Jane Fonda and those “killing machines”

The New Neo Posted on by

Michelle Malkin has a post entitled, “Baghdad Jane’s Bloviations,” excoriating our old friend Jane Fonda for these remarks (offered here in their entirety):

“Hanoi Jane” Fonda is claiming that ever since Vietnam, U.S. troops have been trained to commit atrocities against innocent civilians as a matter of military policy.

“Starting with the Vietnam War we began training soldiers differently,” the anti-American actress says in an email to the Washington Post.

Fonda claims she learned of the policy switch in “secret meetings” she had with military psychologists “who were really worried about what was happening to our combat personnel.”

One doctor, she insists, told her U.S. troops had been deliberately trained to be “killing machines.”

“This began,” Fonda maintained, “because the military discovered that in World War II and Korea, [U.S.] soldiers weren’t killing enough.”

“So they changed training procedures” to teach troops how to commit atrocities.

Still, the anti-war gadfly cautions, it’s important not to blame the soldiers themselves for carrying out war crimes.

Recalling the “Winter Soldier” hearings that she and John Kerry staged in 1971, Fonda lamented: “When you put young people into an atrocity-producing situation where enemy and civilian are commingled, where the ‘other side’ is dehumanized, we cannot be surprised.”

Anti-war vets now returning from Iraq, Fonda cautioned, should be listened to instead of being dismissed as “unpatriotic.”

“We have not learned the lessons of Vietnam,” she declared.

If you look at the trackbacks to Malkin’s post about Fonda, a lot of bloggers are pretty enraged at her Winter-Soldier-redux remarks. And rightly so; I count myself among them. But it’s no surprise that Fonda is singing the same old song, and trying to tie Iraq into Vietnam. I’ve already given my opinion on Fonda, here; so she’s not really the subject of this post. The subject of this post is the substance of her remarks.

Because, strange as it may seem, Fonda is actually correct–at least, about part of what she’s claiming. But a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially in the hands of Jane Fonda, and she draws the entirely wrong conclusions from that element of truth in her remarks.

What is she correct about? Well, she’s got this portion right: U.S. troops have been deliberately trained to be more automatic and focused about killing.

And, just as Fonda claims, “this began, because the military discovered that in World War II and Korea, [U.S.] soldiers weren’t killing enough.”

And indeed, they “changed training procedures” to correct that flaw.

But that’s where Jane parts company with the truth. She believes that this change is what led to atrocities in Vietnam. In fact, she’s got the thing quite backwards.

It’s certainly true that the phrase “killing machines” is a chilling one. But training members of the military to be more efficient and automatic at what they do is actually designed to make them more effective in a combat situation, to reduce psychological stress, and therefore to make atrocities less frequent, rather than more.

To understand this one must study the psychology of killing in war, a subject that until recently has been somewhat taboo (it’s certainly not anything I, as a psych major back in the 60s, heard anything about).

But, just as Fonda states, it was discovered during WWII that:

…according to the military historian S.L.A. Marshall, as many as 80 percent of the American infantrymen he interviewed failed to fire their weapons in combat. Marshall attributed the low ”fire ratio” to a mixture of poor training and a natural reluctance to kill. Even though his methodology has come under attack — critics say his numbers are exaggerated — his premise is generally accepted, and his book, ”Men Against Fire,” is read throughout the military establishment. After it was published in 1947, the military revamped its training to make G.I.’s more comfortable firing at humans; soldiers shot at targets shaped like people rather than at bull’s-eyes, for example. Today, Special Forces units make their training as realistic as possible, using pop-up targets with human faces, and setting off smoke bombs and small explosions to simulate the battlefield experience.

Dave Grossman, who spoke to me about ”the bulletproof mind,” has written about the hidden logic behind military training. In his controversial book ”On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society,” he writes: ”It is entirely possible that no one intentionally sat down to use operant conditioning or behavior modification techniques to train soldiers in this area. But from the standpoint of a psychologist who is also a historian and a career soldier, it has become increasingly obvious to me that this is exactly what has been achieved.” …

Indeed, Special Forces officers openly discuss the use of ”stress inoculation” — in which they are exposed to heartbeat-racing drills that raise their threshold for staying calm. It doesn’t mean Special Forces soldiers are immune to stress or the mistakes that stress causes, but it takes a lot more to rattle one of them than an old-time draftee….

Special Forces soldiers may develop cold-blooded reflexes, but they are also trained to know when not to kill. Targets that pop up during shooting drills include women and children who are not supposed to be shot. Being able to remain steady in combat doesn’t just mean you will be a quick draw; it also means that you will do a better job of deciding when to hold your fire. As Grossman writes of the calibration of aggression: ”This is a delicate and dangerous process. Too much, and you end up with a My Lai. . . . Too little, and your soldiers will be defeated and killed by someone who is more aggressively disposed.” Colonel King put it like this: ”Our guys have got to be confident in their ability to use lethal force. But they’ve got to be principled enough to know when not to use it. We’re not training pirates.”

Exactly how does one train soldiers to be effective and yet principled killers? Operant conditioning is part of it. The goal of this process of accustoming military members to killing in wartime is to reduce their psychological and physical stress/fear, in order to avoid panic. And why is this so important? Because it’s this stress/panic reaction (as well as a number of other factors, to be discussed in a moment) that can lead to the commission of atrocities in war.

The training, as described by the aforementioned Colonel Dave Grossman (an expert in the field), is as follows:

Many people think killing is a natural act, but Col. Grossman argues that it isn’t. He discusses how new and innovative pop up targets, video-based firearms training simulators, and Simunition®-based training are used to facilitate overcoming this innate resistance. These devices are then combined with high repetition to condition a correct response even in the face of fear….

Sometimes, a deadly force encounter explodes without warning, or a fight can be so fast and furious that there is no time to think about which technique to use and how best to employ it. To survive, you must do what needs to be done ”“ now. In order to react reflexively, yet responsibly, and continue to fight no matter how impaired, you must have a set of conditioned responses ingrained into your mind.

