The Problem is Civil Obedience

This is terrific - Matt Damon, a lifelong friend of the American historian and activist Howard Zinn, who died in January 2010, reads excerpts from a speech Zinn gave in 1970 as part of a debate on civil disobedience.

And our topic is topsy-turvy: civil disobedience. As soon as you say the topic is civil disobedience, you are saying our problem is civil disobedience. That is not our problem.... Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience.

How the FBI Tried to Destroy Progressive Movements

Screening of COINTELPRO 101, hosted by Newham Monitoring Project and Stratford Picturehouse - Thursday 21 June 2012, 8pm

On 8 March 1971, activists from a group called 'Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI' broke into an FBI field office in Pennsylvania and stole over 1000 classified documents, which they sent anonymously to a number of American newspapers. Most refused to publish what these documents revealed: the existence of COINTELPRO (an acronym for Counter Intelligence Program), a series of covert and often illegal projects conducted by the FBI, who had spied on, infiltrated, discredited and disrupted a huge range of US political organisations included anti-Vietnam war protesters, Native American groups and especially the Black Panther Party.

But by 1976, what had been initially ignored by the mainstream media had been investigated by the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the 'Church Commission'), which concluded:

Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that...the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.

The exposure of COINTELPRO revealed, in the words of Noam Chomsky, "a program of subversion carried out not by a couple of petty crooks but by the national political police, the FBI, under four administrations... aimed at the entire new left, at the women's movement, at the whole black movement, it was extremely broad. Its actions went as far as political assassination." US government counter-intelligence agencies had sought to deliberately destroy these movements for self-determination and liberation for Black, Asian, and Indigenous struggles, as well as attack the allies of these movements and other progressive organisations. 

Although the programme was 'officially' terminated in 1971, widespread surveillance and 'intolerable techniques' have continued, both in the US and in Britain and especially since the start of the ‘War on Terror’. So too have tactics designed to disrupt the right to protest, such as the use of agents provocateurs, entrapment, the misuse of stop and search powers and the creation of secret databases on known activists.

On Thursday 21 June, Newham Monitoring Project is hosting the screening of a documentary at Stratford Picturehouse, which examines the history of COINTELPRO and its legacy. Claud Marks, the director of 'COINTELPRO 101,' is over from San Francisco and will join a panel to discuss the experiences of the 60s and 70s and what lessons we can learn for the present - particularly the intensive surveillance of campaigners and activists as part of the massive security crackdown planned for east London during this summer’s Olympics.

Tickets are available directly from Stratford Picturehouse, Salway Road, E15 1BX - box office number: 0871 902 5740

Anonymous Sources Raise Olympic Trial Balloon

I see that yesterday’s Guardian article claiming that the United States has raised serious concerns about security measures for next year’s Olympic Games has been rejected by the US State Department.

I’m not really that surprised, for in truth, it was always highly likely that during the Olympics there would be substantial number of overseas security personnel, including FBI agents “to provide protection for America's contestants and diplomats”, just as it was likely that we’d see the deployment of ground-to-air missiles to ‘protect London’. The fact that “the sponsors of the Games, including Coca-Cola, will have their own private security details” was an intriguing extra, but nevertheless, some of us living near to the Olympic site have been saying for several years that our community will effectively become a militarised zone from around May 2012.

What is perhaps most significant about the Guardian piece is its extensive use of unattributed contacts from within the security and intelligence establishment – “one security official” and a “well-placed Whitehall source” – and the eagerness of these sources to blame everything on the Americans. Rereading the article, the issues of ‘concern’ they raise, from the meddling of foreign agencies to restrictions on the scope of anti-terrorism stop and search powers and budgetary limitations, look very much like their own gripes, particularly as Britain’s securitariat is notorious for its turf wars and petty jealousies . What the piece also looks like is the raising of a trial balloon for more money and more draconian powers (especially around stop & search) to see how much is shot down by politicians and public opinion (rather than the aforementioned naval missile batteries).

