Wars
of the Laptop Bombers
Today's
Stories
January 22
/ 24, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Prince
Harry's Travails
January 21,
2005
Dave Lindorff
A
Great American Journalist:
John L. Hess (1917-2005)
Sharon Smith
The
Anti-War Movement and the Iraqi Resistance
Don Santina
Baseball, Racism and Steroid Hysteria
Ron Jacobs
Locked Out and Pissed Off: Protesting the Bush Inauguration
Kurt Nimmo
The Problem with Mike Ruppert
Don Monkerud
Once They Were Cults: Bush's Faith-Based Social Services
Alan Farago
Swimming Home from the Galapagos
Derek Seidman
An
Interview with Army Medic and Anti-War Activist Patrick Resta
January 20,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Dying
for Sycophants
William Cook
The
Bush Inauguration: A Mock Epic Fertility Rite
Joshua Frank
The Democrats and Iran: Look Who's Backing Bush's Next
Eric Ruder
Why Andres Raya Snapped: Another Casualty of Bush's War
Mike Whitney
Coronation in a Garrison State
Robert Jensen
A Citizens Oath of Office
Peter Rost
Bush Report on Drug Imports: Good Data, Bad Conclusions
David Underhill
Is It Torture Yet?: the Eclectic Fool Aid Torture Test
James Reiss
Adieu, Colin Powell: Pea Soup in Foggy Bottom
CounterPunch
Staff
Voices
from Abu Ghraib: the Injured Party
How
the Press & the CIA
Killed Gary Webb's Career
January 19,
2005
Marta Russell
Social
Security Privatization & Disability: 8 Million at Risk
Mike Ferner
Marines
Stretching Movement: Protesting Urban Warfare in Toledo
Nancy Oden
The
Nuremberg Principles, Iraq and Torture
Tony Paterson
A Catalogue of British Abuses in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Divide-and-Conquer Plan to Destroy Social Security
Doug Giebel
BS and CBS: When 60 Minutes Helped Promote WMD Fantasies
Alexander Cockburn
Will
Bush Quit Iraq?
January 18,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
How
Americans Were Seduced by War: Empire and Militant Christianity
Jennifer Van
Bergen
Federal
Judge: Abu Ghraib Abuses Result of Decision to Ignore Geneva
Conventions
Douglas Lummis
It's a No Brainer; Send Graner: a Rap for Our Time
Ron Jacobs
Syria Back in the Crosshairs?
Seth DeLong
Enter the Dragon: Will Washington Tolerate a Venezuelan-Chinese
Oil Pact?
Lance Selfa
Stolen Election?: Most Democrats Didn't Even Bother to Inquire
Paul D. Johnson
Mystery Meat: a Right-to-Know About Food Origins
Elisa Salasin
An Open Letter to Jenna Bush, Future Teacher
January 17,
2005
Heather Gray
Misconceptions
About King's Methods for Social Change
Robert Fisk
Hotel Room Journalism: the US Press in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
What the NYT Death Chart Omitted: Civilians Slaughtered by US
Military
Jason Leopold
Sam Bodman's Smokestacks: Bush's Choice for Energy Czar is One
of Texas's Worst Polluters
Gary Leupp
A Message from the Iraqi Resistance
Douglas Valentine
An Act of State? the Execution of Martin Luther King
Harvey Arden
Welcome to Leavenworth: My First Encounter with Leonard Peltier
Greg Moses
King
and the Christian Left: Where Lip Service is Not an Option
January 15
/ 16, 2005
James Petras
The
Kidnapping of a Revolutionary
Robert Fisk
Flying Carpet Airlines: My Return to Baghdad
Ron Jacobs
Unfit for Military Service
Brian Cloughley
Smack Daddies of the Hindu Kush: Afghanistan's Drug Bonanza
Fred Gardner
The Allowable-Quantity Expert
Dr. Susan Block
The Counter-Inaugural Ball: Eros Day, 2005
John Ross
Zapatista Literary Llife
Suzan Mazur
Unspooking Frank Carlucci
M. Shahid Alam
America's New Civilizing Mission
Frederick B. Hudson
Jack Johnson's Real Opponent: "That I Was a Man"
Mike Whitney
Bush's Grand Plan: Incite Civil War in Iraq
Tom Crumpacker
A Constitutional Right to Travel to Cuba
Bob Burton
The Other Armstrong Williams Scandal
John Callender
La Conchita and the Indomitable 82-Year Old
Lila Rajiva
Christian Zionism
Saul Landau
An Imperial Portrait: a Visit to Hearst's Castle
Doug Soderstrom
A Touch of Evil: the Morality of Neoconservatism
Poets' Basement
Davies, Louise, Landau, Albert, Collins and Laymon
January 14,
2005
Robert Fisk
"The
Tent of Occupation"
Lee Sustar
Bush's Social Security
Con Job
José
M. Tirado
The Christians I Know
Dave Zirin
The Legacy of Jack Johnson
Sheldon Rampton
Calling John Rendon: a True Tale of "Military Intelligence"
Tracy McLellan
Under the Influence
Yves Engler
The Dictatorship of Debt: the World Bank and Haiti
Tom Barry
Robert
Zoellick: a Bush Family Man
Website of
the Day
Ryan for the Nobel Prize?
