IRAN: We study History for a reason; or at least we used to

Given the relentless push toward war with Iran, it is time again to bring out the history books. The weapons for combating ignorance are there for those who care to deploy them: A timely book by Christopher de Bellaigue is reviewed in this issue of The London Review of Books. Entitled Why Weren't They Grateful, the review reminds us of the destructiveness of colonialism:

Both liberal and radical Iranians could cite instances of the country’s humiliation by the West in the 19th century, when it had been dominated by the British and the Russians. The events of the early 20th century further undermined its political autonomy at a time when its political institutions were being liberalised (a parliament had been established as a result of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-7). In the First World War, Britain and Russia first occupied and then divided the country in order to keep the Ottoman-German armies at bay. The end of the war brought no respite. The Red Army threatened from the north and Britain, already parcelling out the Ottoman Empire’s territories, saw an opportunity to annex Iran. Lord Curzon, now foreign secretary and convinced, as Harold Nicolson put it, that ‘God had personally selected the British upper class as an instrument of the Divine Will,’ drew up an Anglo-Persian agreement which was almost entirely destructive of Iranian sovereignty.

The story of Mossadegh is told up to his vilification by the British and, not to be outdone, the USA:

Having proclaimed the ‘American Century’, Henry Luce’s Time took a particular interest in commodity-rich Iran, arguing that the ‘Russians may intervene, grab the oil, even unleash World War Three’. Already determined to overthrow Mossadegh, the British did not take long to exploit the growing American obsession with Soviet expansionism: Iran was to provide a test run on how to taint Asian nationalism by associating it with communism. They found a receptive audience in the Dulles brothers, the secretary of state and the head of the CIA in Eisenhower’s new administration in 1953.

The rest is history: the overthrow of Mossadegh, the installation of the Shah, all with the help of the CIA. If you don't know it, then at least read the book! Maybe then you'll understand why:

Support for Iran’s right to pursue its nuclear programme cuts across the country’s political divisions. Aspiring regime-changers in the West remain blind to the undiminished potency of Iranian nationalism. More bizarrely and dangerously, they ignore the hardening attitudes of the country’s ruling class after a century of humiliation by the West. ‘We are not liberals like Allende and Mossadegh, whom the CIA can snuff out,’ Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, now Iran’s supreme leader, warned during the hostage crisis in 1979.

Memorial Day 2012

In lieu of any meditation of my own, I pass the baton on to others more eloquent than I:

Almost every war in every era could have been avoided, if the majority of men were not motivated by the basest, most repellent and petty of factors: the lust for power, greed, and the pathetic search for "meaning" and "glory" in one's life by killing the designated "other" of a brief historical moment.

Iran: Historical Backdrop to the Present Crisis

Vastly eloquent. Hat tip to Juan Cole.


How U.S.-Iranian Standoff Looks From Iran: Hossein Mousavian:

Both the U.S. and Iran have become prisoners of the past. They need to have a realistic assessment of potential areas where they could have common interests, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, security in the Persian Gulf, curbing drug trafficking, opposing al-Qaeda, and limiting the role of the Taliban. Unfortunately, the pursuit of these potential common interests has so far been hampered by a preoccupation with the nuclear file and the domestic political climate in both countries.

Interracial Marriage was Illegal Not Too Long Ago

According to US law (at the time) I should have never been born.

The nation has certainly come a long way since then (and I am glad to have lived long enough to witness it). It rekindles my faith in the Human Race.

(WASHINGTON) — Interracial marriages in the U.S. have climbed to 4.8 million — a record 1 in 12 — as a steady flow of new Asian and Hispanic immigrants expands the pool of prospective spouses. Blacks are now substantially more likely than before to marry whites.

