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Here's the second in Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair's series as they describe Hillary Clinton's years in Little Rock and her narrow escape from federal charges that would have destroyed her political career for ever. PLUS KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY on how Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards are failing Black America even as they hunt for votes in So uth Carolina's "Black Primary." Get your copy today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Remember contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now
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Today's Stories August 13, 2007 Kathy
Kelly August 11 / 12, 2007 Alexander
Cockburn Stan
Goff Ralph
Nader Vijay
Prashad Greg
Moses Alan
Farago Patrick
Cockburn Ben
Tripp Robert
Fantina John
Ross Seth
Sandronsky Paul
Krassner Website
of the Weekend
August 10, 2007 Paul
Craig Roberts Stan
Goff Marjorie
Cohn Saul
Landau Chris
Floyd Daniel
Ellsberg Anthony
Papa Farzana
Versey Sgt.
Kevin Benderman Nuri
Nuri Website
of the Day
August 9, 2007 Stan
Goff Paul
Craig Roberts Alan
Farago William
S. Lind Doug
Giebel Harvey
Wasserman Jacob
Hill Raul
Zibechi Dave
Zirin Website
of the Day
August 8, 2007 Andy
Worthington Jeff
Halper Greg
Moses Nurit
Peled-Elhanan Sukant
Chandan Robert
Fisk George
H. Strauss D.K.
Wilson Bill
Day Tim
Campbell Website
of the Day
August 7, 2007 Patrick
Cockburn Andy
Worthington Kathy
Kelly Stan
Cox Sonja
Karkar Sen.
Russ Feingold Alan
Farago Norman
Solomon Binoy
Kampmark Dave
Lindorff John
Stauber Website
of the Day August 6, 2007 Bill
Quigley Kathy
Rentenbach Uri
Avnery Col.
Dan Smith Ralph
Nader James
Neshewat D.K.
Wilson Greg
Moses Fidel
Castro Mike
Whitney
August 4 / 5, 2007 Alexander
Cockburn Peter
Linebaugh Saul
Landau Alan
Farago Dave
Zirin Barucha
Calamity Peller Anthony
DiMaggio Dave
Lindorff Fred
Gardner Nicola
Nasser Benjamin
Dangl Rannie
Amiri Daniel
Gross Sherwood
Ross Manuel
Garcia, Jr Missy
Beattie Ron
Jacobs Website
of the Weekend
August 3, 2007 Gabriel
Matthew Schivone Jonathan
Cook Patrick
Cockburn Little
Steven Van Zandt Christopher
Brauchli D.
K. Wilson Linda
Ford and Ira Glunts Kelly
Overton Monica
Benderman Manuel
Garcia, Jr. Website
of the Day
August 2, 2007 Paul
Craig Roberts Stanley Heller Eric
Ruder Robert
Fantina Alan
Farago Chris
Floyd Franklin
Lamb Sen.
Russ Feingold Anthony
Papa Norman
Solomon Website
of the Day
August 1, 2007 Debbie Nathan Fred
Gardner Gary
Leupp David
Rosen Winston
Warfield Daniel
McBride Glen
Ford Thomas
P. Healy John
V. Whitbeck David
Krieger Website
of the Day
July 31, 2007 Kathy
Kelly Clancy Sigal Paul Krassner Joe
DeRaymond Diane
Christian Chris
Floyd Ramzy
Baroud Alan
Farago Fidel
Castro Dan
Bacher
July 30, 2007 Marjorie Cohn: Independent Counsel Time Patrick Cockburn Peter Quinn Uri Avnery John Ross Ron
Jacobs David
Vest Jeffrey
St. Clair Website
of the Day
July 28 / 29, 2007 Alexander
Cockburn Ralph
Nader Robert
Fantina Fred
Gardner
July 27, 2007 John
Ross Arthur
Neslen Dave
Lindorff Julene
Blair Christopher
Brauchli Jesse
Hagopian Charles
Modiano Bill
Day Walter
Brasch M.D.
Mitchell Website
of the Day
July 26, 2007 Kathleen
Christison Andy
Worthington Clancy
Chassay Marjorie
Cohn Susie
Day David
Price Marie
Trigona Norman
Solomon William
S. Lind Natsu
Saito John
Stauber Website
of the Day
July 25, 2007 Andy
Worthington Gary
Leupp Ray
McGovern Dr.
Susan Block Joshua
Frank Tina
Richards Ben
Terrall Farzana
Versey Mohammad
Ali Salih Laura
Carlsen Ron
Jacobs Sunsara
Taylor Website
of the Day
Saul
Landau Kathy
Kelly Russell
Mokhiber M.