Range training must be repetitive. When a pop up target of a bad guy appears (stimulus), you shoot (response). Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, and then a pop up target of a man holding a cell phone appears, you don’t shoot. The more realistic the target is, the better….

Realistic settings and situations, combined with live fire training using Simunition rounds will dramatically elevate your adrenaline to replicate how a real situation feels. The more you engage in this kind of training, the lower your heart rate gets as you become “inoculated” against combat, just as a vaccination will inoculate against a disease.

Stress is part of battle, and can never be eliminated. But too much stress leads to combat fatigue and ineffectiveness, and can also lead to atrocities. Therefore anything that reduces it is likely to reduce atrocities, not encourage them.

In this article there is a very lengthy discussion of the ways in which stress can lead to both casualties and to violations of the rules of war–that is, atrocities and war crimes. Here’s a very brief summary:

Examples of misconduct stress behaviors range from minor breaches of unit orders or regulations to serious violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and perhaps the Law of Land Warfare. As misconduct stress behaviors, they are most likely to occur in poorly trained, undisciplined soldiers. However, they can also be committed by good, even heroic, soldiers under extreme combat stress.

The most famous example of combat stress being a contributing factor in the commission of atrocities was, of course, My Lai in Vietnam. My Lai was an occurrence with many elements that came together on one terrible day to cause a true war crime (in the following, I’ve taken the information mostly from this article, which is part of a military training course. Also, by the way, nothing in the rest of this post should be construed as an excuse for atrocities in general nor of Mai Lai in particular; it’s offered as an explanation only).

Some of the non-stress factors leading to My Lai were part of the Vietnam War itself: the emphasis on body counts, for example; confusing, complex, and poorly understood rules of engagement; the one-year rotation making for lack of cohesive and experienced units.

Enemy tactics were another factor implicated in the mindset that led to My Lai (some of this may sound familiar to those who’ve followed the current “war on terror”):

The Viet Cong conducted a guerrilla war that can best be described as “clutching the people to their breast.” They disguised themselves as civilians, hid amongst civilians, often fortified villages (with noncombatants being the vast majority of the population), and even used civilians of all ages and both sexes (little children, women, and old men, included) for logistical support, intelligence, and to plant mines and booby traps. There was widespread belief among American soldiers that the Viet Cong would use the type of civilians mentioned above to throw grenades. An expert on the Vietnamese army remarked that “the Vietnamese communists erased entirely the line between military and civilian by ruling out the notion of noncombatant.”

One could say that these strategies on the part of the Viet Cong seemed almost designed to call forth atrocities on the part of the Americans, if possible–and if one said that, one would probably be correct:

A member of the Viet Cong would later confirm that: “Children were trained to throw grenades, not only for the terror factor, but so the government or American soldiers would have to shoot them. Then the Americans feel very ashamed. And they blame themselves and call their soldiers war criminals.” It was not rare for small children to wave an American patrol into a booby trap or minefield. Additionally, the Viet Cong would use women and children as lethal ploys or ruses to lead Americans into deadly ambushes. Female Viet Congs were just as effective as their male counterparts, especially in sniper fire. In other words, the civilians were not exactly sitting out the war. American servicemen soon grew wary and suspicious of all Vietnamese.

Yet another huge factor was the terrible stress that C Company in particular, the unit involved in My Lai, had been under:

C Co. was fully deployed in Vietnam by the second week of December 1967. Task Force Barker was activated on 1 January 1968 to take over military operations in the Quang Ngai Province (a province that is overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Viet Cong). C Co.’s first casualty comes from a booby trap on 28 January 1968. The following month, on 25 February 1968, C Co. walked into a minefield. CPT Medina kept his head and, after three died and twelve suffered serious injuries, managed to lead his soldiers out. The soldiers of C Co. blamed the Vietnamese villagers nearby who failed to warn them of the minefield and booby traps.

1LT Calley, who had just returned from leave, saw the helicopters transporting the dead and wounded. 1LT Calley also noticed that, from that point on, the attitude of his soldiers toward Vietnamese children had changed — they no longer gave them candy, and kicked them away. According to one account, 1LT Calley could hardly restrain his satisfaction when he said “Well, I told you so.” Prior to the minefield incident, Task Force Barker had failed on two separate attempts to trap the 48th LF Bn in the Quang Ngai Province. During the second attempt, A Co. came under heavy automatic and mortar fire coming from My Lai 4., the second time in a month that Task Force Barker had encountered resistance from around the hamlet of My Lai. Its company commander is among the fifteen wounded, five other soldiers died.

After the minefield incident, C Co.’s esprit de cops and morale sagged and eventually vanished. They went down to 105 soldiers. To make matters even worse, on 14 March 1968, SGT George Cox, an NCO well liked and respected by the soldiers of C Co., an NCO with a reputation for looking after his soldiers, was killed by a booby trap while on patrol. Since arriving in Vietnam three months earlier, C Co. had suffered twenty-eight casualties, including five killed. All the casualties were caused by mines, booby traps, and snipers.

It takes little imagination to see that C Co. had been undergoing terrible psychological and physical stress–being blown up by mines and booby traps without ever getting a chance to fight back and engage the unseen and mysterious enemy, or to defend themselves. And, since in their minds they had reason to suspect the villagers were cooperative–or even instrumental–in the setting of those booby traps and mines, the stage was set for the massacre, which represented not a disciplined and cohesive force of trained fighting men, but an explosion of frustration and rage by a group that was highly stressed and poorly prepared for what they faced, as well as subject to weak and inadequate leadership.

The idea that training the military to be more automatic in its responses and less stressed in combat is hard to accept; it seems so cold and brutal. But, once understood, I think it’s clear that courses working towards that end, such as Grossman’s, actually lead away from more My Lais, not towards them.

The never agains of Vietnam: the last battle?

The New Neo Posted on by

I thought this comment from Nicholas on a previous thread was worth highlighting:

I think the home battle is between the two types of children of Vietnam…

Type “A” is “Never Again!” in the sense of never getting into [a] fight worth winning.

Type “B” (you and me) is also “Never Again!” — but in the sense of never getting into a fight we’re not willing to actually fight for the win.

