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Today's
Stories
October
2, 2003
Saul Landau
Who
Got Us Into This Mess and Why?
October 1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Married
with Children: the Supremes and Gay Families
Robert
Fisk
Oil,
War and Panic
Ron Jacobs
Xenophobia
as State Policy
Elaine
Cassel
The
Lamo Case: Secret Subpoenas and the Patriot Act
Shyam
Oberoi
Shooting
a Tiger
Toni Solo
Plan Condor, the Sequel?
Sean Donahue
Wesley
Clark and the "No Fly" List
Website of the Day
Downloader Legal Defense Fund
September
30, 2003
After
Dark
Arnold's
1977 Photo Shoot
Dave Lindorff
The
Poll of the Shirt: Bush Isn't Wearing Well
Tom Crumpacker
The
Cuba Fixation: Shaking Down American Travelers
Robert
Fisk
A
Lesson in Obfuscation
Charles
Sullivan
A
Message to Conservatives
Suren Pillay
Edward Said: a South African Perspective
Naeem
Mohaiemen
Said at Oberlin: Hysteria in the Face of Truth
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
Does
a Felon Rove the White House?
Website
of the Day
The Edward Said Page
September 29, 2003
Robert
Fisk
The
Myths of Western Intelligence Agencies
Iain A. Boal
Turn It Up: Pardon Mzwakhe Mbuli!
Lee Sustar
Paul
Krugman: the Last Liberal?
Wayne Madsen
General Envy? Think Shinseki, Not Clark
Benjamin
Dangl
Bolivia's Gas War
Uri Avnery
The
Magnificent 27
Pledge
Drive of the Day
Antiwar.com
Recent
Stories
September
26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Alan
Dershowitz, Plagiarist
David Price
Teaching Suspicions
Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity
Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and
the Patriot Act
Brian
Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again
Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama
Robert
Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions
M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA
John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN
Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada
William
S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security
Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia
Chris
Floyd
Vanishing Act
Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui
Richard
Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved
George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said
Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized
Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss
Mickey
Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice
Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said
Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room
Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie
Website
of the Weekend
Who the Hell is Stew Albert?
September
25, 2003
Edward
Said
Dignity,
Solidarity and the Penal Colony
Robert
Fisk
Fanning
the Flames of Hatred
Sarah
Ferguson
Wolfowitz at the New School
David
Krieger
The
Second Nuclear Age
Bill Glahn
RIAA Doublespeak
Al Krebs
ADM and the New York Times: Covering Up Corporate Crime
Michael
S. Ladah
The Obvious Solution: Give Iraq Back to the Arabs
Fran Shor
Arnold and Wesley
Mustafa
Barghouthi
Edward Said: a Monument to Justice and Human Rights
Alexander Cockburn
Edward Said: a Mighty and Passionate
Heart
Website
of the Day
Edward Said: a Lecture on the Tragedy of Palestine
September 24, 2003
Stan Goff
Generational
Casualties: the Toxic Legacy of the Iraq War
William
Blum
Grand Illusions About Wesley Clark
David
Vest
Politics
for Bookies
Jon Brown
Stealing Home: The Real Looting is About to Begin
Robert Fisk
Occupation and Censorship
Latino
Military Families
Bring Our Children Home Now!
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Preemptive Zeal
Website
of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
23, 2003
Bernardo
Issel
Dancing
with the Diva: Arianna and Streisand
Gary Leupp
To
Kill a Cat: the Unfortunate Incident at the Baghdad Zoo
Gregory
Wilpert
An
Interview with Hugo Chavez on the CIA in Venezuela
Steven
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause--Part 2: Charity Ryerson, Young and
Radical
Stan Cox
The Cheney Tapes: Can You Handle the Truth?
Robert
Fisk
Another Bloody Day in the Death of Iraq
William S. Lind
Learning from Uncle Abe: Sacking the Incompetent
Elaine
Cassel
First They Come for the Lawyers, Then the Ministers
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website
of the Day
The
Baghdad Death Count
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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October
2, 2003
The Comprehensive
Pursuit of Liberty
What's
So Great About Gandhi, Anyway?
By NIRANJAN RAMAKRISHNAN
"Mahatma Gandhi was OK, but he was
no Manmohan Singh", remarked a friend of mine. I laughed
out loud at this deadpan humor, only to realize that my friend,
a smart and successful high-tech baron in Silicon Valley, was
entirely serious. He genuinely thought that Gandhi's contribution
was merely in freeing the country from the British, while Singh,
the Indian finance minister who had 'freed the Indian Economy
from governmental shackles' in the early 90s, thus ushering India
into the global economy, was clearly the larger figure.
