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Senator Russ Feingold had hoped the Senate Democratic leadership would
challenge George W. Bush's decision to withdraw the United States from
Democratic senators with track records on arms control to defend the
agreement between the United States and Russia that since 1972 has
are still hypercautious about questioning the Bush White House on
defense issues, however, Feingold stood alone.

Wisconsin Democrat. Feingold knew that meant it would be impossible to
chairman of the Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on the Constitution,
rose on the Senate floor to remind his colleagues of the constitutional
requirement that decisions regarding treaties be made by the President
intent--as explained in Thomas Jefferson's Manual of Parliamentary
Practice: For the Use of the Senate of the United States
legislature alone can declare them infringed and rescinded."

Congress has a constitutional role to play in terminating treaties,"
withdrawing from a treaty, and especially from a treaty of this
magnitude, the termination of which could have lasting implications on
the arms control and defense policy of this country."

When Feingold sought unanimous consent to debate a resolution making
Judiciary Committee, objected. That ended any hope for a Senate
attempt by Dennis Kucinich to assert that chamber's authority to
preserve the treaty.

The failure of Daschle and other Senate Democrats to stand with Feingold
illustrates how, post-September 11, the loyal opposition frequently
chooses loyalty to misguided Administration initiatives over necessary
in the US District Court in Washington by Kucinich and thirty other
House members who object to the President's unilateral decision. Peter
would be forced, retroactively, to seek Congressional approval of the
treaty withdrawal.

Feingold's participation in the suit is important, as a judge could
involving interpretation of the requirement that a President seek the
backed a 1979 attempt by the late Senator Barry Goldwater to block
termination of a defense treaty with Taiwan, but an appeals court
extraconstitutional, as the Bush Administration did, it becomes all the
more essential that we insist upon the legitimacy of the founding
still sacred."

audience of 800 Americans and Chinese at Brandeis University, he showed
an earth-shaking movement.
      He sang a song about a wolf.
analysis of the student movement that Chinese rock music composers Qin
students than the dissident physicist Fang Lizhi...
      The auditorium buzzed with the gasps and whispers of delighted students
and their bewildered elders.
            (Boston Globe, September 18, 1989)

John Sebastian's famous lyric about the impossibility of "trying to tell
indeed when Wu'er Kaixi--the flamboyant Tiananmen student
celebration of individualism meant to his generation. The students
agreed with senior dissidents that institutions must change, he said,

student and even though I had misgivings about any single activist
demonstrations occurred that helped lay the groundwork for those of
dissident Fang Lizhi's impact. Students found his speeches inspiring,
but other things also triggered protests: complaints about compulsory
Dean concert.

presentation at Harvard the next evening and planned to talk about a
protests, Red Guards did likewise in the 1960s and the Tiananmen
and others had reworked (albeit often unconsciously) a rich inherited

I also pointed out that the lyrics to the latest version of
corrupt, autocratic officials.

A desire for reform and personal freedom helped get students onto the
moral outrage, widespread disgust with power-holders whose attachment to
the ideals of the Communist revolution of 1949 had seemingly disappeared
completely. The country's leaders now seemed only to care about
there were topical as well as melodic links between 1989 and some
Party's leaders for being corrupt and abandoning the ideals of the
revolution that had brought them to power.

languages in the past dozen years, the uniqueness of the Tiananmen
generation, the root causes of their activism and the songs that
sang these songs throughout the demonstrations of mid-April through late
fields by the People's Liberation Army.

Zhao Dingxin's The Power of Tiananmen is the latest in a long
which linked the pre-Communist and Communist eras, he distinguishes
sharply between (nationalistic) pre-1949 protests and the
("pro-Western") Tiananmen ones.

