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Today's
Stories
January 6, 2004
David Price
"Like
Slaves": Anthropological Notes on Occupation
January 5, 2004
Al Krebs
How
Now Mad Cow!
Kathy Kelly
Squatting
in Baghdad's Bomb Craters
Jordy Cummings
The Dialectic of the Kristol Family: Putting the Neo in the Cons
Fran Shor
Mad Human Disease: Chewing the Fat Down on the Farm
Fidel Castro
"We Shall Overcome": On the 45th Anniversary of the
Cuban Revolution
Gary Leupp
North
Korea for Dummies
January 3 / 4, 2004
Brian Cloughley
Never
Mind the WMDs, Just Look at History
Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan
The Wrong War at the Wrong Time
William Cook
Failing to Respond to 9/11
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
Robert Fisk
Iraqi Humor Amid the Carnage
Ilan Pappe
The Geneva Bubble
Walter Davis
Robert Jay Lifton, or Nostalgia
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft vs. the Left
Mike Whitney
The Padilla Case
Steven Sherman
On Wallerstein's The Decline of American Power
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Taiwan Hypocrisy
William Blum
Codework Orange!
Mitchel Cohen
Learning from Che Guevara
Seth Sandronsky
Mad Cow and Main Street USA
Bruce Jackson
Conversations with Leslie Fiedler
Standard Schaefer
Poet Carl Rakosi Turns 100
Ron Jacobs
Sir Mick
Adam Engel
Hall of Hoaxes
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert & Curtis
January 2, 2004
Stan Cox
Red Alert
2016
Dave Lindorff
Beef, the Meat of Republicans
Jackie Corr
Rule and Ruin: Wall Street and Montana
Norman Solomon
George Will's Ethics: None of Our Business?
David Vest
As the Top Wobbleth
January 1, 2004
Randall Robinson
Honor
Haiti, Honor Ourselves
David Krieger
Looking
Back on 2003
Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs
Stan Goff
War,
Race and Elections
Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac
Website of the Day
Embody Bags
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The Washington
Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season
December 24, 2003
M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics
of Empire
William S. Lind
Marley's
List for Santa in Wartime
Josh Frank
Iraqi
Oil: First Come, First Serve
Cpt. Paul Watson
The
Mad Cowboy Was Right
Robert Lopez
Nuance
and Innuendo in the War on Iraq
December 23, 2003
Brian J. Foley
Duck
and Cover-up
Will Youmans
Sharon's
Ultimatum
Michael Donnelly
Here
They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco
Uri Avnery
Sharon's
Speech: the Decoded Version
December 22, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray
to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks
Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?
Marjorie Cohn
How to
Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue
Kathy Kelly
The
Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"
December 20 / 21, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
How
to Kill Saddam
Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy
Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali
David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the
Islamic World
Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee
Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush
Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared
Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression
Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN
Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and
Latino Prisoners
Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler
John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane
Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful
Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race
Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie
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 Here
for More Stories.
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January
6, 2004
"Like Slaves"
Anthropological
Notes on Occupation
By DAVID PRICE
There are two political itches that most of us
feel compelled to scratch from time to time. These are the desires
to make political predictions and to compare present political
developments with the past. While predictions and comparisons
are both irresistible, they are oft doomed to failure. They
are irresistible because the past does offer an important guide-if
only prologue-to the present; but doomed because we cannot foresee
what unknown events may hijack present trajectories towards unseen
ends.
Innumerable scholars from Marx onward
have examined recurrent historical formations giving rise to
similar social relations and struggles-while detractors find
in these same historical details idiosyncratic events which they
claim disprove the existence of recurrent patterns. There are
no short-cuts out of such fundamental disagreements about the
nature of the world (other than berating the political baggage
of such detractors). But those who insist we see the world anew
with each political development undermine fundamental critiques
of power; and strands of postmodernist theory have strengthened
the posturing of salon-bound critiques reflecting on minutia
at the expense of confronting recurrent forms of oppression.
The trick is to ground one's comparisons on the transcendent
deep structures of economic relations while not being distracted
by the surface form of particular cultural and historical developments.
But such divinations are anything but straightforward, and these
comparative maneuvers always risk the compression of potentially
significant features. To get a taste of this just read the pundits'
predictions about the future of the Iraqi occupation now that
Saddam Hussein has been found: those who misread the importance
of this single man risk ignoring the larger infrastructural context
of these events.
The current occupation of Iraq leads
many critics to evoke comparisons with other military occupations-these
comparisons typically run the range of the occupations of the
Nazis, Soviets, Israelis, Cardassians and so forth. While none
of these comparisons are perfect fits, they can add an anthropological
angle of abstraction that help us view the present dangers through
a distant lens that can help us understand the nature of occupation.