Shahid Alam Patrick
Cockburn and Anne Penketh Dave
Lindorff Binoy
Kampmark Richard
Neville Cindy
Sheehan Evelyn
Pringle Norman
Solomon CP
Newswire Website
of the Day
July 23, 2007 Andy
Worthington Uri
Avnery Patrick
Cockburn Sousan
Hammad John
Walsh Harvey
Wasserman Martha
Rosenberg Collin Baber
Reza
Fiyouzat Stephen
Lendman Website
of the Day
July 21 / 22, 2007 Alexander
Cockburn Werther Ralph
Nader David
Keen Fred
Gardner Gary
Leupp Robert
Fantina Saker Rannie
Amiri Mike
Whitney Dr.
Susan Rosenthal, MD Monica
Benderman Dan
Bacher Michael
Baney Missy
Beattie Ron
Jacobs Adam
Engel Thomas
Naylor Poets'
Basement Website
of the Weekend
July 20, 2007 Eliza
Szabo Pam
Martens Alan
Farago Harvey
Wasserman Marjorie
Cohn Dave
Zirin Anthony
DiMaggio Scott
Liebertz Linn
Washington, Jr. Bill
Piper / Anthony Papa Ramzy
Baroud Website
of the Day
July 19, 2007 Patrick
Cockburn Remi
Kanazi Winslow
T. Wheeler Sharon
Smith Dave
Lindorff Conn
Hallinan D.
K. Wilson Joshua
Frank Norman
Solomon Russell
Hoffman Ray
McGovern Website
of the Day July 18, 2007 Brenda
Norrell Col.
Dan Smith Martha
Rosenberg Conn
Hallinan Binoy
Kampmark Patrick
Bond / Tom
Johnson Paul
Craig Roberts Bob
Quellos Felice
Pace Robert
Weissman CP
Newswire Website
of the Day
July 17, 2007 Patrick
Cockburn Marjorie
Cohn Evelyn
Pringle David
Rosen Susan
Miller Franklin
Lamb Don
Monkerud Harvey
Wasserman Russell
Hoffman Dave
Lindorff Dave
Zirin Website
of the Day
July 16, 2007 Gary
Leupp Ellen
Cantarow Paul
Craig Roberts Allan
J. Lichtman Dan
Bacher Patrick
Cockburn Manuel
Garcia, Jr. James
Brooks Liaquat
Ali Khan Julie
Flint Website
of the Day
July 14 / 15. 2007 Alexander
Cockburn Andy
Worthington Ralph
Nader Robert
Fantina Ron
Jacobs Joshua
Frank Conn
Hallinan Dr.
Susan Rosenthal, MD John
Ross Fred
Gardner Rannie
Amiri Charles
Modiano Anthony
DiMaggio China
Hand Missy
Comley Beattie Dr.
James J. Murtagh, Jr. Kenneth
Rexroth Poets'
Basement Website
of the Weekend
July 13, 2007 Patrick
Cockburn Winslow
T. Wheeler Imran
Khan Todd
Chretien Sam
Husseini Dr.
Herman Mindshaftgap Anthony
Papa D.
K. Wilson David
Michael Green Website
of the Day
July 12, 2007 Paul
Craig Roberts Robert Jensen Dr. Susan Block Joshua Frank John Chuckman Corporate Crime
Reporter Mike Whitney Nicola Nasser Richard Rhames William S.
Lind Website of the Day
July 11, 2007 Patrick
Cockburn Richard
Neville Debra
McNutt John
V. Walsh Scott
Liebertz George
C. Wilson James
McEnteer Philip
Rizk Johnny
Hazard Dave
Lindorff Website
of the Day
July 10, 2007 James
Ridgeway Tariq
Ali Javed
Hussein William
Blum Ralph
Nader Jay
Arena Anthony
DiMaggio Eva
Liddell Jerry
Kroth Alice
Woodward Nikolas
Kozloff Paul
Shannon Website
of the Day
July 9, 2007 Fidel
Castro Diana
Johnstone John
Walsh Uri
Avnery Ramzy
Baroud John
Ripton Stephen
Lendman Bruce
Jackson Michael
Donnelly Doug
Giebel Website
of the Day
Saul
Landau Ismael
Hossein-zadeh Fawzia
Afzal-Khan John
Ross Pat
Williams Rannie
Amiri Farzana
Versey Bart
Gruzalski Paul
Rockwell Reza
Fiyouzat Monica
Benderman Kenneth
Couesbouc Dave
Lindorff Charles
Modiano Missy
Beattie Dal
LaMagna Jean
Gerard Anne
Dachel Ron
Jacobs Poets'
Basement Website
of the Day
Daniel
Ellsberg Gary
Leupp Harvey
Wasserman Omer
Subhani Marjorie
Cohn Christopher
Brauchli David
Michael Green China
Hand Renee
Saucedo Corporate
Crime Reporter Website
of the Day
July 5, 2007 Andy
Worthington Mike
Stark Norman
Solomon Michael
Schwartz Susie
Day Jacob
Hornberger Bill
Hatch Don
Fitz John
Wright Website
of the Day
July 4, 2007 St.
