The Cherry Orchard

Let’s take a moment to salute a brave woman who endured a “tour of ridicule” that must have been more difficult than many imagine. In an age when a stunning number of intelligent American citizens say that they feel powerless to influence the direction of their own elected government’s foreign policy, Cindy Sheehan’s bold and heartfelt personal protest against our conduct of the Iraq war proved them all wrong. Here’s Cindy’s farewell diary on Daily Kos. I hope she gets some well-deserved rest and perspective, but I also hope we’ll eventually hear from her again.

Before I dive into the following inquiry, I’d like to clear up why I think I’m qualified to write about history even though I have no training as a historian (though I have degrees in philosophy and computer science and consider myself well-read).

The fact is, our “experts” aren’t getting the job done. History is an absolutely critical piece for anybody trying to understand modern politics, and in fact a good understanding of the past and present is probably the single most important tool in the toolbox of anybody engaged in a political field (as a journalist, a candidate, a commentator or a supporting player). When it comes to strong popular coverage of the stunningly important debates of the day, though, it seems like we’ve let the room get taken over by yammering monkeys. There’s a lot of noise, but nobody’s saying much at all.

I think we should do better. In the series of posts I’ll be writing for the next few weeks, I’m focusing on one particular question, and I hope you’ll help me figure out the answer by posting comments if you’d like.

It’s a simple question, the kind only an amateur would ask. What is genocide?

What is genocide? Well, let’s see what some of these events share in common. Thinking about, say, the Turkish murder of a million and a half Armenians during World War I, the Nazi Holocaust during World War II, and the monthlong killing spree in Rwanda in which a million Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutus, one big fact pops out right away. All three of these events occured during wartime, and the victims were ethnic minorities who were considered likely to betray their nations to invading armies.

The nation of Turkey (during the last years of the Ottoman empire) was allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary against France, Britain and Russia in the First World War. After Turkey lost critical battles to the Russians, the government resolved that the minority population of Armenian Christians were likely to welcome the coming invaders, and planned to kill them all. They carried these plans out for three years.

The Jews of the varied nations of Europe were already reeling from the incredible discrimination and dehumanization of the German Nazi regime when the death trains began rolling in 1942. The Nazi brand of anti-semitism has deep roots, but the German drive to clear Eastern Europe of Jews during its vicious war against Russia was rooted in military strategy as well.

The Rwandan million-person massacre of 1994 was, incredibly enough, a carefully plotted and insidiously executed political maneuver. Hutus form the majority population of Rwanda, but remained in many ways economically and politically subservient to the wealthier minority Tutsis. In 1994, the weak Hutu-led government seemed about to collapse to a powerful invading force of Tutsi exiles when a Hutu radio station began broadcasting instructions that all Tutsis must die (the machetes had already been distributed).

What is genocide? Well, it seems to have a hell of a lot to do with war. Ahh, those masters of war! Genocide belongs to them too (no, to us, all of us, since we are all to blame).

Here’s a slogan more people should hear: War Causes Genocide. War causes genocide like cigarettes cause lung cancer. Something to think about the next time you’re about to reach for a pack, or call up some troops.

More on this subject to follow, of course! Please feel free to comment and tell me how you think this inquiry is going so far.

You may have seen or heard about the controversial Bill Clinton interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News in which the former President scolded the conservative journalist for suggesting that Clinton did not do enough to combat Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda during his eight-year presidency.

The video is 10:01 minutes long but worth it (it gets real good around 5:47). Once you’ve watched this video, check out Keith Olbermann’s brave words about this altercation. Well said, Keith.

I’d like to add another perspective to the discussion of Bill Clinton’s legacy against terrorism. I haven’t heard others mention this recently, but it’s a fact that Clinton’s record as a peacemaker in the Middle East was second only to Jimmy Carter’s.

When Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook the hand of Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat in 1993, that was the inspired work of Bill Clinton and his team, including Secretary of State Warren Christopher and U. S. Envoy to the Middle East Dennis Ross, whose thick history book The Missing Peace provides an enlightening look at the hard, hard work it takes to end wars.

Do you remember the 1993 Rabin/Arafat handshake? All Americans felt proud at that moment, because our country had helped to bring about a change towards greater global understanding and justice. How far we’ve come since then!

