| Number 155 | April 26, 2002 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, Sometimes one has to reach quite far to produce the jarring dissonance upon which Nygaard Notes readers have come to rely. That's why, in addition to the usual mix of newspapers, think tanks, activists, and dissidents, I find among my sources this week "Alice In Wonderland." Also "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." OK, OK, I get it. I got a lot of very positive response to last week's "Stroll Through the News With Nygaard" and finally I realized, when I started reading the letters, that I always get a lot of positive response when I run this feature. So it seems like the thing to do is to upgrade it from a "whenever I feel like it" feature to more of a regular one. Long-time readers know that it is hard for me to predict what will be in the Notes from week to week, but I will try to get it in once every couple of months or so. Or more. Or less. Nygaard Notes is taking a vacation for a couple of weeks, so the next issue will not come your way until May 17th. I'm really going to try to have this be a "vacation," as opposed to the working vacations I have been taking lately, so if you don't get any response to your letters and E-mails during this period, it means I am being successful. Peace, Nygaard |
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"Quote" #1: The President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, was elected in 1998, and re-elected overwhelmingly in 2000, in elections universally declared to be free and fair. Chavez was ousted in a military coup on April 12th, and returned to power two days later after a massive popular uproar (and some dissension within the military). The day after his return to power, a senior member of the administration of George W. Bush had this to say about Hugo Chavez:
This official chose to remain anonymous, presumably because he was embarrassed to utter such words as a member of the administration of George W. Bush. Mr. Bush, readers may recall, was declared President of the United States after not receiving a majority of the votes cast in November of the year 2000. He was quoted in the New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print") on April 15, 2002. "Quote" #2: When asked if being forced from office by the military at 3 a.m. and shipped off to prison by the military would count as a "coup," another unnamed "official" of the Bush administration was quoted in the April 13 edition of the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) as follows:
"Quote" #3: The Red Queen, quoted in Alice in Wonderland:
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"More Insulted and Attacked After September 11" was the report on page 12 in the New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print") of March 11. Attacks on Asian-Americans, particularly Pakistani and Indian immigrants, increased greatly in the weeks after September 11th, according to a report from the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium (find them on the Web at http://www.napalc.org/news/index.html.) The Times chose to merely summarize some of the facts in the report, laundry-list style, presumably because the implications of these facts involve interpretation, which is not "objective." I think this is the heart of the report, however, so here are a couple of points drawn from the actual NAPALC press release that you didn't see in the papers (at least not the Times): "The aftermath of hate and intolerance in the wake of the tragic terrorist attacks" of September have given us "two Asian Pacific Americans dead, scores beaten, and entire communities...fearful of physical violence and intimidation." The report also warns against "a wave of draconian government measures that send a message of intolerance and discrimination in employment, immigration and other policies." Finally, the report states the reality facing Asian Pacific Americans before and after September 11:
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"Health Care: Minority Groups Get Worse Care." This wasn't even a headline, but merely a subhead—and the bottom of the list, at that—in a "Health Roundup" that appeared on page 6 in the March 21st Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!). The report, released March 20th by the Institute of Medicine, can be found on the Web at http://www.iom.edu/ (Click on "Recent Reports"). This major report was surely deserving of far more than a "brief" in the newspaper, and not only because the issue of racial disparities in health care is important. The report itself spent considerable energy in trying to determine the sources of the disparities and draw the conclusions necessary to begin to address them. There's no room to talk about such things in a 234-word brief. The Star Trib brief reported that "Racial and ethnic minority group members in the United States receive lower quality health care than whites, even when their insurance and income are the same." (The report also factored out age and severity of conditions, although the Star Trib didn't say so.) The report included the words of Martha N. Hill, director of the Center for Nursing Research at Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, saying, "The differences are pervasive. It cuts across all conditions of health and across the entire country, and we think this is a very serious moral issue." These things are accurate, but the actual report had far more to offer. Here, for example, is one paragraph from the official press release for the report, "Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care," that I would have included:
This simple paragraph hints at the realities that even "nice" people can unconsciously internalize prejudice and perpetuate racism—a crucial point for all of us "nice" people!—and it also indirectly indicts the high-speed clinical environment that our modern medical system has inflicted upon us. The actual report discusses these issues at some length. Whoever wrote the Star Trib brief stated that "The panel cited subtle racial prejudice and differences in the quality of health plans as possible reasons why even insured minority group members get worse care." That's not exactly what the report said, which you could see if you were to actually read the report. The racism it cited was anything but subtle, and in fact the report goes to some length to illustrate the interaction between the machinations of today's clinical procedures and the unsubtle prejudice in the society at large. This report's unusually nuanced discussion of unconscious white supremacy, as well as its willingness to look at the racial implications of the market-based "health care" system in the U.S. both serve to make "Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care" worthy of front-page placement. In contrast with the Star Trib, the New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print"), to their credit, did place this story on their front page that day. I salute them. |
