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Recent
Stories
April
23, 2003
Chris
Floyd
Desolation Row: Bush's Barbarians Teach
by Example
Marjorie
Cohn
Tax the War Profiteers
William
Lind
The Fourth Generation of Modern War
Dave Marsh
Nina Siimone: Freedom Singer
Binoy Kampmark
Malayasia's America: the War on Iraq
David Vest
Who's Looting Whom?
Standard
Shaefer
Super Imperialism: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/22
April
22, 2003
Edward
Said
The Appalling Consequences of the Iraq
War are Now Clear
Sam
Hamod
What's the Deal with This War?
Kurt
Nimmo
Shi'a Will to Power
Gary
Leupp
At last! The Necessary Evidence
Carl
Estabrook
Oblivious Americans: They Distort,
We Subside
John
Stanton
Iran's Reza Pahlavi: a Puppet of the US and Israel?
Ramzy
Baroud
What Else Hasn't Israel Told America?
Steven
Sherman
About That Cuba Letter
Wayne Madsen
Bush's "Christian" Blood Cult
Stew
Albert
Creep
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/22
Website
of the Day
Critical Media Literacy in Times of War
April
21, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
An Administration in Contempt
Gary
Leupp
Easter Thoughts on Liberation, Jesus
and Kanaka WaiWai
Roger
Witherspoon
Why Michigan Needs Affirmative Action
Uri Avnery
At Midnight, a Knock on the Door
Col. Dan
Smith
Early Lessons from Iraq
Jo
Freeman
After the Protest Comes Politics
Michael
Berry
The Friedman Absurdities
Gray
Brechin
Hang Black Banners: Mourning the Cultural Loss
Bob Riedel
The Taliban from Texas
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/21
April
19, 2003
Gary
Leupp
The Rape of History
Saul
Landau
Shop, Go to Church, Support Bush's
War, Wait for Armageddon
Michael
J. Fellows
Off With Their Heads: the Constitution According to Scalia
Pablo
Mukherjee
Roadmap to Resistance
Omar
Barghouti
Sharon's Bloody Beat
Anthony
Gancarski
Tony Blair: the Most Powerful Man in the World
Mickey
Z.
Animals: the Other Collateral Damage
Will
Potter
When Police Attack Journalists
William
MacDougall
America's In-Bedded Journalism
Neve
Gordon
Haunted by History
Adam
Engel
Wal-Mart and Peace
Dr.
Susan Block
Art Bombs: American Libertines for Peace
Poets'
Basement
Albert, Buono, Guthrie
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/19
Song of
the Weekend
Baghdad to Basra
April
18, 2003
Uri
Avnery
Operation "Syrian Freedom":
This One's Not About Oil
Jorge
Mariscal
"They Died Trying to Become
Students": the Future of Latinos in an Era of War and Occupation
Mickey
Z:
Coalition of the Unindicted: Only Losers Get Tried for War Crimes
Hussein
Ibish
Syria and the Road to World War IV
Reza Ladjevardian
Tarqeting Iran? Do It With TV, Not Cruise Missiles
Matania
Ben-Artzi
You Are Not Protecting My Son's Rights: a Letter to the President
of Israel's Supreme Court
Bruce Jackson
Jews Like Us
Joe
Allen
My Lai Revisited
Carl Estabrook
Support Our Euphemism
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/18
Website
of the Day
Meet the Victims of War
April
17, 2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Patriot Gore: the Fatal Flaws in
the Patriot Missile System
Joanne
Mariner
Looting Antiquity: the Legal Implications
for the Pentagon
Issam
Nashashibi
Zalmay Khalilzad: the Neocon's Bagman
to Baghdad
Wayne Madsen
Another Sign of the "End Times" for American Journalism
Robert
Fisk
The Army of Occupation
Boris
Kagarlitsky
Virtual Saddam Takes Aim
Biljana
Vankovska
A Personal View of Iraq: Where
is the Truth?
Dan Brook
Oil War: Fueling the Empire
Stanley
Heller
Bomb and Steal: This is What Privatization Looks Like
Tim Robbins
A Chill Wind is Blowing Through This Nation
Harold
A. Gould
Iraq After the War
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/17
Hot Stories
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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for More Stories.
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April 23,
2003
Who's Looting Whom?