The Monkey and the Dragon mentions the "Internationale" and many
authorities there.

perform in a fundraiser, returned to Beijing to join other intellectuals
defector to be returned to sender."

themselves as charged with an epic mission to save their homeland from
misrule. According to Jaivin, this patriotism occasionally blurred into

China's 1989 was a complex, multifaceted struggle (not a simple
that year remain open to competing interpretations, even among those of
about the government's supposed need to use force to pacify

This is because one has to grapple continually not only with big
questions of interpretation but also numerous small ones of
whether the protesters in question are American or Chinese and whether
an impassioned, iconoclastic, frequently entertaining, often insightful
and sometimes self-indulgent
movement, whoever the writer, contrasting approaches to small matters
can create big gaps in overall perspective.

Leaving China aside, consider how minor divergences can create major
differences in presentations of an American student movement--that of
When exactly did this movement begin and end? Which student activists
and which nonstudents (leaders of related struggles, radical
actions that contradicted these? Were countercultural elements central

Accounts of student movements can also diverge, depending on the answers
we need to leave room for spontaneous, even irrational individual
inspiring heroism.

It may be true that the potential for divergence between accounts is
unusually great in that particular case, due to the struggle's
protracted nature and connections to other upheavals, especially the
Jaivin's book may doubt this. Tiananmen was comparatively short-lived
dramatically different directions.

This is not to say that Zhao's and Jaivin's treatments of Tiananmen
authors--Jaivin's previous writings include a rollicking novel called
Eat Me, while Zhao's peer-reviewed scholarly articles are
on interviews conducted later according to social scientific protocols,
Chengdu). And each pays relatively little attention to workers.

is excellent, yet the topic falls outside the scope of Jaivin's

The two authors also treat previous studies very differently. Take
sociologist Craig Calhoun's justly acclaimed 1994 study Neither Gods
Nor Emperors
. Zhao cites it several times (sometimes approvingly,
Australian China specialist whom Zhao never cites. Jaivin's reliance on
Barmé is no surprise: The two co-edited a superb
Tiananmen-related document collection, New Ghosts, Old Dreams,
were married for a time (Monkey includes a diverting account of
none of Barmé's writings are listed in Zhao's bibliography. This
wouldn't matter except that some specialists (myself included) think him
among the most consistently insightful and on-target analysts of Chinese
culture and politics.

Switching from references to events, we again find divergences. For
African men were attacked. In these incidents, some male Chinese
admirable things--lashed out against African males whose freer
lifestyles they envied. The rioters also expressed outrage at efforts by
the black exchange students to establish sexual liaisons with Chinese
women. That only Jaivin mentions these racist incidents is illustrative
of a general pattern. Zhao criticizes the Tiananmen generation for
strategic mistakes, factionalism and political immaturity but otherwise
occasion even toward Westerners).

Surprisingly, given Jaivin's greater fascination with pop culture, among
He states that demonstrations began in Shanghai "as a protest against
the arrest and beating of students after many students danced on the
were triggered by complaints about cafeteria food and manipulated local
around Shanghai campuses had a class-related dimension. Students
complained that concert security guards had treated their classmates
the 1989 mass movement, it never disappeared.

welcome) development in social movement theory: a commitment to paying
sense of disgust or feelings of pride can be factored into existing
equations quite easily, without disrupting a basic approach that relies
heavily on assessing structural variables, the sway of formal ideologies
and rational calculations of risk.

refers to the most famous trickster character in Chinese culture, the
himself and contribute to the transformation of others--something often
associated with spells of enchantment.

emphasizes that the 1989 movement was full of unexpected developments
that perplexed even those who knew Chinese politics intimately. In
seemingly contradictory things. For example, she writes that Hou was
convinced by late May that the students should leave the square before
knew the funds raised by the concert there would help the students
magic moments followed one another at a dizzying speed that spring.

not just structures and calculations of interest but also passion and

manner. Here in Britain two Orthodox Jews were attacked outside Harrods
few weeks ago. Britain's broadsheet newspapers agonized over whether the

Something is happening. I've had more conversations about anti-Semitism
after listening patiently while a friend wondered whether American
seeing a writer who'd never expressed an opinion on the Middle East
soldier standing guard at the door.

current furor over European anti-Semitism is any recognition that the

Some historical perspective might also be nice. It was widely reported
Kristallnacht--the kind of coincidence journalists find
irresistible. But the damage to Cohn's synagogue was repaired within
of the Conservative shadow Cabinet. The rise of Austria's Jörg
Haider and the murdered Dutch maverick Pim Fortuyn are often depicted as
racist double-entendre prompted Austrian journalist Eva Menasse to
militarized state, a genocidal ideology and open contempt for democratic
norms--a combination not found anywhere in the current European
political landscape.