With under a year until the start of the Games, it feels like the process of soften us up for potentially sweeping new powers – in the name of Olympic security – has finally begun This may well mean more arguments for a ‘temporary’ reversal of the repeal of section 44 of the Terrorism Act, which allowed police to stop and search people with impunity, along with demands for a range of new laws to clamp down on public gatherings, ban protests and install a far more intimidating level of visible security in east London than many people may have perhaps realised.

The security establishment used to use the Murdoch press, especially the Sunday Times, as its vehicle for communicating its messages. The right, however, is already largely onside. That this story appeared first in the Guardian does tend to therefore suggest a more targeted audience, aiming to persuade liberals who are more likely to complain about infringements on civil liberties that draconian measures are necessary in the ‘special circumstances’ of the Olympics – and pointing the finger of blame at those terribly hawkish, ‘risk-averse’ Yanks.

Sadly, it’s a strategy that is likely to work – we only have to look at the meek acceptance of the Blair government’s aggressive legislation over a decade of ‘the war on terror’ to see how fragile the liberal establishment’s support for civil liberties can be during ‘special circumstances’. However, the implications for those living near the Olympic park remain genuinely frightening, especially if you are young, black, Muslim, poor and unable to afford to escape to Tuscany during July and August next year.

Condemning US Anti-Muslim Racism Is Not 'Anti-Americanism'

Writing yesterday in the Telegraph, the columnist Janet Daley flung a familiar accusation against the 'British liberal establishment': that of anti-Americanism.

Commenting on the Qu'ran-burning stunt planned by the previously obscure Pastor Terry Jones, Daley argues that the actions of "one publicity-crazed loony" has been used as an excuse "for casting America as a cartoon country whose heartland is dominated by bigoted know-nothings" and suggests that "the failure to make any serious attempt to understand the United States and its political culture is now more than smug, stupid and cynical (although it is certainly all those things)". She goes on:

The perverse ignorance which allows the British liberal establishment to caricature America’s obsessive concern with its constitutional integrity as simply a front for bigotry (note the BBC’s derisive treatment of the Tea Party movement) is beyond silly: it now presents a real threat to the common cause which the nations of the Enlightenment must make if they are to see their way through the present danger.

Apparently this "dominant anti-American mythology" is the result of all the optimists heading for America and all the pessimists staying in Europe, a debating point that surely carries a far greater claim to being 'beyond silly'.

There's always something strange about right-wingers, usually so ready to lambast victimhood as a hiding place for whingers and malcontents demanding special treatment, who nevertheless claim that the most powerful nation on the planet is itself a 'victim' - in this case of bigotry and ignorance. The problem with Daley's argument, of course, is that hostility to Islam and contempt for Muslims is not the preserve of "one publicity-crazed loony" and not even necessarily of the American right. Daley clearly hasn't read the extraordinary piece written by Martin Peretz of the New Republic magazine, a mainstay of America's centre-left liberal establishment.

In a vile attack, Peretz, who is the magazine's editor-in-chief and a supporter of the Democrats, claimed victimhood for the majority of his fellow (non-Muslim) citizens by insisting that "Americans are so fearful of being accused of bias" that they are too terrified to demonstrate against "Muslim or Arab interests or their commitments to foreign governments and, more likely, to foreign insurgencies and, yes, quite alien philosophies." Praising the racist anti-Islam parties of Europe, he says:

This is certainly not the situation in Britain and France, Germany and Denmark, Holland and Spain where a demo against the Arabs or the Pakis or the Algerians or the Moroccans or the Turks and Muslims more generally is a regular feature of the political landscape and where parties win parliamentary seats precisely because they campaign with Islamists and Islam as the targets.

I have no idea whether using the word 'Paki' has the same jarring cultural connotation in the United States as it does here, but the disgraceful racist tone is still clearly evident. Peretz continues with another, very familiar argument about Muslim hypocrisy, one commonplace amongst the 'Decent' left in Britain:

Why do not Muslims raise their voices against these at once planned and random killings all over the Islamic world? This world went into hysteria some months ago when the Mossad took out the Hamas head of its own Murder Inc.

