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Today's
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January 10, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Bush
as Hitler? Let's Be Fair
Diane Christian
On Lying and Colin Powell
Lisa Viscidi
Exhumations: Unearthing Guatemala's Macabre Past
Saul Landau
Homeland Anxiety
Elaine Cassel
Who's Winning the War on Civil Liberties?
January 9, 2004
David Lindorff
The
Misers of War: Troop Strength and Chintzy Bonuses
Kurt Nimmo
Saddam's Defense: Summon Bush Sr. to the Stand
Mike Whitney
Orange Jumpsuits for the Bush Clan?: The Carnegie Report on Iraq's
Non-existent WMDs
Deb Reich
Palestinians and Israelis: This War is Unwinnable
David Vest
Disabled
Vets Fire Back at Rumsfeld
January 8, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israeli
Refuseniks Sentenced to Jail
Lenni Brenner
Dr.
Dean and the Godhead
Ray McGovern
Bush: Driving Without Breaks
Mark Scaramella
Inside
the DA's Office: Lies, Errors and Tedium
Yves Engler
Bush's Mexican Gambit
James Hollander
Journalists
Under Fire: the Death of José Couso in Baghdad
January 7, 2004
Democracy Now!
Uncharitable
Care: How Hospitals are Gouging and Even Arresting the Uninsured
Greg Weiher
The
Bush Administration's Ongoing Intelligence Problem
Ben Tripp
The Word of the Year, 2003
Dave Lindorff
Dean and His Democratic Detractors
Michael Leon
The NYT Does Chomsky
Bob Boldt
God Talk
Ramon Ryan
Small
Victories and Long Struggles: the 10th Anniversary of the Zapatista
Uprising
January 6, 2004
Dave Lindorff
RNC
Plays the Hitler Card: MoveOn Shouldn't Apologize for Those Ads
Ron Jacobs
Drugs
in Uniform: Hashish and the War on Terrorism
Josh Frank
Coffee and State Authority in Colombia
Doug Giebel
Permanent Bases: Leave Iraq? Hell No, We Won't Go
John Chuckman
Sick Puppies: David Frum's New Neo-Con Manifesto
Rannie Amiri
The Politics of the Iranian Earthquake
John L. Hess
A Record
to Dissent From
Thacher Schmid
A Cheesehead's Musings on the Sunday NYT
David Price
"Like
Slaves": Anthropological Thoughts on Occupation
January 5, 2004
Al Krebs
How
Now Mad Cow!
Kathy Kelly
Squatting
in Baghdad's Bomb Craters
Jordy Cummings
The Dialectic of the Kristol Family: Putting the Neo in the Cons
Fran Shor
Mad Human Disease: Chewing the Fat Down on the Farm
Fidel Castro
"We Shall Overcome": On the 45th Anniversary of the
Cuban Revolution
Gary Leupp
North
Korea for Dummies
January 3 / 4, 2004
Brian Cloughley
Never
Mind the WMDs, Just Look at History
Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan
The Wrong War at the Wrong Time
William Cook
Failing to Respond to 9/11
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
Robert Fisk
Iraqi Humor Amid the Carnage
Ilan Pappe
The Geneva Bubble
Walter Davis
Robert Jay Lifton, or Nostalgia
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft vs. the Left
Mike Whitney
The Padilla Case
Steven Sherman
On Wallerstein's The Decline of American Power
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Taiwan Hypocrisy
William Blum
Codework Orange!
Mitchel Cohen
Learning from Che Guevara
Seth Sandronsky
Mad Cow and Main Street USA
Bruce Jackson
Conversations with Leslie Fiedler
Standard Schaefer
Poet Carl Rakosi Turns 100
Ron Jacobs
Sir Mick
Adam Engel
Hall of Hoaxes
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert & Curtis
January 2, 2004
Stan Cox
Red Alert
2016
Dave Lindorff
Beef, the Meat of Republicans
Jackie Corr
Rule and Ruin: Wall Street and Montana
Norman Solomon
George Will's Ethics: None of Our Business?
