'The Iron Heel at 100’

Bad times inhibit good writers, but they also inspire them. Just look at the new and recent arrivals in bookstores and libraries. The double-barreled assault on civil liberties and human rights, by the administration of President George Walker Bush, has, if nothing else, spurred an outpouring of books, both fiction and nonfiction, condemning the erosion of American democracy and the perceived drift toward totalitarianism. Jack London—the best-selling twentieth-century American author, who was born in 1876, the year of the American Centenary, and who died in 1916, the year before the United States entered the First World War—would surely not be surprised. In fact, one might well anoint London the founding father of the contemporary body of literature about political repression, including Henry Giroux's The Emerging Authoritarianism in the United States, Matthew Rothschild's You Have No Rights, Chris Hedges's American Fascists, Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Crimes Against Nature, and Philip Roth's disquieting 2003 novel The Plot Against America. Of course, there are many others that cover much the same terrain.

Sinclair Lewis, who wrote the electrifying classic It Can't Happen Here (1935)—about the advent of a Nazi regime in Washington, D.C.—owed much of his inspiration to London's The Iron Heel, which was first published in 1908, and which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. London's dystopian novel also inspired George Orwell when he wrote 1984, and it deserves recognition as the first modern American novel to sound the alarm about the dangers of a dictatorship in the United States. The Iron Heel has never achieved the popularity of London's dog stories—The Call of the Wild and White Fang—but from the moment that Europe began to drift toward fascism in the 1920s, and then throughout the twentieth century, it was widely read in Europe, the Americas, and Asia, and hailed as a great, prophetic work of art by the likes of Leon Trotsky, the exiled Russian revolutionary, and Anatole France, the Nobel Prize-winning French novelist.

One hundred years after its initial publication, London's political ideas and cultural insights seem remarkably contemporary. Indeed, in The Iron Heel, he describes a sinister conspiracy, by an oligarchy, to quash freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, imprison its outspoken opponents and critics, control news and information, install a professional army of paid mercenaries, create a secret police force, and wage global warfare for economic hegemony. There's also guerrilla warfare, furious acts of wanton terrorism, and cold-blooded terrorists—a world roiling in violence that might be taken for the world of the twenty-first century. Here's a book that demonstrates the veracity of Ezra Pound's remark that "the artist is the antenna of the race."

Like much overtly political fiction and didactic storytelling, The Iron Heel tends to emphasize ideas and ideological concerns at the expense of character development and plot, but London, the artist, could not help but craft a story with suspense, drama, and bigger-than-life, cinematic scenes that depict bloody warfare and horrific massacre in the streets of the United States. In the handwritten notes for the novel that he originally entitled "Oligarchy," he scrawled, "What scenes are given let them be striking to make up for absence of regular novel features," and he made good on that admonition to himself. The change in the title of the novel, from "Oligarchy" to The Iron Heel, shows London moving away from an idea to a compelling and vivid image that enlivens his story.

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London wrote no major political novel after The Iron Heel, but he did not cease to serve as the "antenna of the race." In The Scarlet Plague (1915), one of his last books, he anticipated the arrival of AIDS and HIV, and predicted a pandemic that would sweep across the world and decimate the human race.  Surely a novelist with that much imagination and prescience deserves more attention from literary scholars than he has so far received.

~ From: The Iron Heel at 100 Jack London — The Artist as 'Antenna of the Race' ~

 

“When democracies torture"

AMY GOODMAN: Now, these latest revelations, what is your response, Professor Rejali?

DARIUS REJALI: Well, I mean, they fall under the doctrine of command responsibility; that is to say, moral culpability lies with people who know that something is happening or should have known that something is happening under their command and had the power to stop it. So, typically under war crimes trials and things of this sort, this doctrine has been evoked quite a bit. So, first of all, on the moral side, that's the issue.

Actually, the interesting thing for me on the political side is that it doesn't fit any of the two models we thought were happening in the White House. One of the models was that there was this kind of—this is a more conservative argument—a slippery slope: people sent mixed messages, and then people went on to torture. And then, the other model is the Mafia model, the wink-wink, nod-nod model: just get it done, I don't care how. It turns out, actually, that there were not only demonstrations, but also that the policymakers that were key to this wanted a legal cover. And so, they cared enough about the rule of law—this is the silver lining, if you want—that they actually went to lawyers and had them write a cover, which means that sort of on the—this is sort of central to the thesis of Torture and Democracy—when democracies torture, they always try and do it under the cover of law, and they try and do it in such a way that appears that no torture is actually happening, leaving torture techniques that leave no marks and things that really make it difficult for victims to come forward credibly.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about that difference—it's just an odd phrase to say "when democracies torture"—but the difference between torture in democracies and not democracies.

