Category: History

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300

Now that I’ve seen the movie, I have a one line review: the only things missing are the Nazi arm-bands.

Seriously, this a movie about how wonderful and beautiful and spiritually rewarding it is to die in warfare. We don’t know whether it’s good to die for a cause, because Sparta wasn’t really a “cause”– just a repository of mindless war and oppression.

In real life, the Persians were rather enlightened and well-regarded as far as empires go. They gave Jerusalem back to the Jews and ordered the Babylonians to return all the sacred relics to them.

In real life, Athens was worth fighting for: the prize of culture and learning and philosophy in the Greek world. Can you think of any Spartan philosophers, play-writes, or kings, other than Leonidas?

And it was the Athenians that inflicted the more significant wound on the Persian Empire with their naval victory at Salamis.

Oh, by the way, of course, the Spartans actually had an army of 5,000 other Greeks with them at Thermopylae. Didn’t notice them in the film, did you? There is a core of truth, in that 300 Spartans were a particularly effective force within the over-all effort– oh, what the heck, let’s just go crazy.

Before anyone rushes off to worship at the alter of “300” and rhapsodize about the beautiful, fit Spartans and how courageous they were to give their lives for freedom and liberty and their lovely, sexy wives, it ought to be remembered that Sparta was to freedom and beauty and life what Reverend Jim Jones was to true religion. The Spartans hated freedom, as much as they hated Athens, which did stand for freedom. Every soul in Sparta was expected to sacrifice his or her personal interests for the military good of the state, to the point of death.

If a soldier fled the battle scene, every soldier in his group would be executed for cowardice.

Yes, yes, let us duly note that compared to modern times, the notion of “freedom” in Athens in 400 BC was relatively constrained.

In Sparta, Plutarch tells us, when babies were born, they were tested for toughness and strength. If they failed the test, they would be abandoned on the side of Mount Taygetos.  (This, apparently, is a myth.)

Young boys were sent for military training by the time they were seven, at which time they might also enjoy the privilege of serving as the object of sexual gratification of an adult male.

It wasn’t all bad. Women in Sparta had many rights, including the right to hold property, and to go where-ever they pleased. Divorce laws were the same for women as for men. It seems that Spartan women were allowed to bring lovers into the house if they pleased, and to bear the children for other men– for the benefit of the entire commune. They dressed in short skirts, while the Athenian women wore bulky, long dresses and robes. This was remarkable for it’s day.

Sparta’s women were also educated, and they took part in athletic competitions, and there are accounts of Spartan princesses leading troupes into battle. Really, it’s kind of extraordinary. Why doesn’t someone make a good movie about this?

Sometimes these women would hold a contest to see who could take the most severe flogging. I am not making this up. More movie material.

So the primary benefit of the courage and fortitude of the Spartans is that they help preserve Athens from the potential ravages of the Persians.

In terms of Spartan art and culture, relics are conspicuously absent. It appears that it just didn’t exist.

If you could picture an entire society that operates and functions like an American college football team, complete with token curriculum and cheerleaders, you have Sparta.

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13 Old White Men

Someone recently observed that the people whose assumptions and dispositions got you into a mess are very unlikely to get you out. I can’t remember who said it. Maybe lots of people. But it’s true.

[According to BrainyQuote, Albert Einstein said it:  “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”]

But they’ll never stop trying, or insisting that they are the only ones who can get you out, because if what they tried at first didn’t work, they need to try the same thing harder, or more often, or faster. Or admit that they didn’t know what they were doing in the first place. When they come up with a “new” idea, it’s usually actually one of those variations: more, faster, bigger. Then you blame the messengers. Then you blame your own staff or soldiers or followers. Then you blame the people who never believed in your ideas. Then you blame the victims.

They will try again because they cannot admit they failed. They cannot admit that they failed because, given their inflexible mind-set, they cannot imagine that the mechanics of reality are different from the stopwatch in their pockets.

