Co-editors: Seán Mac Mathúna • John Heathcote
Consulting editor: Themistocles Hoetis
Field Correspondent: Allen Hougland
War
on Drugs: Counterinsurgency Operations in
Colombia
The
CIA, Rockefeller, and the Boys in the
Club Recommended
reading on Palestine Jews
and Palestinians Cooperate for Peace Palestinian
Centre for Peace and Democracy B'Tselem,
the Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied
Territories Taliban's
Control Over Afghanistan Boosts Opium
Trade The
world has been shocked into mute incomprehrension at the
final, visual proof of the destruction of the great stone
Buddhas carved into the mountainside in the Bamiyan Valley
in Afghanistan. The
Taliban, known as the most fundamentalist Muslim government
in the world, decided that once the U.S. had imposed an even
stricter sanction regime than previously, they had nothing
left to lose in the face of world opinion. Already known for
their strange interpretation of the Koran; they had banned
everything they considered alien to an Islamic State; from
nail varnish to Western pop music. It was no surprise then,
that the Buddhist statues, along with all other "graven
images", or statues from Afghanistan's rich history should
be destroyed. The
obsession with this particular facet of the Prophet's
teachings seems to Muslim and non-Muslim as bizarre as their
obsession with the length of a man's beard. The stricture
was probably only included originally to prevent either
idolatry (the worship of idols, treating the object itself
as sacred, a fetish); or the worship of living beings (even
more relevant in the era of the mass media with
representations of everyone from Hitler to Elvis, the Pope
or Ayatollah Khomeini). The
tragedy of the destruction of the Buddhas should also be
compared to another, different sort of tragedy taking place
which the Taliban seem unable to deal with; the worst
drought in over 30 years. 12
million Afghans are said to be affected, and at least three
million are actually on the edge of starvation. Joining
the constant stream of political refugees are now up to half
a million Afghans fleeing in search of food, many to
Pakistan. However,
although it is easy to leap to instant condemnation of the
Taliban, it would be wise to consider a few relevant
points. The
Taliban themselves were largely the creation of the
CIA. During
the Cold War, in the immediate post-Vietnam era, the U.S was
looking for areas to continue playing the politics of
tension. A
moderate Afghan government, perhaps the most democratic
regime that impregnable country ever had was promoting, with
admittedly a large amount of Soviet aid, a secular,a
modernising state with equal rights for women, and the
beginnings of land reform. For
the Soviets this would achieve the aim of both tying
Afghanistan into the Russian zone of influence; and would
also ensure a fairly peaceful, contained state existing in
an area bordering theirs, which had always been fiercely
independent. However,
as in any country where the upper classes are expected to
make some sort of sacrifice for the sake of redistribution;
the Government started to find opposition emerging from the
tribal chieftains whose families had run areas within
Afghanistan as little autocracies. More
importantly, many mullahs would have been the younger sons
of the local landowner. In
England, it was common up until the early 20th century for
the eldest son of a landowner to inherit the land; whilst
the younger son would become the local Anglican Minister;
leaving both the temporal and spiritual power in a locality
within the ruling family. Land
reform would been perhaps a cause of some discontent; but
the benefits of a fairer society would have no doubt swayed
the balance of power in favour of the more moderate Mullahs,
and Islamic community. However,
as in so many other tragic parts of the world; the interest
of the CIA and the US State Department in the affairs of
this tiny country, resulted in an unending supply of the
most advanced weaponry to carry out a second-hand war
against the officially recognised Government of the time
(whose successor is still recognised as
legitimate). This
in itself can be seen as the egg which hatched the 'Serpent"
of international Islamic terrorism, which has challenged the
liberal Western powers from Kenya (US Embassy bombing) to
Kosovo (training ground for various international Islamic
groups. Sadly,
another result was the laying waste of a proud and
independent country, rich in history and culture; the flight
into exile of a large proportion of it's citizens, any with
an education - especially women - and the destruction of any
economic or social infrastructures, other than the local
version of Islam. In
some ways the West can probably see the benefit in having
such a state; it means that there is always the awful
apparition of the Taliban to throw up in the face of the
liberal intelligentsia, to justify another wave of
aggression against Arab countries like Libya or Iraq.
