News and Analysis 11/20/07

The FBI has reported that hate crimes in the U.S. rose 8% in 2006. Of 7,720 "single-bias incidents," 51.8% were "racially motivated." Hate crimes are a minor issue, however, compared to the fact that the income gap between blacks and whites has grown in the last 30 years. And it's no surprise: what is sometimes mythologized as a post-civil rights period of ascent towards equality has really been one of retrenchment and backlash. From tax-based school funding to the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush prison boom, the policy of the U.S. government toward black and brown America since the 1970s has been one of racial neoliberalism.

Since Hurricane Katrina, many have warned that white elites will attempt to 'whitewash' New Orleans demographically and politically as well as economically. Well, this is exactly what is happening. The NY Times reports that the New Orleans City Council is now majority white for the first time in two decades.

The death toll from the cyclone in Bangladesh last week, initially calculated at around 1,000, has now been lifted to 3,100. In the most affected districts of the country, according to CBC, up to "70 percent of of homes — mostly made of mud and bamboo — have been partially or completely destroyed, while an estimated 300,000 hectares of crops were lost in the storm." The death toll numbers are probably low, however. From Bangladesh's Daily Star: Pounded Patharghata now a valley of death

The official death count for the upazila, until Saturday, was 307. But even a cursory examination on the ground, witness reports, and simply from the number of mass graves, the death toll is well over 3,000. Cut off from the rest of the country, the upazila was accessible only by air or a long-route by the sea. The approach road was blocked by fallen trees and power-lines, preventing any relief vehicle from entering within a 40-kilometre area.The corpses were found wrapped in paddy sheaves on rice fields, emanating heavy stench of rotting flesh. Most of the bodies were found one or two kilometres from where their homes had been. Some bodies lay tangled on tree branches, some were lining the shore, some unidentified were just left to rot. Sidr rose out of the southern-most village of Patharghata -- Padma. First, it took out a five-kilometre stretch of homes that had been built on the slope of a long mud-baked embankment lining the border of the village. In its wake, a 20-feet tidal surge wiped out the entire community. The tide swept the houses and most of its inhabitants, carrying them two to three kilometres inland. Most of the corpses were found three, sometimes four villages away. In one small pocket, where a 100-metre stretch of the embankment was damaged by a previous flood, the tidal surge wreaked its greatest havoc.The tide broke through the embankment and channelled all of its awesome power through that 100-metre gap razing all of at least 50 homes in one clean sweep.The power of the deadly tidal surge is evident by the vanishing of the big mosque building, made of bricks and concrete, which used to occupy a section of that small pocket."We were about to run to the shelter my mother, my wife, two nephews, and I when we saw the great big wave. I looked up and up and there was no end to it. It swept us up and I grabbed the first tree trunk that I could find," said Delwar, one of the rare survivors from the ill-fated 50 homes. The rest of his family died. At least 135 corpses from that small pocket of Padma village were found till Saturday morning.Similar ghastly stories were found in three other villages along the Baleshwar river, in Rohita, Tangra, and Gouharpur. With at least 400 corpses from Padma village alone, the death toll was rising and no one knew or dared to imagine what it was.

Some 20,000 people protested the School of the Americas at Fort Bening, Georgia yesterday. The School of the Americas, like Philip Morris (now Altria), has renamed itself in an attempt to shed bad publicity. It now calls itself the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Indeed, the SOA is so notorious that 203 members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted to close it in June, but came up six votes short of the majority.

Run by the U.S. Department of Defense, the SOA has been a major conduit of state terror in Latin America since 1946. SOA graduates include a long rogues' gallery of military dictators and death squad commanders. To name just a few, graduates of the SOA are implicated in atrocities in Argentina (Leopoldo Galtieri, Roberto Viola), Bolivia (Hugo Banzer), Peru (Vladimiro Montesinos), Panama (Omar Torrijos, Manuel Noriega), Guatemala (José Efraín Ríos Montt), Honduras (Policarpo Paz Garcia, Aquilino Sorto Gonzalez, and many others), El Salvador (Roberto D'Aubuisson, Jose Guillermo Garcia, and many others). And this merely scratches the surface, as at least 63,000 Latin American military personnel have been trained in the school, averaging 700-1,000 students a year.

Even the most ardent ex-Cold Warriors, quick to defend all U.S.-backed state repression between 1917 and 1989 as a justifiable counter to "the threat of communism" (the same arguments are now recycled for Uribe, Mubarak, Musharraf, Arroyo...) cannot defend the documented slaughter of 200,000 Mayan indian civilians, the assassination of archbishops and trade unionists, the torture and rape of teenage girls and nuns.

Even if most Americans do not understand the role of the U.S. government in arming, training and funding thugs and killers in other countries, the populations of those countries do. And those on the recieving end of chemical weapons, coups, proxy invasions and nuclear weapons are likely to percieve U.S. foreign policy a bit differently from those who get their news from MSNBC, CNN and FOX.

Similarly, for most Kenyans the phrase "Mau Mau" conjures up savagery of the white British kind, rather than of the black African kind. Read more!