And so it is that George Bush proposes more troops for Iraq. More. Bigger. Faster. That will solve this intractable problem of Arabs hating our guts. That will keep every Arab male youth between 18 and 24 around the world from dreaming about killing an American.

Here’s a picture of the Iraq Study Group. Even the token black (Vernon Jordan) and token woman (Sandra O’Conner) are clearly actually old white men. Look at Time Magazine’s summary of their “qualifications”– they might just as well have announced, each is a veritable old fart of certifiable fossilization in corporate groupthink, and completely immune to new modes of thought, startling ideas, or innovative approaches. These are exactly the kind of people who got the U.S. into this mess. They’re “new approach” can only get the U.S. deeper into the mess.

Okay. So we have a group of old white men, mostly lawyers or businessmen, and they are going to look at the Iraq situation because it is a disaster for the U.S. and they are supposed to come up with some new approach that the current administration, including those mind-blowing non-conformists Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsveld, Richard Perle, Stephen Hadley, etc. hasn’t already thought of. And this is going to solve the problem.

I can look into my crystal ball right now and tell you what is going to happen. This Study Group will not be able to even imagine any solution that is not based rigorously on 19th century ideals about “American interests” and “global strategic importance” and democracy and free enterprise and stability and authority and rule of law and so on and so on, and they will recommend more of the same, faster, bigger, better.

If your son is serving in the U.S. army, be prepared to go into denial, for when he dies in the coming year you will be one of the ones who will know that it was for nothing, that it was for Bush’s vanity and Cheney’s megalomania or Powell’s indecisiveness. Your son or daughter will die in vain.

So we will endure until we can blame the Iraqis and get out.

But it is clear now to any sensible person that the U.S. cannot win any more in Iraq and the only reason they don’t leave immediately is because that would make a resounding statement to everyone about just how stupid this whole idea was in the first place.

Who was not in the Iraq Study Group?

1. an Iraqi
2. a non-American
3. a Brit or Canadian or German
4. anyone under 60 years of age.
5. any women. (O’Conner doesn’t count: she hasn’t been a woman in 20 years).
6. non-Christians.
7.  liberals.
8.  scientists
9.  journalists
10.  political scientists
11.  soldiers
12. Iraqis
13. Israelis…

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Anastasia

As if the story of the Russian Revolution and the end of the Romanov dynasty was not strange enough, we have the endlessly fascinating story of Anna Anderson who claimed to be Anastasia, and succeeded in convincing a number or relatives and acquaintances of the Romanov’s that she was the real thing.

The Grand Duchess Anastasia

Anna Anderson was found attempting suicide in a river in Berlin in 1920 and taken to a hospital. Two years later, one of the other patients, Clara Peuthert , after seeing pictures of the Grand Duchess in a magazine, identified her as the Grand Duchess Tatiana, one of Anastasia’s older sisters.

A former member of the royal court circle, Baroness Buxhoeveden, came to the hospital to see for herself; she immediately called her a fraud: she was too short to be Tatiana.

Anna Anderson subsequently identified herself as Anastasia instead. On the right are the pictures: Anastasia, then Tatiana, then…. a polish peasant girl who had gone missing about the same time Anna Anderson was found in the river, Franziska Schanzkowska. And then, Anna Anderson.

Anna Anderson (Franziska Schanzkowska)

Anna Anderson

So why did anyone ever seriously consider her claim to be Anastasia? Apparently some Russian émigrés had designs on the rumoured millions in gold Nicholas had supposedly shipped overseas to fund a government in exile. When they heard about Anna Anderson’s claims, they saw a route by which to lodge legal claims against the estate of the Romanovs.

I had never realized before how stunningly similar Anderson looked to Tatiana, at least, from the pictures, who was stunningly similar to Franziska Schanzkowska. Except, of course, for the height, the fatal flaw.