America's legacy of destruction in Iraq

As a lifelong academic, I am greatly saddened by this. It adds immensely to the shame Americans need to feel for the blunder that was the illegal invasion of Iraq:

An Education in Occupation, by Hugh Gusterson:

Until the 1990s, Iraq had perhaps the best university system in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein's regime used oil revenues to underwrite free tuition for Iraqi university students -- churning out doctors, scientists, and engineers who joined the country's burgeoning middle class and anchored development. Although political dissent was strictly off-limits, Iraqi universities were professional, secular institutions that were open to the West, and spaces where male and female, Sunni and Shia mingled. Also the schools pushed hard to educate women PDF, who constituted 30 percent of Iraqi university faculties by 1991.
(...)
According to The Washington Times, 280 Iraqi professors were killed and another 3,250 fled the country by the end of 2006.
(...)
Those faculty fortunate enough to move abroad became part of the great middle-class exodus from Iraq under US occupation. It is estimated that 10 percent of Iraq's population, and 30 percent of its professors, doctors, and engineers, left for neighboring countries between 2003 and 2007 -- the largest Arab refugee displacement since the Palestinian flight from the holy lands decades earlier.

Add this to America's legacy of destruction in the Middle East.

An Important Day in my Life

Actually, the day I am marking as "important" is yesterday, and for two reasons: The first reason is that I managed to upload Uncle Neal's trio concert onto YouTube (actually a friend helped me do it, but he misspelled Uncle Neal's name). The second reason remains unmentioned...

The US Corporate State

On this Three Kings Day, a time when we step back, take stock of things and try to gain insights into the future, I'm afraid Chris Hedges summarizes the status quo succinctly, as well as points to where the US is headed.

Celebrating My Birthday

I can't think of a better way to commemorate my birthday.

"Nothing has been more moving to me than this desire, realized imperfectly but repeatedly, to connect across differences, to be a community, to make a better world, to embrace each other. This desire is what lies behind those messy camps, those raucous demonstrations, those cardboard signs and long conversations. Young activists have spoken to me about the extraordinary richness of their experiences at Occupy, and they call it love." Rebecca Solnit

Miss Angola Leila Lopes crowned Miss Universe

Congratulations to Leila Lopes! There is more to her story, however, which you will likely not find in the pages of the western press. It needs to be told: The source is in SPANISH, and I have translated it:

Of parents from Cienfuegos, Cuba, and born in Angola, the new Miss Universe, Leila Lopes, has been the victim of vicious racist verbal attacks.

The messages, written in Portuguese and English, were reported by the Stormfront webpage, whose authors define themselves as a "white nationalist community", that is under investigation by the Brazilian Federal Police on suspicion of links with neo-Nazi groups.

Even before learning of the abuse, Leila Lopes had said in a press conference at dawn on Tuesday, to not feel affected by racism.

"Racism does not affect me. The racists are the ones that need help, because it is not normal for a person to [harbor such ideas]... in the XXI century. There is no basis for any kind of prejudice," said the beautiful young 25 year old.

The organizers of the competition held Monday evening in Sao Paulo gave no immediate comment on the racist attacks by members of Stormfront, who also questioned the "racial purity" of European candidates for the title.

Beautifully said, Leila. Short, sweet and to the point! Bravo!

The Legacy of 9-11 on its Tenth Anniversary

I agree wholeheartedly with Tom Engelhardt:

Let's just can it...
Ask yourself this: ten years into the post-9/11 era, haven't we had enough of ourselves? If we have any respect for history or humanity or decency left, isn’t it time to rip the Band-Aid off the wound, to remove 9/11 from our collective consciousness? No more invocations of those attacks to explain otherwise inexplicable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our oh-so-global war on terror. No more invocations of 9/11 to keep the Pentagon and the national security state flooded with money. No more invocations of 9/11 to justify every encroachment on liberty, every new step in the surveillance of Americans, every advance in pat-downs and wand-downs and strip downs that keeps fear high and the homeland security state afloat.