Peace had been a growing trend (though a rocky road) in the Middle East during the years leading up to September 11 2001. The attacks on that day were a strike against the momentum towards peace. Those who loved war found eager partners in the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney administration, and the rest is history.

Eighteen notable writers, including Harold Pinter, Toni Morrison and Russell Banks, have issued a short statement about the current war. It culminates in one pointed paragraph:

Each provocation and counter-provocation is contested and preached over. But the subsequent arguments, accusations and vows, all serve as a distraction in order to divert world attention from a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation.

There’s plenty of room for argument here — why does this article hint at two-sided-ness but then fail to mention that there are also significant long-term military, economic and geographic practices aiming for the liquidation of the Israeli nation? Regardless, these eighteen writers are to be commended for speaking clearly and simply, for stating premises that lead to a conclusion, and for keeping their message short and sharp.

High quality discourse is absolutely essential to the peace process. Whether one agrees with these eighteen writers or not, one can at least appreciate that the clarity of their statement might bring the discussion to the next level by allowing responses of similar clarity.

Then there’s Jostein Gaarder of Norway, the very successful author of Sophie’s World, a book that presents the history of philosophy in a meta-fictional framework. This book was an impressive achievement, and it’s shocking and disheartening to read an Aftenposten article by this author that culminates in a vivid fantasy of Israel defeated and its people sent into exile (at which point Gaarder urges, with facetious sympathy, that the nationless wanderers should not be hurt):

They are vulnerable now like snails without shells, vulnerable like slow caravans of Palestinian and Lebanese refugees, defenseless like women and children and the old in Qana, Gaza, Sabra, and Chatilla. Give the Israeli refugees shelter, give them milk and honey!

This is a revenge fantasy, and I am seriously disturbed to find a reputable author of a popular book on philosophy indulging himself in this type of emotional excess at a time when actual war rages, a time when words matter. This is not a vision of peace but of humiliation. A snail without a shell, Mr. Gaarder? In fact, revenge fantasies are a dime a dozen in our violent times. There are certainly also Israelis who dream of seeing their Palestinian enemies finally defeated and hopeless. Revenge fantasies are common, but what they are not is helpful.
I’m looking forward to using this site to critique public statements on difficult global issues, especially statements made by writers. I hope this will turn out to be a helpful way to shed light on difficult problems. Today’s quick check turns up one group that’s angry but trying to help … and one writer who’s angry but has nothing helpful to offer.

I’ve mentioned CGJT (the Committee to Give Jerusalem to Tibet) before. One interesting feature of this organization is that it does not exist. I made up the name as the fake sponsor of a poetry reading I arranged at the Bowery Poetry Club in the Spring of 2002.

This was a time when the daily carnage in Israel and Palestine was nearly as bad as the carnage in Lebanon and Israel is today. I put posters with this fake organization’s name up all over New York City, and I was then very pleased to find the name living on after the event was over. “The Committee to Give Jerusalem to Tibet (CGJT)” would randomly appear as a fake sponsor of various other event listings at the Bowery Poetry Club for the next month (I’m pretty sure this was the handiwork of club owner Bob Holman, though we never said a word about it to each other).

The name is a joke, but there’s a very serious (and fairly obvious) suggestion behind it. Any long-lasting peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians should involve equally sharing the city of Jerusalem, where great numbers of Jews and Muslims live and worship at historic temples. Realistically, the solution is likely to involve some kind of international overseeing force. This force would need to have sovereign authority, and therefore what we are proposing amounts to the internationalization of Jerusalem.

This wouldn’t be easy to achieve, of course. Battling would occur. I can think of three groups that would vigorously (and violently) fight this type of equitable settlement: fundamentalist Muslims, fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Jews. Nevertheless, it is the right approach and it must be considered.

Jon Stewart recently said as much on The Daily Show while interviewing political critic Vali Nasr, author of Shia Revival. As they discussed possible solutions to the Middle East, Stewart asked why we don’t just internationalize the city of Jerusalem. Nasr and Stewart kicked this around for a long time, agreeing that this might actually work. You can see the video here.

Here’s an easy way to get laughed at: join a group of people discussing the war in the Middle East and propose that the Buddhist religion offers a practical path to peace.