Germany and among the marginal but mediagenic British National Party.
left- and right-wing nationalists momentarily united in stressing US
culpability after the World Trade Center bombings, and on the wilder
shores of British and French Trotskyism. But the primary target of
xenophobic rhetoric and xenophobic violence has been Europe's Arab and
Muslim inhabitants. Fortuyn labeled Islam a "backward" religion and
campaigned on a platform opposing Muslim immigration. (Fortuyn also came
assuring a Dutch television interviewer he had "nothing against
British government has resisted calls to broaden laws against incitement
Britain's Jewish Council on Racial Equality and chair of the Commission
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi proclaimed the superiority of "our

those countries where they have not been allowed to become
anti-Semitic leafleting and verbal harassment as well as violence
indicative of Cossacks riding through Hampstead.

Yet one of the most striking things about the panic supposedly stalking
audience is representative now of much mainstream British opinion."

The connections between events in the Middle East and in Europe are
complex, fraught with the potential for misunderstanding and
manipulation. Only the statistics are straightforward. In London, says
Metropolitan Police spokeswoman Miriam Rich, anti-Semitic incidents went
Whine of the Community Security Trust, "and superimpose them with
Britain, a growing proportion of the attackers come from that country's
disaffected and marginalized Arab minority.

violence against Jews on European soil conjure up images of the
Holocaust also inhibits clear thinking. Anthony Julius, the lawyer who
acted for Deborah Lipstadt against David Irving, and a scholar of
that leads British Jews to exaggerate their difficulties. And while
Julius is careful to distinguish between anti-Semitism and criticism of
Israel, not all of Israel's friends are so scrupulous.

loudest about the danger in Europe care more about retaining occupied
Guardian and the Independent--all news organizations with
fending off accusations of anti-Semitism for simply reporting the
of Barbara Amiel, wife of Daily Telegraph (and Jerusalem
) owner Conrad Black, and herself a staunch defender of Ariel

rights have grounds to be suspicious of those who grant Palestinian
national aspirations a legitimacy they withhold from Jews. Most of the
did recently, that "a Kosher conspiracy" inhibits
reprinted here in the Guardian) that Palestinians "are products
Israeli occupation, or when the tattered mantle of Jewish victimization
is draped over policies of collective punishment and murderous reprisal
position to demand not sympathy but solidarity.

more power, more resources and fewer restrictions.

from a Phoenix agent speculating that Osama bin Laden could be sending
terrorists to flight schools here; and the August 2001 arrest of
Zacarias Moussaoui for acting suspiciously in flight school. Viewed in
September 10 these three bits of information competed for the FBI's
attention with thousands of other memos, leads and suspicious events
pointing in thousands of other directions. We are engaged in a
nationwide session of Monday-morning quarterbacking.

The remedy is worse. Shifting resources to fighting terrorist threats
domestic criminal investigations, which do not even apply to
international terrorism investigations, had nothing to do with the FBI
guidelines announced by Attorney General John Ashcroft will actually
reduce the FBI's effectiveness in fighting terrorism.

The old guidelines were sparked by revelations that in the 1960s and
'70s, the FBI's COINTELPRO initiative targeted perfectly lawful antiwar,
environmental, feminist and civil rights groups for widespread
monitoring, infiltration and disinformation. The guidelines sought to
remedy the FBI's proclivity for indulging in guilt by association and
conducting intrusive and sweeping investigations of political groups
well as to investigate crime.

But even under the guidelines abuses continued. One of the most
prominent involved an investigation of the Committee in Solidarity With
of counterterrorism, the FBI monitored student rallies, infiltrated
bureau had collected information on 1,330 groups--including Oxfam
no evidence of crime.

