Bombs, War Crimes & Our Diminished Sensitivity

A great opinion piece on how bombing & killing innocent civilians, at the push of a button, has become just a video game for the strong & "civilized" nations.

2 Hague Conventions banned the senseless aerial bombing of civilians but the fine print was that these bombings were banned during the wars between "civilized nations." Since, the Global West has always considered itself "civilized," aerial bombing of civilians was never banned during wars when an "uncivilized" country needs to be taught a lesson.

Although, today's world has several different kinds of international institutions, beside the UN, where, countries are supposedly on an equal footing, but when it comes to politics, wars, & the ensuing value of human lives, there is still a huge divide between the strong Global West / North & Global East / South. The Global West / North still consider itself "civilized" & above any international law, whatsoever, whereas, the Global East / South has to be policed & berated like a little naughty baby.

Most of the general public in the Global West has a diminished sensitivity towards illegitimate wars & chaos their countries are creating in other countries. News of innocent civilians being killed for no reason than just being alive either don't make to the Western news media or if they do, the public just brushes it away like some kind of unwanted annoyance. There was a time when huge protests were organized in the streets of American streets against the Vietnam war, but when American drones are easily killing innocent civilians in Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria etc., the public is all fine & dandy with it.

Ironically, as the emir of Afghanistan implied, so-called "civilized" nations have not only mastered the art of killing innocent civilians for no reasons, whatsoever, they have also lost any sensitivity or guilt towards falsely creating wars & then killing people in other countries. In the West, when someone kills someone else without any remorse, he / she is labelled a psychopath. But when hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are killed by a "civilized" nation, it's all in the name of peace & justice. Prosecution of war crimes are never done against them & everyone goes on with their lives like nothing ever happened.

Then, the Western public wonders why the people of "uncivilized" nations hate us? They don't hate you. They hate the double standards of international bodies like UN. They hate double sensitivities of the general public. They hate how the value of an Iraqi life is far less than a French one, for instance. The general public cries a river if a few die in the West, but a thousand killed in the East don't even register a small tear.

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http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/10/bombs-war-crimes-diminished-sensitivity-151013101634047.html

On April 28, 1937, Pablo Picasso read the front-page headlines in L'Humanite: "One thousand incendiary bombs dropped by Hitler and Mussolini's planes reduce the city of Guernica to ashes. An incalculable number of dead and wounded. For how long can the world tolerate the terrifying exploits of international fascism?"

Though generally not much affected by political events, Picasso was devastated by the aerial bombing of civilians in his native country & immediately began to work on an enormous painting of protest & memorial. Executed in the same black-and-white as the harrowing newspaper pictures, Guernica was immediately adopted as both emblem & fund-raiser for international anti-Franco activism.

In the ensuing decades, it became so iconic an image of the horrors of war that a tapestry facsimile was placed in the lobby of the United Nations. In 2003, when Colin Powell went to the UN to present the US' case for military intervention in Iraq, this tapestry was covered with a blue curtain. As the New York Times commented at the time, "Mr Powell can't very well seduce the world into bombing Iraq surrounded on camera by shrieking and mutilated women, men, children …"

Picasso's masterpiece emerged from his epoch's general repugnance towards aerial bombing (in the streets, one million Parisians protested the Guernica bombing while he was painting inside), a now-diminished feeling that we would do well to revive.

Last resort

As HG Wells' 1908 novel, War in the Air, showed, it was not civilian air travel that people envisioned in the wake of the Wright brothers' early successes, but bombs. And, as was immediately recognised, the dominance of the skies by "air navies" would herald a different kind of warfare. Forget those soldierly qualities celebrated since Homer - courage, valour, chivalry & the like; in the future, you could defeat a people without emotion & without danger to yourself. Even generals demurred at a prospect both so brutal & so cowardly, & aerial bombing of civilian targets was banned by both Hague Conventions in 1899 & 1907.

But the Hague Conventions only governed the conduct of war between "civilised nations", which implied that such crude tactics could be used against those deemed neither "civilised" nor "nations". Therefore, naturally, there were experiments in Europe's empires. In 1920, Britain & France used bombs to terrorise civilians rebelling against their newly-installed regimes in Iraq & Syria, respectively. Britain also dropped bombs on civilians in Afghanistan, whose emir articulated the paradox that has obtained ever since: "It is a matter for great regret that the throwing of bombs by Zeppelins on London was denounced as a most savage act … while now we see with our own eyes that such operations are ... prevalent among civilised people of the West."