I tried arguing this in my office at work on Friday, with predictable results. I remain undeterred, because I continue to hope that religious leaders unaffiliated with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic spheres of influence might be able to play a mediating role in the current conflict.  Those of us who wish for change in the Middle East need to actively recruit peacemakers who could possibly establish a dialogue with all parties involved (the alternative is to sit around and watch Condoleeza Rice represent our best hope, and I’d just as soon sit around waiting for the Kansas City Royals to win the World Series). I’m glad that the U.S.A. and France have managed to draft a resolution for the United Nations to vote on, but the work these diplomats are doing is utterly tactical. It’s an important immediate step, but it lacks the kind of moral inspiration that can move people as well as governments, and thus it only addresses the symptoms of war rather than the root causes.

As I’ve written about elsewhere, I am an ethnic Jew but have been a religious Buddhist since I was a teenager (which was a long time ago). I tend to think of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions as more similar than different, and I think of the wonderful traditions of eastern religion (not only Buddhism but also Hinduism and other great intellectual legacies from India, China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia and Tibet) as a rich source of alternative thought. This is a theme I’d like to develop over time on this website, and I’d like to begin today by presenting a few relevant eastern-themed links.

• Deepak Chopra’a Where is Peace in a Time of War recently appeared on The Huffington Post. Chopra is part of a small group that runs IntentBlog, a modest site well worth visiting.

• You may have caught some episodes of Bill Moyers’ Faith and Reason, a PBS series featuring exploratory conversations about religion with various international writers. The episode featuring Pema Chodron is fascinating. Chodron, a Buddhist nun, emphasizes the concept of Buddhism not as an extreme choice but as a “middle path” for a wholesome life. Her prescription for balance and realism strikes me as very useful in the current world climate.

• The Sprout is a good article by Gudo Nishijima of Dogen Sangha.

I hope I won’t seem impatient if I express a wish that well-known Buddhist institutions and leaders would play a more active role in current worldwide dialogue, not because they are obliged to but because their help might make a big difference. I am surprised that this isn’t obvious to those I am addressing.

For example, I understand that Tricycle is a magazine and not a blog or a news source, but I am disappointed to visit their site and see very little discussion of the current situation in the Middle East. I am sure this represents a missed opportunity.

And, I complained last week that the Dalai Lama does not seem to be actively offering his involvement at this time either. I googled his name and all I came up with is the upcoming Peace Jam in Tennessee. Is this the best he can do? I would like to call on the various religious leaders of the world to please consider what they can offer in terms of dialogue and mediation right now. Much is at stake, and wisdom is in short supply. Maybe we need less jamming, and more peace.

This is the last of a quick seven-piece series on a basic question: we all say we hate war and violence and injustice, so who among us are doing anything about it? I decided to approach this question by looking at those who hold several key roles around the world, grouped not by nationality or religion but by function. Here’s what we looked at:

• Politicians

• Religious leaders

• The United Nations

• Independent Activist Organizations

• Writers, Artists and Musicians

• Theoreticians and Academics

I’d like to conclude with the group I feel closest to: journalists and bloggers (I’m really not interested in discussing the differences between journalists and bloggers, which is probably an overplayed topic). I think we’ve got a pretty lively public dialogue going on here in the USA. We’ve got loud voices like Michael Moore, Bill O’Reilly, Jon Stewart, Ann Coulter. I disagree with at least half of them all the time, and all of them probably half the time — but in the end I’ll just say I’m glad they’re all around to keep the dialogue jumping (as annoying as Bill O’Reilly is).

But there is no shared dialogue on a global level. Over here, we read our over-here newspapers that show upsetting pictures of casualties in Israel and don’t show upsetting pictures of casualties in Lebanon. Over there, they read their over-there newspapers that show upsetting pictures of casualties in Lebanon and don’t show upsetting pictures of casualties in Israel. Oh yeah, and both sides think it’s shocking how the other side doesn’t show photos of their casualties, and never notice that they do the same thing. We need better dialogue between nations, between religions, between languages. I wish some of our proud superstar journalists and supposedly innovative media executives would figure out ways to make this happen.

This is an exciting time to practice journalism, due not only to advances in digital video and networked communications but also to a new level of confidence and bravery among both amateur and professional journalists. I have no doubt that this trend will continue, and I can only hope that TheCherryOrchard.org will find ways to contribute to this trend.

Quiz question: name three influential political scientists or academic theoreticians who play a major role in shaping world opinion on important global issues.