Such investigations are likely to be commonplace in the post-
September 11 era. Ashcroft's guidelines expressly permit the FBI to
conduct some investigations without even a shred of information about
potential criminal conduct. And Congress has so expanded the definition
of federal crimes that requiring a criminal basis is not enough to
forestall political spying. Federal antiterrorism laws of 1996 and 2001
now make it a crime to provide any associational support to foreign
whatever to terrorist activity. Under those laws, the CISPES
investigation would have been legal, on suspicion that CISPES was
supporting the Salvadoran rebel movement.

The combined effect of the expanded statute, loosened guidelines and
increased counterterrorism personnel at the FBI will be to bring in
exponentially more information about the populace than the FBI has ever
information about innocent political activity.

analysts sitting in a room analyzing mounds of data for trends and
fusion is no substitute for good relations with the affected
holding Middle Easterners without charges and selectively registering
all immigrants from Arab countries. You don't build bridges by
infiltrating and monitoring legitimate political and religious activity.

of a million people in Manhattan's Central Park protesting nuclear arms,
abolition of nuclear weapons--and to take prompt, concrete steps toward
that goal. The appeal will be introduced in Congress by Representative
Ed Markey as a resolution on June 11.

zygote. Nuclear suicide would also be fratricide.

rationalization of nuclear weapons, cannot condescend to the newcomers
deterrence no longer works--"pre-emptive" attacks will be the order of
on their way to South Asia bearing scenarios showing the awfulness of
nuclear war and counsels of "restraint."

But all that doesn't prevent us from noticing that India and Pakistan
that there was to be no "nuclear apartheid" in the world. Now it seems
One of South Asia's distinctive contributions to the field is a
flippancy in discussing nuclear danger, adding a new dimension to Hannah
Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil." Early in the crisis, General
Padmanabhan, India's army chief, commented, "If we have to go to war,
jolly good! If we don't, we will still manage." Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg,
retired chief of Pakistan's armed forces, commented, "I don't know what
you could die in a nuclear war. You've got to die someday, anyway." Die,
yes, but must we all be killed?

Around the same time, Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes said that
Pakistan's President, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, should not use nuclear
weapons because "I'm sure he doesn't want to kill all the Pakistanis."
Behari Vajpayee and Defense Minister Fernandes who would kill all the

fitfully tries--and mostly fails--to take in the news that 12 million
television station labeled the story with the logo "Nuclear
Distraction." Presumably, the danger of nuclear war was breaking its
concentration on the squabbles between the FBI and the CIA over
September 11 warnings.)

prospect--the voice of novelist Arundhati Roy. Her foreign friends asked
why she doesn't leave New Delhi. Doesn't she think the threat of nuclear
war is real? "It is," she answered, "but where shall we go? If I go away
and everything and every one--every friend, every tree, every home,
every dog, squirrel and bird that I have known and loved--is

And so she and friends have decided to stay. "We huddle together. We
capabilities as though they're discussing a family board game. My
friends and I discuss Prophecy, the documentary about the bombing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.... The dead bodies choking the river. The
living stripped of skin and hair.... We remember especially the man who
that. As stains on staircases.... The last question every visiting
journalist always asks me: Are you writing another book?

"That question mocks me. Another book? Right now? When it looks as
though all the music, the art, the architecture, the literature--the
whole of human civilization--means nothing to the fiends who run the
world? What kind of book should I write?

"It's not just the one million soldiers on the border who are living on
hairtrigger alert. It's all of us. That's what nuclear bombs do. Whether
they're used or not, they violate everything that is humane. They alter
the meaning of life itself."

weapons, and there will be no nuclear war.

Sinn Fein, generally known for its historical association with the Irish
Republican Army and the peace process, has made a breakthrough in the
twenty-six-county Irish Republic by garnering five seats in the Dublin
Parliament. For those unfamiliar with the Irish electoral system, an
equivalent achievement by Ralph Nader and the Green Party would have
meant doubling their national vote and taking twenty Congressional seats
in the 2000 election.

