Two Articles
Both good but entirely unrelated.
Tom Barnett belts on out of the park at Esquire magazine:
What the Hell Is Really Going Down in Honduras?
….The primary charge was treason relating to Zelaya’s stubborn effort to mobilize popular support, through a non-binding poll, for a constitutional assembly. But the underlying suspicion was that the lame-duck and deeply unpopular (as in, sub-30-percent approval ratings) president was plotting to extend his personal rule with the strong encouragement of his new “oil daddy,” Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, whose well-established blueprint has worked with political protégés elsewhere (e.g., Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa).
Essentially, this Chavez scenario was a Pandora’s box that Honduras’s political elite refused to open. Why? Because after too many decades of nasty military dictatorship, Honduras, while still quite poor, had managed seven straight civilian transitions thanks to its 1982 constitution. So the Honduran legislature, which had previously ordered Zelaya’s arrest (but not his deportation), promptly voted him out of office and – following the constitution – selected its ranking member, Speaker Roberto Micheletti, as the interim president. Two key points to remember here: Martial law was never instituted, and the national elections, slated for November, are still a go. In effect, Zelaya’s removal from power was an impeachment without trial – a classic rush job that denied him his day in court even as he had already lost his battle with the country’s supreme court and displayed overt contempt for its rulings on his proposed poll.
From the Honduran military’s point of view, their actions broke no law, and since the military never assumed power, calling these events a “military coup” is completely misleading. From America’s point of view, it seems clear enough that Chavez-style politics has its limits, so overreactions are to be avoided. But from a national-security perspective, when your own Drug Enforcement Agency is telling you (as a Bush official did a year ago) that Chavez has become a “major facilitator” of the flow of Colombian cocaine to America, and when there are credible reports that Honduras, under Zelaya, has joined that network as a trans-shipment waypoint, there definitely needs to be some limits to your diplomatic efforts to reinstate this suddenly revered “pillar of democracy.”
I am in full agreement with Tom here about Mel Zelaya, who is the Rod Blagojevich of Latin America as well as a supplicating client of Hugo Chavez. The Obama administration, with the thrust coming from the State Department, has been too supportive of Zelaya’s outrageous behavior in an effort to avoid giving the Latin American left room to blame America for Zelaya’s removal. Now that moment has passed, it is time to distance the US from Zelaya and let him twist in the wind as OAS encouraged negotiations with the legitimate interim government in Honduras drag out for weeks or months
Chris Albon at War & Health has an excellent book review of Before My Helpless Sight (The History of Medicine in Context)
Leo van Bergen’s book, Before My Helpless Sight, is a history of suffering in World War I, a description the author readily admits: “At the roots of the book lies the question of what can happen to a soldier between the moment he steps onto a train or ship bound for the theatre of battle an the point at which he is evacuated wounded, or whether dead or alive, buried in the ground” (pg. 1). Needless to say, the book is not a light read.
….Van Bergen cannot be criticized on methodology. The book is impressively well researched (and cited), including qualitative and quantitative sources in numerous languages. Apart from the organization of the book itself, you see very little of the author in the pages. Readers are bounced from anecdotal accounts to descriptive statistics with little commentary or fanfare. This is not necessarily a negative, the sources speak for themselves. Their sheer, horrifying weight is ample to progress the book forward.
….However, in the light of the book’s contribution these issues are quickly forgotten. Before My Helpless Sight is a powerful counter to the innumerable discourses on WWI tactics and strategy. Van Bergen pulls back the curtains of glorious offensives and magnanimous generals, revealing the grim, muddy reality of life on the Western Front. It is a story of pus, rats, hunger, dirt, disease and madness. You do not know World War I before reading this book.
More and more, as passing time gives historians greater perspective, the Great War appears as a civilizational turning point for the West on the broad spectrum of human activity. WWI produced, really for the first time, a significant number of horrifyingly disfigured and maimed survivors, who would have perished from their wounds in, say, the Civil War or the Napleonic Wars. John Keegan writes, in his The First World War
Modern war as an industrial, mass-synchronized, 2GW meat grinder was so awful that the West turned to all kinds of stratagems to avoid a repeat of the Western Front – from political pacifism, isolationism and maginot lines to political revolution, blitzkrieg tactics and technological innovations like the tank or airplane. None of them were a complete answer to the horrors born in 1914.