I have expressed myself already on the handling of the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9-11, so there is no need to revisit that. If we must remember something on this day, it should be the following:

It's hardly controversial to suggest that the mainstream media's performance in the lead-up to the Iraq War was a disaster. In retrospect, many journalists and pundits wish they had been more skeptical of the White House's claims about Iraq, particularly its allegations about weapons of mass destruction. At the same time, though, media apologists suggest that the press could not have done much better, since "everyone" was in agreement on the intelligence regarding Iraq's weapons threat. This was never the case. Critical journalists and analysts raised serious questions at the time about what the White House was saying. Often, however, their warnings were ignored by the bulk of the corporate press.

This timeline is an attempt to recall some of the worst moments in journalism, from the fall of 2002 and into the early weeks of the Iraq War. It is not an exhaustive catalog, but a useful reference point for understanding the media's performance. The timeline also points to missed opportunities, when courageous journalists—working inside the mainstream and the alternative media—uncovered stories that should have made the front pages of daily newspapers, or provided fodder for TV talk shows. By reading mainstream media critically and tuning into the alternative press, citizens can see that the notion that "everyone" was wrong about Iraq was—and is—just another deception.

Hypocrisy

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Earl Neal Creque

The final months of the year 2000 were devastating for the West Indian side my family. In October, I lost my mother while in December I lost the last two of my uncles on my mother's side of the family: Marvin and Neal. Uncle Neal passed away around December 1 and it is him I want to remember with this post.

My uncle was born Earl Neal Creque on April 13, 1940, in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, the last of eight children born to my grandfather (Cyril Creque) and grandmother (Leonie Sewer). He began taking piano lessons at age five and from around nine to sixteen years of age he studied classical piano with Edris Stakemann. Since a biographical sketch of Neal can be accessed on-line, I will not reproduce what is already available. I just want to add that my Uncle Neal was a prolific composer, having reportedly composed over 3,000 compositions (not all of them Jazz), and a teacher, having been on the faculty of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and Cleveland State University. Although he didn't leave an extensive legacy of commercial recordings, his compositions have been widely appreciated (and recorded) by top-caliber musicians that knew him, from Mongo Santamaria to Ramsey Lewis, among many others.

What I want to do is commit to writing some scattered memories of my own and combine them with an interview my Uncle Neal granted to the Cleveland Plain Dealer late in his career. First, a bit of personal background is in order. I have a vivid recollection of my Uncle Marvin and Aunt Marilyn's household (whose entire family I grew up with, you could say, since I visited them with regularity from my early childhood days). The house was filled with music (both live and recorded Jazz Music*), given that instruments were always available, which fellow musician friends of my uncle would stop by to play at any hour of the day or night. My Uncle Marvin had learned piano and could belt out a tune from memory although he never pursued a career in music. In fact, the Marvin Creque household had garnered a reputation throughout Charlotte Amalie as a sort of impromptu Jazz studio. Those were joyous days for me and, while I did not recognize it at the moment, they would have a profound impact on me later in life. Hence from my early days, I came to "absorb" Jazz (by osmosis, if you will) and associate it with my Uncle Marvin, though I was only able to fully appreciate the genre later in life.

Although all my mother's siblings were musically trained at some points in their lives, the only one (other than herself) to have made a career out of music was my Uncle Neal. While I had met Uncle Neal during my childhood, it wasn't until I went to Oberlin College (from 1977 to 1981) that I got to know and appreciate his talent as a Jazz musician. It was also during that period that I was finally able to fully appreciate the genre of Jazz, to the extent that I consider it my first love above all other musical genres. Uncle Neal, at the time, was firmly established in nearby Cleveland and I (of course) took advantage of the proximity to visit him on occasion.