The recent victories for the left-wing Sinn Fein are a challenge to
globalization and sharply contrast with the right-wing populism recently
surfacing in other European elections. Sinn Fein campaigned against the
Treaty of Nice, which would have expanded the European Union and which
was rejected by Irish voters in a June 2001 referendum. The EU cannot be
expanded without voter approval, and the Irish political and business
establishment vows to set another referendum for later this year.

Fears of Irish immersion in an unaccountable European megastate underlay
Sinn Fein's opposition. At the same time, Sinn Fein campaigned strongly
against the growing wave of anti-immigrant nationalism in the Irish
Republic. This strategy of progressive rather than reactionary
nationalism was voiced best by Danny Morrison, once a Sinn Fein leader
and now an independent writer in Belfast, in an article on NATO: "The
world has to remain a rainbow coalition of independent and good people,
and if 'nationalism' means denying the bad people the authority to
aggrandize power, and in our name to bomb people and nations we do not
know or understand, who are of no threat, then 'nationalism' has to be
for us."

That would be a defeat for US officials who hope that a pro-business
Irish Republic would become "America's gateway" into Europe. The largest
single foreign presence in the south of Ireland is that of US
multinationals, mainly computer and pharmaceutical firms, using the
island as a platform for business in the EU. Sinn Fein's success,
coupled with the six seats already held by the environmentalist Irish
Green Party, means a strong bloc of progressive opposition to US-style
globalization inside the Dublin Parliament.

Sinn Fein also showed the possibility of progressive populist politics
at a time when traditional liberal politics has become centrist. The
party campaigned for restoring and expanding the public health service,
jobs and social programs for those left behind in the neoliberal "Celtic
Tiger" economy. None of these issues, however, overshadowed voter
attention to Sinn Fein's role in the Northern Ireland peace process and
its roots in armed struggle against British rule.

During the thirty-year conflict in the North, Sinn Fein advocates were
subject to official censorship, harassment and arrest in the South. The
intent of the Dublin government, while paying lip service to its
founding nationalist ideals, was to quarantine the Troubles on the
northern side of the border. In turn, during those decades, Sinn Fein's
opposition to partition led to a policy of abstention from the British
and Dublin parliaments, which they considered illegitimate.

All that changed--changed utterly, to borrow from Yeats--when the IRA
initiated a cease-fire in 1994 and peace talks led to electoral
opportunities for Sinn Fein in the North. The organization has become
the largest nationalist party in the Stormont Assembly and subsequently
dropped its abstentionist posture in the South, where it began community
organizing in urban slums and border counties, leading to this spring's
electoral breakthrough. Sinn Fein's presence in the Dublin Parliament
may implant a spine in the government led by Prime Minister Bertie
Ahern, in the form of diplomatic efforts for peace with justice in the

When polls this spring showed that Sinn Fein was gaining with voters in
the South, all the major parties ganged up to declare that they would
never include Sinn Fein in a coalition government until the IRA fully
disbanded. Ironically, this was opposite the stance taken by the same
parties toward the peace process in Northern Ireland, where they fully
endorsed the entry of Sinn Fein into electoral competition north of the
border. The message to southern voters, in sum, was that a vote for Sinn
Fein was a wasted vote for an isolated party with continuing terrorist

The voters, however, weren't buying that line. In the most intensely
watched constituency, in North Kerry, the Sinn Fein candidate was Martin
Ferris, who had spent ten years in prison for IRA gunrunning on a
trawler out of Boston. The Gardai (state police) arrested the candidate
in the run-up to the election, roughed him up, floated claims that he
knew something about a vigilante attack on drug dealers four months
earlier, then released him without pressing charges. Ferris, who endured
a forty-seven-day hunger strike in 1977, won the seat easily from
Labour's Dick Spring, a former Irish foreign minister who was a favorite
of the Clinton Democrats.