For
both Russia and China, it could be said that the Taliban
could serve the same purpose; reminding their own large
Muslim populations of the benefits of living in modern
secular states which guarantee a freedom of belief. But the
problems hatched within the turbulent state of Afghanistan,
have already started to appear in neighbouring
countries. It
means that there is a constant state of anarchy just across
Russia's border. Afghanistan has proved useful as a training
ground and retreat for the Wahabist Islamic factions waging
a civil war in Chechnya. The US, especially under the new
Oil Billionaire regime of "President Bush", has a vested
interest in hindering any Russian exploitation of it's
oilfields in the Caspian Sea area; of which Chechnya is a
vital link in the supply route. It is
a well-established fact now that the US intelligence
services have been content to impose an international regime
of prohibition; despite the awful consequences to be seen
across the world. It is
perhaps correct to say that the DEA controls the worldwide
supply of at least two of the most potent narcotics, cocaine
and heroin. The
involvement of the US Administration in the supply and sale
of South American cocaine to the gangs in its own inner city
areas, primarily to raise money for secret projects most
notably against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, is well
documented. The
White House at the time was nominally headed by the
Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan; but under the de facto
control of George Bush, father of the present frontman. (His
pursuit of Noriega, with the resulting loss of life in
Panama City, was an important element in the cleaning up the
evidence.) Before
Afghanistan became the world's largest heroin supplier,
coincidentally under the US-funded Taliban; most of the
supplies that reached the West came from the Golden
Triangle, in the far East. In
The Politics of Heroin, the evidence for American intentions
in the area surrounding Vietnam, from the time after
withdrawal of French control after W.W.II, is
overwhelming. The
British writer Norman Lewis detailed how the US made a pact
with the Mafia during W.W.II; for an unopposed route through
Sicily to the Italian mainland. In return, the Mafia would
be left in virtual control of Southern Italy, and all
American hardware following the end of the conflict.
Of
course, Italy, with it's strong Communist party, and it's
mainly left -wing partisans, would be far safer in the hands
of gangsters than socialists. At least, Uncle Sam reasons, a
gangster's rationale is easy to understand and well-defined,
unlike that of pesky social reformers, who might turn out to
have some principles. The
same goes for the drug trade; it compromises the whole
"underworld"; it allows the US to control the supply through
deniable agencies, as well as giving entry into the
underworlds of countries it would normally find it hard to
penetrate. The profit from the vast amount of money it
generates is increased by the fact that the growers of the
raw organic base (the poppies, for instance), inevitably
live in poverty in the Third World; they have little power
to set the price of an "illegal" crop. It
also allows the US State Departments to effect a certain
amount of social control on the populations in its own and
other countries. As
has been so amply demonstrated in no-go areas of some of the
American ghettoes, both North and South, it divides and
impoverishes the poorest first; distracting any unified
efforts to pursue radical movement for change in social
conditions. Soon
enough the drugs spread out into the middle classes;
allowing for an even greater income to be funnelled out of
an economy into all those offshore bank accounts. It also
provides a good excuse for repressive Western Governments to
harass their own artists and "intellectuals". The
'War on Drugs" has also been one of the greatest
justifications of restrictions on personal liberty and
personal movement across the world. It
was the proximity to the source of such a powerful commodity
as opium/ heroin that made Vietnam such an important element
in the US global strategy. It funded their own intelligence
operations, and their puppet- government in the
non-democratic South Vietnam. It
also ended up being brought back in such quantities by their
own, sadly-neglected GI's, that the US inner cities were
swept by a heroin epidemic for the first time; which only
shifted into the background with the arrival of Iran-Contra
cartel crack in the 80's. In
the Far East, Vietnam was left a wasteland; and Cambodia,
the collateral victim of the criminal Kissinger's illegal
war, was swept back to Year Zero by the US/UK trained
stormtroopers of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge - that decade's
version of the Taliban. Currently,
European troops are being left at the mercy of the UCK in
Yugoslavia
(Kosovo and Macedonia). Promoted originally by the CIA as a
nationalist group who could destabilise the remaining
multi-ethnic socialist remains of the Yugoslav Federation;
the UCK has used its control of the heroin
