Forward into the Past!

I don't have anything to say yet about the terrorist attacks in Paris; I haven't seen much information, and it does't seem that there is much information yet -- just the usual speculation masquerading as news that one usually sees.  Maybe later.  Meanwhile:

I confess that although I find the 1960s movie versions unwatchable now, I feel a certain nostalgia (or is it encroaching senility?) for Ian Fleming's James Bond books, especially the final three.  It has been a long time since I read any of them, though, so when I happened on the e-book of The Man with the Golden Gun, I decided to see how it looks to me now.  So far it doesn't look very good, though I see from the Wikipedia entry that Fleming had only completed and submitted the first draft when he died suddenly, so it didn't receive the second-draft enhancement that he expected to give to it.  The Man with the Golden Gun was published posthumously in 1965.

This bit tickled my funny bone, though.  In the book, James Bond has been sent to the Caribbean to take out a bad man, a very bad man.  In the Kingston, Jamaica spy office he encounters Mary Goodnight, who had previously been his secretary in London.  She helps get his mission in gear, and when they have dinner she fills him in on the local situation, which she claims to have learned from the Kingston newspaper, The Gleaner.  The bad guy is in cahoots with Castro, who'd only been in power in Cuba for a few years at that time.  Goodnight says that Castro is trying to sabotage his neighbor countries' sugar crops to raise prices, because of that year's poor harvest, caused by Hurricane Flora.

" ... So it's worth Castro's trouble to try and keep the world price up by doing as much damage as he can to rival crops so that he's in a better position to bargain with Russia.  He's only got his sugar to sell and he wants food badly.  This wheat the Americans are selling to Russia.  A lot of that will find its way back to Cuba, in exchange for sugar, to feed the Cuban sugar croppers." She smiled again. "Pretty daft business, isn't it?  I don't think Castro can hang on much longer.  The missile business in Cuba must have cost Russia about a billion pounds.  And now they're having to pour money into Cuba, money and goods, to keep the place on its feet.  I can't help thinking they'll pull out soon and leave Castro to go the way Batista went... "

In the next paragraph Goodnight continues:

"Washington's trying to keep the price down, to upset Cuba's economy, but there's increased world consumption and a shortage largely due to Flora and the tremendous rains we've been having here after Flora which have delayed the Jamaican crop.  I don't understand it all, but it's in Cuba's interest to do as much damage as possible to the Jamaican crop ..."

I don't know how much of this has any basis in fact, and I'm not sure it's worthwhile to look it up.  But the prediction of Castro's imminent downfall is probably indicative.  I also like the casual remark that the US was trying to keep the price down, to upset Cuba's economy.  At this time the US was engaged in a protracted campaign against Cuba, to sabotage its food supply, and a typical propaganda move in those Cold War days was to accuse Communist countries of doing what the US was doing.  One example was the "Manchurian Candidate" fantasy that the ChiComs were brainwashing US prisoners of war into robotic assassins, which actually was a US project of the period.  Another was the accusation that the Communists were engaged in the drug trade to destroy the moral fiber of America's youth, when in fact the US and its allies were more likely to be doing so.  I don't know how much Fleming knew, but it's interesting that he should admit, however faintly, that the US was trying to sabotage the Cuban economy to punish Cubans for getting rid of Batista: it was in the US interest to do as much damage as possible to the Jamaican crop.  If for no other reason, I'm going to reread the late Bond books for such glimpses into the Cold War paranoia and mainstream conspiracy theories of the period.

Bringing Cuba Under Our Wings

Daniel Larison has written several good posts on President Obama's move to resume diplomatic relations with Cuba.  Today he took Marco Rubio to task for saying the predictable stupid hawkish things about it:

There is no good reason for the U.S. and Cuba not to have normal relations today, and so we should have them. If the U.S. refused to have normal relations with every state because of its authoritarian character or the abuses it has committed, as Rubio claims to want, it would have to shut down its embassies in half the countries around the world.

