. They assumed that depletion of one site could be made up by continuous expansion into others, "and in the long run," Mr. Cronon writes, "that was impossible." Seen from this angle, "the people of plenty were a people of waste." - From the New York Times book review of Changes In The Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England., by William Cronon.
The people of waste, indeed. Consider what they'd inherited, what they could have maintained and copied for their own use, perhaps even shared, for our eventual benefit:
This is the ongoing story of a species whose leaders have a death wish, and whose members at large mostly don't. Also, sometimes they got to wondering what should be done about a large geopolitical concentration of fellow beings operating under the brand name "China".
(9) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (10) Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. (11) There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow. - Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (NIV)
Yeah, that Chinese government, complete jerks, tyrants, to put it charitably. People are surprised that the Olympic torch protests seem only to have stirredChinesenationalism, surprised that the Chinese don't understand why people are angry. Still, I think Glenn asks the wrong question. Because who is it that raised China up? The lack of self-awareness in this situation isn't exclusive to the Chinese, people everywhere have an amazing capacity to accept almost anything as normal.
Indeed, let's cut right to the heart of the matter: whom else will we buy our shoes from?
The Social Concerns Committee of Lake City (Michigan) United Methodist Church, led by Richard Renner, is spearheading an effort to boycott the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. The Chinese Games are regularly referred to as the "Genocide Games," due to China's record of human rights atrocities at home, and their unyielding support of the brutal regimes in Burma and Sudan.
According to Renner, "We absolutely support our American athletes, and it is highly unlikely that the U.S. will completely boycott the Beijing Olympics. However, we urge our Representatives in Congress to support resolutions condemning China's human rights record. Further, we would like our President, George W. Bush, to reconsider his decision to attend the opening ceremonies. As leader of the free world, it would send a strong message of disapproval to the Chinese Communists if he were to decline their invitation to be an honored guest."
Since 1950, when the army of the People's Republic of China illegally invaded and occupied Tibet, the Chinese authorities have conducted a systematic campaign of genocide upon the Tibetan nation. Reliable estimates claim that as many as 1.2 million innocent Tibetans have been murdered. This crime of genocide has been condemned by the International Commission of Jurists, and is currently being investigated by Spain's High Court.
China is the number one diplomatic, economic and military ally of the brutal regime in Sudan. Armed with Chinese weapons, the Sudanese government has conducted a systematic campaign of genocide in the Darfur region. Since the conflict began in 2003, over 400,000 Darfuri civilians have been murdered, 2.8 million refugees have been driven from their homes, and 90 percent of ethnic Darfuri villages have been destroyed. On the U.N. Security Council, China has repeatedly threatened to use its veto to block resolutions imposing economic and diplomatic sanctions on Sudan.
"It is unfortunate that the Beijing Olympics have become so politicized," said Renner. "However, it is the Chinese government that began the process, by continually using the games as a propaganda tool to promote their political and economic agenda. China wants to be recognized as a global power, perhaps even a superpower, and they are using the Olympics to achieve that recognition."
So far, people of conscience from all across Michigan have joined our campaign to boycott the "Genocide Games." However, we need your help, too. For more information contact Richard Renner at 231/229-2505, or rrenner@core.com.
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me."
- Pastor Martin Niemoller, decorated World War I U-boat Commander. Imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau Death Camps from 1938 to 1945 for his anti-Nazi activities.
"We want to say to China, 'We thought that the Olympic Games would help you improve your human rights record," Tutu said. "We still hope... But what we are saying to the heads of state, to President George Bush, is, 'For goodness sake, don't go to the Beijing games... for the sake of our children, for the beautiful people of Tibet. Don't go!'"
This diary is copied from a posting on MyDD as part of the candidate series for Bill Richardson. I am not part of his campaign.
Congressman, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Secretary of Energy and in his second term as Governor of New Mexico after a landslide victory in November 2006, Governor Bill Richardson is running for President to heal America and restore our place in the world. He possesses the experience, vision and leadership skills to be a great President.
"While literature can be a beautiful solitary experience, it can also bring people together in a community."
This sentiment is at the heart of the growing Reading Liberally network of book clubs and tours, but the quote itself comes from Andrew Slack, the 20-something founder of the HP Alliance -- which is making sure our Harry Potter-crazed world recognizes the powerful social justice messages in the adventures of J.K. Rowling's young wizards.
Andrew is by no means alone. Harry and the Potters, a wizard rock band, will be playing to a crowd of 2,000 at New York's Bohemian Beer Garden in Astoria on Thursday as a build-up to their 6,000-person concert on Harvard Yard on Friday -- a week after the 5th film hit the theaters, and the eve of the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in the series.
"Hundreds...thousands of people getting together to rock out to songs about the power of love," explains Slack. "And not in a hippyish way...these are teenagers who feel a connection to the books and to each other."
The nearly 10,000 friends on the HP Alliance's MySpace page demonstrate that connection...and Slack wants to make sure they are talking about more than whether Hermione and Ron will end up together. Especially: the genocide in Darfur.
From their press release last week:
In anticipation of the back-to-back release of the final Harry Potter book and the fifth movie -- HP Alliance is working with the Genocide Intervention Network and several human rights groups to organize hundreds of house parties all over the world.
On July 14, each house party will listen to an HP Alliance podcast where Joe Wilson, former U.S. Ambassador; John Prendergast, senior advisor to the International Crisis Group; and Dot Maver, executive director of the Peace Alliance will discuss the history of the Sudanese genocide and how regular people can do something to stop it. The podcast will also feature "Wizard Rock" bands like "Harry and the Potters," a young Harry Potter fan who got the state of Kansas to divest 38 million dollars from companies that fund the genocide in Darfur, and is co-sponsored by the popular Harry Potter news site, the Leaky Cauldron.
Using house parties to connect Harry Potter with a serious issue like the genocide in Darfur has helped capture the attention of young adults all over the world. "I'm 16 years old and have been actively trying to do just what you guys are planning for years!" said HP Alliance member Michelle. "I'm just a teenager, but I have a voice and a big heart and want to put all my effort into planning an awesome party to help spread the word and help Darfur!"
But the social justice message of Harry Potter isn't issue specific. Beloved Dumbledore rejects the entire right-wing style of divisive, fear-mongering politics. After Voldemort's return, Slack notes, Dumbledore warns of the dark wizard's ability to tear people apart, and argues the only way to counter it is "an equally strong bond of friendship."
And throughout the books, today's political topics are drawn out in black-and-white.
On the evil of torture: Dumbledore begs the Ministry of Magic to rid themselves of the Dementors, saying that a free society has no place for their kind in our penal system.
On the right to trial: Harry's godfather Sirius Black was held and tortured for 13 years without a trial, and in the most recent volume Stan Shunpike and Mundungus Fletcher were imprisoned without trial despite the Minister's knowledge they may be innocent.
On the value of diplomacy: communicating with the foreign and frightening Giants proves better option than isolation or violent conflict.
On racial equality: full rights for "purebloods," "mudbloods" and Muggle-born wizards.
On worker's rights: Hermione's campaign to empower the House Elves.
The 7th and final volume will reach millions of readers within the first weekend -- citizens of all ages who can learn about justice and equality in an open society...and who can take action in the real world to fight the battles Harry fights in his.
As Slack (who'd welcome comment directly at andrew@thehpalliance.org or via their MySpace site) concludes:
A story can change the world. Traditional politics isn't the only way to make people aware or to get people active. We can do a lot with this story and with this gigantic community of readers that's dedicated to fighting the dark arts in the real world.
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