January 13,
2005
Mark Chmiel
/ Andrew Wimmer
Hearts
and Minds, Revisited
Joe DeRaymond
The Salvador Option:
Terror, Elections and Democracy
Greg Moses
Every Hero a Killer?...Not
Dave Lindorff
The Great WMD Fraud: Time for an Accounting
Jorge Mariscal
Dr. Galarza v. Alberto Gonzales: Which Way for Latinos?
Christopher Brauchli
Gonzales and the Death Penalty: the Executioner Never Sleeps
Gary Leupp
"Fighting
for the Work of the Lord": Christian Fascism in America
January 12,
2005
Robert Fisk
Fear
Stalks Baghdad
Josh Frank
The
Farce of the DNC Contest
Jack Random
Casualties
of War: the Untold Stories
John Roosa
Aceh's Dual Disasters: the Tsunami and Military Rule
Carol Norris
In the Wake of the Tsunami
Mike Whitney
Pink Slips at CBS
Alan Farago
Can
the Everglades be Saved?
Paul Craig
Roberts
What's
Our Biggest Problem in Iraq...the Insurgency or Bush?
January 11,
2005
Tom Barry
The
US isn't "Stingy"; It's Strategic: Aid as a Weapon
of Foreign Policy
James Hodge
and Linda Cooper
Voice
of the Voiceless: Father Roy Bourgeois and the School of the
the Americas
Linda S. Heard
Farah Radio Break Down: Joseph Farah's Messages of Hate and Homophobia
Derrick O'Keefe
Electoral Gigolo?: Richard Gere and the Occupied Vote
Gila Svirsky
A Tale of Two Elections
Harry Browne
Irish
"Peace Process", RIP
January 10,
2005
Ramzy Baroud
Faith-Based
Disasters: Tsunami Aid and War Costs
Talli Nauman
Killing
Journalists: Mexico's War on a Free Press
Uri Avnery
Sharon's Monologue
Dave Lindorff
Tucker
Carlson's Idiot Wind
Dave Zirin
Randy
Moss's Moondance
Dave Silver
Left Illusions About the Democratic Party
Charles Demers
Plan Salvador for Iraq: Death Squads Come in Waves
William A.
Cook
Causes
and Consequences: Bush, Osama and Israel
January 8 /
9, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Say,
Waiter, Where's the Blood in My Margarita Glass?
John H. Summers
Chomsky
and Academic History
Greg Moses
Getting Real About the Draft
Walter A. Davis
Bible Says: the Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism
Victor Kattan
The EU and Middle East Peace
John Bolender
The Plight of Iraq's Mandeans
Robert Fisk
The Politics of Lebanon
Fred Gardner
Situation NORML
Joe Bageant
The Politics of the Comfort Zone
Mickey Z.