But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

Yes, you read that correctly: the 'liberal' New Republic's editor is arguing that seven million Muslim-Americans are unworthy of protection from infringements on freedom of religion, speech and assembly, or the right to lobby for redress or over grievances, because they apparently can't be trusted. Imagine the uproar if the same had been said about African-Americans or Jewish-Americans. How, one wonders, can such arguments in a mainstream political journal be reconciled with Janet Daley's assertion that "reverence for and constant appeals to the Constitution are not an excuse for prejudice, but the precise opposite"?

America risks slipping into a dark period, one that it has experienced before against Jews and Japanese-Americans, when racism against a tiny minority of its citizens (Muslims make up just 1% of the population) becomes increasingly acceptable. Saying so is most certainly not some form of European anti-Americanism. That doesn't mean Europeans shouldn't show some humility and self-awareness about their own shortcomings, for the same attitudes are gaining popularity across Europe - I have serious doubts whether the still enouraging Pew Forum figures showing 62% of Americans favouring the right of Muslims to build places of worship in local communities would be matched by public opinion in the UK.

But the United States is still the world's principal military superpower with an assertive insistence on its global entitlement and privilege. There's no point pretending that US right-wingers, busy defending back home the entitlement and privilege of white, conservative, middle-class America by encouraging people to believe their President is a secret Muslim (nearly one-in-five Americans now believe this) are not having a negative impact - even on liberal 'opponents' like Peretz.

And precisely because they provide powerful ammunition to Muslim religious fundamentalists worldwide, they need to be vigirously condemned by the left, whatever the likes of Daley might say. Not just the antics of Pastor Terry Jones, but all anti-Muslim racism.

Who Says Americans Don't Do Irony?

This is near Warrensburg in the state of Missouri, just east of Kansas City. If only we'd seen the signs earlier...

Blog Award Sponsor Linked to BP's Spin Machine

At this time of the year, a number of bloggers begin lobbying their readers to vote in an annual award poll organised by the 'Westminster bubble' magazine Total Politics, hoping for a listing in one of the 'Top 100' categories and the chance to provide the magazine with some free advertising.

But how many of them have ever wondered about the poll's sponsor, which for another year is a company called APCO Worldwide?

APCO is a US lobbying company with extensive links inside the Washington establishment: its international advisory board includes former US senators, ambassadors and insiders like Reagan's chief foreign policy advisor Richard Allen and Anita McBride, former assistant to President Bush. Its clients include a number of the usual multinational companies, particularly in pharmaceuticals, alongside government contracts, but in June one of APCO's Vice Presidents, Anne Womack-Kolton, took on a rather tougher challenge - running media relations for BP.

As Think Progress reported:

Under threat of receivership and criminal investigation for its destruction of the Gulf of Mexico, foreign oil giant BP has hired a former top aide for Vice President Dick Cheney to be their new spokeswoman. Anne Womack-Kolton has been hired to be “head of U.S. media relations.” A rising star in the Bush-Cheney White House since the 2000 campaign, Womack-Kolton served as Cheney’s press secretary during the 2004 election before running public affairs in the Bush Department of Energy:

Another story in June, this time in the Wall Street Journal, reported that another of APCO's clients is Kyrgyzstan's Asia Universal Bank (AUB), which was run by the son of former President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who is accused of inciting ethnic violence against the country's Uzbeks. Maksim Bakiyev now faces charges of "abuse of office, misuse of government funds and money laundering". Earlier this year, the chairman of APCO Worldwide’s government relations team, former Democratic Senator Donald W. Riegle, joined AUB's board. On 7 April 2010, as the Bakiyev government fell, AUB officials approved international wire transfers purportedly for the bank's clients totalling about $170 million, or more than 10% of the country's banking assets. Kyrgyzstan's new leaders and its central bank believe a sizeable portion of this money is the plundered wealth of President Bakiyev and his inner circle.