Western assumptions about which populations may be targeted with aerial bombardment have remained intact - & no one should be surprised if those populations have stored up a diabolical picture of the West over the course of the intervening century.

What has not remained intact is the basic repugnance towards aerial bombing which made it, even in the old empires, an unpopular last resort. Today, aerial bombing fails to generate the outrage that Guernica did, despite its inordinately more destructive effects. Of course, this is partly because the West now feels it will not itself be the target, which was not the case in the 1930s. But it is also because the great internationalist enterprise of which the Hague Conventions were a part - which included making war less brutal, &, if possible, ending it - has fallen into cynical disrepair, & one of the results is the diminished sensitivities of our era.

The Palace of Nations in Geneva ... is a relic of that enterprise, which sought a new and better world. Visionaries from every continent were united in the feeling that what must replace Europe's empires was some form of inter-national "society of societies": Just as in modern nations, free citizens freely congregated to resolve social disputes & determine their joint future, so in the "society of societies", free nations would do the same. Arbitration would replace war; the sphere of politics would be the world.

In an era threatened by total war, this vision captivated generations of idealists, including such disparate figures as Andrew Carnegie and HG Wells. It resulted in an impressive furniture of international laws, conventions & institutions, some of which still operate today. But it was severely damaged by the Cold War when both the US & the Soviet Union undermined international bodies so they could transform the world in their own interests. Since then, the US & its allies have pursued aggressive private policies on the global stage whose relationship with any residual idea of the international "community" is well expressed by that blue curtain across Guernica. Russia is now returning to a similarly extralegal role.

The envisioned "society" of societies has become instead a gangland, & one where there is no trace of the "democracy" that is its frequent war cry. The attack on the MSF hospital on October 3 is just another example of how battered the old civilising project, a key part of which was the inviolability of medical personnel in war zones, is.

Prosecuting war crimes

As far back as 1864, when a Swiss millionaire who had earlier witnessed the carnage of the Battle of Solferino established in Geneva an international medical force to care for the victims of war, regardless of their nationality, the red cross on the doctors' flag was a guarantee of immunity from attack. The Geneva Convention, at which the new organisation was announced, stated, "Ambulances and military hospitals shall be recognised as neutral, and as such, protected and respected by the belligerents as long as they accommodate wounded and sick." This provision was updated & expanded in the Hague Conventions & - during that last burst of internationalism before the Cold War - in the Geneva Convention of 1949.

Despite everything, the legal situation has not been diluted since. Any wartime belligerent knowingly attacking neutral medical staff & facilities without notifying them in advance is guilty of a war crime. ...

Our present world crisis is, in great part, a result of the assault over the last seventy years on the ideals & infrastructure designed between 1850 & 1950 to ensure world peace. It may be too late to rebuild them, but we do not have a better hope. The vision of a consensual internationalism built on parliamentary & judicial process remains the only way to restore to global affairs the kind of legitimacy that might give young people in Iraq or Syria or Afghanistan a feeling that the world is not entirely lawless & senseless - & it does not need to be burned down. And the starting point of such a "society of societies" must be that the strong - as in any society worth the name - be bound by the same rules as the weak.

An apocryphal story goes like this: Pablo Picasso, living in Nazi-occupied Paris, had his studio searched by the Gestapo. Coming across a reproduction of Guernica, a German officer asked the artist, "Did you do this?" "No," replied Picasso. "You did."

One wonders how such a conversation would go today.

Rana Dasgupta is a British novelist and essayist based in Delhi. He is the author of Capital: The Eruption of Delhi.

Walter Scott died because of ... American exceptionalism

A good opinion piece. Nothing much to say for me than to highlight the fact that almost 1100 Americans were apparently killed by cops in 2014. And Americans (with people in other developed countries) think the West is "civilized".
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http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/walter-scott-is-dead-the-cause-american-exceptionalism/

Walter Scott, a retired Coast Guard sailor, was stopped by the North Charleston police for a broken taillight, & was dead moments later. He was shot in the back. One more name, one more civilian killed by American exceptionalism.
 
No one is sure exactly how many people die at the hands of the police in the US every year. Last month, a White House task force created by President Barack Obama in the wake of the riots in Ferguson, Mo., recommended that the federal government should try to count, by collecting these data from local police forces. Notionally, the FBI already has this responsibility & it reports that the number hovers around 400 deaths per year. But an online effort to collect media accounts of fatal police encounters, & to crowd-source the fact-checking, has arrived at a much more grim & more widely accepted figure: more than 1,100 killed in 2014.
 