As it turns out, DNA testing eventually proved that Anna Anderson was, almost certainly, Franziska Schanzkowska. In retrospect, it is hard to even accept that she was merely deranged. If she was not Anastasia, she had to have worked on the job of impersonating her, especially when she had been put to the test so many times. She had to have had help– most likely Gleb Botkin, the son of the the Romanov’s family doctor, who also died at the hands of the Communists.

That doesn’t explain how she was able to fool so many people for so long. How she apparently acquired the ability to speak English and French. Or why she appeared to be three inches shorter than Franziska’s claimed height.

Does it need to be explained that so many people were taken in by her even though she couldn’t speak a word of Russian? But then, some supporters came to believe that she could at least understand Russian, and speak a few words of it. But then again…. the Romanovs, apparently, preferred English.

It is duly noted that Anna Anderson’s height and shoe-size did not correspond exactly to Franziska Schanzkowska’s, and that she showed many scars and injuries that Franziska, it is a alleged, did not have at the time she disappeared. I don’t find this evidence as compelling as the DNA evidence, but it has given ammunition to a small number of determined supporters to continue insisting that Anna Anderson really was Anastasia.

It’s a very strange story. If Anderson definitely resembled Franziska and Franziska bore an uncanny resemblance to Tatiana and Tatiana is Anastasia’s sister–

By the way, the movie, with Ingrid Bergman and Yul Brynner, is lame. But you can see why they tried: there is a brilliant movie in there somewhere.

Incidentally, I am intrigued by the number of contemporary writers, sympathetic to the Royal Family, who enjoy enumerating the vast list of atrocities some editorialists had ascribed to Rasputin, as if the obvious exaggeration meant he really wasn’t all that bad of a guy. Why? Because he only seduced a hundred women instead of a thousand? Because he was a lunatic but not a madman? Because he practiced extortion but not mass murder? The same applies to Nicholas II and Alexandra: the fact that they were not the monsters the Bolsheviks made them out to be doesn’t mean they were not appallingly bad leaders who, convinced they had been appointed by God, blindly and stubbornly led their own nation to ruin. Had Nicholas instituted a few reasonable, modest reforms at the right time, there would have been no Russian Revolution, and history would have been kinder to millions of people.

If you insist on believing that Anna Anderson might well have been the Grand-duchess… read this.

Interesting Trivia: the grand duchesses slept on the same metal cots wherever they traveled. They were folded up and taken with. Give me the simple life…. Interesting Trivia #2: the Romanov family mostly spoke English in the house, not Russian.

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The Peculiar Undeserved Rehabilitation of Marie Antoinette

How can you not root for poor, abused, exploited, and misjudged Marie Antoinette in Sofia Coppola’s fine film biography, “Marie Antoinette”? She’s nothing more than a naïve waif, an exuberant absolutist cheerleader and aesthete, with the charming hobby of playing at being a milk maid and gambling away her nation’s treasury.

It is a peculiarity of our times that historical judgments no longer consist of balanced assessments of all the facts and circumstances of someone’s life. Sofia Coppola does an extravagantly wonderful job displaying the spectacular indulgences of Bourbon court life, and she does a great job, in half the film, in dissecting the nuances of manner and gesture and style in the life of a 15-year-old princess newly introduced to the most dangerous and sophisticated social strata in Europe.

And then, suddenly, she draws back, evades, ignores, and her selectivity becomes transparent. We never see this Marie Antoinette contact royalist factions among the revolutionaries and try to arrange escape, and a counter-revolution, and civil war, all for the purpose of restoring her husband and herself to absolute power. We don’t see soldiers killing unarmed peasants. We don’t see the starving children of peasants, though we hear Marie’s children cry when the mob comes to move the royal family back into the palace in the city.

Marie Antoinette was hardly the monster her contemporary enemies portrayed her as, but she wasn’t this callow, harmless teenager either. And that leads me to the second failing of this film: no young woman, given the power that she had, could have survived court life as long as she did without developing the ability to manage, direct, and command others, not necessarily because she wants to, or because she’s a bully, but because she is royalty in an age that genuinely believed that God had appointed one class of people to scrounge and slave and suffer and die in poverty, and one class of people to collect almost all the wealth they created and rule over them.