But then he wrote something just about as absurd as anything Rubio had said:

That is especially true in those states that mistreat their people and govern in an authoritarian and abusive fashion. These are the states that most need to be opened to outside influences, and they are the states that are often the most opposed to the U.S. Having diplomatic representation in these countries not only helps to secure U.S. interests there, but it also provides an opening for communication with the people of that country.

I know Larison knows better than this, because he wrote in this very piece that "The U.S. maintains normal relations with all kinds of governments, including some of the very worst in the world."  I go further than that, and want to stress that the US has excellent relations with numerous very repressive governments, indeed with "those states that mistreat their people and govern in an authoritarian and abusive fashion." Far from viewing this state of affairs as a distasteful Realpolitik necessity, our rulers are quite enthusiastic about right-wing dictators.  I doubt Rubio is an exception to this rule.  It's simply false that such states "are often the most opposed to the U.S."  Sometimes, yes, they are; but often they are quite friendly with us.

Once we've removed a turbulent, excessively democratic government, we train the new regime’s police in techniques of torture. I don’t know if it’s still true that there’s a positive correlation between a state’s human rights abuses, positive investment climate, and the amount of US aid it receives, but it was true until the 1980s at least. Far from opening such countries to outside (presumably ameliorating) influences, having good relations with the US protects them from such influences. Apologists for this tendency, who are of both parties, tend to adopt an extreme cultural-relativist position: Oh, Those People don’t feel pain the way we do, life is cheap there, they don’t understand Democracy, and besides, we can’t play cops to the whole world.  Openness to outside influences goes both ways, too: the US generally manages to resist such influences that would curb our abuses.

I Like Her Attitude

Today I'm reading Sexual Politics in Cuba: Machismo, Homosexuality, and AIDS (Westview Press, 1994) by Marvin Leiner.  Though it was published during the Clinton administration, it tells me a lot I hadn't known about sexuality and gender in revolutionary Cuba.  Leiner is an admitted heterosexual, and I believe I've seen some criticisms of his work in other academic writings on homosexuality in Latin America, but I'll check those after I finish reading the book.  I have a few minor quibbles myself, but nothing that really affects the value of the book so far.

Leiner is also a socialist, and (or but?) he manages to rebut some criticisms of Castro without being uncritical of the regime.  (He often points out that much of the official and unofficial persecution against Cuban gays has its parallels in the US and elsewhere: like OMG, the nasty Cubans won't let homosexuals serve in the military!  When this book was written, we were excluded from the US military too.)  He's been a scholar of Cuba for decades and has lived there for extended periods; he draws on his own interviews for this book.  But for now I want to quote one of his sources, the director of the National Working Group on Sex Education (Spanish abbreviation GNTES), Monika Krause.  Krause, from the former East Germany, moved to Cuba to work on their sex education program.  Leiner quotes her lecture on homosexuality to Cuban doctors.

Then I say, "I need you, from this moment on, to be capable of repressing your aversion, your hatred, because I need you to listen.  You're doctors.  You are not anybody from the street: you are doctors."

I try to teach this class with a lot of participation, and, sometimes, depending on the group, I also introduce skits.  I tell the doctors that I need a volunteer.  If nobody raises his or her hand, I continue: "You are my doctor; I am an adolescent boy."  (That needs a lot of imagination.)

So I'm role-playing the boy, and I say to the young doctor: "You are the family doctor, and I am asking you what to do because I'm homosexual.  I have a lot of problems, and I don't know what it is, and I want to change because I want to live in accordance with the ethical and moral rules of society.  I don't want to be an outsider.  Well, doctor, what shall I do?  I need your help."

The members of the class don't know what to do.  They are asking the same questions of me, calling on me for help.  Well, then I say, "Tell me, every one of you, what are the main characteristics of a homosexual?"  And I write their answers on the chalkboard: "a disease, a plague." They continue, and I put all the words on the board: weak character, anti-social, faggot, corrupt, deviant, degenerate, unnatural.  All the familiar, terrible phrases.