route between the Middle East and Europe to finance its
purchase of arms to enlarge its fiefdom. Volunteers
from the US, Chechnya and Afghanistan have been in both
Bosnia and Kosovo. Maybe
the destabilisation of Europe is seen as good for the US
economy. . . It is
perhaps in South America, specifically Colombia, that this
policy will begin to unravel at an increasing
speed. The
policy of Prohibition is already being abandoned in a
piece-meal way in the more liberal, intelligent European
countries. They have realised that their own citizens are
now too well-informed to be fooled, at such a high price,
both financially and healthwise. Columbia,
which is at the point of falling to a large, well-organised
guerilla army (the FARC) is currently the target for the
biggest US Government sanctioned operation since the Vietnam
War. The
country was the source of most of the cocaine which funded
the secret operations run by Oliver North during the
Iran-Contra subversion of the US Constitution. It was
procured from the "cartels: who were eradicated with even
more extreme prejudice than that shown to Noriega (the
middleman). The
US has suddenly realised that the main source for the white
powder so beloved of its own population ( a love affair
second only to the one it has with fossil fuels) is slipping
with increasing speed into the control of a large dedicated
revolutionary army. The response of the US has been to swamp
Columbia with "military advisers" and begin a massive, toxic
defoliant (biological warfare) programme - echoes of
Vietnam. If
looked at as a part of a jigsaw, the US is right to be
worried. For a
regime led by Cold War warriors, the map of South America is
beginning to look frighteningly red. Venezuela,
under Chavez, is leading the poorer OPEC countries in
demanding a fair return for their oil being guzzled at an
increasing rate by the USA. They have also expressed strong
support for Castro's isolated haven of Cuba. Mexico;
the country on the borders of the US itself (which
appropriated a number of Mexican States including Texas over
the last 150 years), is on the brink of having the new
government of Vincente Fox accede to the demands of the
guerilla army led by Sub-Commandante Marcos or face total
civil war. For
George W Bush, whose foreign visits over the last 10 years
have only been as far as Mexico; and where both he and his
father made big money in dubious circumstances; this must be
a frightening spectre indeed. The
consensus of the Western Alliance seems to be that the new
enemy to the progress of mankind is religious
fundamentalism. Specifically,
we are told, the fundamentalism of the Islamic
world. In
the past week the liberal intelligentsia - for it has not
been widely reported in the mass media - has been horrified
by the reports emerging from Afghanistan of the destruction
of the ancient statues of giant Buddhas carved into the side
of the mountain. They stand in a valley which has been the
site of recent fierce encounters between the Taliban and the
forces representing what is still recognised in the UN as
the legitimate Afghan government. A
meeting took place between the Taliban government, and
representatives of the UN Heritage Committee; at which
assurances were given regarding the safety of the statues,
as well as the few remaining pieces of Afghan history still
extant in Kabul. It
has been rumoured for a while that up to 6000 pieces of
statuary from the Buddhist era, which had been seized and
held in the basement of the Information Ministry in Kabul,
had already been systematically destroyed. But
the massive statues of the Buddha, over 2000 years old,
carved into the mountainside and surrounded by painted caves
and chambers which had been lived in by monks, were spared
for their "tourist potential" . An
hour afterwards an official communiqué announced the
start of the official destruction of the statues, aided it
was said, by local volunteers. This
act of tragic destruction of a peoples own history; and
their consciousness of who they are, and why they are what
they have become; which are the central lessons we draw from
history; is based on a prohibition by the Prophet Mohammed
against depicting the human face. One
can appreciate that in the sixth century the worship of
icons could easily be translated into a a worship of idols
where the object itself , constructed of base matter is
perceived as sacred. And this attitude could be seen as
having some rationale in our own day, where the projection
of a personality cult, aided by all the wizardry of the mass
media, is generally a precursor of tyranny. However,
what the Taliban are doing by destroying these ancient
statues; is destroying the heritage not only of the Afghans
inside, or in exile from Afghanistan; not just of Buddhists,
but of the whole world. Outside
that troubled country, people from all cultures, including
the Muslim community, have voiced their horror at what is
taking place. The
UN representatives were not allowed to see the other listed
statues which now number less than 500 - all that remains of
Afghan history as they are swept back to year
Zero. One