A Tale of Two
Museums
by DAVID VEST
As the privatization of Iraq's treasures, both
cultural and hydrocarbon, gathers momentum, you can almost hear
the faint sound of a circle being closed. After all, it was predatory
looting, following upon slaughter, that filled most of the world's
great museums in the first place. Houston's museums are filled
with "loot" brought back by seismic teams from "remote"
places with petrochemical deposits. That museums important to
all of humanity should now be emptied by looters is undeniably
tragic and disturbing, but there is also something weirdly fitting
about it.
Donald Rumsfeld, snorting with contempt,
has complained that TV keeps showing us the same vase being stolen
over and over again. You could make that same complaint from
a far different angle. We've heard all about looting by Iraqis,
but there is precious little attention being paid in the media
to the looting being done or contemplated by the conquerors.
We won't see much coverage of the "souvenirs" our troops
will bring home. No, it is looting by the conquered that offends.
It is at least conceivable that some
of the Iraqi looters thought of themselves as preserving pieces
of their national heritage from an occupying army that had already
been observed lighting cigars in presidential palaces and putting
its feet on the furniture.
While the vases may all look alike to
Rumsfeld and Bush, who wouldn't know a Grecian urn from a spittoon,
the rich in general do like to spend money on building museums
and "collections." Corporations especially like to
exhibit this behavior. They think it marks them as "good
corporate citizens." Only when the "collections"
are stolen back from their original plunderers do we refer to
them as "loot."
Actually, what we see happening at the
Baghdad museum is merely the reflection of what Bush, Cheney
and their cronies have been doing to America's treasures since
the day they took (and I do mean took) office. While the law
looks the other way, they have been looting the treasury, plundering
the environment and destroying our heritage of civil liberties.
The drapery John Ashcroft hung over the statue of justice is
eerily similar to the shrouded furniture found in Saddam's abandoned
hang-outs.
In many cases, the Democrats stood by
and watched them do it, just as the Marines stood by and watched
the looting of Iraqi museums. In stark contrast to the prevailing
gutlessness, three members of Bush's own White House Cultural
Property Advisory Committee have resigned to protest the looting
of Baghdad's National Museum of Antiquities.
While American forces allowed Mesopotamian
civilization's past to be ransacked, as though to illustrate
Henry Ford's view that "history is bunk," other eyes
(as if in serene agreement) were on the future.
You do remember the future? Of course
you do. So does Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft.
The future, if you are Mr. Allen, was
when you were about 14 years old and preferred your hormonal
rages to come before you in disguised forms. Vibrating rockets.
Gibbous planets. Androgenous robots, supposedly incapable of
feeling but somehow inspiring dark white fountains of cosmic
gizm wherever they roamed.
When you can no longer imagine a future,
when even your beloved Star Trek can do nothing but recycle the
same dull Klingon grunting and Ferengi dreck, what is there for
you to do but wax nostalgic?
Allen's nostalgia for the future is inspiring
him to build a "museum of science fiction" in Seattle,
a gigantic monument to his own adolescence, a visible pledge
that, come what may, all memory of the precious future shall
not perish from the earth, to be utterly lost and forgotten.
Welcome to America the Collectible, where
nostalgia is overcoming us. Hell, you're soaking in it. While
Iraq is being looted of its past, our own country is turning
into a theme park we have to pay to visit. Vintage this, vintage
that. People are encouraged to miss the good old days, etc. etc.,
when you could get a real hamburger, blah blah, and they didn't
force you to drink Dietetic Pepsi with it.
We have reached the point where people
are even starting to miss Richard Nixon. Nostalgia for Nixon,
who could have predicted it? But why not? Compared to Bush, he
was the fucking Sun King.
David Vest
writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. His scorching
new CD, Way
Down Here, is now available from CounterPunch.
He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com
Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com
Today's
Features
Edward
Said
The Appalling Consequences of the Iraq
War are Now Clear
Sam
Hamod
What's the Deal with This War?
Kurt
Nimmo
Shi'a Will to Power
Gary
Leupp
At last! The Necessary Evidence
Carl
Estabrook
Oblivious Americans: They Distort,
We Subside
John
Stanton
Iran's Reza Pahlavi: a Puppet of the US and Israel?
Ramzy
Baroud
What Else Hasn't Israel Told America?
Steven
Sherman
About That Cuba Letter
Wayne Madsen
Bush's "Christian" Blood Cult
Stew
Albert
Creep
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/22
Website
of the Day
Critical Media Literacy in Times of War
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