None of this will matter, of course, to the right-wingers who make up the majority of Total Politics' readership and blog award voters. But I can't help wondering how many left-wing or Green bloggers will be prepared to simply overlook the blog awards sponsor, knowing about APCO's links to BP and the company's enrichment by dubious central Asian governments?

Fleet Street Feebly Waves Flag For BP (British Patriotism)

It's seems that BP really is too important to the British economy to fail, as I suggested last Wednesday - David Cameron has a phone call today with President Barack Obama and is expected to raise concerns about American condemnation of the company.

Meanwhile Boris Johnson, has accused the US of indulging in "anti-British rhetoric", whilst (lord help us) Piers Morgan has apparently said that Obama seems to be on "an absolute witch hunt" against BP's CEO Tony Hayward. As you can see from the front-pages above, the right-wing press joined in yesterday with its favoured brand of nationalist rhetoric. And never let it be said that at least one national newspaper journalist would miss out on using this evening's clash in South Africa between England and the USA as a convenient metaphor. Congratulations to the Independent for rising to the challenge.

The problem for Fleet Street's finest is that the Americans are right to criticise BP. As the excellent coverage in Mother Jones magazine over in the States has demonstrated, BP has received $93 million for its clean-up operation from the federal government but in spite of upbeat messages last month that it has "turned a corner", the area affected by the oil spill has continued to grow. Coordination of workers and equipment has often been disorganised, oil spill workers have not always been paid and there are only 60 cleaning up around the 1700 acres of Elmer's Island Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana, where BP's response to media scrutiny has been to gag those working for it and exclude journalists. Meanwhile, every positive prediction made by Hayward about the company's ability to cap the underwater well have proven false, as have its initial estimates that the leak is the equivalent of just over 5,000 barrels per day.

Then there is the evidence of how unprepared BP was for a disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Its Regional Oil Spill Response Plan, written in 2009, is riddled with inaccuracies and according to the environmental group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, "contains no information about how to cope with a deep water blowout".

For the sections of the press that are energetically defending a great British company (now only 40% UK-owned) from the restless colonials, the environmental consequences of BP's actions before and since the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig are bad, certainly, but not as bad as the impact on BP's share price and on British pension funds. I know we have come to expect a staggering lack of proportion from our newspapers, but this really is off the scale.

It is undoubtedly the case that the cosy relationship between the US government and the oil companies, especially during the Bush-Cheney years, has contributed directly to the disaster. Obama has done little to curb the power of Big Oil and planned to extend drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

But perhaps we should be grateful to the press and to idiots like the Mayor of London. The more righteous patriotic indignation is spouted in Britain, the greater the likely that the American public will grow even angrier about the power of the oil companies - and not just those whose loved-ones died on the Deepwater Horizon or whose livelihoods have been destroyed by BP's incompetence, misinformation and lack of preparation.

REVIEW: Smile or Die by Barbara Ehrenreich

What could possibly be wrong with having an optimistic outlook on life? Surely positive feelings are always better than negative ones? Not necessarily, says the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of the excellent Nickel and Dimed, whose new book Smile or Die I’ve been reading over the weekend. Not if it also means ignoring reality and abandoning critical thinking.

Conventional wisdom in the US may demand that Americans remain vigilantly upbeat – in the words of the old Bing Crosby song, that they ‘accentuate the positive’ and ‘eliminate the negative’ – but as Ehrenreich’s investigation of the phenomenal growth of the multi-million dollar US “positive thinking” industry argues, the same conventional wisdom is deeply conservative, profoundly self-absorbed and stifles realistic warnings about risk, often with calamitous consequences. Indeed, the message of the torrent of self-help books, life coaches, ‘prosperity gospel’ churches and motivational speakers may have been an important contributory factor in the global economic crisis triggered by the collapse of America’s sub-prime housing market in 2008.