July 10th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
On Honduras, I think it’s important to keep in mind that there is a serious public security problem underneath this political fiasco. It’s one that neither Zelaya or his replacement can tackle alone. I’m talking about an assassination school run by x-military and cops; a relaxed visa requirement for China, Russia, the Dominican Republic and other countries known for org. crime; documentation falsification- birth certificated and nat’l ID cards; declining remittances; an average of 3,500 Hondurans deported from the US every month in 2009; and, at least 6.5 metric tons of cocaine seized in the country in 2009 alone (which represents probably less than a fourth of all coke traffic in Honduras).I could go on! Mainstream media should dig into some of this stuff. Democracy in Honduras is important, but it’s worth zip and just window dressing if there’s no security to underpin the civil contract between society and state. These days, most Hondurans have two choices: leave the country or join organized crime.There’s a serious problem when it’s easier to get a job as an assassin than as a mechanic, a doctor, or a teacher…
July 10th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
The Leo van Bergen sounds promising. (The actual title and subtitle are Before My Helpless Sight: Suffering, Dying and Military Medicine on the Western Front, 1914-1918) . This page otes that the book draws “on British, French, German and Dutch sources”. So, it would apparently cover the whole Western Front. . http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&isbn=9780754658535&lang=cy . Here is the TOC . http://www.ashgate.com/pdf/SamplePages/Before_My_Helpless_Sight_Cont.pdf . Here is a 30 page sample, the Introduction to the book. . http://www.ashgate.com/pdf/SamplePages/Before_My_Helpless_Sight_Intro.pdf . My one quibble with a book of this type is that the depiction of the suffering is often used polemically to say that “nothing could be worth this price”. That attitude forfeits the game to whichever person or group is willing to behave with the most brutality. Looking at only the cost side of the ledger, no matter how huge the butcher’s bill, cannot be the whole story.
.I also agree that the First World War was the key moment when the liberal world order went off the rails, and we have never recovered from the damage.
July 10th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
P.3 of the Intro has this: . “… films like Saving Private Ryan (1998). Full of extremely realistic images, they nevertheless help to revive the myth that wars are fought to combat tyranny and oppression, and that those who go into battle – in this case Americans to a man – sacrifice themselves willingly on the altar of freedom. Spielberg’s film belongs to the same disagreeable tradition as, for example, Stoßtrupp 1917 (Germany, 1934): realistically filmed; mythologicalin content.” . So, here the author is telling us that wars to combat tyranny are myths, and that Saving Private Ryan “belongs to the same disagreeable tradition” as a work of Nazi propaganda. . Both statements are false. . Typically the only way to combat tyranny is to combat it in the sense of using armed force to destroy it. . It is also not true that the depiction of American troops fighting the Nazis is morally or artistically the equivalent of Nazi propaganda. The American troops were part of what destroyed the Nazis. No peace movement would have or could have ended the Third Reich. Anyone stupid enough to try would have been rounded up quickly by the Gestapo and killed. . While the book may have merit as history, its polemical intent is clear.
July 10th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Hi Sam,
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I’ve heard about the coke pipeline through Honduras but nothing to the degree to which you have just mentioned with the state (or some of its officials) providing legal docs for TOC groups to operate. Had not realized that Honduras was tipping so fast toward Failed State status – thanks much Sam!
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Hi Lex,
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"That attitude forfeits the game to whichever person or group is willing to behave with the most brutality."
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Yep, it is the urge to politically coerce one’s fellows into the appeasement or collaboration with the enemy, so as to mitigate the personal sense of shame from engaging in moral cowardice by spreading it to the group. I see the same psychological phenomena in the more extreme advocates of gun control, who are viscerally enraged by other people using guns in self-defense and want them rather than the criminals who attacked them prosecuted. Same principle, different scale, same result – enablement of thugs and crippling of civilized people.
July 10th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
That’s an astute reflection on the impact of the Great War, Zen.
Have you read Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory? Worth reading. I remember Fussell’s observation that many words and phrases that are in common English usage originated in WW1, e.g., "frontline", "over the top" (or "OTT"), "souvenir" (pre WW1 the English word was keepsake), "barrage", "tank" and so on. Generally we use these words and phrases without recognizing their origin, and this is one indication about how deeply imprinted the experience of the Great War is for us.
July 11th, 2009 at 5:38 am
Note that Columbia’s Uribe is also seeking to extend his presidency.
July 11th, 2009 at 6:23 am
hi Duncan,
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Uribe should groom a successor and step aside and not try to be a right-wing Chavez. Bad precedent on a continent rife with a history of caudillo-ism.
July 11th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Dear Lexington, Please forgive me for trying to get a possible misunderstanding out of the world. I do not say – and will never say – that Saving Private Ryan is ideologically on the same path as Nazi-propaganda. Thank God, that this brutal, violent, racist, totalitarian ideology was fought off and beaten. But what I do say is that both pictures have in common that realistic images are used to tell a mythical tale. That many men are willingly sacrificed – in the process beating a German tankbatallion – to save one man in a giant war like 1939-1945, is a myth. In that sense they are both part of some middleform of war-pictures, flanked by pictures making wars heroic, in which the main character never dies and the wounded are never too awful to look at, and anti-war pictures showing all the dirt and horror and often too high prize paid by society and mankind.
July 12th, 2009 at 2:15 am
Leo — thank you for the clarification. Agreed that Private Ryan is "mythical", as most war films end up being. However, the juxtaposition with a Nazi film seemed to imply an equivalence in moral or political content, not simply that they were the same kind of film in some merely technical way. I did not mean to be unfair, and have not read the book. It is an important topic, and your willingness to get into the records in four languages and cover all the Western Front armies is admirable.
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July 12th, 2009 at 7:27 am
Dear Lexington, I do hope that one day you will read the entire book. I would like to hear your comment on the whole. Best wishes (or as we say in the Netherlands: vriendelijke groet) . Leo van Bergen