The JvL Bi-Weekly
James van Luik
Publisher & Editor
Friday 110102
Volume 1, No 3
2 Articles
1. Former President Jimmy
Carter and Norway
And
The
Nobel Peace Prize for 2002
2.
Looking Back to See the Challenge Ahead
1. Former President Jimmy Carter and Norway
and
the Nobel Peace Prize for 2002
James
van Luik
The awarding of the Nobel Peace
Prize to Former President Jimmy Carter once again raises serious
questions as to whether this prize can be regarded as a
meaningful acknowledgment of humanitarian accomplishment. It is
instructive to note that this prize is given not by Sweden, but
by Norway, a member of NATO. Further it should be remembered that
former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger also received the Nobel
Peace Prize. This again should raise a question as to the
legitimacy of the Nobel Peace Prize awarded by a member of NATO
to two of the highest officials in the leading NATO country. This
suggests again that the Nobel Peace Prize given by Norway has
been undermined by political considerations. Furthermore,
reinforcing this context the Chairman of the Norwegian
Nobel Peace Prize Committee explained that the giving of the
Peace Prize to Former President Carter should be interpreted as a
rebuke to “President” Bush. Plainly this suggests that
the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize Committee in effect didn’t
vote for President Carter as much as it did vote against “President”
Bush, certainly a political action.
One can evaluate whether former
President Carter should have been awarded a peace prize. Was he
in fact a legitimate candidate for a prize celebrating peace. I
think the record is clear enough that President Carter waged
“peace” in an unjustified warlike fashion if the United
Nations Charter is accepted as legitimate. After all the United
States is a signatory. President Carter, according to his
admirers, engaged in the typical ruthlessness of war makers,
using the mentally negligible concept of Rheinold Niebuhr that in
trying to do good one may irreversibly harm others. In President
Carter’s case hurting others in the name of political
theology was the norm, that is, in a theology that stated moral
purity to be impossible specially when it comes into conflict
with the American political agenda. This agenda to which he
subscribes is the imperial agenda.
Here are some examples to examine,
all of which are to be found in the public record. These are not
secret, anyone with a bit of searching can find verification of
these historical acts.
President Carter said that America
would not stand idly by while Nicaragua tried to set forth on a
different path, a socialist path, after the Sandinistas came to
power by overthrowing the murderous family dictatorship of
Anastasio Somoza. President Carter told the Sandinistas they had
to retain the National Guard, which had been Somoza’s elite
band of U.S. trained killers. The Sandinistas said “No.”
So President Carter ordered the CIA to bring up the officers and
torturers running the Argentinean death squads to train up a
force of Nicaraguan Somoza followers in exile in Honduras and
launch them on terror missions across the border. They were
called Contras.
Not only content with forming the
Contras President Carter turned his attention to the crisis of
South Korea, where workers and peasants were legitimately
demonstrating. He sent his envoy, Richard Holbrooke, to
South Korea to explain to the South Korean military that they had
to attack the workers and peasants. The South Korean military in
lockstep did just that while killing thousands in a massacre that
was the worst since the Korean war.
And President Carter also intervened
in Afghanistan by starting the murderous covert CIA operation in
Afghanistan, recruiting 100,000 mujahideen to lure the Soviets
into a land war in Afghanistan or so claimed his Head of The
National Security Council, Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski. Soon
the CIA would bring Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan to lend a
Saudi presence and Saudi cash. The result of this vicious
operation was the arrival of the Taliban who were welcomed,
originally, by the Afghanistan peasantry as a relief from the
murderous warlords and the mujahideen.
As Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, an
attorney, who has just finished a history of the early years of
the Nicaraguan revolution (that overthrew the brutal United
States supported Anastasio Somoza) said after the news of the
Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize award to President Carter was
announced, “‘Benign’ Carter was the source of so
many bad things, including the rise of the Christian right (his
endless public pronouncements of his faith, and his sister’s
leadership in the actual Christian right gave the movement a new
legitimacy), the erosion of the UN, the destruction of the
International Economic and Information order, etc. And few seem
to recall that Jimmy Carter led a campaign to free (Lt. William)
Calley when he was governor of Georgia,” or that when he was
President of his pernicious involvement with Burma.
Former President Jimmy Carter is and
was religious to the point not so much of extremism as in thrall
to religious fundamentalism. However, his sense of charity did
not extend to his many deadly political actions, while President
of the United States, as described in a limited way above. I
think he developed a powerful sense of religious guilt, and his
many activities since his presidency have been, in my mind, a
search for redemption and those along with the Norwegian Nobel
Peace Prize he hopes to have found a good measure of it. However,
as he can read in the Testament: God explains that before coming
to him for forgiveness one must seek out those one has injured
and gain their forgiveness. The dilemma for former President
Jimmy Carter is that those murdered, tortured and otherwise
destroyed are dead.