It is a notion shared by increasing numbers
of the Indian intelligensia, both in India and abroad. To many,
Gandhi is no more than a goody-goody icon, who talked about non-violence
and held Luddite views on industry and trade. True, he was honest
and upright, but then those were different times. Some (mistakenly,
in my opinion) associate Gandhi with India's path of economic
protectionism after independence (a policy followed by his associate
Jawaharlal Nehru) and hold Gandhi responsible for India's perceived
backwardness. Others consider his approach to Muslims and Pakistan
naive and gullible. All in all, they conclude, the coward who
shot him in 1948 did India a favor, for Gandhi would have been
an albatross round our modern neck. In a world where terrorism
lurks at every corner and computer screens blink on all sides,
Gandhi is passe.
Is he?
As I watch world events, the more relevant
his life appears. With each passing day, his words and methods
seem uncannily prescient.
There are numerous personal characteristics
of Gandhi--a prodigious courage both physical and political,
enormous self-discipline, asceticism and industry (over a hundred
volumes of writings and 20-hour days), a fine sense of humor
and the ability to mock himself--all interesting and formidable
qualities which must have played a major role in the making of
the Mahatma. But if I were to condense his political philosophy
into one phrase, it would be this--the freedom of the individual.
Complete liberty, for Gandhi, was the
first and last goal. India's freedom from Britain, to him, was
only an objective along the path, and a rather insignificant
one at that. Far more important was the ability of each individual
to seek out his own freedom. "Real Swaraj (freedom) will
come, not by the acquisition of authority by a few, but by the
acquisition of the capacity by all to resist authority when abused",
he wrote. I think of that statement every time I recall how mutely
the public of the United States accepted the slap delivered full
to its face by the Rehnquist Court after the 2000 elections.
It is also in the context of liberty
that ahimsa, his creed of non-violence, must be understood. It
was not out of some sense of piety that he espoused peaceful
means. He held non-violence to be essential because it afforded
the only democratic means of struggle. It was available to everyone--not
only to those who owned weapons. Secondly, a violent victory,
even a just one, would only prove that violence triumphed, not
necessarily justice. A violent solution would mean that the fate
of the unarmed many would be mortaged to the benevolence of the
armed few. This was contrary to liberty as seen by Gandhi.
An extremely intelligent man, he had
a knack of cutting right through the shibboleths to the heart
of the matter. In an earlier echo of the American position on
Iraq, the British kept telling India that they would leave India
in a heartbeat--their only interest being to keep the country
from falling into anarchy. This made some sense to many in view
of the vicissitudes and general caprice of feudal rule in pre-British
India, until Gandhi gently reminded us that good governance was
no substitute for self governance. When hearing the cant that
passes for political discussion on the various talk shows, how
one longs for a similar voice!
Gandhi saw that millions had lost their
livelihood because the British, in a former era of globalization
(who says history doesn't repeat itself!) systematically destroyed
India's cottage industries to create a market for the products
of the industrial revolution. Gandhi was the chief architect
of India's revived cottage industry. A magnificent achievent
by itself, even more telling was the way he brought it about.
He did not run complaining to the British Government to reduce
exports to India. Instead, he moblized the people to boycott
foreign goods. Huge bonfires of foreign cloth resulted in the
handspun Indian fabric, khadi replacing foreign mill cloth to
become, in Jawaharlal Nehru's words, "the livery of India's
freedom". This too has to do with freedom. To demand something
of the government would only increase its power. He chose instead
to empower each individual to make a statement by wearing khadi
and shedding foreign cloth. Today, a third rail of American politics
is the word, 'trade'. It is commonly accepted, often without
challenge, that this is a deity to be propitiated at all costs--even
if it means sacrificing jobs, families, homes, even towns or
entire ecologies. Gandhi wrote that he would like to see all
needs of a community met from within a reasonable radius. Recently,
Vegetarian Times carried a mind-boggling statistic--the average
item we consume in America travels 1200 miles! Is it any surprise
we have to invade other countries for oil? As Ralph Nader, Pat
Buchanan and others rail against NAFTA and WTO, one wonders why
they haven't thought of organizing a movement to buy American-made
products and boycott NAFTA products.