It’s odd how we keep coming back–not to Bataan, but to Vietnam (and also, in a sense, to Watergate).

I wonder sometimes whether this need to go back, and back, and back, will die out only when the generation that came of age at that time (mine) finally dies out, or whether the scars in the national psyche will last well beyond the lifetime of myself and all the other tiresome, addled boomers.

I sometimes fear it will be the latter, if only because so many of the effects of Vietnam have become institutionally embedded: the leftward tilt of academia; the tendency to consider the military as marauding abusers and/or exploited victims; the kneejerk and automatic distrust of the actions, and even the basic motives, of the government and the Presidency.

However, it does seem that one trend that began in that era has effectively ended for the majority of the American public (at least, if polls are any indication). That’s the sense that the press is composed of heroic and crusading truthtellers.

But Type A and Type B of the “never agains” are duking it out mightily right now, over Iraq. I hope it’s the last battle between these two particular factions–the last battle of Vietnam.

Tom Lehrer: no more Mr. Nice Guy

The New Neo Posted on by

Roger Simon has a wish:

I wish Tom Lehrer were around to write new lyrics to his amusing song about our most distinguished university [Harvard], whose Islamic Studies department is now the recipient of a multimillion dollar donation from Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

Roger is referring to Lehrer’s “Fight Fiercely Harvard,” a song he wrote in an effort to create a football fight song that would be appropriate to the Harvard ambiance he knew (it’s funnier when you actually hear him sing it than it is in print).

Well, Roger, I am pleased to inform you that Tom Lehrer is still very much around. That’s the good news. The bad news (and I say this more in sorrow than anger) is that Tom Lehrer has gone off the deep end.

Many of you may not know who Lehrer is. That’s not a surprise, since he pretty much retired from public life after the 60s. Here and here are some introductions, for those of you who don’t know Lehrer’s work.

In the interests of full disclosure, I must admit that I was raised on Lehrer, from such a young age that his oeuvre probably wasn’t very appropriate for a growing child. My family had a good friend who’d been his good friend at college (Harvard, of course!) and so we all had a very early introduction to his work, before he became famous.

To a kid, Lehrer was not only funny, but dangerously “out there.” His early records, featuring songs that ripped such targets as the Boy Scouts and small town life and the celebration of an all-too-commercially- oriented Christmas, were outrageous for a child–or for almost anyone back in the 50s and early 60s, when it was easier to be shocking. Later on, of course, he became much better known for political satire, such as this one about Werner Von Braun (“a man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience”).

I could go on for some time on this subject of Lehrer’s songs, since as a child I effortlessly committed his entire body of work to memory (in fact, his song “The Elements, which listed the names of the chemical elements and put them to a catchy Gilbert and Sullivan tune, got me through a rather odd pop chemistry exam once.)

But, Roger and others, please take a look. Back in 2003, Lehrer gave an interview to a Sydney newspaper that showed that time has only not mellowed him, it’s transformed his rapier wit into a far more vicious blade.

Here are some selected quotes:

“I’m not tempted to write a song about George W.Bush. I couldn’t figure out what sort of song I would write. That’s the problem: I don’t want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them…”

When Lehrer talks in his still-boyish voice about vaporising Bush, he quickly adds: “And that’s not funny.” It’s hard not to laugh, nonetheless, if only because of the sudden change of tone accompanying the word vaporise…

He says he couldn’t do anything with the Israelis and the Palestinians “because I’m against everybody and I can’t take a side”. Nor can the man who found so many snappy couplets and delightful tunes in impending nuclear doom see any toe-tapping inspiration in September 11, the invasion of Iraq, or the thing he seems most keen to talk about the Columbia space shuttle explosion.

“They are calling it a disaster instead of a screw-up, which is all it was. They’re calling these people heroes. The Columbia isn’t a disaster. The disaster is that they’re continuing this stupid program.

One of the things I’m proudest of is, on my record That Was the Year that Was in 1965, I made a joke about spending $20 billion sending some clown to the moon.

I was against the manned space program then and I’m even more against it now, that whole waste of money. And so, when seven people blow up or become confetti, then they’ve asked for it. They’re volunteers, for one thing.”

Not the sort of sentiments that will get you air time in the US at the moment, he agrees. And clearly signs of a man who is getting highly passionate, yet who acknowledges such a condition is bad for humour. “That’s what happened to [satirist] Lenny Bruce. He got angry, and then he wasn’t funny any more. You have your choice there.”

Lehrer makes some interesting points about his brand of political satire:

The audience usually has to be with you, I’m afraid. I always regarded myself as not even preaching to the converted, I was titillating the converted.

The audiences like to think that satire is doing something. But, in fact, it is mostly to leave themselves satisfied. Satisfied rather than angry, which is what they should be.

The interviewer writes:

His favourite quote on the subject is from British comedian Peter Cook, who, in founding the Establishment Club in 1961, said it was to be a satirical venue modelled on “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War”.

Lehrer says you can’t satirise real evil. “You can make fun with Saddam Hussein jokes … but you can’t make fun of, say, the concentration camps. I think my target was not so much evil, but benign stupidity people doing stupid things without realising or, instead, thinking they were doing good.”

I’d really like to ask Lehrer why Saddam Hussein doesn’t come under the category of “real evil.” But perhaps it’s because Saddam is an enemy of the real real enemy, he-who-should-be-vaporized: George Bush.

It’s sad to see another mind deranged by BDS, especially when it’s the mind of Tom Lehrer.

[ADDENDUM: I hereby nominate the worthy Dr. Sanity as Tom Lehrer’s successor.]

Happy birthday, Kesher talk

The New Neo Posted on by

You might want to go over and wish Kesher Talk a happy fourth birthday.

Four years! I’m impressed. In blog-years (the opposite of dog-years), that’s practically ancient. And to think they still have the energy to blog after all that time–well, those folks at Kesher Talk are positively spry.

Neo and Neo: separated at birth?

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, perhaps not quite.

But, in honor of my recent renaming by Gerard van der Leun of American Digest, I thought I’d try my best to live up to my elegant new alias, moniker, appellation: Neo.