A few weeks ago the FBI mailed me a supplemental
installment to the over 500 pages of FBI, CIA, DoD and Energy
Department documents I have already had declassified under FOIA
on American anthropologist Earle Reynolds. This small packet
included a transcript of a curious lecture given by Reynolds
in Okinawa in 1963. In reading Reynolds' critique of the Okinawan
occupation it is difficult to not think of the current occupation
of Iraq.
Reynolds was a physical anthropologist
who moved to Hiroshima in 1951 to work as a biostatistician for
the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission's Pediatrics Department studying
survivors of Hiroshima's A-Bomb attack. His work documented
the devastation brought to survivors and their offspring-detailing
physiological horrors that most of us would rather never confront.
This was heavy work, and the tragedy he studied and documented
on a daily basis deeply impacted Reynolds and his politics.
The FOIA documents previously released establish how Reynolds
came to see his work as contributing to a bureaucracy that calculated
future nuclear wars could be fought and won with acceptable levels
of death and disfigurement. He resigned his position on the
Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in 1956, and over the decades
that followed Reynolds used his 50-foot ketch, The Phoenix of
Hiroshima, to sail into the Bikini Atoll test area, to ferry
medical supplies to North Vietnam, to attempt illegal entry into
China and various other international protests for peace and
anti-nuclear issues.
In the winter of 1963 Reynolds came to
Okinawa to re-new his tourist visa-there are suggestions that
his renewal occurred in Okinawa to avoid the scrutiny he would
have received in Tokyo because of his increased activism. The
Okinawa Council for the Prohibition of Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs
sponsored a lecture by Reynolds entitled: "Various Problems
with Democracy On Okinawa." An Army Intelligence agent
recorded this lecture and later produced a transcription for
inclusion in Reynolds' FBI surveillance file.
Reynolds began with a discussion of the
1954 incident in which the Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon
was blasted with radiation during a US nuclear weapons test of
a 17 megaton bomb at the Bikini Atoll. The incident caused radiation
sickness and death among the crew, and raised Japanese awareness
that American military forces were indifferent to the health
impacts of their irradiation of people and fishing grounds.
The Lucky Dragon incident brought a widespread outcry from the
Japanese public and inspired Takeo Murata and Ishiro Honda to
create the campy Japanese golem of American radioactive repression:
Godzilla. Reynolds' discussion of the Lucky Dragon seems designed
to spark emotional reactions in his audience, much as a discussion
of the impact of depleted uranium on childhood leukemia rates
would in contemporary al Basrah. Reynolds reminded his audience
that America never apologized to Japan for the Lucky Dragon incident
and then launched into a critique of nuclear tests.
Reynolds remarked on the nature of Okinawa's
state of un-freedom. He described what he had seen of the American
occupation of Okinawa, with barbed-wire enclosures, American
seizure of land and the establishment of enclosed occupation
compounds. Reynolds' remarked that:
"I cannot think of one word to describe
the present status of the Okinawans. They are not Japanese;
they are not Americans; they are not even prisoners of war, since
even prisoners of war have certain rights. I have heard the
term slave applied to Okinawans. I know that Okinawans are not
slaves, but even slaves may hold important offices and may be
rich. It sounds strange to say so, but in the terminology of
anthropology, slave is the closest word to describe the present
status of Okinawans. I do not believe that Okinawans live in
a democracy. I do not know what Okinawa is, but I do know that
Okinawa is not a democracy and a military government at the same
time.
Okinawa is a military-occupied country,
and there is no democracy in a military-occupied country. Americans
are here to protect America. When it comes to government, governments
are very selfish and do not concern themselves with the welfare
of other governments and peoples.
When Americans leave Okinawa, what will
become of this country? This question troubles me. If there
is a war, there will be no problems, since there will be no Okinawa
and no people. There will be no Okinawa and no people on Okinawa
because Okinawa is a military base.
The American and Okinawan cultures are
very different, and the Okinawans culture has some good points.
The American culture has some good things to offer the world,,
and one of these is basic American democracy, which is a very
good thing.
American culture has a good beginning
and foundation; however,, the American are now going in the wrong
direction. Americans are generous when they can afford to be
generous. Americans talk often about courage, but they are really
very afraid. It is the nature of Americans to kill other people
in defense of their own security"
Reynolds closed with remarks on the strength
and importance of Ryukyus culture-stressing the importance of
indigenous culture in the face of hegemonic occupation.
It is hard to read Reynolds discussion of Okinawa's occupation
without overlaying "Iraq" where he describes Okinawa.
Such retro-glosses create their own illusions and misdirections,
but even with such obvious limits: there are glimmers of a parallel
universe of power relations.
It would be neat and tidy if the parallels
between Okinawa and Iraq were precise and endless, but they aren't.
