By Badri Raina | ZNet, March 7, 2009
Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page
I
Gandhi’s spectacles did go under the hammer in New York for money.
And money bought them back for India.
The Mahatma (great soul) wished the Capitalist class to perform as the “Trustees” of the nation’s interest.
As the premier Gandhian, Vinobha Bhave, was to write of Gandhi’s equation with Scientific Socialism: “Socialism wishes to advance by setting class against class, Gandhism by cutting across classes.”
Well, the whisky magnate, air-line and stud farm-owning industrialist, Vijay Mallya, may or may not be a trustee of the nation’s interest, but he surely has paid more than a million dollars to retrieve Gandhi’s spectacles etc.
India of our days may have only an archival interest in those spectacles, but Mallya surely will benefit. Frontline entrepreneur that he is, his vision is sharp.
He may even set up a huge enterprise cloning those spectacles for the global market. And global celebrities may pay for them more than handsomely as well. And then walk the ramp. Them spectacles could become the best business going.
The powers-that-be, after all the melt-downs, still devoted to neo-liberal economics, may claim during the forthcoming general elections that they did not let the Mahatma’s spectacles fall into foreign hands as mere commodity, even if it barely sees eye to eye with the eye that saw through those spectacles.
Asked once how any individual may assess and evaluate the rightness or wrongness of a course of action, the Mahatma responded with his famous talisman:
Ask yourself, he counseled, whether the thought you think or the action you contemplate has any benefit for the most wretched of faces you may ever have seen, and if the answer is “yes” know that you are in the right path.
As the number of Indian billionaires burgeons, and the gulf of inequity between the top and the bottom widens forever, it beggars the imagination to claim that the Indian state has been a devoted votary of that talisman.
But, on another front, what is a nation without heritage?
II
The word “memorabilia” is of course a dead give-away.
It connotes at once that he/she whose effects we gather and embellish is a memory, rather than something that impels our present thoughts and actions as a living force.
Yet, the more fallible we are, the more good memories and tough ideals we need.
Plagiarising the poet, Browning, a man’s memory must exceed his greed, or what is our striving for.
There are times when a twitch of memory may reclaim us from the excesses we are about to commit. It sort of lends a Kantian distance to our embroiled subjectivity.
And memory expanded manifold is after all what we call history-which is something quite distinct from a chronology of past events.
And it may even now be rather impossible to conceive of India’s modern history without reference to Gandhi, however we may work that hermeneutic. Indeed, the more he nags us, even if as an unpleasant toothache, the better our gastronomical functions might become.
III
To illustrate.
I was once asked by a perfectly well-intentioned bigot why I retained my commitment to socialist ideals, since socialism was now all a memory.
Naturally, this was several years before now, when Capitalism is fast on the way to becoming one as well,–a memory, I mean– and when Das Kapital is suddenly the highest selling work in Europe and Karl Marx on the cover of Time Magazine.
I sighed back in shamefaced agreement, but posed a question back to him as well.
You seem to me a very religious man, I said, and a good one at that. Of course, he shot back with glee, and some satisfaction at my percipience.
So, do you often go to the temple?
Ever since I was a child.
That would make it some fifty odd years. Yes.
Which means you must have seen god more than once?
Alas, that good fortune I haven’t had.
And yet, I said, you keep visiting the temple? I do, he answered with pride.
In other words, you continue your devotion to something you have never seen, but advise me to abandon that which I and the world have, and which continues to exist in one shape, colour, or form, here, there, and elsewhere?
That indeed was the end of that.
IV
Which is to say, Gandhi did exist and walk the earth, even when, as Einstein had prognosticated, many find it hard to believe that such a one did so.
And not only did he walk the earth, he led a movement for freedom from colonial oppression in a way that seems today to have come to invalidate other ways of seeking freedom from oppression.
So that the more violence the world sees and perpetrates, without finding the ends that the violence is directed to achieve, the more Gandhi stands validated.
The more that the glaciers melt and the oceans rise, and the forests disappear, and draught and flood answer the sophistries of the profit-maximizers, the more all of that underscores the simple truth that Gandhi enunciated: “the earth has enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed.”
The more that organized bigotry backed by big money takes mankind away from god, the more Gandhi’s pluralist pieties seem vindicated, warts and all.
I recall once asking a colleague at Madison, Wisconsin-a seventh-day Baptist he was– what he thought might be Gandhi’s fate on Judgment day, remembering that he was one man who carried the Sermon on the Mount everywhere he went, and sought to live Christ’s simplicities.