It was at my insistence (I believe), that Uncle Neal came to Oberlin for the first time. During my student days, there was a cultural activity of sorts being organized by the Black Students Association on campus for which students were asked to suggest artists. I jumped at the idea of having Uncle Neal play since by then I had come to love his music and, with him being in the vicinity, it wouldn't cost much to bring him. He brought a trio and wowed the students, but it wasn't until after I graduated that I learned that he had returned to Oberlin and eventually gotten a faculty appointment at the Jazz studies Department of the famed Oberlin Conservatory. I was so proud for him and for many years thought I had somehow managed to facilitate that job opportunity by inviting him to Oberlin during my student years. Ironically, I had bragged for many a year that my crowning achievement in Oberlin wasn't the fact that I obtained my bachelor's degree, but that I had unsuspectingly hooked Uncle Neal up with the prestigious conservatory of music!). I learned, shortly before his death that it was actually the Director Wendell Logan of the Oberlin Jazz Studies Department that had witnessed Neal (on another occasion) and beckoned him to (eventually) come to Oberlin.

Regardless of how he arrived at Oberlin, we were all so happy for him because it got him off the Jazz clubbing circuit. It is truly heartbreaking to witness the tragic history of many of Jazz's finest musicians and composers, who unable to make much money, are forced to constantly be on the road seeking gigs at (often seedy) night clubs, a lifestyle that leads to early burn-out in their careers and often to an early death. While most musicians don't have it good, the Jazz musician's lot in particular is terrible (although it has changed for the better in recent years). Hence, the steady job afforded Uncle Neal the opportunity to give loose reign to his creative powers without the economic knife at his throat. He also relished the opportunity to teach and was able to go back to one of his great loves - classical composition.

Uncle Neal expressed his outlook in an interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer - He devotes more and more time to teaching at Oberlin College and Cleveland State University and writing classical music. What he tries to convey in his music, Creque says, "is the hope that the kids coming up in music respect the educational system that is afforded them today. A lot of things that are available to them, if they had been present years ago, no telling how far Jazz might have advanced. You can be studying at Oberlin and the talent can come in from all over the country to perform," he says. (…) As for the clubs, Creque doesn't miss them. "I think my interests have grown in a different direction", he says. "My original love was classical music and I'm back to that. Between performing and composing classical works and teaching, you get a chance to see an extension of yourself in terms of the student. When you see what you have accomplished, and pass some of that on, it's a marvelous thing."

Footnote and a requiem: My Uncle Marvin, more than any of us, loved Uncle Neal, perhaps because he saw in him the realization of what he had always wanted to do. We used to anguish over Uncle Neal's aversion to the recording studio. Despite being a prolific composer, Uncle Neal only left a handful of commercial recordings and most of these were made early in his career (which is one reason he is not well known on the Jazz circuit).

Neal did keep us readily supplied, however, with tape recordings of his concerts as well as some studio quality recordings. This would sometimes frustrate us even more because we (especially Uncle Marvin) would listen to these fantastic recordings and lament that they were not available on the commercial market (thus garnering him wider recognition). In an effort at garnering him wider recognition, I once even contacted the host Marian MacPartland of the popular radio program Piano Jazz to try to get him on the show, only to be told (after I mailed up a selection of his recordings) that a prerequisite for being invited to the show was that the artist have made a recent commercial recording. Shortly thereafter, we all learned that Uncle Neal had contracted cancer and I was (we all were) devastated.

I make no joke when I say that Uncle Neal is my favorite musician. I would say so even if he were no relative of mine. The fact that he was related to me was a source of immense pride and joy beyond description. I cherish the tapes and videos he diligently sent us over the years and preserve the copies of the classical pieces he composed late in his career, copies of which he had sent my mother. As a tribute, view the YouTube of Uncle Neal and Howie Smith playing Neal's composition "Slightly Monkish". I have a particular love for this piece because, aside from being a tribute to the all-time great Jazz icon (and favorite of mine!) Thelonious Monk, it has the calypso rhythm of our West Indian heritage in the Virgin Islands. God Bless You Uncle Neal.

