The Cherry Orchard

I don’t praise the Bush/Cheney administration often in these pages, but I am glad to hear of a meeting that signals a positive new change in USA foreign policy. For the first time in decades, there has been a high-level meeting of US ambassadors and Iranian ambassadors over the future of Iraq.

Some may question why I want my country to begin an open dialogue with a hostile nation that is escalating the world’s nuclear arms race as well as spreading deeply offensive lies about the history of Germany’s genocidal campaign against Jews during World War II. Well, no matter how offensive another nation, organization or person is, I believe the best policy is to keep an open dialogue with that nation, organization or person. Talking doesn’t hurt. And even if the lies flow on all sides, some truths might sneak out as well.

I watched coverage of today’s talks on both CNN (which welcomed the development) and Fox News (which presented one commentator saying that we should not honor Iran with a high-level meeting since they are clearly working to destabilize Iraq). Another commentator correctly pointed out that it is the USA-led coalition in Iraq that Iran is trying to destabilize, not “Iraq” itself — their goal in Iraq is clearly to support a Shiite-dominated government that offers fewer concessions to the Sunni majority than the coalition government offers. It’s a fact that they are arming our enemies. But we should not make the mistake of believing Iran is motivated by a love of “chaos” or violence. Iran’s policy is entirely pragmatic and, for their interests, sensible. Iran is a Shiite nation, and they back Iraq’s Shiite majority for obvious reasons.

Let the talks begin. I hope there is a follow-up session soon, and I’ll be sure to cover it here when there is.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s new campaign of disinformation regarding the European Jewish genocide of half a century ago has had a positive effect for me: it’s inspired me to do a lot of thinking on this subject. Since writing this article, I’ve been studying up on the actual histories of the Jewish holocaust and several other holocausts of the 20th century, and learning some surprising things.

I wrote in the article linked above that, contrary to popular perception, genocide is anything but rare in the world today. I’ve been gathering more information (though my knowledge of the subject is still sparse), and I’m continuing to find many surprising patterns and similarities between what appear to be isolated histories. Here are some of the more well-known cases of genocide on our planet in the last hundred years, listed chronologically:

1. Turkish Armenians, 1915-1918

2. Russian Peasantry, 1932-33

3. Eastern European Jews, 1939-1945

4. Chinese Peasantry, 1958-1961

5. Cambodian Peasantry, 1975-1979

6. Iraqi Kurds, 1988

7. Rwandan Tutsis, 1994

8. Bosnians, 1992-1995

9. Sudanese, now

We are accustomed to examining these incidents in isolation, but what can we learn by comparing them, and why is that most popular treatments (books, movies) of genocide focus so tightly on specific incidents but draw back from any attempts at universal conclusions?

I believe this is a natural result of the intensely private experience we each have when apprehending the ugly facts of our own history. It is very difficult for me, as a Jew, not to see Hitler’s Jewish holocaust as a searingly unique event, despite the fact that a wider look reveals it was nothing of the sort. Historians with personal connections to any of the other ethnic groups or economic classes above will likewise tend to individuate, and if we stop our inquiries there we are likely to miss the obvious fact that genocide follows clear and distinct universal patterns. In fact, once we separate ourselves from our emotional reactions of victimhood and take a close look, a shocking truth quickly emerges: genocides happen because they serve a functional purpose.

This contradicts the prevailing idea of genocide as the work of madmen. I’m sorry to report that no such easy excuse can survive close examination. I only wish we could blame this horrible phenomenon on human insanity, but this explanation does not hold.

Today is Martin Luther King Day, which seems like an appropriate time to announce the beginning of a new inquiry that I will conduct here at the ol’ Cherry Orchard Blog, Fruit Stand and Political Theme Park. I am going to attempt a field guide — a broad, fact-rich overview — of the worst known incidents of man’s inhumanity to man (as we like to call it) in modern history. Please visit again during the next few weeks as I prepare my first summaries on this topic.

I planned to review the second day of debate at the United Nations General Assembly this morning. Unfortunately, the UN.org website is still a technical mess, and I can’t get to the texts of most of the speeches. There is no excuse for this, and the volume of web traffic to UN.org can’t possibly justify the poor performance. If YouTube.com can serve millions of LonelyGirl15 webviews to the world with barely a glitch, certainly the United Nations web servers should be able to deliver the text of a few dozen speeches each day without crashing to their knees.

But my review of day two will have to wait, even as day three commences with speeches by Boris Tadic of Serbia, Uribe Velez of Colombia, Emile Lahoud of Lebanon, Emilio Guebuza of Mozambique, Branko Crvenkovski of Macedonia, Stephen Harper of Canada, Jose Socrates of Portugal, Valdas Adamkus of Lithuania, Miyegombo Enkhbold of Mongolia, Solomon Berewa of Sierra Leone, Ban Ki-Moon of South Korea (who is often mentioned as a possible successor to outgoing United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan), Sergey Lavrov of Russia, Alexander Downer of Australia, Ursula Plassnik of Austria, Miguel Angel Moratinos Cuyabe of Spain, Ahmed Aboul Gheit of Egypt, Aichatou Mindaoudou of Niger and Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine (who gets, like Israel yesterday, the terrible closer spot at the end of another long, long day of speeches).

I wish I could comment on Hugo Chavez’s speech, which made big news when the Venezuelan leader suggested that George W. Bush was the devil and that the UN’s podium still smelled like sulfur after his appearance the day before. But I haven’t been able to read the full text of his speech, so instead I’d like to follow up on Tuesday’s speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a dynamic and wily speaker who is leaving many moderate and reasonable people stunned and speechless with his inflammatory remarks about Jewish history and the Holocaust.