We almost never see this Marie Antoinette do what princesses and queens do: order people about, dismiss them, communicate her wishes. We see her frolicking in her lovely, pastoral gardens, and we overhear a few snippets about the outlandish costs, and she cavorts with her attending ladies like a school girl, but Coppola never shows us the Queen of France exercising her will, and the people around her reacting to the immovable force of her preferences, her desires, her tastes.

We see her innocently imitate a milk-maid, but the servants who actually do the work of gardening and maintenance are all cheerful and picturesque.

The process of rehabilitation is easy. No one is a perfect monster, or, as in this case, perfectly trivial. It doesn’t strike me as particularly significant that, once France began to fall apart, we find evidence of Marie Antoinette dressing less extravagantly, and refusing more diamonds, or that she was a decent, loving mother, or that she had her charities.

Or, pity her grace, after her arrest and the death of Louis:  “some of the guards going as far as blowing smoke in the ex-queen’s face”.

But it is striking to me how this kind of historical revision seems to overcompensate. Louis XIV was an incredibly incompetent monarch, and France’s ruling class did almost everything possible to bring about a revolution by creating absolutely intolerable conditions for the poor and middle classes, while indulging their own tastes for unbelievable extravagance, and financing a war in America.

And, contrary to “Marie Antoinette”, both Marie and Louis conspired to arrange for an army from Austria to invade France, arrest and kill the revolutionaries, and restore the Bourbons to the thrown.   Had she carefully avoided association with the Austrian threats, and the attempt to flee to Varennes, she might have escaped.

There is no excuse for the omission of this central fact about the fate of Marie Antoinette.  She didn’t deserve to die– nobody did– but she was not innocent.

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How Dare You Not Stop Everything When I Tell You Too

When construction crews at the site of the World Trade Centre found some human remains in an abandoned manhole last week, some of the families of the victims were “outraged”. They demanded a stop to all construction. They demanded that the world stop turning and the winds stop blowing, until their grief has been adequately recognized by a monument 1150 miles high, made of pure titanium, and costing more than a billion, trillion, zillion dollars.

And all of the other suffering people in the world– your suffering is not important or significant or worthy of memorials or cash awards because, you are not me.

Nobody will publicly take on the families of victims of 9/11 because their shrieking outrage will be deafening and the media is terrified of displeasing them in any way, so they get to make demands like this with impunity, without blowback, without anybody calling them out.

And one thing the media would not dare to do is raise the question of why other victims of government malfeasance or neglect, like black families living in poor neighborhoods because of red-lining,  polluted by lead factories or dumps of asphalt shingles or leaky refineries, suffering outrageously increased rates of cancer and lung disease, — why do these families never receive even a penny of compensation for their suffering?

Yes, we do know.  And it is an outrage.

 

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Tony Blair Bans Military Parades, Medals, and War Movies

According to the CBC, Tony Blair is finally going to do something I can agree with. He is going to ban the glorification of terrorism. From now on, it will be illegal to “glorify”– that’s the word they use: “glorification”– acts of terrorism.

First of all, let’s describe terrorism. Acts of violence with the aim of achieving a political or social objective? Violence directed at civilians? Violence used to further a religious cause? Let’s get the definition straight, because we don’t want the British occupation of the Middle East at the close of World War II to be classified as terrorism, because then, I suppose, we would have to ban “Lawrence of Arabia”, or “Cast a Giant Shadow”. And we don’t want the first American gulf war to be classified as terrorism, just because

What about violence for the purpose of obtaining material benefits or economic power? Like the U.S. inspired coup in Guatemala in 1956? And does this mean that General Pinochet of Chile will really be arrested and held the next time he visits Britain? Is it unsafe for Mr. Henry Kissinger to spend a weekend frolicking in London? “In Flanders Fields” glorifies acts of violence by British and Canadian conscripts in World War I. What was so different about those acts of violence, to further the aims of the British government of the day? That they were deceived by an elected government into believing that killing Germans had some kind of divine purpose?