[P.S. Krause's remark that "You are not anybody from the street; you are doctors" is probably unfair to people "from the street."  Lower-class Latinos have wide differences of opinion and attitude to homosexuality, but I can say that in my experience, working-class people without college educations are generally not hostile to gays; they may consider it sinful, but hey, we're all sinners.  Epithets like "a disease, a plague," are more likely to come from the more educated.  I realize that Krause means merely to shame her audiences for their irrational vehemence, but to do so by appealing to their class prejudice -- in a socialist society! -- isn't an ideal approach.]

While I hope that they are better than this now, the same program before a roomful of American doctors in the late 1970s and early 1980s would probably have gone exactly the same way.  American doctors weren't, until that time and possibly later, required to take any courses on human sexuality, even though general practitioners were sure to be asked questions about sex.  This is one reason why straight doctors mostly failed to deal properly with the AIDS crisis as it unfolded; gay doctors were another story.  Back to Krause:

Several times when I am talking, they jump and shout, and I have to say, "Are you a doctor?  Or are you illiterate?"  When they ask for further clarification, I explain that we do not yet know the real essence of homosexuality.  But neither do we know the real essence of heterosexuality.  Only nobody is asking about that; everybody is asking about homosexuality.  Our view  was always that homosexuality is something bad, evil, something terrible, unnatural.  I say, "We know a lot about what homosexuality is not.  We have enough arguments to say that it is not what is on the board; of that I assure you."  And we have no possibilities of carrying out research because our homosexuals in Cuba are still under obligation, if they respect themselves, to hide their condition.  Not to do so would bring about the end of his or her life as an accepted human being ...

Often when I teach this class, the doctors will interrupt me -- shouting, getting very agitated and losing their control.  Sometimes they feel very ashamed when I have to calm them down.  "Control yourself!  You are doctors!  You cannot behave this way in front of a patient; you can't.  Even if you hate homosexuals, you cannot manifest the same behavior and attitude you just have with me."

And then I say, "Of course, I do not expect that you will change your attitude from today to tomorrow.  I know what many of you are thinking: She is one of them because otherwise, she wouldn't say that.  She is perverted; she is a lesbian, she is a feminist; she is a this or a that and so on.  And I assure you, I was thinking the same things ten or fifteen years ago.  But we have to be consistent with our humanistic conception of society ...

And then I tell them an anecdote.  I attended the Latin American Congress on Sexuality and Sex Education in Venezuela two years ago.  The representative of the Catholic Church, Bishop Monsignor Leoni from Caracas, gave a speech.  He was condemning so many things, so many things.  Delegates from the Congress asked him: "What is the position of the Catholic Church concerning homosexuality?"  And the monsignor answered, "A homosexual can never be a good Catholic.  The Catholic Church and homosexuality are antagonistic."  People asked why.  He answered, "Because it is so."  "Why can't a homosexual be a good Catholic?"  He replied, "Because he cannot."

Then I say to the class: "You are not allowed to answer as did the Bishop Monsignor Leoni of Caracas" [46-48].

I think I'm in love.  I've often said that I don't like the term "common sense," but what Krause says here feels like common sense to me.  Lest anyone protest that she's imposing "Western" ideas about sexuality and homosexuality on a non-Western society, let me point out that, first, Krause was brought in by the Cuban government to teach these things; and second, the homophobic attitudes of those doctors (not to mention Monsignor Leoni) are thoroughly Western.  (As others have pointed out, when non-Westerners condemn homosexuality as a Western import, they are usually quite happy to cite Western bigots to support their views.)

When it's appropriate, and unfortunately it often is, I've said basically the same thing to classes which train teachers or social workers: you're entitled to your personal beliefs and opinions, but you are not entitled to impose them on your students and clients.  (Just as I, an atheist, would not be entitled to tell Christians I was counseling or teaching that they'll be just fine if they give up their religious beliefs.)  It's lovely to see someone else saying the same things.