David Vest
As the Top Wobbleth
January 1, 2004
Randall Robinson
Honor
Haiti, Honor Ourselves
David Krieger
Looking
Back on 2003
Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs
Stan Goff
War,
Race and Elections
Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac
Website of the Day
Embody Bags
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The Washington
Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season
December 24, 2003
M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics
of Empire
William S. Lind
Marley's
List for Santa in Wartime
Josh Frank
Iraqi
Oil: First Come, First Serve
Cpt. Paul Watson
The
Mad Cowboy Was Right
Robert Lopez
Nuance
and Innuendo in the War on Iraq
December 23, 2003
Brian J. Foley
Duck
and Cover-up
Will Youmans
Sharon's
Ultimatum
Michael Donnelly
Here
They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco
Uri Avnery
Sharon's
Speech: the Decoded Version
December 22, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray
to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks
Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?
Marjorie Cohn
How to
Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue
Kathy Kelly
The
Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"
December 20 / 21, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
How
to Kill Saddam
Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy
Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali
David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the
Islamic World
Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee
Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush
Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared
Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression
Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN
Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and
Latino Prisoners
Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler
John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane
Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful
Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race
Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
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
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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January
10 / 11, 2004
National Liberation
Movements and Beyond
A
Review of Resistance: My Life for Lebanon
By MARK HAND
Although half a world away and 100 years apart,
Soha Bechara's life in Lebanon, at least the first 36 years,
has presented some striking similarities to Alexander Berkman's
struggle for economic justice during the age of industrialization
in the United States. Her just-published memoirs, Resistance:
My Life for Lebanon, convey a single-minded determination
to rid the world of a perceived wrong, a style that characterized
the autobiographical writings of political revolutionaries from
the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In 1988, at the age of 21, Bechara shot
Antoine Lahad, a general in charge of the South Lebanese Army,
the pro-Israeli, predominantly Christian militia that controlled
southern Lebanon as a proxy for Israel. Lahad survived the assassination
attempt. For the next 10 years, following weeks of torture, Bechara,
a member of the Lebanese Communist Party, was held without trial
at Khiam, a brutal detention center in the mountains of southern
Lebanon created by the Israelis and managed by the SLA.
Berkman was also 21 when he tried to
assassinate millionaire industrialist Henry Clay Frick. In 1892,
Frick oversaw the shooting of striking workers at the Carnegie
steel mills in Homestead, Pa., near Pittsburgh. Born in Russia
in 1870,  Berkman developed a taste
for political agitation early in his life and had been deeply
moved by the plight of five revolutionaries who were executed
in connection with the 1881 assassination of the Russian tsar.
Already an orphan, Berkman in 1888 decided
to move to the United States where he developed a close and lasting
friendship with Emma Goldman, also a Russian Jew who had immigrated
a few years earlier. Upon his arrival, controversy was still
raging over the execution of the Haymarket anarchists in Chicago
in November 1887. Looking back, Berkman viewed the Haymarket
affair as a galvanizing moment in his lifelong embrace of anarchism.
During the Homestead steel strike, Frick
had become a "symbol of capitalist oppression, whose removal,
he thought, would rouse the people against the injustice of the
existing order," Paul Avrich writes in his book, Anarchist
Portraits. Berkman spent 14 years in the Western Penitentiary
of Pennsylvania, an experience he described in his Prison Memoirs
of an Anarchist, published six years after his release: "I
feel like one recovering from a long illness; very weak, but
with a touch of joy in life."
Five years after gaining her freedom
from the Khiam detention center, Soft Skull Press has published
the English translation of Bechara's memoirs, Resistance: My
Life for Lebanon, a large portion of which describes the ordeal
of her captivity. Upon her release from Khiam, Bechara said she
felt the weight of all those stolen years. "I had been roughly
shaken back to life, and I found it hard to find the rhythm of
a peaceful existence," she remembers.
Although a member of the Lebanese Communist
Party, Bechara's guiding philosophy was nationalism and a Lebanon
free of Israeli control. "My apprenticeship in politics
sped up dramatically during 1982, that terrible year. The Israeli
invasion gave me bitter strength in my beliefs. I was fifteen,
and I was now ready to move into action," she writes.