Clair / Frank Vijay
Prashad Carl
G. Estabrook Ron
Jacobs David
R. Dow Claudia
Johnson William
S. Lind Gregory
Afghani Paul
Edwards D.
K. Wilson Niranjan
Ramakrishnan Thomas
Jefferson Cindy
Sheehan Website
of the Day
Bill
Quigley Gary
Leupp Lynda
Brayer Richard
Thieme Helen
Redmond David
Swanson Jacob
Hornberger Ayesha
Ijaz Khan Franklin
Lamb Ray
McGovern Kevin
Zeese Dave
Lindorff Website
of the Day
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August 13, 2007 Imperial TongueThe Language of DominionBy KENNETH COUESBOUC
The nation is a fairly recent concept. It is a hybrid of the medieval feudal kingdom and the city state of Antiquity. So, vassalage and citizenship are in continuous contradiction. And equality is reduced to the formality of the ballot. Trained for combat from the earliest age, European chivalry was either crusading against heretics and heathens, or warring over matters of suzerainty. Who believed what and who was whom's vassal were the obsessions of the times. Suzerainty often opposed the sovereigns of England and France. A cross-Channel quarrel started by Norman William, that was to last eight centuries. And, on either side of this narrow stretch of sea, the two nations constructed themselves on the basis of this opposition to one another. The historian G. Duby sees the first signs of an appeal to the French nation at the battle of Bouvines (1214) where Philip II of France beat English John's continental allies, thanks to a large contingent of commons. This was turned around at Crecy (1346), when Edward III's English longbows outshot the Genoese mercenary crossbows of Philip VI. Myth and poetry have glorified these alternate victories and have put words into the antagonists' mouths. Heart-swelling harangues precede the onslaught and can seem to determine the outcome. This is habitual. Bolstering morale before a mêlée was already standard practice for the heroes of the Iliad. But, notwithstanding the poets' rendering, there is always uncertainty as to the language actually used. Some two hundred years after the event, Shakespeare had Henry V speaking Elizabethan English on St. Crispin's day (Oct 25, 1415). That is the same as having Wellington speaking today's idiom on the field at Waterloo. At Crecy, seventy years before Agincourt, how did Edward address the yeomanry who were about to win the day? Among themselves, he and his court and his knights spoke the form of French that was their Norman and Angevin heritage. His archers, however, and the artillerymen firing the first rudimentary canons to be used in battle were composed of and manned by freemen, whose heritage was Anglo-Saxon and who spoke an evolving language similar to the English of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. If, as was the custom before battle, Edward said something to his army, it had to be understood by all. His appeal to common England would have been in English. The French king at Bouvines faced a different situation. At the beginning of the 13th century, the kingdom of France was split by a linguistic North/South divide, named oïl and oc after the two different ways of saying yes. A split that can still be heard when French is spoken today. This was (is) due to the particular history of the Mediterranean coast. The Greeks settled in Marseilles in the 6th cent. BC, and later the Romans built cities in the South, long before Julius Caesar's conquest of « hairy » Gaul. The South was more Latinized and more densely populated than the North and the Germanic influence was proportionally less. Philip II's Frank ancestors had been counts of Paris and Dukes of France (the region around Paris is still called Ile-de-France), before founding a kingdom and a royal dynasty. He would have addressed his freemen in his own Northern dialect. The protracted dispute over who owed fealty to the other and the changing modes of warfare obliged the rulers of England and France to rely increasingly on the willing support of urban and rural commons. The result of this dependency was the recognition of a cultural and linguistic ascendancy. On the one hand, London, the surrounding counties and Anglo-Saxon English. On the other hand, Paris, the surrounding dukedoms and Frank langue d'oïl. Language and ethnicity became the basis of a new power structure. Christendom's mythic unity of clerical Latin and the universal Church of Rome was shattered. The energy of numbers was perceived and harnessed, held by the mental reins of words. A control that was to intensify with the arrival of paper and the printing press, from China via Constantinople, and the invention of movable metal types by Gutenberg. The permanence of the written word has long been recognized. Litera cripta manet. Printing was to multiply this permanence and the written word was to have an unprecedented impact on the human thought process. From the start, printing was competing with the monastic copyists. From the start, it involved entrepreneurship and mass production. From the start, the printed word showed a preference for the vernacular speech. In his classic book The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan studies how a new medium changes the way reality is perceived. From the "hot" media of talking, shouting, singing and chanting, to the "cool" medium of the printed page read in silence, from hearing to seeing. The Athenian contemporaries of Plato were probably all literate. But under the Roman Empire and, consequently, in the Middle Ages writing was a specialized craft. And reading (deciphering) was practiced out loud for an audience. Printing broke what had become a carefully censored monopoly held by the clergy. The