Ehrenreich critique of “positive thinking” begins with the diagnosis of breast cancer she received ten years ago. Searching for information about the disease, she discovered “very little anger, no mention of the possible environmental causes and few comments about the fact that, in all but the more advanced, metastasized cases, it is the ‘treatments’, not the disease, that causes the immediate illness and pain.” Instead, “the cheerfulness of breast cancer culture goes beyond mere absence of anger to what looks, all too often, like a positive embrace of the disease” – an embrace where “dissent is a kind of treason”.

Urging patients to ‘stay positive’ went far beyond usefully helping patients to cope with the stress of their illness. Instead it placed an expectation and additional burden on them to constantly monitor their emotions, based on a completely unscientific belief that survival itself hinges on ‘attitude’. If the cancer spreads or treatment is less than completely successful, “the patient can only blame herself: she is not being positive enough; possibly it was her negative attitude that brought on the disease in the first place.”

Ehrenreich traces the roots of ‘positive thinking’ to a rejection of the harsh Protestantism of the nineteenth century and charts its rebirth in the growing consumer culture in the 1950s. However, its ideas have taken off as an industry in itself with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, where the notion that disease, poverty or unemployment are the essentially the result of personal ‘negativity’ is, of course, incredibly helpful to corporate America. This explains why companies often bulk-purchase copies of the self-help guides and DVDs to give to their staff, particularly to those who have either suffered or survived the latest round of redundancies. The message of the motivational ideologues is always good news, no matter how terrifying the circumstances: embrace ‘change’, see unemployment as an opportunity.

What is fascinating about Ehrenreich’s argument, however, is how all encompassing this has become. The efforts of corporations offering consumer products and easy credit matched (and often overlapped with) the huge growth of mega churches, where a message that ‘God wants you to have a new house or car’ and would provide as long as people believed enough was a powerful incentive for the poorest to become woefully indebted. The emergence of ‘positive psychology’ provided pseudo-scientific foundation to the movement. With the quarterly share price becoming the only measure of corporate success, the same blind optimism amongst senior executives created a culture of complete denial at all levels of the possibility that bad things could happen, to the extent that anyone raising questions or expressing doubts faced the possibility of losing their job. There had, of course, been downturns before, like the dot com crash, but to even consider the possibility that house prices would collapse led to the firing in 2006 of Lehman Brothers’ Mike Gelband, the head of its real estate division.

Within two years, as we now know, Lehman Brothers itself no longer existed.

Even after the near collapse of the banking system, ‘positive thinking’ remains deeply embedded. The message has been so culturally ingrained that the motivational speakers have continued to make a fortune from the disaster and there are plenty who are prepared to condemn critics of the banks for ‘talking down the economy’ (and failing, presumably, to maintain sufficient ‘positivity’). Ehrenreich’s book argues that the alternative to positive thinking is not despair, but realism and critical consideration of risk, something that is clearly lacking in the growing reluctance in America to accept the evidence for the impact of climate change. The instinct to remain upbeat and deny that bad things may happen, this time on a global level, isn’t likely to disappear overnight.

Brilliant though the book is, if I have one criticism of Smile or Die, it is the complete absence of arguably the most powerful motivational speaker of them all. Ehrenreich supported President Barack Obama’s election campaign, one built around a message of hope, change and individual responsibility that encouraged blind optimism (“Yes we can!”) in spite of the lack of any detail about how 'change' might actually be achieved. To have excluded him from a book that so thoroughly and accurately excoriates the Republican right seems like a deliberately partisan lack of critical thinking.

Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America & The World is published by Granta.

Breast Cancer Action’s Think Before You Pink campaign raises concern about the number of pink ribbon products on the market and calls for more transparency and accountability by companies that take part in breast cancer fundraising.