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Here Comes your Non-Violent Resistance

A defining moment for all parties involved:

"FOR many years now, we've heard American commentators bemoan the violence of the Palestinian national movement. If only Palestinians had learned the lessons of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, we hear, they'd have had their state long ago. Surely no Israeli government would have violently suppressed a non-violent Palestinian movement of national liberation seeking only the universally recognised right of self-determination...So now we have an opportunity to see how Americans will react. We've asked the Palestinians to lay down their arms. We've told them their lack of a state is their own fault; if only they would embrace non-violence, a reasonable and unprejudiced world would see the merit of their claims. Over the weekend, tens of thousands of them did just that, and it seems likely to continue. If crowds of tens of thousands of non-violent Palestinian protesters continue to march, and if Israel continues to shoot at them, what will we do? Will we make good on our rhetoric, and press Israel to give them their state? Or will it turn out that our paeans to non-violence were just cynical tactics in an amoral international power contest staged by militaristic Israeli and American right-wing groups whose elective affinities lead them to shape a common narrative of the alien Arab/Muslim threat? Will we even bother to acknowledge that the Palestinians are protesting non-violently? Or will we soldier on with the same empty decades-old rhetoric, now drained of any truth or meaning, because it protects established relationships of power? What will it take to make Americans recognise that the real Martin Luther King-style non-violent Palestinian protesters have arrived, and that Israeli soldiers are shooting them with real bullets?"

Fukushima Nuclear Disaster- You won't hear this on the Main Stream News.

Obama Is Helping Iran

Most people I know are having difficulties figuring out what is happening in the Middle East and why. This is understandable, given the Western (and especially US) mainstream media's tendency to hand out the propaganda that Washington wants deployed precisely for domestic consumption. Hence, I feel compelled to highlight the following article by authors Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett. Flynt Leverett, who is about my age, is no light-weight. He:

...is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. and a professor at the Pennsylvania State University School of International Affairs. From March 2002 to March 2003, he served as the senior director for Middle East affairs on the National Security Council. Prior to serving on the NSC, he was a counterterrorism expert on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, and before that he served as a CIA senior analyst for eight years. Since leaving government service, Leverett served as a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy before becoming the director of the Geopolitics of Energy Initiative in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation.

So, if you would like some insight about the Middle East and what is happening and likely to continue happening there, then do yourself a favor and read his article in Foreign Policy. Here are some excerpts:

On Obama's watch, the regional balance of influence and power has shifted even further away from the United States and toward Iran and its allies. The Islamic Republic has continued to deepen its alliances with Syria and Turkey and expand its influence in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. Public opinion polls, for example, continue to show that the key leaders in the Middle East's resistance bloc -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Syrian President Bashar Assad, Lebanon's Hassan Nasrallah, Hamas's Khaled Mishaal, and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan -- are all vastly more popular across the region than their counterparts in closely U.S.-aligned and supported regimes in Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, and Saudi Arabia.
(...)
From literally the day after Iran's 2009 presidential election, we pointed out that the Green Movement could not succeed in bringing down the Islamic Republic, for two basic reasons: The movement did not represent anything close to a majority of Iranian society, and a majority of Iranians still support the idea of an Islamic Republic. Two additional factors are in play today, which make it even less likely that those who organized and participated in scattered demonstrations in Iran over the past week will be able to catalyze "regime change" there.
(...)

Go to the original article at Foreign Policy to discover what those "two additional factors" are. For further antidotes to the US mainstream media, I recommend Juan Cole and The Arabist.

An Open Letter from Gaza: Two Years after the Massacre, a Demand for Justice

An Open Letter from Gaza: Two Years after the Massacre, a Demand for Justice

The assault lasted 22 days, killing 1,417 Palestinians, 352 of them children, according to main-stream Human Rights Organizations. For a staggering 528 hours, Israeli Occupation Forces let loose their US-supplied F15s, F16s, Merkava Tanks, internationally prohibited White Phosphorous, and bombed and invaded the small Palestinian coastal enclave that is home to 1.5 million, of whom 800,000 are children and over 80 percent UN registered refugees. Around 5,300 remain permanently wounded.
(...)
We ask: when will the world’s countries act according to the basic premise that people should be treated equally, regardless of their origin, ethnicity or colour – is it so far-fetched that a Palestinian child deserves the same human rights as any other human being? Will you be able to look back and say you stood on the right side of history or will you have sided with the oppressor?