I Want My DDT: Little Nicky Kristof Bugs Out
Ben Tripp
CounterClockwise Evolution
Ron Jacobs
Elvis and His Truck: Out on Highway 61
Saul Landau
Sex
and the Country
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Time to End the Blackout
Ellen Cantarow
NPR's Distortions on Palestine
Richard Oxman
Bageantry Continued
Poets' Basement
Gaffney, Landau, Albert, Collins
January 7,
2005
Omar Barghouti
Slave
Sovereignty: Elections Under Occupation
Kent Paterson
The Framing of Felipe Arreaga: Another Mexican Environmentalist
Arrested
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Old
Vijay Merchant and the Tsunami
David Krieger
Cancel the Inauguration Parties
Gideon Levy
New Year, Old Story
Dave Lindorff
Ohio Protest: First Shot Fired by Congressional Progressives
Christopher
Brauchli
Privatizing the IRS
Roger Burbach
/ Paul Cantor
Bush,
the Pentagon and the Tsunami
January 6,
2005
Brian J. Foley
Gonzales:
Supporting Torture is not His Greatest Sin
Greg Moses
Boot
Up America!: Gen. Helmly's Memo Leaks New Bush Deal
Petras / Chomsky
An
Open Letter to Hugo Chavez
Alan Maass
The Decline of the Dollar
Dave Lindorff
Colin Powell's Selective Sense of Horror
Jenna Orkin
The EPA and a Dirty Bomb: 9/11's Disastrous Precedent
P. Sainath
The
Tsunami and India's Coastal Poor
January 5,
2005
Alan Farago
2004:
An Environmental Retrospective
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Oversight
Detected?: Sen. McCain and the Boeing Tanker Scam
Jean-Guy Allard
Gary Webb: a Cuban Perspective
Fred Gardner
Strutting, Smirking, As If The Mad Plan Was Working
David Swanson
Albert Parsons on the Gallows
Richard Oxman
The Joe Bageant Interview
Bruce Jackson
Death
on the Living Room Floor
January 4,
2005
Michael Ortiz
Hill
Mainlining
Apocalypse
Elaine Cassel
They
Say They Can Lock You Up for Life Without a Trial
Yoram Gat
The
Year in Torture
Martin Khor
Tragic
Tales and Urgent Tasks from the Tsunami Disaster
Gary Leupp
Death
and Life in the Andaman Islands
January 3,
2005
Ron Jacobs
The
War Hits Home
Dave Lindorff
Is
There a Single Senator Who Will Stand Up for Black Voters?
Mike Whitney
The Guantanamo Gulag
Joshua Frank
Greens and Republicans: Strange Bedfellows
Maria Tomchick
Playing Politics with Disaster Aid
Rhoda and Mark
Berenson
Our Daughter Lori: Another Year of Grave Injustice
David Swanson
The Media and the Ohio Recount
Kathleen Christison
Patronizing
the Palestinians
January 1 /
2, 2005
Gary Leupp
Earthquakes
and End Times, Past and Present
Rev. William
E. Alberts
On "Moral Values": Code Words for Emerging Authoritarian
Tendencies
M. Shahid Alam
Testing Free Speech in America
Stan Goff
A Period for Pedagogy
Brian Cloughley
Bush and the Tsunami: the Petty and the Petulant
Sylvia Tiwon
/ Ben Terrall
The Aftermath in Aceh
Ben Tripp
Requiem for 2004
Greg Moses
A Visible Future?
Steven Sherman
The 2004 Said Awards: Books Against Empire
Sean Donahue
The Erotics of Nonviolence
James T. Phillips
The Beast's Belly
David Krieger
When Will We Ever Learn
Poets' Basement
Soderstrom, Hamod, Louise and Albert
December 23,
2004
Chad Nagle
Report
from Kiev: Yushchenko's Not Quite Ready for Sainthood
David Smith-Ferri
The
Real UN Disgrace in Iraq
Bill Quigley
Death
Watch for Human Rights in Haiti
Mickey Z.
Crumbs
from Our Table
Christopher Brauchli
Merck's Merry X-mas
Greg Moses
When
No Law Means No Law
Alan Singer
An
Encounter with Sen. Schumer: a Very Dangerous Democrat
David Price
Social
Security Pump and Dump
Website of the Day
Gabbo Gets Laid
December 22,
2004
James Petras
An
Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre
Historical Amnesia
Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit
Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge
Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column
Kathleen Christison
Imagining
Palestine
Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos
December 21,
2004
Greg Moses
The
New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV
Dave Lindorff
Losing
It in America: Bunker of the Skittish
Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk
Dragon Pierces
Truth*
Concrete
Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam
Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"
Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti
Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report
Paul Craig
Roberts
America
Locked Up: a System of Injustice
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of
Propaganda in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add
Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk:
the Daughter I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
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Weekend Edition
January 22 / 24, 2005
Can Critical Intellectuals Survive Under State Capitalism?
One
China; Many Problems
By
DANIEL BURTON-ROSE
In
answering difficult questions, scholars in classical China reserved
a modest option for themselves: que yi, "leaving
the question answerless." Indicative of the cacophony of
the contemporary world, One
China, Many Paths edited by Chaohua Wang chooses the
opposite tact. In it, a multitude of voices illuminate China's
options for creating a place in the world characterized by dignity
and social justice. Cleared from the ideological detritus of
quasi-colonialism, coerced communist orthodoxy, and capitalist
boosterism, the spring of the oldest continuous intellectual
culture in the world bubbles forth.