Learn to Speak Tea Bag

Planning on visiting the US anytime soon? Then make sure you are prepared for conversations with the teabaggers:

Fox News Favourite Arrested For Illegal Phone Tapping

Howard Zinn - The Passing of the People's Historian

The Boston Globe has confirmed the death of Howard Zinn, the socialist historian and activist who wrote the brilliant People's History of the United States. He was 87.

Zinn was hugely important to the political education of radicals around the world and there will inevitably be many tributes in the coming days (see these already by Though Cowards Flinch and Alex Snowdon) but the words of such an eloquent polemicist are probably tribute enough. There is an archive of interviews that Zinn gave for Democracy Now! that is worth visiting: meanwhile, here are some typically brilliant quotes:

I think people are dazzled by Obama’s rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president — which means, in our time, a dangerous president — unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.

From Howard Zinn's final article about the first year of the Obama presiodency, written for The Nation.

I wanted students to leave my class not just better informed but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence.

If the gods had intended for people to vote, they would have given us candidates.

Remember, there are some people who cannot be educated. They must be defeated.

There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.

Historically, the most terrible things -war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.

Truth has a power of its own. Art has a power of its own. That age-old lesson – that everything we do matters – is the meaning of the people’s struggle here in the United States and everywhere. A poem can inspire a movement. A pamphlet can spark a revolution. Civil disobedience can arouse people and provoke us to think, when we organize with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress. We live in a beautiful country. But people who have no respect for human life, freedom, or justice have taken it over. It is now up to all of us to take it back.

Any humane and reasonable person must conclude that if the ends, however desireable, are uncertain and the means are horrible and certain, these means must not be employed.

The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface.

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.

Hat-tip for image above: Antagonista

Just Walk Away From the Democrats

Drew Western in the Huffington Post had this to say before Christmas:

Somehow the president has managed to turn a base of new and progressive voters he himself energized like no one else could in 2008 into the likely stay-at-home voters of 2010, souring an entire generation of young people to the political process.

This from Ron Jacobs over at the excellent Dissident Voice offers a solution:

I can’t be emphatic enough, there is no reasonable reason to waste a dollar or a moment of your time campaigning for the Democratic Party. Barack Obama’s campaign based on false hope and promises and the subsequent reneging on almost every promise of change should be enough to convince any left-leaning or progressive person in the United States who voted for Obama in 2008 that the time has come to end this relationship for good and forever. Like the cheating and lying spouse that keeps asking for one more chance after you find them in bed with your enemy once again, there comes a time to end the relationship. Not only have the occasional moments of bliss and the crumbs that say I care become fewer and fewer, they are no longer enough. The denial so many left-leaning Americans have lived with in their relationship with the Democrats is causing more harm then it is worth. Walk away, close the door behind you and begin the work required to build a real force for progressive change in the United States.

Noam Chomsky Interviewed in Belfast

VBS’s Kate Albright-Hannah interviews Noam Chomsky in Belfast in October 2009.

Hat tip: Pickled Politics

Haiti - Shock Doctrine

A quick roundup on Haiti from today:

Newsweek has an interview with Naomi Klein, whilst an excellent article by Andy Kershaw in the Independent calling on the media - and the BBC's Matt Frei in particular - to stop treating the Haitain people like savages is matched by Indigo Gilmore in the Guardian on the myth of the country's lawless streets . The Times reports that the French have issued a formal protest to Washington after US controllers refused landing permission to a French Airbus with a field hospital on Saturday.

Meanwhile, whilst Reuters reports that the World Bank has announced it will waive payments on Haiti's debt for the next five years and the IMF has said its proposed loan would be interest free until 2011, an international petition has been launched calling for the immediate cancellation of Haiti’s $1 billion debt and that any emergency earthquake assistance is provided in the form of grants, not debt-incurring loans.