What’s with the black apple? Well, see, the apple is a face shield, a substitute for Keanu’s sunglasses, which admittedly are much sharper-looking. As is Keanu.

[ADDENDUM: For those of you who are aware of my technological shortcomings, I must confess that I did not photoshop this on my own. Credits go to my non-resident computer expert, my son.]

Bianca and Ramsey

The New Neo Posted on by

They seem like strange bedfellows: Bianca Jagger and Ramsey Clark. But I think something the former said can shed a bit of light on the dark and murky thought processes of the latter.

Writing in Friday’s NY Post, Amir Taheri reports on a speech given by Bianca at a Foreign Press Association meeting in London. Taheri writes that a prize was given to there to “Akbar Ganji, an Iranian investigative reporter who is on a hunger strike in Tehran’s Evin Prison.”

Taheri has learned from experience that ordinarily there are certain unwritten rules about awarding such prizes:

Together with several colleagues, I had been trying for months to persuade the Western media to take an interest in Ganji, a former Khomeinist revolutionary who is now campaigning for human rights and democracy [by the way, that sounds like another fairly dramatic “change” story, doesn’t it?]. But we never got anywhere because of one small hitch: President Bush had spoken publicly in support of Ganji and called for his immediate release.

And that, as far as a good part of the Western media is concerned, amounts to a kiss of death. How could newspapers that portray Bush as the world’s biggest “violator of human rights” endorse his call in favor of Ganji?

To overcome that difficulty, some of Ganji’s friends had tried to persuade him to make a few anti-American, more specifically anti-Bush, pronouncements so that the Western media could adopt him as a “hero-martyr.”… Would Ganji adopt [this] tactic in order to get media attention in the West? The answer came last January and it was a firm no.

The result was that Ganji, probably the most outspoken and courageous prisoner of conscience in the Islamic Republic today, became a non-person for the Western media. Even efforts by the group Reporters Without Frontiers, and the International Press Institute, among other organizations of journalists, failed to change attitudes towards Ganji.

Taheri was heartened when the Foreign Press Association decided to defy convention and to honor Ganji despite his refusal to denounce the evil Bush. But then, at the awards ceremony, Bianca Jagger turned out to be the speaker of the evening. And it was quite a speech she made:

She started by telling us about her recent trips to Tehran and Damascus, presumably the two capitals of human rights that she likes best, and how she had been told “by officials and others” that she and other Westerners had “no moral authority” to talk about human rights and freedom.

She then proceeded by saying it is all very well to remember Ganji but that should not prevent us from remembering “those held in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and all other secret prisons” that the United States is supposed to be running all over the world.

The rest of the little speech had nothing to do with Ganji and everything to do with the claim that the United States is drawing an almost sadistic pleasure by practicing torture. I couldn’t believe my ears.

There was this caricature of a “UNICEF ambassador” equating Ganji ”” a man who has fought only with his pen ”” with men captured armed in hand on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq.

So what does this have to do with Ramsey Clark? Well, Taheri had the following post-speech exchange with Jagger:

Having swallowed my anger, I gave the “UNICEF Ambassador” a piece of my mind. She seemed surprised. No one had ever told her such things, especially not in a polite society of dinner jackets and long robes. “Is Ganji the same as the alleged terrorists in Guantanamo Bay?” I asked.

“Well, yes, I mean no, I mean yes,” she mumbled. “But they are all prisoners, aren’t they?”

They are all prisoners, aren’t they? That’s it; that’s the key. In Jagger’s eyes, all prisoners are the same: victims.

And I think that is also the key to Ramsey Clark: in his eyes, the role of prisoner trumps all others, and immediately makes a person a victim, and therefore a figure of pity. If you’ve read my piece on Clark, you know the rest.

[NOTE: And, in a possibly doomed effort to head some of you off at the pass, this does not mean that (a) I approve of torture; (b) I approve of the Abu Ghraib goings-on that fell short of torture; or (c) that I don’t think Saddam should have a defense lawyer. It’s just about two things: (1) the PC need to denounce Bush in order to get any human rights kudos; and (2) the mentality that automatically assumes all prisoners are victims.]

Richard Pryor: vulnerability and bravado

The New Neo Posted on by

Reading the news of Richard Pryor’s death yesterday, I have to say that it surprised me—not that he died, but that he’d still been alive. He had been so sadly debilitated in recent years that it seemed remarkable that he’d lived so long.

And it was remarkable, considering the ways in which he’d abused his body and mind when younger, and the bad luck he had in also coming down with a vicious case of MS.

So, RIP Richard Pryor.

You may or may not have noticed (probably not) that in my old normblog profile, I answered one of Norm’s questions this way:

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > I liked Richard Pryor when he was in his prime, and also the classic early Saturday Night Live crew.

I thought this might be a good time to explain why I went out of my way to mention Pryor.

He was shocking, he was crazy, yes, but that wasn’t it for me. He was funny, really really funny. I haven’t watched any of his stuff in decades, so I don’t know how I’d react to it today, but at the time it came out, I thought his “Live in Concert” act was a work of genius.

What was it about Pryor, way back then? Well, first of all, he truly was groundbreaking. Even though he talked about race, and talked more raunchily and freely than I’d heard previous comics speak on the subject, it seemed that he was talking person to person, from the heart.

As Roger Simon (who knew him) wrote today:

…it was Richard’s remarkable humanity [the audience was] reacting to, his ability to express a people’s pain without rancor or anger, with a forgiving grace that finally defused all rage in laughter and put everything on a different, even strangely color-blind, level.

My sentiments exactly. Pryor sometimes (although not always, by any means) focused on race, but his routines transcended race at the same time. How did he do this?

If you watch those old Pryor routines, look at his eyes. I was always transfixed by them. They are the eyes of a brave but very very frightened child. An intense and very feeling one, as well, who seems almost too vulnerable to bear the world and its hardships, but is going forward nevertheless into every experience it has to offer.