The Vultures Are Circling

I just heard that Hugo Chavez has died, and I must say that matters more to me than the latest deaths of TV sitcom stars and the like.  I'm not uncritical of Chavez, he did make some moves I objected to, and it seems he abused power at times.  I put it tentatively like that because the corporate media were so dedicated to lying about him that it became more trouble than it was worth to distinguish lies from truth where Chavez was concerned; I just tended to assume that everything bad I heard about him was false, except on the rare occasions when it came from someone more or less trustworthy.  When it comes to human rights violations and abuses of power, though, Chavez didn't begin to compare to any number of rulers the US has propped up to the bitter end -- to say nothing of our own President.

My real worry is whether Venezuela will be able to maintain the good things Chavez worked for.  The main thing that bothered me about his electoral successes was that they were too tied to his person, and it was hard to tell whether a political culture was growing in Venezuela that would survive him.  I guess we'll find out now.

I expect a lot of material from right-wingers and centrists to turn up on Facebook celebrating Chavez' death, so I'm girding my loins and opening a big can of whoop-ass.  But part of me is asking quietly, "What's the use?"  I imagine that will pass once the monkeys start throwing their handfuls of fecal matter.  Still, it's a valid question.  Ta-Nehisi Coates has a good post today about the national "Conversation on Race":

Writers who focus on race/gender/sexual orientation are often of the mind that the issues that they are tackling have, somehow, never been tackled before, or if so, have not been tackled "honestly" or "forthrightly" or "candidly." In the arena of race, the notion that Americans "don't talk about race" is a particularly pernicious rendition of this logic. I've never actually found this to be true. On the contrary, there's a lot of literature on the subject -- some of it enlightening, some of it clueless, and some of it racist. The sheer amount of material should, theoretically, raise the bar for "writing about race."

But because Americans actually enjoy yelling about race a great deal, it does not.

He might have qualified that first sentence by specifying "writers for corporate media", but you know what he meant, don't you?  There is a lot of good "literature" on all those subjects (race/gender/sexual orientation, and he could have added religion or politics in general), but little of it turns up in the corporate media.  (Coates himself is one of the notable exceptions.)  That's not because of a conspiracy, but because the people who run the media are generally not very knowledgeable about anything, and writing that strays from the corporate center with all its squishy goodness will be found to be "not right for us, thanks."  So the same tired cliches on controversial subjects persist for decades and more, and as I've gotten older I've found that more and more dispiriting.  Sure, I keep myself sane by reading outside the corporate media, but sooner or later I have to face what the mainstream is saying: the same old same-old.

An instructive example is a post that also appeared on the Atlantic's site, explaining why Cuba will still be anti-American after Castro.  At first glance I thought it had possibilities: someone could write a good article about the reasons Cubans have to look askance at the US: invasions, terrorism, multiple assassination attempts on Castro, and economic warfare in the form of a decades-long blockade aimed at starving the Cuban people into submission. This article, however, wasn't it: it was all about Fidel and Raul find it politically expedient to blame the US for all of Cuba's problems (which works so well because the US is to blame for many of Cuba's problems) as they pack the government with loyalists, more elderly revolutionaries, and their own kids. These would be good points if they were put in context, but author Jaime Suchlicki isn't interested in context, just in the perfidy of the Castro brothers. He has not a word to say about the dictatorships the US supported in Cuba before the Revolution, nor about US attempts after the Revolution to return Cuba to its proper place in our sphere of influence.  To talk about Castro's anti-Americanism as though it were a total fabrication in the face of US benevolence, which is what Suchlicki does, is to mark his article as "clueless" at best  in Coates's classification scheme, which means it's perfectly mainstream.

You Don't Say!

From the BBC, on the US acquittal of Cuban terrorist Luis Posada-Carriles:

The US has previously refused to send Mr Posada Carriles to Cuba or Venezuela, saying he could face torture.

There's less danger, as far as I can tell, of Posada being tortured in either Cuba or Venezuela than of anyone's being tortured by the US or our agents. So, what I want to know is, why wasn't he tortured in the US?

And does this mean the US, I mean NATO of course, will have to enforce a no-fly zone over Egypt?