Military parades essentially glorify the capacity of the government to inflict violence upon various enemies of the realm. Good. Let’s ban them, along with “Top Gun”, “Ballad of the Green Berets”, and “The Dirty Dozen”. Can we arrest Oliver North now, since he supported and “glorified” the activities of the Contras in Nicaragua when they were trying to overthrow the Sandinista government?

How about anyone involved in the Reagan administration’s support of — holy cow!– Osama Bin Laden, and the insurgency against the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan in the 1980’s?

Bust Margaret Thatcher for her passionate romance with British military might in the Falklands?

It’s a magic bus. Let’s all get on board.

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Our Moral Decline

Would you be surprised to find that, in the view of this website, public morality is in decline? What? Again? It is? Oh my goodness! Whatever will we do?!

www.holybible.com is a fairly representative Christian commentary on our day and age, our times, our era, our epoch, our cultural milieu. (It even, of course, like almost every other “Christian” website in the world, has a pitch for your money on the main page, for a CD or worship of songs, though I should acknowledge that it’s a relatively low-key pitch for the genre).

Or, like me, would you be more inclined to think about just how shocked you would really be if you ever happened to stumble into a website somewhere, by a Christian journalist or pundit, that expressed the thought that public morality was improving?

Seriously. I thought about that a lot. Why would it seem totally weird to read a comment like, “it is clear that our society is less sinful now than it was 50 years ago”? But you know that you are never going to hear that from a Christian journalist or pundit. Not in your life.

If virtually every single Christian commentator thinks the world is getting worse, not better, they must be right– right? They can’t all be wrong.

But if society is in decline, when, according to these punsters, was it ever in incline? It must be declining from somewhere. It must have improved, from the barbaric ages, at some point. Say, the 1950’s. The America of Ozzie and Harriet and the Beaver.

Do they have a picture in their minds of rural villages dotted with white churches, milk-maids tending the cows and baking apple pies, young boys fishing at the creek, fathers mowing the hay?

That’s nostalgia. That’s sentimentality masquerading as social conviction. Even a cursory survey of the real historical record reveals that the 1950’s was actually an age of profound immorality. Racism was not only tolerated, it was accepted. Sexism was embedded in the infrastructure of the workplace. Materialism and conformity were promoted as “healthy” social values. Sexual abuse was ignored, if even reported. And it was the official policy of the U.S. government that, if necessary, 100s of millions of people would be killed to stop the Soviets.

You would think that Christians would be among the first celebrate the achievements of the civil rights era, or the accomplishments of U.N. peace-keepers, or the land-mine treaty, or democracy in the Soviet Union, the disarmament movement, equality for women, peace. Nyet. Doesn’t matter. Has no importance. The important thing is that 13-year-old girls use the f-word in movies. That’s it! It’s the end of times!

This is all a bit like the “values” argument conservatives love to wave around. We poor liberals believe in diversity, tolerance, progress, human rights, community, the environment, and equality. It’s such a shame we don’t have any values. Hey bubba– lets get a six-pack and some buckshot and drive your Hummer down the back roads of Idaho so we can shoot some helpless furry creatures and talk about values. Right, Bobby-Bob– like the sanctity of the right to own guns, and the sanctity of the right to pay our employees a low minimum wage? And the sanctity of the right to send people to jail for 99 years for stealing a cell phone? Damn right we have values…

I frankly believe that even if 90% of the population stopped fornicating and drinking beer and thinking kind thoughts about minorities and the poor and suddenly decided to go to church on Sunday instead… even if all of that happened, the Christian commentators would continue to tell you that the world is in moral decline…. because that’s what they do. That’s their bread and butter. That’s their mental frame-work, their cache, their frame of reference. They could not do without it, and they would not feel powerful and mighty without that cudgel with which to whack you in the face: listen to me, or you will burn in hell.