result was a radical transformation of society. Common people were reading for themselves and imagining the sounds and their signification. And, as much and more than the content, the form of the new medium was installing a new world order. The Greeks and the Romans had been there before. McLuhan sees a chain of cause and effect going from the phonetic alphabet and literacy to the phalanx and the legion. The letters of the alphabet are all different, but each has its precise place in the written word. And, notwithstanding the first and the last or their frequency, each individual letter is equally essential to the whole. The poster, the handbill, the printed page in general with its perfect margins accentuates this impression. A motley crowd of equals joined together by language. The letters lined up in a rectangle are a representation of the citizen army. And, as the sequence of letters depends on the idiom used, their assembly depicts the nation. The loose oral bonds of medieval Europe acquired the permanency of writing. And the language used was imposed by the centre of power. Latin was replaced by French for all official documents in 1539, by a royal ordinance of Francis I. Four years earlier, Henry VIII had declared himself head of the Church of England. This was nation building by absolute monarchs, reducing vassals to mere courtiers and annexing their semi-autonomous territories. Central control was then reinforced by imposing uniformity. One religion, one language, one kingdom, such was the end that justified the means. The ancient Celtic tongues were all but annihilated, while Occitanie, the land of troubadours and amour courtois, was dragooned and its inhabitants sent to the galleys or the gallows. Religion was often the pretext but absolute power was the goal. The Divine Right of Kings is not in the bible. Though annointed, the Old Testament monarchs had at best a tenuous mandate from the heavens. Their legitimacy depended on decorum, success in war and peace, and the general well being of their subjects. Similarly, Greek and Roman citizens had opposed tyranny in writing and in acts. As printing made this known to a widening public, the status quo seemed ever less tenable. In Protestant England, Bible reading led to the Puritan movement and, ultimately, to constitutional monarchy and the rule of parliament. In Catholic France, where the Bible was proscribed, the belated Enlightenment referred back to Athenian democracy and republican Rome. And, while they remained opposed, both nations were convinced that their particular social model was universal. Monotheistic and humanistic values can both be perceived as identical for all mankind. The struggles against despotism, in London and in Paris, had drawn their inspiration from different sources. The puritans had striven for a New Jerusalem, whereas the Enlightened referred to the Graccus brothers rather than the Maccabees. Both, however, had consented to colonial empires, showing thereby that their ideals were only ideas. Spreading the word, or the light, justified every conquest, as though Divine Right had simply been transferred from the monarch to his subjects, or, more precisely, to the idealised fiction imagined by the first circle of power, Britannia and Marianne, the commonwealth and the republic. A new despotism emerged, based on ethnicity. The nations of Europe (Spain had flowered and faded, Germany, Russia and Italy were finding themselves) were the chosen few. Their power epitomized their destinies as models for humanity. The majesty of empire and the white man's burden were exposed as a farce at Ypres and Verdun, at Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and at countless other places in between. Europe had given a spectacle of such beastly barbarity that it defied the wildest imaginations, while the subject peoples of the world looked on, incredulous. If the master race could do that to itself, it was disqualified. The exemplary façade was like a Potemkin village, a pretty screen to hide the vicious squalor of its natural inclinations. The tight hold had to loosen, but it could not let go. Empires may be reduce to rubble but their foot prints are too deep to be obliterated. This time the heritage for humanity was a criss-crossing of frontiers drawn by colonial map makers. The arbitrary lines of a planetary cadastre that had been fought and haggled over, bought and sold. As in Europe, the national boundaries of a postcolonial world are the result of war and take no account of who should live together and who must be separated. Communities are divided by frontiers, or are obliged to cohabit with hereditary foes. The peoples of Europe had nationality imposed on them by force. They are slowly reclaiming the autonomy refused them for centuries. England, France, Spain, even little Belgium, are granting legislative and executive powers to their ethnic minorities. Ethnicity, however, is as tricky to handle as nitro-glycerine. It is only stable at very low temperatures. As soon as things warm up, the slightest shock can set off the most nightmarish processes. And, even if all stays cool, how can those nationals whose ancestors were Asian or African be identified as Welsh or Walloon? A history book for primary schools and its multiple revised editions was the standard throughout France and its colonies, for at least half a century. It began by the celebrated phrase, "Nos ancêtres les Gaulois ". This mythic Gallic ancestry was hammered into heads across the empire, because of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and the subsequent loss of Alsace and Lorraine. These pseudo pre-Roman forbears |