I’m not saying Pryor was a child. But he kept within him, quite close to the surface (and somehow managed to express, despite his all-too-adult persona and his wild comic flair) the intensity of vulnerability and pain most people feel when very young. For the majority of us this pain and vulnerability lessens, or goes underground, with adulthood. But for Pryor, both always appeared all-too-easily accessible—much too easily for his own good.

And it was his own good that he seemed famously and carelessly unconcerned with, developing a legendary cocaine habit that probably was responsible for an early heart attack, as well as being the mechanism for his near-death (and probable suicide attempt) back in 1980.

In “Live in Concert,” Pryor isn’t just a comedian, he’s an actor. He becomes each character he talks about, using his body effectively to create the illusions of change. But what I considered the most memorable part of the evening was the portion of his routine (although it was anything but “routine”) about his heart attack. He was somehow screamingly funny (how could that be?) while at the same time deadly serious as he described what it had felt like. This had nothing to do with race, and everything to do with humanity.

As for his actual death from a heart attack at age 65–well, according to Wikipedia (so I suppose we need to take it with a grain of salt), Pryor:

…was brought to the hospital after his wife’s attempts to resuscitate him failed. His wife was quoted as saying that “at the end there was a smile on his face.”

It’s possible. If anyone could die with a smile on his face, it might just be Richard Pryor.

Lessons from the first snow

The New Neo Posted on by

No, it wasn’t technically the first snow. We’d had a few flurries earlier this fall. Once, a tiny bit had even remained on the ground for a few hours, before melting.

But yesterday was the first true snowstorm, signalling the start of the longest-seeming season in New England. No matter that the calendar says it’s a few weeks yet before the official first day of winter. It’s cold, it’s dark, it’s snowed over a foot: it’s winter.

When it snows like that—long, and hard—whatever you’d thought to do that day (unless it was to stay home and rearrange your closets) is off.

So the first lesson of the storm is: surrender. You’d planned to do this, and then that, and then the other thing? You needed to do this, and then that, and then the other thing? There was a party Friday night that promised to be fun?

Forget about it. Not gonna happen. Choose something else—something that doesn’t involve going outside at all.

And preferably something that doesn’t involve electricity. Where I live there are a lot of tall trees, and so in every storm—rain or snow—there’s a highly enhanced chance of losing it due to branches fallen on the power lines.

The second lesson of the storm, then, is: dependence. We rely on electricity for heat and light, for cooking, and for many kinds of entertainment (not to mention the solace, distraction, and demands of the computer). We are dependent on the snowplows that come to clear the streets–until then, there’s no getting out, except on foot. Because of old back injuries, I am dependent on the guy who comes to plow the driveway, and this time he came late and managed to pile up little mountains in front of the garage door rather than away from it. Hmmm, we’re going to have to have a little talk about that.

I didn’t think of still another dependence until, early in the afternoon, I got a call from the agency that provides my mother’s caretakers. “I bet you thought you’d be hearing from me” the head of scheduling said when I answered the phone. Stumped for a moment, I had no idea why she’d said that–till I realized that of course, the caregiver of the day was probably having trouble getting to my mother’s apartment, in which my mother is relatively helpless (relatively, not absolutely any more) without her.

Yet another lesson of the storm is transcendence through transformation. Every landmark covered in white, including the huge evergreens that bow low under its weight; the world is an unfamiliar place of stark, monochrome beauty. It won’t last long–the wind will blow the snow off the trees; dirt and dog pee will turn the snow on the ground mixed colors of gray, brown, and yellow. And it all will finally melt, revealing the straw-colored grass beneath.

But for now all this is in the future. For now everything is the whitest of whites.

For the children, since the snow came on a Friday, there’s the abounding and surpassing joy of no school. For skiers, the knowledge that soon they can hit the slopes and encounter what in New England passes (or substitutes) for powder.

Back when I myself was in school—on non-snow days, that is—I was fascinated by the group of people known at the time as the Eskimo, and now as the Inuit. I learned of their ability to live in a harsh and challenging winter landscape (so like New Englanders, only to the nth degree), their inventiveness, even the wide variety of exotic games they played.

So I was wondering now: what of the legend of the hundred—or three hundred–Eskimo words for snow? Well, it turns out there are quite a few, although certainly not hundreds. Here are the root words. No doubt you’ll find them useful:

Snow particles

(1) Snowflake
qanuk ‘snowflake’
qanir- ‘to snow’
qanunge- ‘to snow’ [NUN]
qanugglir- ‘to snow’ [NUN]

(2) Frost
kaneq ‘frost’
kaner- ‘be frosty/frost sth.’

(3) Fine snow/rain particles
kanevvluk ‘fine snow/rain particles
kanevcir- to get fine snow/rain particles

(4) Drifting particles
natquik ‘drifting snow/etc’
natqu(v)igte- ‘for snow/etc. to drift along ground’

(5) Clinging particles
nevluk ‘clinging debris/
nevlugte- ‘have clinging debris/…’lint/snow/dirt…’

B. Fallen snow

(6) Fallen snow on the ground
aniu [NS] ‘snow on ground’
aniu- [NS] ‘get snow on ground’
apun [NS] ‘snow on ground’
qanikcaq ‘snow on ground’
qanikcir- ‘get snow on ground’

(7) Soft, deep fallen snow on the ground
muruaneq ‘soft deep snow’

(8) Crust on fallen snow
qetrar- [NSU] ‘for snow to crust’
qerretrar- [NSU] ‘for snow to crust’

(9) Fresh fallen snow on the ground
nutaryuk ‘fresh snow’ [HBC]

(10) Fallen snow floating on water
qanisqineq ‘snow floating on water’

C. Snow formations

(11) Snow bank
qengaruk ‘snow bank’ [Y, HBC]

(12) Snow block
utvak ‘snow carved in block’

(13) Snow cornice
navcaq [NSU] ‘snow cornice, snow (formation) about to collapse’
navcite- ‘get caught in an avalanche’

D. Meterological events

(14) Blizzard, snowstorm
pirta ‘blizzard, snowstorm’
pircir- ‘to blizzard’
pirtuk ‘blizzard, snowstorm’

(15) Severe blizzard
cellallir-, cellarrlir- ‘to snow heavily’
pir(e)t(e)pag- ‘to blizzard severely’
pirrelvag- ‘to blizzard severely’

And now I do believe it’s time to go out and play.