UPDATE

A Spanish newspaper, ABC, quotes Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez accusing the United States navy of launching a tectonic weapon capable of inducing a powerful earthquake off the shore of Haiti. No confirmation that this report is based on a reliable source - but the conservative newspaper's report is here in Spanish and here in English (a Google Translate version)

Spiritually Transformed Firearms Of Jesus

Over in the States, ABC News' Nightline programme has a fascinating story: that a company with a multi-million dollar contract with the US Department of Defense has been adding secret biblical references onto the sights for high-powered military rifles.

In August of 2005 Michigan-based company Trijicon started to provide up to 800,000 of its Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight (ACOG) to the U.S. Marine Corps. According to Trijicon, the ACOG is "ideal for combat due to its high degree of discrimination, even among multiple moving targets." At the end of the scope's model number has been added "JN8:12", a reference to the New Testament book of John, Chapter 8, Verse 12, which reads: "Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life." The ACOG is widely used by the U.S. military.

The company's Reflex scope, meanwhile, is imprinted with the marking "2COR4:6", a reference to the second book of Corinthians in the New Testament, Chapter 4, Verse 6: "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."

The discovery of these 'bible-coded sights' is now the subject of inquiries by the US Army and the Marine Corps and has been condemned as making it seem that the US miliary is engaged in a religious "Crusade" in Iraq and Afghanistan - and that the Jihadists are not the only 'holy warriors'. Which, it has to be said, is exactly the conclusion that many are likely to draw...

See the Military Religious Freedom Foundation's press release for more.

New Year Redux

... and this from Mark Fiore...

Ominous Music Heard Throughout US Sends Nation Into Panic

More brilliance from The Onion:

This Is What Democracy Looks Like

The notion that all Americans don't 'get' irony has always been very unfair, but at times its easy to see why this old cliché is continually recycled.

Take the word 'democracy', one that like 'freedom' the United States likes to claim as its own. This is in spite of evidence of outright fraud not only in the infamous circumstances of the US presidential elections of 2000 but in 2004 too. Neither is US interference in Latin American democracies simply a matter for historians: for example, since the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia in December 2005, the US government has sent millions of dollars in funds that have ended up in the hands of opposition groups linked to anti-government violence. Obama has continued the pattern of propaganda aimed at undermining the Venezuelan government and provided tacit support for the military coup in Honduras by seeking to legitimise its sham elections. Then, of course, there is the backing provided to the Karzai government in Afghanistan, despite overwhelming evidence of election fraud in 2009.

None of this is a contradiction to the U.S. Department of State, which on Thursday launched a global Democracy is… Twitter contest. It calls on Twitter users to tweet what they think democracy is, before 21 January, using the hash symbol #democracyis, with the goal of providing "a worldwide platform in which people can discuss the meaning of democracy and exchange ideas from diverse perspectives." There's even a prize, apparently.

One of the 'diverse perspectives' that the Hilary Clinton's department would probably prefer not to hear is that over the last ten years, the most powerful examples of what democracy looks like, from Latin America's democractic decade to worldwide anti-war protests, have been in direct opposition to US foreign and economic policies. That kind of makes the opportunity to provide a 140 character explanation why the US needs to stop lecturing the world on democracy almost impossible to ignore.

So what is democracy, really? I need to give some thought to my contest entry but my own memorable example, from February 2003, looks like this:

War Is Peace

Barack Obama accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, 10 December 2009:

"The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity and enabled democracy to take hold. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity."

This is probably unnecessary, but here are some examples of the US not seeking to impose its will:

Korean War 1950-53	Guatemala 1954	Indonesia 1958
Cuba 1959-60	Congo 1964	Vietnam 1961-73
Laos 1964-73	Cambodia 1969-70	Lebanon 1982
Grenada 1983	Honduras 1983-89	El Salvador 1980s
Nicaragua 1980s	Libya 1986	Iran 1987-88
Panama 1989	Philippines 1989	Iraq 1991 to present
Somalia 1992-95	Haiti 1994-95	Sudan 1998
Yugoslavia 1999	Afghanistan 2001 to present	Yemen 2000-2002

Clearly Obama's BA in international relations from Columbia University seems more limited than one would expect of an Ivy League institution.