Gandhi was an exponent of 'demand-side
economics', to coin a phrase. This was a much longer and more
arduous path than supply-side economics, but a more enduring
one, and one with fewer deleterious side-effects. He believed
that ultimately, the only guarantee of good society lay in the
quality of the citizenry. Benjamin Franklin's "A republic,
if you can keep it" approximates Gandhi's belief. A society
with no demand for cigarettes, for instance, would soon stop
manufacturing them. Gandhi believed the gift of liberty also
carried with it the utmost moral responsiblity for its use. In
a famous interview with Margaret Sanger, the noted birth-control
proponent, he said flat out that he was against contraception,
as it meant escaping the consequences of one's action. He was
no politically correct weathervane, preferring rather the liberty
to say what he thought. He gave Margaret Sanger an analogy along
these lines (not an exact quote), "I overeat, and instead
of suffering the consequences of my indulgence, I go to the doctor
and get some pills. To mitigate the side-effects of the pills,
I then take some whiskey... Where does it end?" He would
certainly be aghast at the blithe acceptance of abortion. He
always made a connection with the individual morality and public
policy. Consider the drug war for example. We do practically
nothing to discourage the taking of drugs. Instead, we pour money,
change foreign governments, destroy countrysides and fight endlessly
(Panama, Columbia, Peru) because we don't have the guts to demand
the highest of our own citizenry. Gandhi was unafraid of public
opprobrium, indeed even assassination. Every politician is willing
to tell us what is wrong with someone else--Gandhi was different
because he told us what was wrong with us. "Let us turn
the searchlight inward", he once said, to the astonishment
of a crowd which had come expecting some rousing rhetoric condemning
the British, only to find him spouting uncomfortable home truths
about how Indians themselves enabled British rule in a hundred
small ways. Likewise, if we turn the searchlight upon our own
contradictions--we might wonder how, while complaining of our
disappearing forests, we continue to build new housing developments
(and prize this as an index of economic health!), or how, while
complaining of rising medical costs, we cannot keep from our
Big Macs.
Like Jefferson, Gandhi too believed in
small government, writing that, "that government is best
which governs least". Once again, this is an offshoot of
his ideal of least external control, maximum individual freedom,
coupled with complete moral responsibility--making for an uncharacteristic
meeting point between Karl Marx (state withering away) and Ayn
Rand (individual freedom from the collective). As fear-stricken
citizens throughout the world surrender their personal rights
to their fear-stricken governments in the name of safeguarding
their personal security, which in turn surrender their soverieignty
to faceless agencies like the WTO in the name of economic security,
we might recall Gandhi's words, "Fearlessness is the first
attribute of spirituality. Cowards can never be moral."
The art of forging popular movements
based on inveterate opposition to injustice, while always demanding
the highest moral standards both of the individual and of the
collective, is Gandhi's enduring contribution to politics. It
is almost certainly owing to Gandhi's movement that India, for
all its flaws, has remained a liberal democracy (no other country
freed from the colonial yoke can make this claim). Without a
Gandhi, India might well have ended up like Pakistan, a hotbed
of intolerance and obscurantism (it may be pure coincidence that
the more India rejects Gandhi, that's exactly where it seems
headed!). At the risk of oversimplification, we can note that
Martin Luther King applied Gandhi's means and managed to avoid
a West Bank in America. The Palestinians did not--and did not.
Long ago, the Indian socialist Rammanohar
Lohia wrote that the 20th Century had produced one innovation,
the Atom Bomb, and one innovator, Mahatma Gandhi. As paranoia
and insanity sweep our times, Lohia's terms appear in sharper
focus--fear vs. freedom. In this contest, Gandhi is not merely
relevant--he is central.
Niranjan Ramakrishnan is a writer living on the West Coast. His articles
can be found on Indogram.
He is currently working on a web site dedicated to Gandhi's writings
on industrialization and globalization, called www.hindswaraj.com.
The site is scheduled to be launched on November 14, 2003, to
commemorate the 80th birth anniversary of K. G. Ramakrishnan,
Indian freedom fighter and Gandhian thinker. Niranjan Ramakrishnan
can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Alan
Dershowitz, Plagiarist
David Price
Teaching Suspicions
Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity
Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and
the Patriot Act
Brian
Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again
Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama
Robert
Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions
M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA
John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN
Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada
William
S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security
Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia
Chris
Floyd
Vanishing Act
Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui
Richard
Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved
George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said
Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized
Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss
Mickey
Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice
Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said
Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room
Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie
Website
of the Weekend
Who the Hell is Stew Albert?
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