Journalism: fact-checking and full disclosure

The New Neo Posted on by

Omri Ceren is none too pleased with the LA Times. After reading his post, I doubt you will be, either.

I haven’t read the full backup materials to which Ceren links (it’s a book-length Strategic Studies Institute document), just a summary and the excerpts Ceren offers. So I haven’t done my own independent analysis, and am relying on his. With that caveat, though, I must say that he makes an excellent case that the Times op-ed piece in question, by George Bisharat, is at the very least misleading.

Here’s Bisharat’s opinion piece from the Times. And here’s the SSI–US Army War College document on which Bisharat based his article.

Bisharat’s thesis is as follows:

To avert Iran’s apparent drive for nuclear weapons, concludes Henry Sokolski, a co-editor of “Getting Ready for a Nuclear-Ready Iran,” [the SSI report] Israel should freeze and begin to dismantle its nuclear capability…[T]here is an Achilles heel in our nonproliferation policy: the double standard that U.S. administrations since the 1960s have applied with respect to Israel’s weapons of mass destruction. Israel’s suspected arsenal includes chemical, biological and about 100 to 200 nuclear warheads, and the capacity to deliver them.

Initially, the United States opposed Israel’s nuclear weapons program. President Kennedy dispatched inspectors to the Dimona generating plant in Israel’s south, and he cautioned Israel against developing atomic weapons. Anticipating the 1962 visit of American inspectors, Israel reportedly constructed a fake wall at Dimona to conceal its weapons production.

Since then, no U.S. administration has effectively pressured Israel to either halt its program or to submit to inspections under the International Atomic Energy Agency. Nor has Israel been required to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The apparent rationale: Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of an ally are simply not an urgent concern.

Yet this rationale neglects a fundamental law of arms proliferation. Nations seek WMD when their rivals already possess them. Israel’s nuclear capability has clearly fueled WMD ambitions within the Middle East. Saddam Hussein, for example, in an April 1990 speech to his military, threatened to retaliate against any Israeli nuclear attack with chemical weapons 郂— the “poor man’s atomic bomb.”…

[The SSI report’s] suggestion is comparatively mild: Israel should take small, reversible steps toward nuclear disarmament to encourage Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

I’ve quoted Bisharat at some length in order to be fair to him. The thrust of his message to the casual reader who hasn’t read the SSI report (and my guess is that that would be close to 100% of his readers), is that the report recommended that Israel start disarming, and that Iran would then follow suit.

That is indeed a distortion of the report’s message. Here is a summary of the report’s recommendations, taken from the report itself (which, by the way, is almost totally about the threat posed by Iran):

To contain and deter Iran from posing such threats, the United States and its friends could take a number of steps: increasing military cooperation (particularly in the naval sphere) to deter Iranian naval interference; reducing the vulnerability of oil facilities in the Gulf outside of Iran to terrorist attacks, building and completing pipelines in the lower Gulf region that would allow most of the non-Iranian oil and gas in the Gulf to be exported without having to transit the Straits of Hormuz; diplomatically isolating Iran by calling for the demilitarization of the Straits and adjacent islands, creating country-neutral rules against Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty state members who are suspected of violating the treaty from getting nuclear assistance from other state members and making withdrawal from the treaty more difficult; encouraging Israel to set the pace of nuclear restraint in the region by freezing its large reactor at Dimona and calling on all other states that have large nuclear reactors to follow suit; and getting the Europeans to back targeted economic sanctions against Iran if it fails to shut down its most sensitive nuclear activities.

Ceren, who has apparently read the full report, states that what it actually recommends is this:

(1) The SSI report explicitly calls for Israel to “not yet dismantle” any nuclear capability, in direct and undeniable contrast to Bisharat’s claim that it calls for Israel to “begin to dismantle its nuclear capability”

(2) The report deals only with Israel mothballing fissile material – not nuclear weapons. This is a critical distinction – it’s the difference between Israel resting on its arsenal of 150-200 nuclear weapons in an otherwise de-nuclearized Middle East, and Israel weakening itself by dismantling its arsenal. The SSI report does not believe that Israel actually disarming would have any effect on Iranian motives for proliferation because Iran is not developing their arsenal for defensive purposes. They’re developing it to destroy Israel…

The report recommends that Israel trade its ability to produce future bombs for Iran’s ability to produce future bombs…There’s a very specific reason why the SSI authors do not recommend that Israel publicly dismantle its nuclear arsenal – because they think it would risk a regional nuclear war.

In Bisharat’s piece, he omits the details–and, as usual, the real story is in the details. If one reads Ceren’s piece first and then reads Bisharat’s, one can see that Bisharat does not actually say, point blank, that the report asks Israel to start disarming its nuclear arsenal, although one can also see that, if one has read only Bisharat’s article, a typical reader might easily come to the conclusion that that is what he’s saying.

Yes, Bisharat does mention that the report asks that Israel perform “small, reversible steps towards disarmament.” By this he no doubt is referring to the steps Ceren mentions, which involve mothballing fissile material and freezing a reactor, in exchange for a host of similar steps and obligations by other Arab and Moslem countries. But by failing to explain precisely what those steps asked of Israel are, and by not emphasizing the quid pro quo aspects of them, he is misleading the reader.

This is not an isolated case; it seems that, when op-ed pieces (or even straight news pieces) are written based on documents about policy recommendations, those recommendations are frequently distorted almost beyond recognition (remember Duelfer?). Is this a reading comprehension problem on the part of the writers and journalists composing these pieces? Or a writing problem? Or is it deliberate obfuscation?

What is the obligation of editors at newspapers such as the LA Times to fact-check these pieces by reading the original reports, and to see if the articles fairly represent what’s actually in them? And do those editors have a duty to fire journalists who consistently distort such reports? In addition, what should the editors’ standards be in choosing op-ed writers, and do they need to identify those writers in such a way as to clarify whatever agendas they may bring to their works?