DARIUS REJALI: Yeah. Most people think that, well, logically, democracies are unlikely to torture, because they're bargains of leniency—people don't like to be tortured, they elect their rulers, rulers don't torture them—whereas in authoritarian states, they can torture them as much as they want, because the people don't control power.

In fact, it's a little different than that. Authoritarian states indeed use scarring techniques, techniques—they don't particularly care if they leave bloody marks or if journalists report or other sorts of things, because they can stop them. In democracies where there's a minimal civil society, where people watch their government, whether they're church groups or whether they're newspaper organizations or human rights organizations, then whether it's your local government, your local police or your national government, they try to use cleaner techniques. And by this, I mean techniques that leave very few marks. I mean, the list of techniques that you read earlier—sleep deprivation, various forms of stress positions, waterboarding—these are all techniques that are actually kind of rare in human history up until the nineteenth century, where we find them appearing first in democracies and then spreading—

AMY GOODMAN: Like where?

DARIUS REJALI: Well, waterboarding—well, let's say electrotorture, the most famous of these, is—first appears in the United States in the 1908. Emma Goldman was—documented the very first electrotorture device in American prisons, the famous anarchist writer. 1908, she documented something called the "humming bird," which was a device that probably hummed with electricity, which was used in New York prisons. So it's very, very early on that we start using these things.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, in terms of torture, you go back to slavery.

DARIUS REJALI: Yes, certainly slavery existed. What's really interesting about slavery is that there were two types of techniques in—among slavers. There were techniques that left marks. Most people think that slavery is about whipping and those things. That mostly pertained to owners. But dealers, to sell slaves, had to leave no marks on their slaves, because that would affect the price. So what we find—what's very interesting is that the techniques that slave dealers were using start becoming much more common, and the police start adopting them in the United States starting in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. And they become common interrogation techniques in the '20s and '30s.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what happens to a society that has engaged in torture?

DARIUS REJALI: Yeah. There's always blowback. There's always blowback. One of the things that definitely happens is that, particularly if the torture happens in a foreign war, is that the soldiers come back, and those who have been involved in torture get involved in usually security activities, policing or private security. And what then happens is that they use the same techniques to get ahead that they did in the war.

Torture has a twenty-year shadow, it appears. That is to say, the reason we all know waterboarding, for example, isn't because we had waterboarding from the early days; it's because the soldiers who came back from the Philippine insurgency war in 1902 all brought it back to the United States, and then this technique started appearing all over the United States, particularly in the South and against conscientious objectors during the World War I.

So—and the same thing happened in Chicago. We have—one of the biggest torture crises of recently years was the torture crisis in Chicago, which involved hundreds of victims and including people who were forced to confess and were condemned to death row. And—

AMY GOODMAN: You're talking about the police commander, Jon Burge—

DARIUS REJALI: Jon Burge

AMY GOODMAN: —and the prisoners forced to so-called confess, end up being taken off of death row now, and say that they were tortured—

DARIUS REJALI: That is correct.

AMY GOODMAN: —and now the documentation is there.

DARIUS REJALI: There are many other cases that will soon probably come into that whole discussion. The main point is that the torture techniques that were used by police in those circumstances were torture techniques that were first documented in southern Vietnam during the Vietnam War. So somebody brought these back. And so, I mean, the thing is that the torture techniques in this war are likely to appear in a neighborhood near you sometime in the next twenty years, and that's one of the most serious blowbacks of this.

~ From: Torture and Democracy, Part II: Scholar Darius Rejali Details the History and Scope of Modern Torture ~

 

'It's not the first time this type of approach has been recommended for a catastrophic pandemic'

The idea is to try to make sure that scarce resources — including ventilators, medicine and doctors and nurses — are used in a uniform, objective way, task force members said.