can understand the emergence of a fundamentalism which is so
ascetic, in a world forced, blackmailed or blinded into
living by the philosophy of fundamental materialism; where
to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the price of everything has been
listed, but the value forgotten. We
are being led blindfolded through the skin-deep culture of
soaps and supermarkets, which demean us, define us, degrade,
downgrade, downsize, deny us our spirit; the pornography of
consumerism. Even
revolt and awareness comes packaged and palatable; sold to
us by the sharks who are are devouring us. No
wonder people turn to the bottle, brown powder, the Book and
the Sword; become ticking - time bombs. Some
of us have gone with little protest; the ones led
blindfolded down the supermarket Malls; because we have been
allowed to share some material benefit in the pillage and
piracy carried out in our name in the rest of the
World. But
now the tide has turned, and the people in the slums, the
ghettos, housing projects, favelas and all the stripped
jungle clearings and desert velds have started to look for a
reckoning, before the Planet herself wreaks her own slow but
inevitable righting of the balance. Even
Einstein; a great philosopher - whose thought, sadly, will
be probably be best remembered for its ultimate expression
of triumphalism materialism, the atomic bomb; was aware that
matter and energy are in constant flux, but that the total
remains constant. Also
that our Universe - and by extension, the microcosm
represented by our world, hang in a fragile balance; with
existence balanced on a razor blade,an infinitesimally small
margin. So
before we in the West suck the world dry; using the threat
of assured total destruction if we do not always get our own
way, or pressurise everyone to play the same game as us;
those people left to scavenge in the landfills of the
opulent West, or of those in the Third World scavenging a
living in states run by small elite's maintained in power by
the West, imposing the religion of Kapital; are determined
to get their share. Sometimes
all that unites the poor will be their religion; if this is
a religion of the Book, it might be the only book they have
ever been allowed to read; or it may indeed provided them
with the gateway to the endless well of the thoughts of
mankind preserved through the written word. Whichever
is the case, the Book will assume an immense importance in
the culture of the Poor. The
accusation of extremism is more often levelled at the
Muslims than either of the two other worldwide Abrahamic
religions, Judaism and Christianity. Yet
Judaism is used by the Zionists to justify the appropriation
of a land lived in until recently by its original
inhabitants, the Palestinians; who are a people both
Christian and Moslem, as well as Palestinian Jews and
Samaritans. Geo-political
concerns and historical myth have allowed a virtual-reality
"country", with indeterminate borders, (called Israel) to be
created, based on the alleged gift of a large piece of
real-estate, from God to a community of monotheistic Semitic
tribes (ancestors of both Jew and Arab, genetically all the
"children of Abraham"). Armed
to the teeth by the West, and the largest recipient of US
foreign Aid, it has a stranglehold over the politics of the
Middle East; coincidentally the source of most US and
Western oil supplies. The
State of Israel has been more responsible than any other
factor for the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, much to the
dismay of both secular and Christian Arabs or democratic
moderate Moslems and Jews. Ironically,
some of the greatest opponents to the Zionist State of
Israel in that part of the world are the ultra- Orthodox
Jewish sects who believe that the appropriation of Jerusalem
and the surrounding areas before the return of the Jewish
Messiah, is an ultimate heresy against the Talmudic
teachings. Secular
European Jewry,
before being wiped out in the Holocaust,
were also opposed to the Zionist ideals. Not
only did it encourage the racists in their aim of driving
European Jews from their European homelands; it also gave
justification for a virulent cultural nationalism based on
dubious sources, which , as in Europe would eventually find
a victim to assert it's supremacy over. The
consequences for Europe of the loss of it's Jewish
population were in cultural terms disastrous. The
development of European thought and aesthetics has been so
swift largely because of the intellectuals and artists who
networked from East to Western Europe over the last 250
years; so many of whom were cosmopolitan Jews. Banned
from the professions, exempted from the European
aristocracies; they helped create the common man's own
aristocracies of the mind, of reasoning. It
was this that the Nazis feared more than anything else about
the Jews of Europe; and it was the socialist Jewish Bund
that were seen as greater enemies by the Nazis than the
religious or Zionist Jews; along with non-Jews who had
staked their lives on the principle of the Freedom of
thought. Fundamentalist
Christianity has been pursuing its own Armageddon agenda.