There are many factors that help to explain why American police kill civilians at a dramatically higher rate than in any other developed country, but 3 deserve special attention as being unique to the United States.
 
First, there are more guns per capita in the US than in any other country in the world. Estimates vary from 270 million to 310 million legal & illegal guns in circulation. This provides almost one gun for every man, woman & child. A recent study in the American Journal of Public Health reported that 1 in 3 households contains a gun. This is down from 1 in 2 in the 1970s, but gun ownership is still 35% higher than the next-highest country: Serbia.
 
This directly changes the way that American police forces operate. With so many civilians carrying guns, is it surprising that the police shoot first & ask questions later? In fact, American police are at relatively more peril than their counterparts elsewhere. According to the FBI (so perhaps take this with a grain of salt), approximately 50 officers are “feloniously killed” in the line of duty each year.
 
This has, understandably, created a police culture that is both defensive & aggressive. One small example that illustrates this involves car chases. In the United Kingdom, police cars box in fleeing vehicles & use “rolling roadblocks” to force them to stop. But American police, assuming all suspects are armed, use the more violent & potentially lethal “PIT manoeuvre” to swerve into the rear bumper of the car being chased, sending it crashing off the road.
 
The second factor is that America remains one of the most racially divided countries in the world. Last year, the Public Religion Research Institute released a study showing that the average white American has 91 times more white friends than black ones. In fact, three-quarters of whites don’t even have 1 black friend. This racial divide has real consequences. For most white cops, their references for understanding black Americans must come from second-hand sources or popular media; in other words, from rumour & rap songs. This is something that needs to be considered when trying to understand why young, black males are 21 times more likely to be shot by the police than their white counterparts, as revealed by the analysis of independent news organization ProPublica.
 
The third uniquely American factor is the embattled-hero mythology that surrounds the police. In no country are the cops as lionized as they are in the US. Not even Canadians, who place the “Mounties” at the centre of their national identity, elevate the police to such heights. From The Lone Ranger to Hill Street Blues & CSI: Miami, American culture has constructed a pervasive narrative of the imperilled but noble police officer, courageously risking his life every day on the thin blue line between civilization & murderous chaos.
 
But this portrayal is very misleading. In reality, America is not being threatened by criminal anarchy. While the number of civilians being shot by police has never been higher, incidents of violent crime have dropped more than 50% since the 1990s. Yet local police increasingly arm themselves with preposterously lethal equipment. Consider the small town of Sweetwater, Fla. It has a population of only 13,000, slightly smaller than that of Kenora, Ont. Yet the local police force has its own SWAT team, a mine-resistant armoured vehicle, a “commando” armoured car, 4 light attack helicopters, 20 M16 machine guns & a grenade launcher. These weapons were never designed to “serve & protect”; they are only suited for killing & conquering.
 
And the myth of heroism? In spite of all the guns, being a policeman in America is actually a relatively safe profession. Loggers, roofers, carpenters, farmers, construction labourers, even garbagemen, are far more likely to be killed on the job. But when they die in the service of the community, there are no televised funerals, no flag-draped coffins.
 
Alexis de Tocqueville was right when he wrote about American exceptionalism in 1835. It is a remarkable nation with countless unique qualities that other countries struggle to emulate. But it has uniquely dangerous problems, too, which can combine into toxic moments, such as the one we watched last week, as Walter Scott ran away, stumbled, then fell, 6 bullets in his back.

Inside America's Machine Gun theme park

America: the land where you can never have enough guns. Like that Isaac Asimov's quote that science has raced ahead to 21st century, & we humans think that our mentality is also developed enough to be in 21st century, but society is still in caveman mentality.
 
What do you expect when you give a caveman a gizmo from 21st century? Feelings of awe, wonder, & power. If that gizmo is some kind of firearm, then the result could be far more dangerous. Similarly, you don't give the bottle of industrial-strength cleaner to a toddler; it will kill itself.

 

Ironically, developed countries, like America, consider themselves "civilized" countries but love to make, own, & sell firearms to the world. Developing countries are considered "uncivilized" & "barbaric" by developed countries, & people in those developing countries (South Asia, Asia, Africa etc) don't own as many guns, or make guns, or even sell guns to other countries.