Newham School Campaigns Against Death Penalty in US

The following article is by Roger Silverman, a teacher from Lister Community School in Newham whose father Sydney Silverman MP introducted the private member's bill that led to the abolition of the death penalty in Britain. It appears on the Independent website:

If it’s not ill-discipline, it’s falling standards or bullying. The welter of negative stories about schools in the national media is unremitting. As a teacher in an east London school I feel the impact of this every day, and frankly I resent it. Why? Because school students deserve a better deal than this. Let me give an example of what they are really capable of.

Last week, on 26th November, my school - Lister Community School, a multi-ethnic comprehensive in Newham, east London - played host to a 42-year-old American woman called Martina Correia. Of all things, she was telling an audience of 100 13-15-year-olds about how her brother Troy Davis is on death row in the US state of Georgia and how for 18 years she’s been campaigning for him to be released.

I teach English, so why should I be arranging talks like this? Because teaching students to be responsive and articulate is not something to be confined to four hours a week in a classroom. For several years my proudest achievement has been to help our students bring out a unique independent student magazine called CARBOLIC, which has unearthed priceless nuggets of subterranean literary and journalistic talent. This little publication, a work of real pride for our students, has earned plaudits from the likes of the Times Educational Supplement, and writers and poets including Benjamin Zephaniah, Michael Rosen and John Agard.

Last week's Troy Davis meeting belongs to a proud and unparalleled tradition. Previous events organised by CARBOLIC have included meetings with the former Guantánamo detainee Moazzam Begg, campaigners for justice for Zahid Mubarek, the Asian teenager murdered in his prison cell, and a protest rally against the invasion of Gaza, where both Muslim and Jewish speakers spoke in solidarity with the Palestinians. Up to 200 students have stayed after hours to crowd into these meetings.

Martina is an electrifying speaker who held her audience totally rapt. People who imagine typical modern schoolkids to be always sullen or de-motivated ought to have been there as these bright-eyed students were inspired by Martina’s account of her fight for justice for her brother - wrongly-convicted, she maintains, for a crime he didn’t commit. Not only that, but they also heard from De’Jaun, Martina’s 15-year-old son, an inspiring and funny speaker in his own right, who immediately struck up an amazing rapport with his peers in east London. Amnesty speakers talked about the global campaign to abolish capital punishment and Richard Hughes, the drummer from rock band Keane, added his own insights after visiting Troy Davis this autumn.

For me the meeting had a special poignancy. It’s 44 years since Britain had the death penalty on its statute book. I know, because it was my father Sydney Silverman who, following a lifelong campaign, finally brought the private member’s bill through parliament which abolished capital punishment. The son of a penniless refugee, as a young socialist war resister during the First World War he had refused conscription and been jailed twice for mutiny and desertion. In prison he had gone on hunger strike and witnessed fellow prisoners beaten to death and carted off for execution. He went on to become Britain’s first pro bono lawyer, earning the plaudit “our biggest enemy” by the Liverpool police for his defence of evicted tenants and victimised trade unionists. For 35 years he was a Labour MP, at a time when that still meant anything.

So, in a way, this special event at our school formed a sort of historical “loop”. Recent British history and a modern US debate over capital punishment came together in a dynamic session that textbooks could only hint at.

A full hour after the close of last week’s event, it was still impossible to drag our students out of the hall, as they exchanged stories and jokes with De’Jaun and the other speakers, queued up for stickers, and eagerly collected start-up packs for the new youth branch of Amnesty they’d decided on the spot to set up.

This is no small thing. As a former full-time socialist activist, I know that mass education was only won after bitter struggle, and as a current teacher of English I have never been able to separate education from the fight for a better society.

Who says young people today have a short attention span? Who says they are non-political? Give them something worth listening to, and something worth fighting for, and they'll soon surprise us all.

Roger Silverman is a teacher at the Lister Community School, in Newham, east London