Ghosts of Tiananmen
Wang Chaohua, the collection's
editor, was a graduate student at the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences when the student democracy movement picked up in 1989.
She participated as a leading activist in the Autonomous Association
of Beijing College Students. Older than most of the students
and younger than the intellectuals who influenced them, Wang
is described in Ian Buruma's Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels
from Los Angeles to Beijing (Random House: 2001) as more
clear-eyed than her peers. She urged students to return to their
campuses, organize and consolidate their gains. Instead they
succumbed to the orgiastic confrontation orchestrated by the
likes of Chai Ling. A week before the Tiananmen Square massacre,
Chai notoriously told an American reporter "My students
keep asking me, 'What should we do next? What can we accomplish?'
I feel so sad, because how can I tell them that what we are actually
hoping for is bloodshed, the moment when the government is ready
to butcher the people brazenly. Only when the square is awash
with blood will the people open their eyes. Only then will they
really be united." Both Chai and Wang fled China after the
crackdown and emigrated to the U.S. Embodying one of the conceptions
of "democracy" died for on the square, Chai enrolled
in the Harvard Business School and, upon graduation, co-founded
an internet company backed by Microsoft and Reebok executives.
Instead of cashing in, Wang entered the Chinese literature and
civilization program as a graduate student at UCLA. One China
is a result of the subsequent decade's contemplation of Chinese
culture and political organization.
More ghosts are present than
those of the relative handful of students. Even the youngest
contributors to this collection lived through the Cultural Revolution.
While chastened by the idol worship and ensnaring cruelty of
the Mao years, they are also committed to improving the lives
of all China's residents (unlike the hypocritical party bosses
of the "People's Republic"). A consideration of the
political taxonomy in contemporary China demonstrates the complexity
of being "left" under an ossified communist dictatorship.
The term "New Left," one of the labels in currency
for progressive intellectuals, is distracting because it identifies
a distinct cohort of European and American activists and implies
a direct connection to an "Old Left" which few Chinese
are eager to inherit. Do "liberals," another camp,
simply advocate for the opening of the economy into the capitalist
world system, or are they willing to fight for civil liberties
and democratic political institutions? Partially in response
to these complexities "many of the most courageous and creative
intellectuals of the ['90s] can not be easily assigned to one
camp or the other, and even when they did so themselves, their
work hardly fitted conventional classifications."
Post-Colonial Imbalances
In her introduction Wang proclaims
her intent to "correct the imbalance" between Chinese
awareness of Euro-American philosophy and political dialogue,
and Euro-American ignorance of the same in China. She succeeds
admirably. She does so by interviewing key players and translating
crucial pieces in '90s political debates. Most of this material
is available in English for the first time.
Questions were sparked by the
chilling example of Yugoslavian disintegration, primarily "Does
regional economy at the cost of centralized power inevitably
lead to secession?" The protests against the CIA-orchestrated
bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade were also provocative.
China's communist government, desperately grasping nationalism
since it abandoned a class-based identity, let the anti-American
protests run for several days. When it stepped in to control
them, intellectuals were disquieted by the rapidity with which
indignant anti-imperialism was transformed into celebratory patriotism.
One China contributor Wang Hui responds by recalling an
earlier Chinese nationalism which was anti-imperialist and internationalist;
consequently the ideology contained a counter-logic of cosmopolitanism.
By drawing on millennia of
political organization, the contributors to this collection are
able to "criticize the claims capitalism makes for itself"
such as inventing the market, social mobility, and intellectual
curiosity. In so doing, they undermine its foundational myths.
This points to the most profound contribution of this collection:
it epitomizes a way of operating in the contemporary world-system
rooted in a particular place while open to the boons of inter-connectedness.
(One contributor's rule of thumb for this process is "'-ism'
can be imported: 'questions' must be generated locally, and theories
should always be constructed independently.") This clears
a path, not only for positive political development, but for
shared insights into "the ontological predicaments of human
existence," as another contributor puts it.
One China,
Many Problems
Obviously, China is a country
beset by a multitude of problems. Contributor Hu Angang breaks
them down this way. In addition to the "operational difficulties"
of a large number of China's enterprises, "Corruption and
abuse of power are seriously harming the masses. Consequently,
the incidence of all sort of social instability is on the rise,
indeed increasing at a pace that is outstripping the growth of
the economy itself. Between 1996 and 2000the number of labor
disputes accepted by the courts, criminal cases investigated
by police, transport and other accidents, multiplied yet more
rapidly [than the GDP]. Labor relations are often very tense,
and conflicts with management are increasing fast. Crime and
insecurity are becoming a more and more conspicuous problem.