I hate being stunned and speechless, personally, but my natural emotional reaction to Ahmadinejad’s words leaves me grasping for words, and I’m not sure where to even begin refuting his points. Well, let’s leave some other avenues aside and start right here:

Mr. Ahmadinejad, you have every right to re-examine the myths of history, and you are certainly correct that the European genocide of the Jews that took place during World War II has been overly mythologized. No part of human history can be considered taboo; every stone must be turned over, and every “certainty” is fair game for re-examination. Nobody should stand against the honest pursuit of historical fact, even when one fears (as in this case) that political motivations are underlying the pursuit.

BUT, Mr. Ahmadinejad, you go too far when you suggest that the history of the Jewish holocaust stands as the justification for the current existence of the nation of Israel. As I’ve said here before and I will certainly say again: Israel’s right to exist is based only on the fact that there are human beings living there now. They were born there, they are citizens of no other country, and this is the only home they have.

A new study of the history of the Holocaust may turn up some surprising facts and conclusions (though it won’t find that the genocide was a fraud). But even if it turns out that all of World War II was staged with actors and filmed in a studio in Burbank, the fact remains that millions of Jews have been born in the nation of Israel, and that “the Zionist entity” is their home.

It’s about living human beings, Mr. Ahmadinejad. There are living human beings in Israel and living human beings in Palestine. History happened yesterday. What do you have to offer us for tomorrow?

British author and social critic Martin Amis recently wrote a book called The War Against Cliche; it’s a pretty good book, and it’s a great title. As an author of fiction and poetry trying to turn my head towards the controversial topics of the day, I can relate to the title. When I write about world events I often feel myself fighting the war against cliche, and sometimes losing it.

What’s a writer to do? I am filled with disgust and anger towards a few world leaders whose decisions and statements seem too banal for tragedy and too predictable for comedy. I want to write about this, but I can come up with nothing to say that hasn’t been said before. But if I don’t write what I feel, I find myself unable to write anything at all. My anger is a clot, a clump.

So, let’s dive in. I have two subjects today, two influential global leaders who claim to be each other’s philosophical opposites: one is a religious fundamentalist and populist politician who embraces military solutions to human problems, whereas the other is a religious fundamentalist and populist politican who embraces military solutions to human problems. I’m speaking of George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The Bush administration has begun a new public relations initiative aimed at keeping Republican seats in the US Senate and Congress during the November midterm elections. Their speechwriters have now put the phrase “Islamic fascism” into regular rotation, and Vice-President Dick Cheney recently delivered a speech comparing the anti-war movement in the USA to the appeasement of Hitler before World War II.

As many before me have already said, the Bush administration does not have the credibility to make comparisons like this pass any type of inspection. The horrific results of the war in Iraq, begun in March 2003, betray a more obvious truth: this war was hastily planned and badly executed. The good citizens of the USA know that their current leadership is frighteningly incompetent, and many of us dread the damage that may be done in this administration’s remaining two years. As far as I’m concerned, Bush and Cheney are already lame ducks, and I earnestly plead that they cease delivering speeches. They have already insulted America’s honor with their reckless foreign policy; I beg that they stop insulting our intelligence.

The administration of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is no less reckless. Cartoonists and comedians in the USA like to portray the earnest fanatic as a clown, a madman, but in fact he is a career politician with over twenty-five years of experience in Iranian politics. It’s all too easy to laugh him off when he convenes a panel of academics to study whether or not the genocide of six million Jews in mid-20th Century Europe is a myth. We know that the Holocaust was all too real, as were other holocausts of modern times from Russia to China to Cambodia to Rwanda to Bosnia to Darfur. How shall I react to a politician like this? Ahmadinejad is all over the news: he is famously beginning a program of nuclear enrichment, he has declared that Israel has no right to exist, he has called for a purge of liberal intellectuals from Iranian universities. I believe Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a familar character from history. I don’t intend to bore my poor readers by beating this subject to death, but I do plan to use this site to watch his activities in the future.

Cliches? Yeah, I’ve got nothing but cliches to offer today. I hate when the world seems simplistic, but I’ve got to call the shots like I see them.

When we complain about the wars that rage around us, we often ask why the politicians and military leaders of the world can’t discover the path to peace. In fact, it’s our mistake to assume that politicians and military leaders are suited to this task.

Why do we sit and wait for them to do everything? The problem with this approach is obvious: they are the ones at war. Since when do peacemakers sit back and wait for the warring parties to create peace? We’d have to wait a long time. A person engaged in leading a nation must think strategically. This is why there’s such a vile sense of gameplaying when the top leaders of the world meet to shake hands and kiss and discuss “the world’s problems”.

The real problem becomes clearer when you think of the fact that all of these politicians and national leaders must satisfy their own constituencies and prove to their supporters that they are capable of tough military action. This explains much of what we see from both Israel and Iran — in Israel, Olmert’s aggressive response to Hezbollah and Hamas is helping to establish his credibility as a successor to Ariel Sharon, and in Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is using the battle with Israel as a national call to unity. War is an essential political tool, and most political leaders are only capable of using it as such.

If peace is hard work (it is) and if we can’t trust our favorite politicians to do this work, who can we trust? Religious leaders? The United Nations? Independent organizations like Amnesty International? Artists and writers and musicians?  Theoreticians and academics? Journalists and bloggers? I’d like to spend the next few posts on this site examining this question in some detail.

In the past, political leaders have sometimes proved capable of working for peace. Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat come to mind (though Sadat sadly sacrificed his life for his actions, and Carter’s hard work failed to earn him re-election in 1980), as do Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk in South Africa and Albert Reynolds, Gerry Adams and John Major in Northern Ireland and England. But if I had to grade the work of our current crop of world politicians in promoting world peace, I’d give the whole class a D+. And that’s just because I’m feeling generous. How do the other parties I mentioned above stack up? I’ll be writing more on this soon.