He took not a second to answer that he (Gandhi, that is) would be damned, not having been baptized.
Jesus, are you there, and listening?
Further, the more that technologies calculated to free us from necessity actually bind us into unfreedom, the more we may recall what Gandhi said of freedom:
ask not what you are free from, but free for.
V
So, what of the warts I spoke of-his insistence that politics without religious inspiration must be evil, that the varna ashram (caste system) has a point to it, barring the reprehensible practice of untouchability, that the cow be seen as a panacea for all kinds of economic and moral maladies, that the rich have a place just as the poor, assuming economic democracy to be neither achievable nor perhaps desirable, that the village system be preserved in perpetuity, and so forth?
Here is my simple suggestion: take a cue from the old man and mount a Gandhian movement against all those warts. And most others as well.
Indeed, what many Civil Society Movements in India and elsewhere in the world seek to do in resisting authoritarian pogroms against democracy and human rights, against the degradation of the earth, against social evils of one kind or another, against corruption in political systems, bureaucracies, and big business, against armaments, polluting agents, war, after all, owe not inconsiderably to the legacy that the Mahatma left the world.
It remains for us then only to extend the reach of that legacy to resist the irrational and uncritical impulse of idolatry, of the impulse to justify his work everywhere without warrant, and to use his methods to rid his legacy of those warts.
Something of course that must require us first to imbibe as much as we can the daring selflessness and freedom from distorting personal ambitions, the conviction to refuse sectarian purposes and self-righteous loathing of the “other”, or the belittling impulse always to claim credit that so informed his life and work.
Now that his spectacles are back with us, how about we recall what he said to the Nawab of Junagarh when he made a gift of those glasses to the fleeing Nawab: “these are the glasses through which I saw my way to the freedom of India.”
That seems far more miraculous than anything in Harry Potter.
The paradox is that while India strains to recover those spectacles, it is governments and leaders elsewhere who talk passionately of his vision.
Gandhi said to Louis Fischer that he regarded himself a Communist, and that Communists after Marx had greatly distorted the spiritual force of the latter’s work and vision.
Hey, as the meltdown deepens everywhere, how about we begin to see our way to marrying the two-Gandhi and Marx-and see where that takes us.
What is there to lose, more than we have lost?
________________________________________________________________
badri.raina@gmail.com
Saturday March 07, 2009 04:32
by 
War Crimes and Double Standards
March 8, 2009Robert Parry | Consortiumnews.com, March 5, 2009
New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof – like many of his American colleagues – is applauding the International Criminal Court’s arrest order against Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for his role in the Darfur conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.
In his Thursday column, Kristof describes the plight of an eight-year-old boy named Bakit who blew off his hands picking up a grenade that Kristof suspects was left behind by Bashir’s forces operating on the Chad side of the border with Sudan.
“Bakit became, inadvertently, one more casualty of the havoc and brutality that President Bashir has unleashed in Sudan and surrounding countries,” Kristof wrote. “So let’s applaud the I.C.C.’s arrest warrant, on behalf of children like Bakit who can’t.”
By all accounts, Kristof is a well-meaning journalist who travels to dangerous parts of the world, like Darfur, to report on human rights crimes. However, he also could be a case study of what’s wrong with American journalism.
While Kristof writes movingly about atrocities that can be blamed on Third World despots like Bashir, he won’t hold U.S. officials to the same standards.
Most notably, Kristof doesn’t call for prosecuting former President George W. Bush for war crimes, despite hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died as a result of Bush’s illegal invasion of their country. Many Iraqi children also don’t have hands – or legs or homes or parents.
But no one in a position of power in American journalism is demanding that former President Bush join President Bashir in the dock at The Hague.
Tortured Commission
As for the unpleasant reality that Bush and his top aides authorized torture of “war on terror” detainees, Kristof suggests only a Republican-dominated commission, including people with close ties to the Bush Family and to Bush’s first national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
“It could be co-chaired by Brent Scowcroft and John McCain, with its conclusions written by Philip Zelikow, a former aide to Condoleezza Rice who wrote the best-selling report of the 9/11 commission,” Kristof wrote in a Jan. 29 column entitled “Putting Torture Behind Us.”
“If the three most prominent members were all Republicans, no one on the Right could denounce it as a witch hunt — and its criticisms would have far more credibility,” Kristof wrote.