Gender, Race and the Logic of Extraterritoriality

The Blackwater bodyguards who killed 17 Iraqi civilians have been granted immunity from prosecution by the U.S. State Department. This is a symbolic middle finger from Washington to Nuri Al-Maliki, who recently said that Blackwater ‘must pay’ for the killings. Evidently, the State Department is no longer even trying to pretend that the Republic of Iraq is a sovereign state. (Kind of like the U.S. vis-à-vis South Vietnam circa 1963. And, in fact, some Washington insiders have made no secret about wanting to pull a Ngo Dinh Diem on Al-Maliki, and replace him with another puppet who really knows his place.)

It’s not just private U.S. mercenaries who get this kind of treatment. Just last week, Japanese police announced that they would not arrest U.S. marines who a 19-year-old Japanese woman had accused of gang-raping her. The police cited “inconsistencies” in her story. Perhaps they were hoping to avoid a repeat of an embarrassing 2005 incident in which, after 6 U.S. soldiers gang-raped a 22-year-old Filipina, the U.S. embassy refused to surrender the soldiers to the Philippine Department of Justice. Or how about Okinawa in 1995? At least the perpetrators in that case were tried in a Japanese court, and paid reparations to the family of the victim. But the U.S.-Japan Status of Forces Agreement continues to grant extraterritorial rights to U.S. soldiers in Japan, and there are similar agreements in place in the Philippines and dozens of other countries.

In July 2006, the Paraguayan National Congress granted U.S. soldiers immunity from prosecution until December 2006, despite claims that they are engaged in legitimate “anti-terrorism operations.” In 2004, the U.S. demanded that the U.N. Security Council pass a resulting granting war crimes immunity for U.S. peacekeepers on U.N. missions.

The consistent policy aim of placing U.S. soldiers, private mercenaries and even peacekeepers “above the law” in foreign countries perpetuates a two-tiered legal relationship between the U.S. and its satellites--a kind of Jim Crow jurisprudence. In this framework, there are rules for “Us” and rules for “Them,” and in practice the line between "Us" and "Them" is a sexualized and racialized one. These sexual and racial aspects can be seen at the macro-level of history, or the micro-level of day-to-day practices. At the broadest level, regarding sex, the connection between patriarchy and warfare (or prostitution, rape and standing armies) stretches back to the upper Paleolithic or to the Bronze Age, depending on who you ask. (For a review of the debate, see, for example, the work of Gerda Lerner and Joshua Goldstein.) Regarding race, at a similarly (though less) broad level, there is the historical continuity between the European conquest of four-fifths of the planet from 1492 to 1945 (one of whose episodes was the conquest of North America by white settlers and soldiers); and the global dominance (in economic, military and cultural affairs) of the biggest of the white settler states, the USA, from 1945 to the present. Despite the weakening of U.S. hegemony post-Vietnam, the resurgence of China, the upsurge in Latin America, and the tokenistic integration of women and people of color in the U.S. military, U.S. military power remains coded as both male and white. And the presence of 737 major U.S. military bases in 130 countries abroad is nothing if not an expression of power.

Conversely, it is not hard to find sex and race in terms like “client state,” “host country” and “native population,” much less “towelhead” and “Haaji.”

The expression of this patriarchal/white supremacist power is often blatant. As Katharine H.S. Moon notes in her study Sex Among Allies, since the Korean War “over one million Korean women have served as sex providers for the U.S. military.” And as Cynthia McEnloe (I am indebted to Moon’s study for the citation) writes in her book Bananas, Beaches and Bases:

“A military base isn't simply an institution for servicing bombers, fighters, aircraft carriers, or a launch-pad for aggressive forays into surrounding territories. A military base is also a package of presumptions about the male soldier's sexual needs, the local society's sexual needs, and about the local society's resources for satisfying those needs. Massage parlors are as integral to Subic Bay, the mammoth U.S. naval base in the Philippines, as its dry docks.”

This also applies to female soldiers on the bases. In her essay "Why the War is Sexist," Huibin Amee Chew reports the following statistics:

"Alarmingly, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, over 80 percent of recent women veterans report experiencing sexual harassment and 30 percent report rape, or attempted rape, by other military personnel [!]. Crimes of sexual violence by military personnel are shocking yet are institutionally ignored. Lawyer Dorothy Mackey of Survivors Take Action Against Abuse by Military Personnel reports that of the 4,300 sexual assault and abuse cases she is handling, only 3 were actually prosecuted. In Mackey’s own experience as a survivor of repeated sexual assault by military personnel, her attempt to press charges was opposed by the Department of Justice as a threat to national security."

The same hierarchies that render such statistics invisible in mainstream U.S. discourse also serve to distort perceptions of risk. Polls show that a majority of Americans erroneously believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9-11. Even if that were true, consider the trade-off: some 1.2 million Iraqis may have been killed since 2003 as a result of the U.S.-UK invasion, whereas 2,973 people died on 9/11. And it needs to be acknowledged that the logic tying 9/11 to Iraq is both sexualized (vengeful retaliation) and racialized ("Bin Laden and Hussein are both Arabs, so they might as well be in cahoots"). And, let's face it, only a worldview seriously distorted by white supremacy could see the loss of 1 million-odd Iraqi lives between 2003 and 2007 as a ho-hum affair, but the loss of 3,000-odd American lives on 9/11 as an occasion for profound grief.

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