Differences in natural resources, demographics, history and
culture are marked and significant; but there is a transcendent
continuity birthed by the culture of occupation that emerges
from the material forces of occupation.
Iraq is not Okinawa. Iraq is not Palestine,
Vietnam, the Matrix, or 1939 Poland: but America is occupying
Iraq in violation of international law and with a callousness
that draws any number of justified comparisons. Okinawa never
had the petrol-resources of Iraq, but the value of Iraq as the
site for a series of permanent U.S. military bases is comparable
to that Okinawa. We now know the answer to Reynolds' questions
and predictions of what would become of Okinawa once the American
occupation ended-though the 1972 administrative return of Okinawa
to Japan did not significantly reduced America's military presence.
Given America's aspiration for a permanent military base in the
Middle East (as well as increasing pressure from Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait and the Emirates to remove American military forces from
their countries) we can expect the establishment of an Okinawa-like
military base of operations in Iraq. While we don't know what
we will find in Iraq a dozen years from now we know what we won't
find if America stays the course: we won't find an Iraq that
has become "an example to all the Middle East of a vital
and peaceful self-governing nation" as promised by President
Bush on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq.
Reynolds' Okinawan observations on the
incompatibility of occupation and democracy have relevance for
Iraq and other occupations. The American occupiers have resisted
allowing democratic reforms in Iraq. As our tax dollars are
misspent securing oil reserves and surrounding villages in barbed-wire,
the White House and State Department are echoing that old line
from the neo-colonial chorus of the White Man's Burden that "they
are not ready for democracy." The lack of critical examination
of the antebellum logic of this assertion is remarkable and testifies
to the hegemonic power of the clone army of Thomas Friedmans
occupying the editorial pages of America's daily newspapers.
This stance betrays an un-American understanding of our Declaration
of Independence's radical insistence that the rights of democracy
are unalienable rights shared by an equal humanity, not rights
of privilege to those of some imagined more-evolved "civilization."
This racist justification is fobbed-off on us largely because
the Shiite majority would be difficult to manipulate and could
forge alliances with the Iran we have so quickly alienated during
the Bush years, and because Iraqi democracy would undermine the
Halliburtonization of Iraq's natural resources.
There are some contemporary anthropologists
studying military occupations. While some of this work follows
Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper's heroic example of confronting
and resisting occupations, most of these anthropologists are
facilitating occupation rather than challenging it-though those
anthropologists who work with occupiers most frequently rationalize
their actions as being to reduce dangers for those occupied.
Some anthropologists instruct the military and the State Department
about culturally sensitive means of occupation. To some this
is an open sore on the body anthropology-betraying a fundamental
abandonment of ethical commitments to serve populations anthropologists
study-while others see this as a way of serving these populations
by diminishing the dangers for those occupied by educating the
occupiers about the culture they are occupying. This latter
position recalls anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt's remark concerning
anthropologists working in the WRA detention camps for Japanese-Americans
during World War Two, that "this was a case of rape, but
the anthropologists who went into the War Relocation Authority
felt that they could serve to ameliorate this situation even
if they could not stop it." But rape is still rape, and
at some point the act of comforting victims while rape continues
transforms amelioration into abetment.
But such collaborations with military
occupiers are themselves manifestations of recurrent patterns
in anthropology. After all, some elements of the American occupation
of Japan and the Okinawa Reynolds found in 1963 were facilitated
(admittedly, in ways often exaggerated) by Ruth Benedict and
other anthropologists working for George Taylor at the Office
of War Information at the war's end.
David Price is
Associate Professor of Anthropology at St. Martin's College.
His book Threatening
Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI Surveillance of Activist
Anthropologists will be published this March by Duke University
Press. He can be reached at: dprice@stmartin.edu.
Weekend
Edition Features for January 3 / 4, 2004
Brian Cloughley
Never
Mind the WMDs, Just Look at History
Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan
The Wrong War at the Wrong Time
William Cook
Failing to Respond to 9/11
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
Robert Fisk
Iraqi Humor Amid the Carnage
Ilan Pappe
The Geneva Bubble
Walter Davis
Robert Jay Lifton, or Nostalgia
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft vs. the Left
Mike Whitney
The Padilla Case
Steven Sherman
On Wallerstein's The Decline of American Power
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Taiwan Hypocrisy
William Blum
Codework Orange!
Mitchel Cohen
Learning from Che Guevara
Seth Sandronsky
Mad Cow and Main Street USA
Bruce Jackson
Conversations with Leslie Fiedler
Standard Schaefer
Poet Carl Rakosi Turns 100
Ron Jacobs
Sir Mick
Adam Engel
Hall of Hoaxes
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert & Curtis
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