If I spend my day asking this question to everybody I see, I expect to hear two alternating answers:

a) (silence)

b) “Noam Chomsky” (followed by silence)

I am ashamed to admit that I can’t even come up with three good names myself. But, please understand that I have only been running this blog for a week, and have barely begun doing the research that will, I hope, make this site informative and useful (I’ve actually spent the last few years absorbed in literary news and fiction and poetry scenes, and I’m only now beginning to invest the same amount of my time into staying thoroughly up to date on political topics).

So, at this moment, I am in the same position as most people I know — I’ve read some Noam Chomsky, and other than that I have absolutely no idea what the most brilliant representatives of our top universities and research centers and think-tanks are doing to improve our world. I know there are many academic journals read by specialists in the field, like the Political Science Quarterly, but I don’t know anybody who reads or talks about these publications.

What should we think about the fact that our top contemporary academics have so thoroughly failed to penetrate popular consciousness? Doesn’t this amount to some kind of failure? I think it does.

And then there’s this amusing fact about Noam Chomsky, the only academic I can think of who has managed to penetrate popular discussion of global issues in our times: he’s not a professor of political science. Noam Chomsky is a linguist, and he made his reputation in 1956 with the introduction of the Chomsky-Schutzenberger Hierarchy, described by Wikipedia as a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars that generate formal languages (which is probably a very exciting development if you’re a linguist). Books like 9-11, Failed States and Manufacturing Consent have benefited from Chomsky’s reputation as a highly-respected academic, but Chomsky is an academic in a field completely unrelated to political science or history.

It seems that the contemporary community of top political academics are utterly failing to play a role in the popular understanding of global issues. I hate to use a cliche like “ivory tower”, but that’s apparently where these guys are broadcasting from, and it doesn’t seem like anybody’s tuning in.

It’s standard practice to laugh at musicians, artists or writers who speak out on politics. “What the hell is Bono doing in Africa? Why don’t these rich rock stars leave the politics to the politicians?” Yeah, sure, the politicians are doing such a good job of it, right?

I applaud any celebrities who stand up for political causes, and I’m sick of hearing people put them down. I don’t particularly like Bono’s music, and I usually change the radio real quick as soon I start to hear “un … dos … tres … quatorce”. But I really respect the fact that he constantly risks embarrassment by working for causes that have nothing to do with music, and the fact that so many amateur comedians make fun of him (or Bob Geldof, or Bruce Springsteen, or Pearl Jam, or the Dixie Chicks, etc. etc.) for this only proves that these comedians don’t have the brains to come up with better material.

There’s a long tradition of writers covering the political field. Shakespeare’s history plays were firmly grounded in the partisan politics of his day. Rousseau, Voltaire, Locke and Hume created the intellectual environment that gave direction to the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Emile Zola famously stood up for Alfred Dreyfus in France, Harriet Beecher Stowe raised awareness of slavery with Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Joseph Conrad exposed the hypocrisy of Belgian exploitation of the Congo in Heart of Darkness. There are far too many examples of politically-engaged writers to even consider listing any subset of them.

Outspoken artists and musicians like Pablo Picasso, John Lennon, Bob Marley have also reached large audiences in the past, and famous musical events from Woodstock to Live Aid to Live 8 have succeeded in generating public awareness of global issues. It’d be hard to say the artists and writers and musicians of our time are doing enough to affect important global issues, because so much needs to be done. But many are doing everything they can do. In these cases, I think it’s pretty sad that the best most of us do in response is laugh their hard work off.

Do independent non-governmental activist organizations like Amnesty International and Greenpeace accomplish anything? It’s hard to say. Some of these groups have large enrollments and keep extremely busy with focused activities and grassroots causes. But they rarely manage to penetrate popular awareness, and remain “niche communities” separated from mainstream dialogue. I am glad the major (and minor) organizations are there, and I know they do good work, but I wish they were more aggressive, more vocal, and more disruptive when needed.

To tell the truth, I haven’t paid much attention to any of the more well-known groups recently, but as background research for this new blog I am going to begin paying more attention, and I plan to use this space to report on the activities and pronouncements of as many independent international organizations as I can, including the following:

• Amnesty International, which works on many fronts and issues useful reports like this one

• Greenpeace (which is mainly an environmental group, but also engages in political dialogue

• The Red Cross

• The Carter Center (founded by Jimmy Carter)

• United for Peace

• Peace Action

• War Resisters