So, now, former President Jimmy
Carter has been named the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize winner for
the year 2002 a prize for which he has been campaigning a
long time. Here he is a man with the blood of thousands on his
hands. I think it should be quite clear how yet again the
Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize has been seriously compromised.
2. Looking Back to
See The Challenge Ahead
Howard Zinn
The issues and controversies that
filled the newspaper columns and airwaves on September 10, 2001
were rendered irrelevant on 9/11. The nation seemed traumatized,
incapable of thinking of anything beside what occurred that
morning.
The fire and smoke that cascaded
from the Twin Towers on 9/11, and the thought of the thousands
trapped, burned, crushed by an act of unspeakable horror,
transfixed the nation. People at all points of the political
spectrum seemed traumatized.
First to recover was President
George Bush. He immediately declared a “war on terrorism.”
This relieved the paralysis of most Americans, for now they could
turn their attention to the military action which would,
supposedly, locate and destroy those responsible for the awful
events of that day.
This meant also that the great body
of the American public would now put behind them whatever
concerns they had before 9/11. Those concerns, real and troubling
as they were, seemed dwarfed by two enormous and immediate
realities: terrorism and war.
There were many Americans who did
not believe that the proper response to 9/11 was to start bombing
Afghanistan. However, their very opposition to the war trapped
them inside a circle where they were greatly outnumbered, their
back turned to critical issues which had roused them before 9/11,
but which were now obscured in the smoke of that event.
In the months before the attacks,
there was a large body of Americans who believed that the
Bush administration had been put into office not by popular will,
but by a politically motivated Supreme Court majority, and that
we were now living, essentially, in an occupied country. Clearly,
something was wrong with a political system that could allow
this. Talk was beginning about structural change: abolition of
the electoral college, preferential voting for the presidency,
proportional representation in voting for Congress.
The terrorists cut that discussion
short – indeed the dubiously elected president now could
command overwhelming support because the nation was at war.
Before 9/11 there was growing alarm
about the new administration’s policies on the environment:
opening wildlife areas to oil exploration, allowing the auto
companies to continue polluting the air with high levels of auto
emissions, refusing to ratify the Kyoto treaty to reduce global
warming, and a whole array of plans involving deregulation of
corporate activities dangerous to the environment.
After the war began, it was
difficult, in an atmosphere where fear of terrorism crowded out
everything else, to hear voices of protest as the administration
stepped up its attacks on the environment: undermining the Clean
Air Act of 1970, resuscitating nuclear power, cutting
billions of dollars from the conservation of natural resources.
Through the ‘90s, and even as
the nation moved into the new millennium, there was a growing
consciousness about the flagrant misdistribution of wealth in the
world’s richest country. Largely as a result of changes in
the tax structure in the ‘70s and ‘80s, by 1995 the
richest 1 percent of Americans had gained over a trillion dollars
and now owned over 40 percent of the nation’s wealth.
Between 1980 and 1995 the Dow
Jones average of stock prices had gone up 400 percent, while the
purchasing power of workers declined by 15 percent. Forty million
people were without health insurance, and infants, especially
those of color, died of sickness and malnutrition at a rate
higher than that of any other industrialized country.
Homelessness and unaffordable housing were becoming a national
scandal.
The Clinton presidency took no bold
steps to deal with the gross problems of economic injustice. The
Bush administration came into office unabashedly pro-business and
anti-labor. In the atmosphere of militarism and flag-waving that
accompanied the war, the Democratic party, which had spoken out
occasionally and cautiously about economic equality (after all,
their ties were with corporate power, too) remained cowed and
silent.
Since 9/11, those
Americans who do not think that war is a justifiable response to
terrorism have had difficulty concentrating on the traditional
concerns of progressivism – the plight of the poor, the
homeless, the victims of both class and race prejudice.
Ironically, their strong revulsion against war has left little
room to deal with those issues where they stand the greatest
chance of finding support in the larger American public.
But a year has
passed since the Twin Towers collapsed and the Pentagon burned.
The claim of the Bush administration, after 10 months of ruthless
bombing in Afghanistan, and continued alarms about terrorists
everywhere, that “we are winning the war on “terror”
(Bush’s “State of the Union” speech) looks more
and more hollow. The corporate scandals, crippling the hopes of
retirees, devouring the savings of working people, have revealed
the long-standing corrupt connections between government and big
business.
What remains to be
seen is if a new, bold agenda, centered not only on the rejection
of war, but on a rational and humane distribution of the country’s
enormous wealth, may now be revisited. The challenge will be for
a new, energized citizens’ movement to present this as an
inspiring vision to what could be an increasingly receptive
American public.
---------------------------------
(The next issue of the JvL Bi-Weekly
will include an article on repackaging Creationism as “Intelligent
Design” thereby continuing the challenge in the public
schools to the teaching of the Theory of Evolution.)