 

Who is more "barbaric" & "uncivilized" now?
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Children as young as 13 can shoot military-grade firearms at America's newest gun-themed attraction.

 

Machine Gun America in Florida is offering gun lovers full access to an arsenal of high calibre automatic weapons.

 

Customers can spray submachine gun bullets at target posters ranging from Osama Bin Laden to vampires, with ticket prices starting at $100.

 

Even visitors with no prior weapons training are handed heavy weaponry such as the MP5, M4, & the Glock 17 to destroy targets.

 

Young women are so far one of the largest demographics of visitors to Machine Gun America.

 

John Webster, 21, from Tampa, Florida, USA visited the range with his two friends. He said: 'My heart was pumping - I never fired a gun like that in my life. To feel so much power was just exhilarating - pulling the trigger & having your whole body shake, there's nothing like it.'

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2942540/Inside-America-s-machine-gun-theme-park-Firearms-lovers-flock-Florida-s-newest-attraction-tourists-try-Glock-17s-shoot-Bin-Laden.html

The Palace of Shame that makes China angry

Good article. The West developed itself, in the past 500 or so years, primarily through the looting of treasures of inanimate objects & enslaving millions in the process. In many cases, they also occupied whole countries.

The West forced their way into several countries / kingdoms of yesteryear (South Asia, Latin America, North America, Africa, Australasia, Middle East) in the guise of "increasing trade & economy", then took over those lands through brutal means, kept it occupied for decades, & then after emptying the lands for whatever they were worth (all their treasures, financial & human capital), left the indigenous population fighting for scraps among themselves for decades to come. All this was going on, while, "civilized" society was ruling over "barbarians".

The Western countries still do the same thing by letting their companies force their way into their former occupied lands (developing countries) in the name of trade & taking advantage of weaker / corrupt governments of those countries (which are propped up by the West), then start plundering the mineral wealth of that country without ever properly compensating those countries, e.g. Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Uganda, Libya, Congo, Peru, Venezuela, Iraq etc.

When a good leader does come along in those former occupied lands, he/she asks for compensation, debt forgiveness, & reassesses all those contracts for mineral wealth being looted out of his/her country. Those leaders are scorned & the West tries to rile up a small minority of that country to create trouble for the that leader, e.g. Venezuela's late leader Chavez. Some other countries, like Greece, when asks for compensation for past wrongs, they are essentially told to go screw off, & "look to the future instead of past." When African countries, e.g. Congo asks for debt forgiveness, they are told that "a loan is a loan & has to be repaid", even though, that loan was essentially paid to a corrupt dictator, who was widely known that he was a corrupt dictator, but he kept getting the loans from international banks & monetary agencies.

How can the public & the honest governments of the developing countries ever trust the Western countries & their leaders, when the recent history of the world is replete with the West's dishonesty, lies, & exploitation of the developing countries with any means necessary?
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There is a deep, unhealed historical wound in the UK's relations with China - a wound that most British people know nothing about, but which causes China great pain. It stems from the destruction in 1860 of the country's most beautiful palace.

It's been described as China's ground zero - a place that tells a story of cultural destruction that everyone in China knows about, but hardly anyone outside.

The palace's fate is bitterly resented in Chinese minds & constantly resurfaces in Chinese popular films, angry social media debates, & furious rows about international art sales.

And it has left a controversial legacy in British art collections - royal, military, private - full of looted objects.

These days the site is just ruins - piles of scorched masonry, lakes with overgrown plants, lawns with a few stones scattered where many buildings once stood. The site swarms with Chinese visitors, taken there as part of a government-sponsored "patriotic education" programme.

As everyone in China is taught, it was once the most beautiful collection of architecture & art in the country. Its Chinese name was Yuanmingyuan - Garden of Perfect Brightness - where Chinese emperors had built a huge complex of palaces & other fine buildings, & filled them with cultural treasures.

A new digital reconstruction by a team at Tsinghua University gives a vivid idea of what this extraordinary place looked like when, 155 years ago, a joint British-French army approached Beijing.

The army was sent towards the end of the Opium Wars to force Chinese imperial rulers to open up their country further to Western trade & influence. In command on the British side was the 8th Earl of Elgin, from one of the most famous families in British imperial history.

French troops reached Beijing & the Summer Palace, where they began helping themselves to porcelain, silks & ancient books - or simply destroying what they found.