While other guerrilla movements of the left have withered or failed to
make the electoral transition, Sinn Fein keeps growing, despite the
chilling impact of the war on terrorism and the close British-US
alliance. Although its total vote in the Republic's proportional system
is at 7 percent, its leader, Gerry Adams, has equaled and at times even
topped the popularity of Prime Minister Ahern. And unlike any other
party, Sinn Fein now has seats in Parliament in London, the Assembly in
Stormont and the southern Irish Dail, or Parliament. The Bush
Administration has been unhappy with this Irish exceptionalism to the
generally conservative trend in the wake of the war on terrorism.

Sinn Fein's chief burden, being identified as the IRA's "political
wing," is also the source of its strength, at least as long as the IRA's
guns remain silent. Continued provocation by loyalists in the North,
like the relentless pipe-bomb attacks on Catholics this past year, might
still provoke the IRA to respond, though the chances are minimal. The
IRA cease-fire enables Sinn Fein to compete successfully for the
middle-class peace vote, especially north of the border, and to stake a
claim in the South as the movement that ended the war on a just note for
nationalists. Perhaps the greater burden in the South, shared by parties
of the left all over the world, is how to tap the middle-class vote in a
time of relative prosperity and voter comfort. For that challenge, Sinn
Fein will have to find a way to link its leadership charisma and peace
program to a revival of social and economic democracy.

Father Desmond Wilson, a respected independent priest from Republican
West Belfast, voiced this challenge that the new politics still faces
after hearing the election returns: "Will Ireland in its prosperity
become an example of how you can really get rid of poverty and bring
equality? Will Ireland succeed in convincing the world that militarism
should be stopped, that the world should be taken care of and its people
most of all, even if it means reducing the lifestyle of the potentially
very rich? Nobody needs to be very rich, but everybody needs to survive
with dignity." It appears that some people are listening.


A DECADE after the end of the cold war, the peril of nuclear destruction
other countries are producing them and terrorist groups are trying to
acquire them.

POORLY GUARDED warheads and nuclear material in the former Soviet Union
may fall into the hands of terrorists. The Bush Administration is
developing nuclear "bunker busters" and threatening to use them against
nonnuclear countries. The risk of nuclear war between India and Pakistan
is grave.

DESPITE THE END of the cold war, the United States plans to keep large
numbers of nuclear weapons indefinitely. The latest US-Russian treaty,
which will cut deployed strategic warheads to 2,200, leaves both nations
and inactive, strategic and tactical) of more than 10,000 warheads each.

THE DANGERS POSED by huge arsenals, threats of use, proliferation and
terrorism are linked: The nuclear powers' refusal to disarm fuels
proliferation, and proliferation makes nuclear materials more accessible
to terrorists.

THE EVENTS of September 11 brought home to Americans what it means to
experience a catastrophic attack. Yet the horrifying losses that day
weapon were used on a city.

THE DRIFT TOWARD catastrophe must be reversed. Safety from nuclear
eliminating nuclear arms under binding agreements.


§  RENOUNCE the first use of nuclear weapons.

§  Permanently END the development, testing and production of nuclear warheads.

§  SEEK AGREEMENT with Russia on the mutual and verified destruction of nuclear weapons withdrawn under treaties, and increase the resources available here and in the former Soviet Union to secure nuclear warheads and material and to implement destruction.

§  STRENGTHEN nonproliferation efforts by ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, finalizing a missile ban in North Korea, supporting UN inspections in Iraq, locating and reducing fissile material worldwide and negotiating a ban on its production.

§  TAKE nuclear weapons off hairtrigger alert in concert with the other nuclear powers (the UK, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Israel) in order to reduce the risk of accidental or unauthorized use.

§  INITIATE talks on further nuclear cuts, beginning with US and Russian reductions to 1,000 warheads each.




It’s the 100th anniversary of the Christmas Truce of WWI.

December 23, 2014


December 23, 2014

Now that President Obama has broken the taboo on recognizing Cuba, he should send a US ambassador to Palestine as a prerequisite for a comprehensive peace treaty.

December 23, 2014


December 22, 2014


December 18, 2014


December 17, 2014

The two countries have resumed a dialogue after fifty years.

December 17, 2014


December 17, 2014

Dick Cheney clarifies what he means by American Exceptionalism.

December 17, 2014


December 12, 2014