Why is it so illogical to constantly, consistently, always proclaim that public morality is declining? If it doesn’t already seem absurd to you, here’s why. Suppose that your salary were declining every year, year after year, without fail? How much salary, exactly, would you now have?

If you started at, say, $30,000 in 1970, and your salary declined continuously since then, you would have almost none of it left. But that’s silly. Nobody’s salary declines like that.

In the same way, public morality cannot be in constant decline. But have you ever heard any of these pundits that morality ever improved in any particular year? No, and you never will: where’s the money in that?

 

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Kennedy vs George W. Bush

Did you ever think you might get nostalgic for Ronald Reagan?

Not that I have anything but contempt for the Reagan administration. It was the most Hooveresque of governments, conspicuous in it’s cheery optimism and fanfare, and utterly devoid of compelling policy or leadership. But there was one thing Reagan had that Bush does not have: a sense of getting there, or moving along, of seeing ahead to something brighter and more satisfying than what we have.

Neither of them, of course, can hold a light to John F. Kennedy, who started the space program, the Peace Corps, and, reluctantly, provided federal support for the nascent civil rights movement. I say “reluctantly” not because Kennedy hesitated to support the goals of the civil rights movement, but because he felt it may be too early to engage in confrontation with the racists citizens and governments of the deep south.

Kennedy put the screws to the mob in a way never seen before or since, through his brother, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, who had to kick J. Edgar Hoover’s butt to get him moving on the issue. (The FBI famously denied that “organized crime” even existed.)

Kennedy articulated a vision of a future life that would be better for all Americans, more prosperous, but also richer and more satisfying. It was Kennedy that brought culture to the White House, inviting world-renowned artists, musicians, and writers. It was Kennedy who solidified American support for West Germany in the face of increasing belligerence from the Soviets. And it was clear that Kennedy was increasingly dubious of American involvement in Viet Nam at the time of his death– Johnson’s first official act was to rescind a Kennedy memorandum reducing the number of “advisors” there.

It’s not entirely an act of communal nostalgia when polls repeatedly show that Kennedy remains the most popular president of the 20th century. Conservatives sometimes like to claim that Kennedy’s policies were not all that “liberal”. That tells you how badly they wish he’d been one of “them”.

Now we have George W. Bush. Let’s compare.

First of all, Kennedy actually served in the military, on a PT boat, with obvious distinction. Bush didn’t even bother to serve out his National Guard deferment.

Both Kennedy and Bush were pushed into political careers and supported by their wealthy fathers.

When Kennedy screwed up. by permitting a weird CIA scheme to invade Cuba to go ahead (planned by the Eisenhower administration) — the Bay of Pigs disaster– he owned up to it immediately and apologized to the American public and took steps to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. Bush still won’t release the official report on why intelligence agencies–including the CIA– weren’t able to prevent the WTC attacks.

When confronted by pervasive, organized criminal activity, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy was relentless. He used every means at his disposal to attack the Mafia head on, deporting many of their leaders, and making numerous arrests and getting convictions. When confronted with pervasive, organized criminal fraud, George Bush Jr. looked the other way, and appointed one of their own to the government body entrusted with regulating stocks and commodities trading.

John Kennedy–reluctantly– federalized the National Guard and stood up for the civil rights of black students in segregationist schools and universities in the deep south. George Bush has been busy whittling away at our civil liberties from his first moment in office, but especially since 9/11. His administration has boldly asserted a policy of treating an entire race– Arabs– as criminal suspects.

John and Jackie Kennedy invited the leading lights of literature, poetry, painting, and music to the White House and celebrated achievements in the arts. When one of Laura Bush’s invited writers indicated he might not be in support of the war on Iraq, he was summarily uninvited.

