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Book by John Maxwell
How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalist and Journalists
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Empire
of Fear
By John
Maxwell
One
does not have to be Scaramouche to
have a sense that the world is mad – most of us have known for
quite a long time that we are governed by lunatics in both the
public and the private spheres.
And
how else can we explain the IMF and the World Bank telling
Jamaica that its economic direction is unsustainable, when we
have been the most diligent of their students for more than 20
years?
How
else to explain that Royal Dutch/Shell, one of the world’s
largest and most important entities, has confessed that one
fifth of its golden eggs did not exist – that one fifth of the
assets it claimed to have in oil reserves were either imaginary
or otherwise non-existent?
How
else explain the American initiative to democratise Haiti when
democracy at home is in serious need of repair and
resuscitation?
How
do you explain that in the latest capitalist scandal, this time
in Italy, the head of the country’s largest food company
Parmalat and of its transnational subsidiaries turns out to
be a telephone operator?
The
news that the empires presided over by Mr Patterson and Mr Seaga
are both bankrupt should come as no surprise.
And
it should be no surprise that Mr Patterson’s government is
taking steps to make it as difficult as possible for the rest of
us to mount any kind of challenge to him or to any other of
the powers that be – or that imagine themselves to be, pace
Shell!
‘The
Blind leading the Deaf’
A
few months ago, many of us were slightly bemused to learn from
President Bush himself that he did not read newspapers or listen
to TV news. His news, he vouchsafed, was filtered, delivered
word of mouth by his closest and most trusted advisers.
‘That
explains it!’ some of us thought, prematurely.
It
now turns out, according to the former Treasury secretary, Paul
O’Neill, that Mr Bush is even less connected to reality than
we thought.
According
to O’Neill, a former CEO of ALCOA, even in cabinet meetings,
where the fate of the world is decided each week, the President
was ‘so disengaged “that he was “ like a blind man
in a room of deaf people.”
According
to Mr O’Neill, the Administration’s decision-making process
was so flawed that often top officials had no real sense of what
the president wanted them to do, forcing them to act on
"little more than hunches about what the president might
think."
Reacting
to O’Neill’s criticism, Mr Bush’s mouthpiece, Scott
McClellan said on Friday "I think it's well known the
way the president approaches governing and setting priorities.
The president is someone that leads and acts decisively on our
biggest priorities and that is exactly what he'll continue to
do."
The
problem is that Mr Bush’s priorities soon turn out to be our
priorities and the priorities of billions of people round the
world.
For
instance, we have all been forced to bow down to the
President’s ruling which abrogates the Geneva Convention on
the treatment of prisoners of war. We say nothing to challenge
the vigilante behaviour of the Government of the
United States – now holding more than 600 people from more
than 40 countries under what one of the most eminent jurists in
the world calls conditions “of utter lawlessness.”
Lord
Steyn, the third highest in Britain’s legal hierarchy, is a
judge whose opinions are respected round the world. Steyn said
in November he hoped the British Government would denounce
“and make plain publicly and unambiguously our condemnation of
the utter lawlessness at Guantanamo Bay.”
In a
memorial lecture to law students at the Inns of Court in
November, Lord Steyn warned Americans that the denial of justice
to foreigners would lead to the gradual erosion of fundamental
civil rights of US citizens.
Steyn
described the Guantanamo Bay detentions as a ‘monstrous
failure of justice” leading to “Kangaroo Courts – a
pre-ordained arbitrary rush to judgment by an irregular tribunal
which makes a mockery of justice".
"The
purpose of holding the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay was and is to
put them beyond the rule of law, beyond the protection of any
courts and at the mercy of victors," Lord
Steyn reminded his audience that it was a recurring theme
in history "in times of war, armed conflict, or perceived
national danger, even liberal democracies adopt measures
infringing human rights in ways that are wholly disproportionate
to the crisis. Often the loss of liberty is permanent". He
chided Judges who he said, were often too deferential to
the executive even in peacetime. It was "a monstrous
failure of justice" that so far the US courts had decided
they could not even consider credible medical evidence that a
detainee had been or was being tortured.
"The
procedural rules [at Camp Delta] do not prohibit the use
of force to coerce prisoners to confess," he went on.
"On the contrary, the rules expressly provide that
statements made by a prisoner under physical and mental duress
are admissible 'if the evidence would have value to a reasonable
person', i.e. military officers trying enemy soldiers."
Lord
Steyn quoted officials as saying: "It's not quite torture
but at close as you can get."
Prisoners
had been left without any rights,. Trials would be held in
secret, with none of the basic guarantees for a fair trial.
The
jurisdiction of the US courts was excluded. The military
controlled everything, subject to decisions of the president
even on guilt or innocence in individual cases, as well as
sentences. President Bush had already described the prisoners as
"killers".
"The
question is whether the quality of justice envisaged for the
prisoners at Guantanamo Bay complies with the minimum
international standards for the conduct of fair trials,"
Lord Steyn continued – "The answer can be given
quite shortly. It is a resounding 'NO'."
The
object of Lord Steyn’s contempt is primarily the American
Attorney General, author of the PATRIOT Act, and a man of
such refined sensibility that he needs to put clothes on
statues.
It
is he, and the lawyers he leads, who are now the exemplars
of the world and Jamaica, as we rush to enact into law an
anti-terrorism Act to comply with the paranoia of the US
authorities.
‘If
it ain’t Broke …
We
Jamaicans have been here before.