Foiled in their attempt to foist the idiot Quayle onto the
American public (he was originally hired as Pres Bush I's
best insurance policy against sudden death in office); the
Christian Right in the US have finally got their patsy in
the White House. From
being a no-hoper tainted by allegations of draft-dodging,
drug-taking, alcoholism and arrest; to serious questions
concerning his financial ethics, and qualifications for a
job running the world's dominant superpower (main
qualification being intelligence), George
W. Bush
was effectively propelled into the White House by an unholy
triumvirate of the Christian Right, the Supreme Court and
his Daddy's old contacts (the CIA/ Corporate
Masters). Being
born-again means never having to explain who you were before
you "found God". Well,
I believe in forgiveness, but when someone wants you to
place your life in their hands, you have the right to ask a
few questions. His
first act in office was to ban any US funding which might be
used in health programmes in the Third World for
contraception or abortion. Forget
Aids and overpopulation, and that great American slogan of
Freedom and Choice. His
education policy is set on a course where the teaching of
Creationism is given equal status to that of Evolution; the
rejection of rationalism is obviously not the sole preserve
of the Taliban. Both of course have the same objective - the
ignorance of the masses is the best guarantee of easy rule
by an autocratic minority. The
belief in - and implicit wish - in the arrival of
Armageddon; a Last Judgment, in which the righteous (for
which read the born-again bright-eyed bourgeoisie) will
inherit the Earth, the whole Earth from the rest of us; is
not a good sign that there will be much left for the
children, let alone the children's children. This
belief can be the only basis for the Bush regime abandoning
all its pre-election promises concerning fuel emissions. Who
cares about the ecology of this old world, when God is going
to give us a bright new shiny one? The
Christian Right's interpretation of Christ's original
message of love, forgiveness and social inclusiveness are
about as far from the original as the Taliban's
interpretation of the Koran. From
a Buddhist perspective, one cannot see how a Book, any book
or all the Books ever written could express the
inexpressible, or even provide a summary of the
infinite. If
the Universe is the creation of the Godhead, then surely
that in its ever-changing form, is the only document that
could ever contain the whole unutterable description of the
God; to claim that any book could ever do so seems more than
a little presumptive or reductive. However,
if any religion could make sense of such a tragic loss of
its material history; then it is probably the
Buddhists. Unlike
the religions of the book; with their fetishism of holy
places; buildings constructed by the hands of men,such as
the Wailing Wall, the Dome of the Rock, the Vatican; the
philosophy of Buddhism is transcendental enough to
appreciate the absence of the Buddhas in the mountainside.
Not
being there, they probably say more about this world than
ever before. It is
just to be hoped that the people of the world do not start
to become immunised to the shock of seeing their history
destroyed in front of them; especially those parts
constructed out of love and a feeling for the sacredness of
Creation. But
it is possible that they are just the tiny tremors felt
before an earthquake, which the survivors only remember in
retrospect, as the end of their previous, secure lives, and
the beginning of a harsher world.
The
main Buddha in the Bamiyan valley, 240 kilometers
northwest of the Afghan capital Kabul, before total
destruction by the Taliban. The 53 meter Buddha was the
largest statue in the world. With its strategic location
at the intersection of roads to Persia, India, Tarim
basin, and China, it developed an art style with a fusion
of Iranian, Indian, Gandharan and local style into an
independent mode of its own. This style of Buddhist art
traveled eastward and was quickly adopted at Kizil,
Xinjiang and ultimately Dunhuang. Buddhism reached the
height of its power in the 8th and 9th centuries in
Afghanistan before it fell to the Arabs.
Oil
Drugs
Kosovo
and the UCK
South
America
Religion
Materialism
Land
of the Book - Israel
The
Word and the Sword
The
BuddhaThe
Taliban and the CIA
Oil
Drugs
Kosovo
and the UCK
South
America
Religion
Materialism
Land
of the Book - Israel
The
Word and the Sword: Fundamental Christian
Materialism
The
Buddha
Tradition
records that the Tantric Buddha Padmasambhava came from a
land called Ögyen, which is thought to be somewhere
in the wild remoteness of the Karakoram mountains, where
India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia and Tibet all meet.
Buddhism reached the height of its power in the 8th and
9th centuries in Afghanistan before it fell to the Arabs.
Most of Afghanistan's Buddhist heritage survived intact
until quite recently - although the site was destroyed by
Genghis Khan in 1222, the statues remained.