Innumerable transport and industrial accidents are reported.
Levels of corruption are rising, involving ever greater sums
of money and higher ranking officials. All kinds of gang-controlled
organizations are emerging and growing in number, engaging in
criminal and black-economy activities. In China, these different
ingredients of social instability are ever-widening in number,
affecting ever-wider spheres of the population."
One must also add environmental
devastation, a topic which One China inexplicably mentions
only in passing, as a potential limit to the GDP The eco-void
in the collection isn't because original Chinese-language material
doesn't exist. Why not include, for example, Ma Yinchu's "Why
Did the Chinese Environment Get So Messed Up?").
This is an area where shared
problems and shared solution in the U.S. and China can be distinguished.
When contributor Qin Hui states "The state enjoys enormous
powers and accepts few responsibilities" and asserts "We
need to restrict the powers of the state, and enlarge its responsibilities,"
the prescription holds for the U.S as well as China. Many of
the above problems are created by free market policies. Others
include the privatization of industry and concomitant unemployment,
and the privatization of education and its subsequent inaccessibility.
There is also intense displacement of farmers, and the concentration
of land in fewer hands. The displaced become immigrants in their
own land, traveling to the coastal cities where they plunge into
new depths of pre-revolution squalor.
Only One China?
The title of this collection connotes a nationalist consensus
hostile to pluralism. "One China" is a propaganda phrase
which bulldozes cultural diversity eternally and keeps China
on and acquisitive and belligerent footing toward its closest
neighbors. Genuine democracy would inevitably entail not only
independence for Hong Kong and Taiwan, but for Tibet and other
culturally distinct regional majorities, such as the Uighur inhabitants
of Xingiang, who have decided that they have little to gain by
being colonized by China. These are all unmentionables for the
Beijing regime, and it's in this area of "the nationality
question" that One China is most clearly circumscribed,
not just by the limits of political speech, but by the cultivated
ethnocentrism of the Han Chinese power-holders. This is acknowledged
by Wang: "Serious discussion, based on careful investigation
and independent thinking, of these matters israre." Permitting
ethnic minorities and indigenous groups to speak for themselves
is apparently outside the scope of this collection. Only one
of the sixteen contributors, by my ill-informed count, is of
an ethnic minority, and he doesn't discuss the matter.
The spiritual paucity of contemporary
China, which plays prominently in imagination of many diasporan
dissidents, merits little attention. It's also not the comprehensive
tally of daily rumblings from below occurring throughout the
country, a book which has yet to be written. (Ian Johnson's Wild
Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China [Pantheon
2004] comes the closest, with a chapter each on peasant struggles,
property rights, and religious persecution.)
Dreaming
with Two Feet on the Ground
It's something of a cliché
to say that exiles from dictatorships gain freedom at the price
of insolence. That's not the way power works in the contemporary
world system. Pressure from outside is often instrumental in
optimizing the potential of domestic organization for change.
The outside world often doesn't even know what's taking place
unless dissidents-domestically and throughout diasporan networks-tell
them. One China is, in this sense, like the English translations
of political dialogues within Israel; it pierces an imposing
monolith, permitting previously contained ideas to rush out,
deflating the colossus.
Many "Chinese believe
that they have been recklessly fooled by a fake idealism in the
twentieth century," observes Xiao Xuehui. "When they
start to reflect on their own experience, the very idea of 'utopia'
became an object of condemnation, equated with a hypocritical
ideology, naivety, and mendacious promises." Xiao argues
that this cynicism has gone too far.
At its core, One China
promotes practical idealism.
"Debates
Among Intellectuals Are Real Social Struggles Too"
The central contention of One
China is that ideas illuminate the path a country should
take.
For thousands of years, the
role of the critical intellectual in China has been to inform
the ruler and deal with the consequences of their decision. What
has changed since then? The communist party came to power and
claimed to put the people in place as their own rulers. Now,
with capitalist immersion, many hope for the creation of a middle
class which, as in the U.S., can make dumbed-down, circumscribed
choices and call it democracy. To whom can intellectuals address
themselves? How can they provoke change? The power of ideas lies
in diffusion and implementation. Let's hope the material in One
China finds a dedicated audience.
Daniel Burton-Rose is a co-editor of Confronting
Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement (2004, Softskull
Press).
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