During
the First and Second World Wars the British passed laws which
restricted civil rights, most importantly, freedom of
expression, in the cause of winning the war. The Germans did the
same. One side had to lose. The side that lost was that one most
efficient in preventing freedom of expression.
The
Defense of the Realm Act in the Second World War got a few
Jamaicans into trouble. George Scotter, an Englishman who was a
sub-editor at the Gleaner was one. Others included PNP
stalwarts such as the Four H’s, Samuel Marquis and, of course,
Alexander Bustamante, or Alexander Clarke as he then was.
Later, the laws of sedition caught up with one of my
predecessors at Public Opinion, Roger Mais, who spent
nine months in prison for being rude to Sir Winston Churchill
and the Empire. His Managing Editor, O.T. Fairclough narrowly
missed the same fate, as did I 20 years later – in the
sixties, when parliament solemnly debated whether I had
been excessively and offensively critical of Sir Alexander
Bustamante – agitator turned imperialist..
The
basic thrust of our nascent anti-terrorism act is, from what I
can gather, to repeat prohibitions already contained in other
laws and to add a few more, just to make us realise that we are
living in the new world constructed by Kafka, Orwell, and Bush.
Oddly
enough, if we take the new act seriously, it will, it seems to
me, be able to catch and identify as terrorists, some very
large corporations for reasons I will not explain today. It will
probably also snare journalists like me and protesters like
those who demonstrated last year against the Iraq war.
What
most of us don’t realise is that Jamaican law is already
oppressive and able to take care of whole swaths of people who
could even marginally be described as terrorists. In 1974
we passed the Gun Court Act and the Suppression of Crimes Act.
The latter was repealed because it allowed the police too much
power, in addition to the abusive imperium they already enjoyed.
We
don’t need a new act, all we need is some sharper prosecutors.
…
Don’t Fix It’
Which,
of course, brings me to the process of justice itself. Lots of
people will argue that I am (God Save Us!) a diehard
conservative because I am against the Caribbean Court of Justice
as presently envisioned. My reason is simple. We have no Lord
Steyns here.
An
article in the West Indian Law Journal a few years ago by Zanifa
McDowell, a Master of Laws of Cambridge, and at the time a
temporary lecturer in Law at the UWI, asks some very
serious questions about the quality of the Court – the
essential question in my mind.
Unfortunately
I do not know whether Zanifa McDowell is a man or a woman, so I
hope I will be excused for not identifying her/him
by the correct title.
In
the introduction to an examination of the quality of our judges,
McDowell says that while the political and other questions tend
to be the main concerns, the real concern should be whether the
court would be competent and capable of effecting justice
between parties.
“Judging
from the relative volume of cases referred to the Privy Council,
and judging from the number of over-turned decisions, arguably
the issue concerning intellectual maturity, analytical ability,
and sound judgment of our local judges falls squarely into
question.”
After
examining a number of appeals from the Caribbean to the Privy
Council it becomes clear that sometimes judges, including whole
courts, make serious mistakes, even at an elementary level.
In
one case the Privy Council commented inter alia “The
argument accepted by the Court of Appeal seems to have been as
follows: Either the police officers were acting in execution of
their duty, or they were not. If they were, the defendants are
entitled to the benefit of the Public Authorities Protection
Act. If they were not they must have been on a frolic of their
own . . . and the crown would not be vicariously liable. So
either way, the plaintiff must fail”.
McDowell
drily comments that “after reading the Councils
judgment, any reasonable person would feel that justice was
vindicated, but only at this level (my italics) Where
does that leave our confidence in our own regional judicial;
institutions?”
“Should
independence and sovereignty mean more to us than justice for
our people? Is it not a fact that independence and sovereignty
emerge as a result of the observance of the rules of justice? If
justice is then watered down to the level where basic rules of
law, basic rules of legal practice and procedure, basic canons
of construction of statutes and documents affecting people’s
rights can be violated and/or ignored or seriously
misinterpreted by those entrusted with the administration of
them, then, surely the national and regional pride felt on
account of our independence and sovereignty must give way
to the outrage we feel that justice for our people means little
more than a judge persuading a jury by making personal comments
about an accused’s identity or credibility.”
And
like me, McDowell would plead for time to ensure that something
“positive and constructive is done to improve the competence
and abilities of those whom we entrust with the highest
honour – that of dispensing justice and upholding the
rule of law.”
For
me, the law has two brand new heroes: Steyn and McDowell.
We,
whose necks are on the block, salute them.
©2004 John Maxwell
maxinf@cwjamaica.com* *
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Forged: Writing in the Name of God
Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are
By Bart D. Ehrman
The evocative title tells it all and hints at the tone of sensationalism that pervades this book. Those familiar with the earlier work of Ehrman, a distinguished professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and author of more than 20 books including Misquoting Jesus, will not be surprised at the content of this one. Written in a manner accessible to nonspecialists, Ehrman argues that many books of the New Testament are not simply written by people other than the ones to whom they are attributed, but that they are deliberate forgeries. The word itself connotes scandal and crime, and it appears on nearly every page. Indeed, this book takes on an idea widely accepted by biblical scholars: that writing in someone else's name was common practice and perfectly okay in ancient times. Ehrman argues that it was not even then considered acceptable—hence, a forgery. While many readers may wish for more evidence of the charge, Ehrman's introduction to the arguments and debates among different religious communities during the first few centuries and among the early Christians themselves, though not the book's main point, is especially valuable.—Publishers Weekly /
Forged Bart Ehrman’s New Salvo (Witherington)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 16 June 2008
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