“Democrats might begrudge the heavy Republican presence on such a commission, but surely any panel is better than where we’re headed: which is no investigation at all. …
“My bet, based on my conversations with military and intelligence experts, is that such a commission would issue a stinging repudiation of torture that no one could lightly dismiss.”
In an earlier formulation of this plan, Kristof suggested that the truth commission be run, in part, by Bush’s first Secretary of State Colin Powell.
One of the obvious problems with Kristof’s timid proposal is that Rice and Powell were among the senior Bush officials who allegedly sat in on meetings of the Principals Committee that choreographed the abuse and torture of specific detainees.
Zelikow remained a close associate of Rice even after she replaced Powell as Secretary of State. And Scowcroft was President George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser and one of Rice’s key mentors.
It’s also not true that any investigation is always better than no investigation. I have witnessed cover-up investigations that not only failed to get anywhere near the truth but tried to discredit and destroy whistleblowers who came forward with important evidence. [For examples, see Secrecy & Privilege.]
In other words, bogus and self-interested investigations can advance bogus and self-interested history, which only emboldens corrupt officials to commit similar crimes again.
No Other Context
Kristof’s vision of having President Bush’s friends, allies and even co-conspirators handle the investigation of Bush’s crimes would be considered laughable if placed in any other context.
But Kristof’s cockeyed scheme passes almost as conventional wisdom in today’s Washington.
On Wednesday, the Washington Post assigned its satirical writer, Dana Milbank, to cover – and mock – Sen. Patrick Leahy’s Judiciary Committee hearing on his own plan for a truth commission to examine Bush-era abuses.
Milbank’s clever article opened with the knee-slapping observation: “Let’s be truthful about it. Things aren’t looking so good for the Truth Commission.”
The derisive tone of the article also came as no surprise. Milbank has made a cottage industry out of ridiculing anyone who dares think that President Bush should be held accountable for his crimes.
In 2005, when the Democrats were in the minority and the Republicans gave Rep. John Conyers only a Capitol Hill basement room for a hearing on the Downing Street Memo’s disclosures about “fixed” intelligence to justify the Iraq War, Milbank’s column dripped with sarcasm.
“In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land of make-believe,” Milbank wrote. “They pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags to make the whole thing look official.”
And the insults – especially aimed at Conyers – kept on coming. The Michigan Democrat “banged a large wooden gavel and got the other lawmakers to call him ‘Mr. Chairman,’” Milbank wrote snidely. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Mocking the Downing Street Memo.”]
Then, last July, Milbank ridiculed a regular House Judiciary Committee hearing on Bush’s abuses of presidential power. The column ignored the strong case for believing that Bush had violated a number of international and domestic laws, the U.S. Constitution, and honorable American traditions, like George Washington’s prohibition against torture.
Instead, it was time to laugh at the peaceniks. Milbank opened by agreeing with a put-down from Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, calling the session “an anger management class.” Milbank wrote: “House Democrats had called the session … to allow the left wing to vent its collective spleen.”
Milbank then insulted Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who had introduced impeachment resolutions against Bush, by calling the Ohio Democrat “diminutive” and noting that Kucinich’s wife is “much taller” than he is.
What Kucinich’s height had to do with an issue as serious as abuses of presidential power was never made clear. What Milbank did make clear, through his derisive tone and repeated insults, was that the Washington Establishment takes none of Bush’s crimes seriously.
So, Milbank’s mocking of Leahy’s latest initiative fits with this pattern of the past eight years – protecting Bush from the “nut cases” who think international law and war-crimes tribunals should apply to leaders of big countries as well as small ones.
The pattern of “American exceptionalism” also can be seen in Kristof cheering the application of international law against an African tyrant but suggesting that Bush’s offenses should be handled discreetly by his friends.
Journalist Murray Waas often used the saying, “all power is proximate.” I never quite understood what he meant, but my best guess was that Waas was saying that careerists – whether journalists or from other professions – might have the guts to take on someone far away or who lacked power, while ignoring or excusing similar actions by someone close by with the power to hurt them.
That seems to be especially true about Washington and its current cast of “respected” journalists. They can be very tough on President Bashir but only make excuses for President Bush.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
Share this:
Tags: Darfur conflict, illegal invasion of Iraq, International Criminal Court, Nicholas D. Kristof, President George W. Bush, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, torture, war crimes
Posted in Commentary, War Criminals | Leave a Comment »