Bechara and her colleagues in the resistance
movement aimed to strike Israeli interests in the occupied zone
of southern Lebanon. After assessing various options, they decided
that Bechara's mission would be to target Lahad, Israel's military
chief in the region. But as the moment neared for her to perform
the deed, Bechara's thoughts turned to anguish over committing
such a violent act. "I was as determined as ever, but for
the first time I realized the difficulty of the task, the self-will
that murder, however justified it was in my eyes, implied,"
Bechara writes.
In the end, though, Bechara felt an obligation
to the resistance against the South Lebanese Army and Israel.
"I felt it was my duty to take part. If we did nothing,
I said, we Lebanese would suffer the same fate as the Palestinians."
A similar spirit for liberation raged
in the hearts of activists in late 19th century America, a time
when workers were forced to toil terribly long hours in dangerous
conditions, only to receive crumbs from the awesome wealth they
were creating. To Berkman, Frick was the symbol of wealth and
power, of the injustice and wrong of the capitalistic class,
just like Lahad represented the chaos and turmoil created when
one nation used its might to occupy and oppress the people of
another.
In her autobiography, Living My Life,
Goldman explains how Berkman, knowing that he may be executed
for his act, asked her to use her speaking skills to explain
to the workers the significance of his planned assassination
of Frick. "I could articulate its meaning to the workers.
I could explain that he had no personal grievance against Frick,
that as a human being Frick was no less to him than to anyone
else," Goldman writes. "Sasha's act would be directed
against Frick, not as a man, but as an enemy of labour."
In her final days before the assassination
attempt, Bechara received advice from her comrade, Rabih, who
recommended she write a letter explaining her act in case she
became a "martyr" of the Lebanese resistance. "I
wrote about the civil war, the Israeli invasion, and the death
of our heroes," Bechara says. "I expressed my admiration
for the Palestinian initifada, which had just broken out in the
occupied territories, and which seemed to me to be a beautiful
example of resistance and an ideal of revolution."
Her assassination of Lahad failed, but
the act itself sent a message to Israel that its surrogates in
Lebanon were vulnerable. Bechara was not executed in retaliation
for her attempted assassination of Lahad, although the torture
inflicted on her could have easily killed someone of lesser health.
While in captivity, Bechara rejected
how the Israelis and the SLA characterized Khiam. She would tell
her captors that she was in a camp, not a prison. "A prison
is a place where people are sent after being tried," Bechara
says she told her captors. "With us, this is not the case."
In June 1998, Bechara was released from
captivity. Two years later, Khiam was shut down for good after
the Israeli Defense Forces had retreated from southern Lebanon.
Khiam was "liberated," Bechara recounts, "at the
same time as the rest of South Lebanon, by bare-handed villagers.
For years, they had been haunted by the tortured cries emanating
from the camp. Now, columns of civilians made their way up towards
the prison. ... They broke open the locks, bringing back to life
haggard men and women who were dumbfounded by this sudden reversal
of history."
In the weeks after the fall of Khiam,
Lahad took refuge in Tel Aviv. "Like him, most of the former
guards of Khiam had also gone to Israel, where after the debacle
they found themselves stranded in temporary camps," Bechara
writes. "They were eager to get away, the sooner the better,
to find a home somewhere that was more accommodating about their
past."
After her release, Bechara was hailed
as a hero by the Lebanese Communist Party. She was received by
Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri and mobbed by members of
the media who wanted to get her reaction to freedom after 10
years of captivity. "My liberation had turned into a kind
of national holiday," she writes. "During the three
months that followed September 3rd, thousands of visitors streamed
into my house and party offices."
Upon Berkman's release from prison in
1906, there was no celebration by government officials in Pennsylvania
or Washington. The anarchist movement was in its prime at the
time and agents of the state were on the trail of suspected anarchists
plotting the next violent deed against the ruling class. Where
Berkman did find a warm welcome was in the labor movement, especially
among fellow anarchists. With the death of influential anarchist
Johann Most shortly before Berkman's release from prison, Berkman
and Goldman became leading figures in the American anarchist
movement.