Kennedy was articulate and smart and witty. George Bush Jr. can barely get through a single sentence without mangling a three-syllable word. You might have noticed he doesn’t seem as verbally clumsy lately as he used to be: his staff have learned to avoid three-syllable words.

When the Soviets began installing medium range offensive missiles in Cuba, Kennedy carefully and shrewdly managed to persuade the Soviets to withdraw them, without creating any new, simmering grievances. The confrontation was followed with the first negotiations for a nuclear test-ban treaty.

George Bush wants to put lasers in the sky to shoot down all the missiles that will come– and they will come, by god, in George’s world. In only three years, Bush has created or aggravated a thousand festering wounds.

Kennedy believed the role of government was to make life better for the average citizen. His space program reflected the dreams of Americans with vision, to initiate the exploration of space, the quest for new knowledge. George Bush Jr. wants the average American to be fearful, and he wants to require all students to pass standardized tests, that will reflect, of course, the lowest common denominator. And, of course, he sees space as a great location for those lasers.

Kennedy saw that the oil companies were receiving outlandish tax breaks on their oil revenues and tried to make the tax system fairer for the average American. George Bush wants to give the oil industry, and all big corporations, more of those tax breaks.

When confronted by terrorism, George Bush fled the White House in his private jet, until he could be sure he was safe, and then made macho speeches behind his bulletproof glass.

When confronted by threats of violence against him personally in the South, Kennedy traveled to Dallas to give a speech and tour the city in an open convertible.

Okay– well, we know how that ended.

Did you know that Richard Nixon was in Dallas on the day of the assassination?  And that Gerald Ford, future president, was on the Warren Commission that investigated the Kennedy Assassination?

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Iraq’s Debt

The New York Times reports that Iraq owes various entities about 60 to 80 billion dollars.

Who owes that money?

Iraq has been run by a dictator for 30 years. Saddam Hussein was never elected to power by free and fair elections. The vast majority of the citizens of Iraq had absolutely no voice in the government’s decision to borrow money. And what was the money borrowed for? Probably to buy weapons. Why did Saddam need weapons? To crush his own people.

So who owes the world 60 to 80 billion dollars? Saddam Hussein, that’s who. And when Saddam Hussein came to these banks and government institutions to ask if he could borrow some money and the banks said, how do we know you’ll pay it back, he answered, the people of my country willingly undertake to cover all of my debts, and the banks reply: but Mr. Hussein, you were not elected! And he didn’t get his money. Right?

So if you’re Russia or Citibank or France or Halliburton (which did more than $40 million of business with Iraq only a few years ago) or whoever the hell is owed that money, I guess you just sigh and say to yourself, “darn– if only Saddam hadn’t been deposed! Now we lost our money.”

Ha ha ha.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!

I’ll tell you what we are going to do. We are going to make the people of Iraq pay Saddam’s debt. It’s only fair. They live there. What would banks and credit agencies do if people didn’t repay their debts? They would become irresponsible parasites who cheat us out of our money and they would never learn the value of good hard day’s work. Almost like stock analysts.

Or a billion barrels of oil.

I hope you think I’m joking but I’m not. Iraq’s predicament is no different from that of many third world countries. Some asshole rises to power by killing his opponents and bullying citizens into helpless submission. He imprisons, tortures, and murders his own people with impunity. They live in terror of being arrested by his secret police. Then he goes to Citibank. Does Citibank say, “gee, that would be a risky loan– what if he is deposed and the people don’t want to pay for his palaces, his air force, his missiles, and his tanks? I’ll lose my money.”

No. Citibank says, “we can always count on the IMF and the World Bank and the United States government to enforce these loans!

And so it is.

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Bamiyan

A few years ago, the world watched in horror and disgust and contempt as the Taliban, those freaky arch-Victorians of the Islamic imperium of Afghanistan, destroyed the massive sandstone carvings of Buddha in the side of a mountain in Bamiyan.