British troops joined in when they arrived shortly afterwards. "Officers and men seemed to have been seized with temporary insanity," said one witness. "In body & soul they were absorbed in one pursuit which was plunder, plunder."

Lord Elgin ordered the British troops to burn down the entire Summer Palace complex. The destruction, he wrote later, was intended "to mark, by a solemn act of retribution, the horror & indignation... with which we were inspired by the perpetration of a great crime".

I visited the current Lord Elgin, at his ancestral home in Scotland, to ask how he explained what had happened in 1860.

"There are things that perhaps you might have done differently," he says of his ancestor. "At the same time you've got to judge what was the feeling - intense feeling - at that particular moment."

China rejects such explanations.

"This is what they say to justify their actions," says Wang Daocheng, a leading Chinese scholar of these events. "That's the way they try to maintain the so-called moral high ground."

Soon after the Summer Palace's destruction in 1860, the 8th Earl of Elgin made a triumphant entry to the centre of Beijing, his procession symbolising British & Western domination - & Chinese humiliation.

China is also focusing increasingly on all the art that was looted by French & British forces - & taken to Europe. It was widely traded & still sits in all kinds of private & public collections.

"We're making a plan to start a series of actions to recover these antiques & get them back to China," says Niu Xianfeng, general director of the National Treasures Fund, affiliated to the Chinese Ministry of Culture.

"China will never give up the right to bring these looted or stolen treasures back."

Liu Yang, a researcher who has spent 15 years tracking down the artworks, says "British museums never reply" when he writes to ask what they have. But he has collected hundreds of images of looted items on his computer.

The Royal collection has several other items thought to be connected with the Beijing Summer Palace, including Chinese imperial sceptres, brass plaques & a mahogany screen.

The Wallace Collection in London has magnificent imperial vases from the palace.

British military museums have many items too. At the Royal Engineers' museum in Kent deputy curator James Scott showed me a beautiful jade ornament brought back from the 1860 campaign. There are also parts of a Chinese imperial throne acquired by the officer Charles Gordon - used for many decades as part of the furniture in the officers' mess.

Labelling these items is a sensitive matter. "We don't actually mention the word loot at all. We try to keep the interpretation as neutral as possible," says Scott.

Similar sensitivities are needed by auctioneers, who can make huge profits when items originally taken from the Summer Palace are re-sold today. Proof of their origin as part of the Chinese imperial collection - such as inscriptions by made by the soldiers who looted them - hugely increases their potential value.

Some newly wealthy Chinese have bid for such items. But having to pay for art that was stolen - as many Chinese see it - causes increasing resentment.

And what of the Elgin family? Does today's Lord Elgin think art should be returned to China?

"It's a very good arguing point" he concedes. But "the beauty of something is inherent in it wherever it happens to be".

"These things happen," he says of the 1860 events. "It's important to go ahead, rather than look back all the time."

The French, who joined in the looting of the palace, have been more open about their regret. "We call ourselves civilised & them barbarians," wrote the outraged author, Victor Hugo, about the destruction of the Summer Palace. "Here is what Civilisation has done to Barbarity."

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30810596

Lords of War ... in West

This article reminded me of one of my most fav movies: "Lord of War". Damn, it was a good movie but it only earned $73M (budget: $42M) ... but I digress ...

How can there be any peace in this world when all powerful, developed, "civilized", & guardians of UN & NATO, are armed to the teeth themselves, & support their defense industries through tax $$$ (people don't get healthcare, food, education in US, UK, EU, but there are millions available for state subsidies for these companies). Ironically, North Korea also uses its state funds to build more weapons instead of feeding its own people.

People are being laid off all over the place because economies are in recession for almost 7 years now, but ironically, these companies like Raytheon, Cobham, Thales etc. are enjoying significant growth in their businesses all over the world. Ironically enough, not only they are principal job creators in the West but they also are at the forefront of technological innovation.

Regardless of what some groups are doing in Middle East & Africa or what is right or wrong in their eyes or the world, but at least, in the West or "civilized" parts of the world, all of us humans know, for a fact, that wars & conflicts are bread & butter of these huge defense companies. Then, why will they ever, with the help of their respective governments, pursue or help spread peace in this world? Thanks to media, we are all being programmed to hate dictators & certain groups in Middle East & Africa, but we completely ignore pointing fingers at these billion-$$$ harbingers of death & destruction, & their activities are much more widespread & destructive than those dictators & groups.

http://rt.com/uk/229675-arms-industry-profit-bloodshed/