There is a War going on

"Happy" Thanksgiving

Haiti's Academic Community digs out of the Rubble

We share our grief with the rest of the world for the tragic circumstances that have befallen our fellow human beings in Haiti.  As members of the academic community, though, we hold a particular interest in the fate of those that labor in country's institutes for higher learning. In this respect, I would like to share with you an email from Dr. Jacky Lumarque,  Rector at Université Quisqueya.

Rough translation of mail ( by Gilles Lubeth) from Dr Jacky Lumarque,  Rector Université  Quisqueya:

It's my first time on the Internet since Tuesday's earthquake. My apologies to friends who may have been worried by my silence but I have been focused on rescue operations and assistance to families. Iwas bent on not ending rescue operations until getting confirmation that the persons we were searching for had indeed died.

Here's the situation...

I stopped searching for survivors for good and I am finally able to extract those corpses that have been identified: 5 students from the Faculty of Education, including 2 priests from the Salesiens congregation, a monk and a nun from the St Croix congregation, a lecturer, an engineer and two gardeners. We will find out this morning if there are more victims that can be identified.

The corpses are badly decomposed and we had to turn a water tank into a grave, in the botanical garden. This location will become a mausoleum dedicated to the victims of the earthquake. Bishop Dumas, members of the Don Bosco and St Croix congregations will hold a church service in memory of the victims at noon. Those who cannot be present physically will surely keep us in their affectionate thoughts.

Special thanks to students and volunteers (most of whom didn't even finish primary school) for the extroadinary courage displayed, as they work 48 hours non-stop to take about 20 survivors from the rubble, without any technical support and at risk of losing their own lives. Those who died before our eyes did not make it because of the lack of resources and equipment to move them out from under the beams and flagstones where they were crushed.

All the buildings were destroyed, including the Museum which was hosting an exhibition dedicated to the famous Haitian-born painter, Jean-Michel Basquiat, as well as three apartments for visiting lecturers at Quisqueya and the state universities. We will have to start from scratch but I have no doubt about our collective ability to find the means, the energy and the determination to do so.  

For now, mobilization at Quisqueya has been directed to families in need. The Harry Truman Boulevard Campus has been used as a Center already hosting 10,000 victims from Cité  l'éternel. The Gheskio Center and US doctors are assisting those who are ill or injured. We invite ALL Quisqueya Medical Faculty students to come and assist us in organizing daily life in the community and providing basic care. We will wait for the venue to be secured (fences have to be put up again) before starting distributing food, in order to avoid looting.

On the Turgeau campus, the esplanade and the parking lot will also be transformed in a care center for the victims. Since we will be located near the main drinking water reservoir in the city, we are trying to set up a small water treatment plant in order to produce 3 thousand gallons of drinking water per day, to serve residents and newly installed "colonies" in peripheral neighbourhoods (Turgeau and Debussy). Aide et Action is expected to get the equipment needed for the plant from the Dominican Republic. Quisqueya students are invited to form a solidarity network. Helping the more fragile among us will actually give them the strength and inspiration to rebuild their individual lives and the community.

International aid has been abundant but poorly coordinated and there are great frustrations. The population has spontaneously formed "colonies" in various areas; these groups must be helped to get organized rationally while relief efforts are channeled to those who are most in need.

Thank you to all our friends for expressing their solidarity and affection. The hardest time is still to come, when we have to rebuild and spontaneous solidarity fades away. It is up to Haitians to get organized with the help of a network of friends acting out of solidarity rather than out of the search for media visibility only.

For additional information in English and from a Caribbean regional perspective, please check Dr. Norman Girvan's SITE.

This diary is cross-posted at Daily Kos and European Tribune.