When we see an op-ed piece by Pat Buchanan, for example, or by Jimmy Carter, we pretty well know what we are dealing with. We know their history and their political agendas, and we know how to weigh what they are saying, adding into the mix our own notions of how they might be predisposed to slant things to advance those agendas. If this piece had been written by the Iranian ambassador to the UN, for example, we’d know where he was coming from; likewise, if it had been written by his Israeli counterpart. That doesn’t mean either would be lying, by the way; it simply means they would be bringing known biases to the table. The reader should always evaluate each piece of writing on the merits of its own logic, of course. But knowing what biases to look out for can only enhance our ability to perform such evaluations.

So, it is in that spirit that I ask: who is Bisharat, and what are his political biases in the area of the Middle East and Israel? Does he have any? The Times identifies him as: is a professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco who writes frequently on law and politics in the Middle East. And this is, in fact, the case.

But if you read the entire bio to which I just linked, you’ll find the following:

[Bisharat’s] study of the impact of Israeli occupation on the Palestinian legal profession of the West Bank, Palestinian Lawyers and Israeli Rule: Law and Disorder in the West Bank, was published in 1989. In recent years, Professor Bisharat has consulted with the Palestinian Legislative Council over the structure of the Palestinian judiciary, reforms in criminal procedure, and other aspects of legal development.

Again, let me emphasize that such a history is not a disqualification for writing on this subject. Nor is being a Palestinian (or a Jew or an Israeli, for that matter), a disqualification; not at all. But we do need to know whether Bisharat is or is not an objective observer here; does he have a relevant political agenda?

With just a bit more research, one can easily come up with more information about a possible political agenda.
Here, for example, is a piece written in early 2004 by Bisharat for the extreme leftist periodical Counterpunch. It’s entitled, “The Right of Return: two-state solution sells Palestine short.” The opening paragraph:

It is a tragic irony that, more than 55 years ago, one desperate people seeking sanctuary from murderous racism decimated another–and continue to oppress its scattered survivors to this day. In 1948, about 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland, their land and possessions taken by the new Jewish state of Israel. This included the Jerusalem home of my grandparents, Hanna and Mathilde Bisharat, which was expropriated through a process tantamount to state-sanctioned theft.

One can only conclude that Bisharat does have a clear political agenda. The rest of the piece is basically an indictment of Israel and a call, not only for a two-state solution, but for a full implementation of the “right-to-return” for all Palestinian refugees and their descendants. And it’s clear that Bisharat considers himself one of those descendants, and wants to have that right; in fact, he uses the term “we” consistently throughout the article to refer to Palestinians desiring to return, and to Palestinians as a whole.

I have no intention in this post to debate the issue of the right to return, or the conditions under which the Palestinians originally left and under which they remained unassimilated refugees in other Arab lands. Suffice to say there are nearly innumerable websites that present each side of the question. You can (and perhaps you already have) certainly read them for yourself, taking into account the possible biases of their respective authors, and weighing the issues as best you can on the preponderance of the evidence presented, as well as its authenticity and veracity.

At any rate, my point in quoting the “Right of Return” article by Bisharat is merely to say that, clearly, this is not a disinterested and impartial party. Now, getting into identities and assuming bias on the basis of those identities is one of those slippery slopes that feel dangerous. So I’m not saying Bisharat’s objectivity is questionable because of his Palestinian origins or his cultural identity. Rather, it’s because Bisharat has the clearest of political agendas–one which he has stated unequivocally in a public forum–and it is a fairly extreme one.

Of course, Bisharat is entitled to his position about Palestine, the SSI report–or for that matter, anything else. He’s also entitled to state it, and the LA Times is entitled to print it, if they so choose. But, before publishing it, shouldn’t the Times check to see whether he’s presenting the report fairly? And doesn’t the LA Times also have a duty to inform us about Bisharat’s extremist agenda, rather than to present him as a neutral and disinterested party? Of course, if the first were true (we could rely on the Times to make sure his article was fair before they printed it) the second (identifying his agenda) would not be necessary–it would be irrelevant.

Literary leftists: H.G. Wells and the future (Part III)

The New Neo Posted on by

[Part I: Reading Lolita in Tehran]
[Part II: Hemingway and Dos Passos and the Spanish Civil War]

We all know H.G. Wells.

That is, we all think we know him. He’s the author of science fiction novels that seem to have been designed with the express purpose of being made into films. One might almost think he foresaw the invention of movies, too–but films were actually in the process of being invented when Wells wrote his most famous books–The Time Machine in 1895, and War of the Worlds in 1898.

When Wells was alive, he was considered by many to be far more than a mere spinner of tall tales, entertaining though those tales might be:

In his lifetime and after his death, Wells was considered a prominent socialist thinker. In his book The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek, one of the twentieth century’s most famous proponents of laissez-faire capitalism, held up Wells in particular as an example of the idealist intellectuals who believed in “the most comprehensive central planning” and could “at the same time, write an ardent defence of the rights of man”.

Wells became a socialist in 1903, when he joined the Fabian Society. But Wells (and the Fabians) was a gradualist; he did not believe in revolutionary socialism:

The Fabians believed that social reform could be achieved by a new political approach of gradual and patient argument, ‘permeating’ their ideas into the circles of those with power: ‘the inevitability of gradualism’ was an early slogan.

As Sidney Webb wrote to the Fabian Edward Pease in 1886, “Nothing is done in England without the consent of a small intellectual yet political class in London, not 2000 in number. We alone could get at that class.” The Fabians were especially active in London local government. The Fabians aimed for democratic socialism. Believing that voters could be persuaded of socialism’s justice, they sought to achieve reform by education, stimulating debate through lectures and discussions initiated by democratically accountable and educated professionals.