In Lebanon of the late 20th century,
activists were forced to address the problems posed by civil
war and foreign occupation by Israel and Syria before they could
seek to refashion Lebanon along more egalitarian lines. The United
States, on the other hand, was a growing imperial power where
the roadblocks to progress, in the minds of the anarchists, were
the capitalist class and the government itself, not a foreign
colonial power.
In this setting, Berkman helped to organize
the Ferrer School in New York, which encouraged a libertarian
spirit among its students. He continued to agitate for better
working conditions and for the unemployed. During the First World
War, Berkman organized antimilitarist rallies and held lectures
in an attempt to spur public opinion against the growing war
hysteria. That same hysteria, similar to the U.S. government's
modern day anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant movement, led the state
to deport both Berkman and Goldman to Russia in 1919.
After floating from country to country,
Berkman eventually landed in France in 1925 where he was to live
the rest of his life. There, he organized a fund for aging European
anarchists. He also spent a great deal of time writing and authored
such well-known books as The Bolshevik Myth and Now and After:
The ABC of Communist Anarchism. In 1936, suffering from illness,
Berkman shot himself to death in his apartment in Nice.
After her release from prison, Bechara
also landed in France, where she spent four years in Paris studying
Hebrew. She now lives in Switzerland. Prominent in her native
country as someone willing to fight for the cause of nationalism,
Bechara now must determine the next step in her life. Successful
anti-colonial liberation movements often produce an initial euphoria.
In many cases, however, the leftover scars from the colonial
era are so deep that some countries are unable to create a civil
society that's any less oppressive than what was experienced
under colonialism. During independence struggles, the cause is
getting rid of the imperial power. Little attention is paid at
the time to the shape of the new society in case the struggle
proves successful.
For Soha Bechara, resisting Israeli's
occupation of Lebanon dominated the first half of her life. In
another 35 years, perhaps we will read a sequel in which we will
learn about some new callings in her life. For Alexander Berkman,
his entire life was spent fighting for the cause of a political
philosophy that transcends national borders.
For both Bechara and Berkman, the inability
early in their lives to successfully complete a grisly deed probably
saved them from facing execution at the hands of the state. For
both, the time spent in captivity also served to strengthen their
convictions. Berkman emerged from prison with the spirit to spend
a lifetime fighting for the anarchist cause and ultimately to
become one of the movement's great historical figures.
Freed from captivity, Bechara and the
other liberation fighters in Lebanon soon found that their dream
of ridding Lebanon of the Israeli invaders had come true. Was
there to be a second phase in their strategy for building a more
perfect Lebanon? Or was removing Israel and its proxies the end-all,
be-all of their movement? In her memoirs, Bechara recognized
this void in her life as soon as she had won her freedom from
Khiam after 10 long years. "But somehow, I had to invent
the next step, find another form of commitment," she concludes.
Mark Hand
lives in Arlington, Va., and is editor of Press
Action. He can be reached at mark@pressaction.com.
Weekend
Edition Features for January 3 / 4, 2004
Brian Cloughley
Never
Mind the WMDs, Just Look at History
Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan
The Wrong War at the Wrong Time
William Cook
Failing to Respond to 9/11
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
Robert Fisk
Iraqi Humor Amid the Carnage
Ilan Pappe
The Geneva Bubble
Walter Davis
Robert Jay Lifton, or Nostalgia
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft vs. the Left
Mike Whitney
The Padilla Case
Steven Sherman
On Wallerstein's The Decline of American Power
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Taiwan Hypocrisy
William Blum
Codework Orange!
Mitchel Cohen
Learning from Che Guevara
Seth Sandronsky
Mad Cow and Main Street USA
Bruce Jackson
Conversations with Leslie Fiedler
Standard Schaefer
Poet Carl Rakosi Turns 100
Ron Jacobs
Sir Mick
Adam Engel
Hall of Hoaxes
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert & Curtis
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