On February 26th the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) published an article from the Washington Post headlined "Weapons Trade Under Attack." Here's what the lead paragraph said: "U.S. and European law enforcement officials say they have made advances in efforts to disrupt what some describe as the biggest weapons trafficking network in the world." The subject of the article is a trafficker named Victor Bout, and an associate named Sanjivan Ruprah, who have been accused of delivering "sophisticated weapons systems anywhere in the world," according to "U.S. and British investigators." The nature of the illicit arms trade makes it difficult to put a dollar value on the arms sold by people like Bout, whose activities are reprehensible and have been monitored by the United Nations for some time. Regardless of the size of Bout's network, however, one thing we know for certain is that it is not "the biggest in the world." In fact, it's not even close. When U.S. and British officials insist on referring to Bout's network as "the biggest," and U.S. media repeat this perversion of reality uncritically, it reveals a couple of standard components of the U.S. propaganda system. Standard Component #1 The first standard propaganda component is the "Good Guys/Bad Guys" classification system, a disarmingly simple system in which the "Good Guys" are anyone who is operating in line with the wishes of U.S. power, and the "Bad Guys"—or, more currently, the "Evil Guys"—are, well, everyone else. This classification system typically remains unstated in press conferences, but it is generally known, consciously or unconsciously, by reporters and editors and results in startling occurrences like... ...the amazing disappearance of the reprehensible activities of our own government and its corporate allies, whose "weapons trafficking network" dwarfs those of all others, including not only the relative small fry like Bout and Ruprah, but all other nation-states on the planet. As the Federation of American Scientists puts it: "U.S. weapons sales for 1999 accounted for 54% of all registered international arms deliveries. This was more than 4 times the value of exports by the United Kingdom, the second largest exporter, 7 times the level of exports registered by France and Russia, and 54 times the level of exports registered by China." (Besides the simple volume of arms produced and distributed by the United States, it is worth noting the role that U.S. military assistance programs, including arms giveaways to nations in the developing world, play in developing the global market for all types of arms that people like Bout exploit.) Standard Component #2 An almost inviolate rule of U.S. propaganda is that human rights abuses committed by a government (at least by a "Good Guy" government) are in a different category than abuses committed by individuals like Bout or by non-state actors, like national liberation movements. In fact, in the U.S. Code, the official laws of the United States (Title 22, Chapter 38, Section 2656f(d)2) "terrorism" can only be committed by "subnational groups or clandestine agents," thereby making it impossible, by definition, for any government to commit terrorist acts. An excellent current example of how this plays out is the nation of Colombia, where there has long been a civil war in progress. The Colombian government is now the third-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid in the world, while the resistance movement on the other "side" of the war are considered "terrorists." What's wrong with that, you ask? First of all, it is illogical to classify as "terrorist" only one side in a conflict in which serious human rights abuses are committed by both sides. Secondly, human rights groups attribute upwards of 70 percent of the violations to the Colombian government and its agents, meaning that, if one insists on going ahead and choosing one side to label "terrorist," one would have to choose the Colombian government. Unless, of course, we remember that governments cannot, by definition, commit terror, under U.S. law. Another, even more vivid, example is the current violence in Israel/Palestine, where individual suicide killings of innocent people are officially and accurately labeled "terror" by the U.S. government, while our government not only refrains from calling the far more numerous Israeli government killings of innocents "terror," but even (in large part) finances them. Israel continues to be the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid in the world, by far. The role that U.S-made and -sold weapons play in facilitating gross human rights abuses is well-known to those who care about such things, and it's a pattern that has become even more obvious in the months since September 11th. As one among many examples, Human Rights Watch points out in a recent report that on January 9th the United States rewarded the nation of Tajikistan for its support of the War Against Terrorism (the WAT?!) by lifting an eight-year-old ban on arms sales to that Central Asian state. Tajikistan has a history of torture, suppression of political opposition and the media, and arrests based on religion, but no matter, since they are now officially considered "Good Guys." It's not just Tajikistan, of course. In 1999 the United States delivered, by conservative estimates, roughly $6.8 billion in armaments to nations which violate the basic standards of human rights, presumably also because they are considered "Good Guys." The Washington Post story reported that "U.S. and European law enforcement officials" have been working for the past three years, at who-knows-what cost, in the attempt to "disrupt...the biggest weapons trafficking network in the world." And they still have the wrong suspect! Maybe they are using the wrong equipment. All they really need is a mirror. |