Their recommendations appear in a report appearing Monday in the May edition of Chest, the medical journal of the American College of Chest Physicians.

"If a mass casualty critical care event were to occur tomorrow, many people with clinical conditions that are survivable under usual health care system conditions may have to forgo life-sustaining interventions owing to deficiencies in supply or staffing," the report states.

To prepare, hospitals should designate a triage team with the Godlike task of deciding who will and who won't get lifesaving care, the task force wrote. Those out of luck are the people at high risk of death and a slim chance of long-term survival. But the recommendations get much more specific, and include:

_People older than 85.

_Those with severe trauma, which could include critical injuries from car crashes and shootings.

_Severely burned patients older than 60.

_Those with severe mental impairment, which could include advanced Alzheimer's disease.

_Those with a severe chronic disease, such as advanced heart failure, lung disease or poorly controlled diabetes.

Dr. Kevin Yeskey, director of the preparedness and emergency operations office at the Department of Health and Human Services, was on the task force. He said the report would be among many the agency reviews as part of preparedness efforts.

Public health law expert Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University called the report an important initiative but also "a political minefield and a legal minefield."

The recommendations would probably violate federal laws against age discrimination and disability discrimination, said Gostin, who was not on the task force.

If followed to a tee, such rules could exclude care for the poorest, most disadvantaged citizens who suffer disproportionately from chronic disease and disability, he said. While health care rationing will be necessary in a mass disaster, "there are some real ethical concerns here."

~ From: Who should MDs let die in a pandemic? Report offers answers ~

 

Dalai Lama condemns branding of Muslims as terrorists

Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, on Sunday condemned moves to brand the Muslim community as 'terrorists' in the wake of the recent spurt in terror activities in India.

Inaugurating the 'Global Conference on Terrorism' here, he said that it was wrong to brand Muslims as terrorists because of the views and deeds of a few mischievous people.

"Some mischievous people and their deeds generalize whole religion. Because of these incidents, it creates impression that Muslims are militants. It is wrong. I'm Buddhist but I am defending Islam," he said.

He is expected to visit Jama Masjid (Mosque) today for the first time.

India has suffered a wave of militant attacks in recent years, with targets ranging from mosques; temples to trains but few groups came forward to claim responsibility for the attacks.

Islamist militant groups in Pakistan and Bangladesh who aim to spread hatred between Muslims and Hindus and damage fragile peace process between New Delhi and Islamabad, are often blamed for the bomb attacks in India.

~ Top News ~

 

Will proposed treaty make border agents copyright cops?

An Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) under quiet negotiation by several countries including the U.S and Canada is raising concern in some quarters after a leaked document, purportedly offering more details on the nascent agreement, was posted on the Internet.

The document, titled "Discussion Paper on a Possible Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" (download PDF), was posted last week by the Wikileaks whistle-blower Web site. The four-page document was apparently quietly provided to select lobbyists in the "intellectual property industry" late last year -- but not, apparently, to public-interest organizations, according to Wikileaks.

Plans for the trade agreement were announced last October by the office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). At that time, the agreement was described by the USTR as a "major" step in the fight against the global piracy and counterfeiting of intellectual property.

The countries that have been identified as engaged in ACTA discussions are the U.S., Canada, the 27 member states of the European Union, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, and Switzerland. In a fact sheet (download PDF) accompanying the announcement, the USTR said that ACTA would focus on increasing international cooperation and information sharing around IP protection, the creation of stronger and standard enforcement mechanisms, and the establishment of a more "effective" legal framework for combating piracy and counterfeiting. Among the legal provisions being considered are those for criminal enforcement, "border measures" and for Internet distribution of IP.

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Importantly, the treaty -- if adopted as proposed -- also has the potential to turn customs and border patrol agents into copyright cops, said Caleb Sullivan, an attorney specializing in international trade and customs law with Becker & Poliakoff, a Florida law firm.

U.S Customs and border patrol officials have already been carrying out searches of laptops and other electronic devices belonging to travelers at U.S borders without any reasonable cause or suspicion, Sullivan said. If ACTA is adopted, it will give these officials a much broader pretext for carrying out such searches, he cautioned. "If the rules are established within this international treaty it would provide further justification from them to engage in this type of behavior," he continued, "and it won't be just at U.S. borders that travelers could be subjected to such searches, but in other countries as well."

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