The statues were not remarkable artistically, but they were deeply significant for historical and cultural reasons. (Sorry if you do think they’re beautiful– I don’t. They look like something a bunch of monks without great artistic talent would create.) In the seventh century AD, there were over 5,000 Buddhist monks living in the caves around the statues. Islamic Arab tribes drove the Buddhists out by the ninth century– they didn’t destroy the statues, though.

That would be barbaric.

The destruction of them by the Taliban was an act of mindless, philistine thuggery that astounded the world. If one was not, until then, convinced of the barbarity of the Taliban, this one act did it.

The Taliban repressed women, of course, and was famously intolerant of freedom of expression, diversity, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, or any kind of fun whatsoever. But those statues were just sitting there, harmlessly, impressively (175 metres high). It takes a peculiarly vindictive and petty and malicious mindset to destroy something like that.

In 2003, the Americans invaded Iraq. The marines that arrived first in Baghdad immediately secured the oil ministry buildings and guarded them diligently during the first weeks of the occupation. Down the road, the Baghdad Museum featuring an absolutely priceless collection of some of the world’s most important antiquities sat there, unguarded.

The Americans stood by as Iraqis of unknown affiliation or devotion destroyed and looted the museum. The marines did nothing. They didn’t even seem to care.

It is not that the Americans were unaware of the significance of the collection. Well, maybe they were. But they certainly knew that cultured and educated people in the U.S. and elsewhere regarded the collection as invaluable and irreplaceable. Experts from around the world had made efforts to ensure that the Americans didn’t bomb it by mistake, and had taken measures to protect the collection once they occupied Baghdad. The Americans said, “yeah, yeah, fine, we’ll take care of it.” Then they didn’t.

The Washington Times uncovered a March 26 memo that showed that the Pentagon had communicated, to the coalition commanders, a list of important sites to be protected during the war. The Baghdad museum was number 2 on the list. Somebody in the Pentagon had a brain.

The world should never forget or forgive Donald Rumsveld for sloughing off the destruction of the Baghdad museum as just “so many vases”. It was a wonderful moment, if you think shocking revelations of the deep-seated idiocy are “wonderful”. He really didn’t care. He really didn’t grasp the significance of the collection. He really could not imagine why anyone would worry about the loss of these absolutely unique examples of the art and expression of mankind’s earliest civilizations.

That’s fine, really. Nobody cares if some asshole called Donald Rumsveld sits in his cave somewhere picking his teeth while contemplating the eternal symmetry and beauty of a plum pit.

But George Bush, during his election campaign, never once informed the voters that, given the opportunity, he’d appoint people who would happily stand by and do nothing while priceless antiquities are looted and destroyed. Donald Rumsveld surprised us.

Jack Valenti, the head of the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA), goes around the world berating governments for supporting local film industries at the expense of Hollywood productions. He wonders why anyone would bother with indigenous film, when they can have as many copies of “Ernest Saves Christmas” and “Dumb and Dumber” as they want.

Bush should hire him. He belongs in this White House working with Mr. Rumsveld. They can both be put in charge of the world’s priceless antiquities.

Do you think any of these leaders of the free world care about the beauty of the rain forest, or a pristine wilderness area, or coastal wetlands, or a medieval cathedral, or a rare endangered species, or live theatre or the ballet, or opera, or Mozart’s birthplace, or humpbacked whales, or snowy owls, or Dostoevsky’s manuscripts, or Shakespeare’s original theatre, or a Scottish castle, or the Great Wall of China, or mummies, or cuneiform tablets, or anything at all, other than the stock market and McDonalds and Disneyland?

Think again. When they come to your neighborhood promising the delights of democracy and free enterprise, get ready for drive-thru’s and golden arches.

If you never knew it before, you know now that George Bush and Rumsveld and Perle and Cheney are to culture and history and civilization what McDonald’s is to gourmet cooking.