Wells flirted for a time with the Soviets, but he quickly learned that his aims and theirs were antithetical:

Although Wells had many reservations about the Soviet system, he understood the broad aims of the Russian Revolution, and had in 1920 a fairly amiable meeting with Lenin. In the early 1920s Wells was a labour candidate for Parliament…In 1934 he had discussions with both Stalin, who left him disillusioned, and Roosevelt, trying to recruit them without success to his world-saving schemes. Wells was convinced that Western socialists cannot compromise with Communism, and that the best hope for the future lay in Washington…In THE HOLY TERROR (1939) Wells studied the psychological development of a modern dictator exemplified in the careers of Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler.

Wells was clear-eyed enough to understand tyranny, and he had no use for it.

Why am I writing about Wells? He was a fascinating combination of amazing foresight about scientific discoveries, unrealistic idealism about human nature, and pessimism about that very same human nature.

I came across some astounding excerpts from his novel The World Set Free (written in 1914) in the November 28, 2005 issue of the New Yorker (yes, indeed; that magazine again!), which amply illustrate the first and last of these Wellsian characteristics. They are part of an article by Tom Reiss entitled “Imagining the Worst: How a literary genre anticipated the modern world,” about futuristic science fiction and its relation to reality.

In his book The World Set Free, Wells had the distinction of foreseeing nuclear war. His vision was not of some generalized and unspecified sort of apocalyptic weaponry; it was of nuclear weapons themselves, including an excellent description of a chain reaction. He even seems to have used the term “atomic bombs.”

Reiss writes:

When the book appeared, no physicists thought that an artificially induced chain reaction–which Wells called “the disease of matter”–was possible. Wells based the science in his story on research by the British physicists Frederick Soddy and Ernest Rutherford, both of whom dismissed the idea (Rutherford called it “moonshine.”) In 1932, however, Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist working at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, in Berlin, read the novel in a German translation. The following year, while on a walk in London, Szilard had an epiphany in which he conceived how a nuclear weapon might actually be built. He subsequently sent the first chapter of Wells’ book to Sir Hugo Hirst, the founder of British General Electric, accompanied by a letter in which he wrote, “The forecast of the writers may prove to be more accurate than the forecast of the scientists. The physicists have conclusive arguments as to why we cannot create at present new sources of energy…I am not so sure whether they do not miss the point.”…

The book’s main character is the nuclear chain reaction itself;: a phenomenon portrayed in such intimate and creepy detail that it seems almost like a living thing…The last part of the book takes place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where…[m]ost of the capital cities of the world were burning, millions of people had already perished, and over great areas government was at an end.

Wells had a solution for the problem, too–at the end of the book, nations abandon their nationhood and form a world government that ends war. It was the only solution that seemed possible to him; but even then, it came at the end of nuclear catastrophe, not in time to prevent it.

Here’s Wells in The World Set Free (and as you read this passage, remember that it was written and published at the beginning of World War I):

All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of energy that men were able to command was continually increasing…Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it; it was revolutionizing the problems of police and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city. These facts were before the minds of everybody; the children in the streets knew them. And yet the world still, as the Americans used to phrase it, “Fooled around” with the paraphernalia and pretensions of war.

I think it’s a truly impressive prediction in light of today’s talk of suitcase bombs. And of course there’s that phrase “any little body of malcontents;” Wells foresaw, if not the exact identity of Islamicist terrorists, then the general phenomenon of a small group of angry people gaining incredible destructive power and being willing to use it.

Wells was stellar at foreseeing the march of science and the problems to which it would lead. What he didn’t have was a solution–although he wanted to find one, and tried to find one. His idea of a world government banning war was certainly attractive, and is difficult to give up even today, when it has proven untenable.

The idea was a hope born of desperation. Towards the end of his life, Wells seems to have abandoned it to despair. It was his fortune–or misfortune; I’m not sure which–to have lived to see the end of World War II, and even the beginnings of atomic war (although not the out-of-control worldwide atomic war he foretold and feared). He died almost exactly one year after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while working on a project on the dangers of nuclear war.

In his preface to a 1923 edition of The World Set Free, Wells still retained hope, although it was fading and tenuous:

[T]he question whether it is still possible to bring about an outbreak of creative sanity in mankind, to avert this steady glide to destruction, is now one of the most urgent in the world. It is clear that the writer is temperamentally disposed to hope that there is such a possibility. But he has to confess that he sees few signs of any such breadth of understanding and steadfastness of will as an effectual effort to turn the rush of human affairs demands. The inertia of dead ideas and old institutions carries us on towards the rapids. Only in one direction is there any plain recognition of the idea of a human commonweal as something overriding any national and patriotic consideration, and that is in the working class movement throughout the world. And labour internationalism is closely bound up with conceptions of a profound social revolution. If world peace is to be attained through labour internationalism, it will have to be attained at the price of the completest social and economic reconstruction and by passing through a phase of revolution that will certainly be violent, that may be very bloody, which may be prolonged through a long period, and may in the end fail to achieve anything but social destruction. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it is in the labour class, and the labour class alone, that any conception of a world rule and a world peace has so far appeared. The dream of The World Set Free, a dream of highly educated and highly favoured leading and ruling men, voluntarily setting themselves to the task of reshaping the world, has thus far remained a dream.

Wells was both a man of science and a dreamer. But he was enough of a realist, I believe, to sadly renounce his dream in the face of evidence that it wasn’t tenable. His final book, World at the End of its Tether (compare that to the optimistic title of his earlier work, The World Set Free), was utterly despairing about the prospects for the future. My suspicion is that the abject failure of the League of Nations, the horrors of Stalin’s USSR, and the conflagration of World War II made Wells recognize that salvation did not lie in working class internationalism. That realization was probably nearly unbearable for him.

Would Wells have been encouraged or dismayed if he had somehow taken a time machine and found himself in our present world? I don’t know. But I like to think he’d be pleasantly surprised to find, at least, that the world has lasted as long as it has without total nuclear destruction. I also like to think he would have given up–albeit reluctantly–on the old but unrealistic dream of international bodies such as the UN solving the problem. I like to think he’d see a certain amount of hope in the spread–however tenuous–of democracy in areas of the world which have never seen it before.

And I like to think that he wasn’t so very prescient after all, and that his vision of destruction never comes to pass–and that, at least in that respect, life does not imitate art.