text:
Pro gay mayor suspended from office
Post your comment
Comments on this article are now closed.
Reader comments
You describe Ken Livingstone as 'pro gay mayor'. Strangely you forget to mention that he warmly welcomed to London an Islamic cleric who favours the death penalty for homosexuality and no doubt shares his contempt for Jews. With friends like Ken, who needs enemies?
Ken Livingstone is a humanitarian and a socialist. He believes in dialogue not confrontation. These attributes scares the daylights out of the establishment, Maggie Thatcher tried to depose him by killing off the LCC. The people knew his quality and voted him into parliament. The people voted him in twice as lord mayor of London. Ken Livingstone is the greatest asset GLBTI people have, for his championing of the rights of GLBTI people. The establishment make a fool of themselves by the use of an undemocratic and unelected quango, to try and demean him. Ken Livingstone is not a career politician, he his a fighter for social justice and London(especially GLBTI people) is lucky to have such person.
He's not the lord mayor of London, he's a #@£%!!!!
These comments are un-moderated and do not necessarily represent the views of PinkNews. If you believe that a comment is inappropriate or libellous, please contact us.
Most commented this week
- Comment: Why I'm glad UKIP were able to march at Pride in London 168
- Police use tear gas and rubber bullets at Istanbul Pride 160
- Dr Christian Jessen: Same-sex dance couples on Strictly would look 'silly' 98
- Christian minister blames the Jews for America getting equal marriage 91
- Ofcom won't investigate Coleen Nolan's 'ISIS cake' comments 81
- Homophobes now showing they don't like gay people with 'US flag' Facebook pictures 74
- US trans students win right to use appropriate gender toilets 68
- Police investigating alleged anti-Semitism at Pride in London 57
- Watch: This Christian lady really can't handle the SCOTUS same-sex marriage ruling 55
- Russian MP wants to block Facebook over rainbow flag pictures 55


text:
The former chief of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn has instructed his lawyers to file a defamation suit after "Welcome to New York" by Abel Ferrara was released on-demand in France on Saturday. It stars Gerard Depardieu as a Strauss-Kahn lookalike who assaults a hotel maid.Read More »
At the start of last night's premiere screening of Abel Ferrara's "Welcome To New York," projected onto a screen in a tent on the Carlton Beach, Gerard Depardieu revealed in a brief on-screen interview why he had agreed to play a character who, for all intents and purposes, is disgraced former IMF c...Read More »
A deliriously entertaining political cartoon in B-movie clothing, Abel Ferrara's "Welcome to New York" puts Dominique Strauss-Kahn's sex scandal under the microscope.Read More »
It's just been announced that Abel Ferrara's latest film "Welcome to New York," starring Gerard Depardieu and Jacqueline Bisset, is set to premiere at Cannes.It should be noted that this is a market screening, not in the official selection. Ferrara has been in the selection before, and distributor W...Read More »
Abel Ferrara's "Welcome to New York" will get a special screening outside of competition at the Cannes Film Festival.Read More »
No stranger to his own questionable scandals, actor Gérard Depardieu may perfectly embody the type of skeevy, predator-type French womanizer that comes to mind when one thinks of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. In 2011 IMF chief Strauss-Kahn was confined to house arrest after allegedly sexually assaulting a...Read More »
As far as headline making scandals go, the hoopla around IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his alleged sexual assault of a hotel worker in New York City, seems to have faded from memory. But leave it to Abel Ferrara to bring it charging back into the minds of everyone. The latest trailer for "Wel...Read More »
The 2007 drama "Go Go Tales" showed Hoskins doing what he did best.Read More »
Abel Ferrara and theatrical distribution mix like oil and water. His films always seem to be hard to find on the big screen, usually slotted with a smaller distributor who doesn't expand his films beyond the few screens they manage to snag in New York City and Los Angeles. And for his latest, "Welco...Read More »
Well, we'll give co-writer/director Dan Fogler credit for this: he certainly knows how to work a Rolodex. Ordinarily, we probably wouldn't pay a movie titled "Don Peyote" much mind, but when it manages to rope in a rather oddball assortment of people for cameo roles, well, we gave more time out of d...Read More »

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Click to expand
What do you think? Give us your opinion. Anonymous comments allowed.
Reply0#47 - calawesome (01/26/2013) [-]
Is this the movie with Roddy piper in it?..if it is, then i gotta hire it again.
Reply+6#54 to #47 - lazyvoltage (01/26/2013) [-]
Reply0#51 to #47 - itrooztrooperdown (01/26/2013) [-]
Yes it is. One awsesome piece of movie.


text:
Select Year
Select Make
Select Model
Select Submodel
Select Engine
Not listed? Select a new vehicle
Home > DODGE > SPIRIT > Clutch Pedal Ignition Switch > 1994
Market Price :$39.34
Discount Price :$31.56
Total Savings :$7.78
Receive Exclusive Offers!
Payment Options:
Copyright © 2015 Auto Parts Train. All rights reserved.
Use our Part Fit Checker to view parts compatible with your vehicle.


text:
Home > Sports Memorabilia > NCAA Team Gear & Collectibles > Florida State University > NCAA Florida State Deluxe Patio and Tailgating Bar Set
NCAA Florida State Deluxe Patio and Tailgating Bar Set
Get the party started while rooting for your favorite NCAA team with this portable bar!
Ultimate Tailgating/Homegating party bar!
This NCAA bar set includes an L-shaped bar with steel frame that showcases your favorite NCAA team.
Has 3 levels of shelving, large patio umbrella that also has your team logo on it, in-shelf cooler for up to 1 case of drinks, wheeled case for easy transport or storage, and 4 bar stools with matching NCAA seat covers. Engineered for everyday use at home, but completely portable.
Sets up in minutes, no tools required. Just choose your team and you are ready to go. This bar set is water resistant and UV Protected fabric.
Materials: Steel and Polyester.
- Bar: 63"L x 19"W x 44"H; Weight: 75 lbs
- Chairs (each): 18"L x 14"W x 30"H; Weight: 8 lbs
NCAA Florida State Deluxe Patio and Tailgating Bar Set
Shopping Cart


text:
Now, this is rare. Jay Electronica follows up his epic Christmas Eve Twitter rant with some new vocals. CETO features him on "Hail Mary," which appears on his So Magnolia mixtape. There's no word on when we'll hear something new ...Read More
Featured On XXLmag.com
The Latest
Jahlil Beats Talks Working With Jay-Z, Meek Mill's "Repo" Diss, and "Crack Music Vol. 6″
Producer Jahlil Beats got on the phone with Mina SayWhat on Power 99 in Philadelphia. The Roc Nation artist updates us on everything including his hand in Meek Mill's diss track "Repo," making new music with Jay-Z, and his upcoming ...Read More
What Is Kanye West Wearing at His Revel Performance?
Kanye West is kicking off his pre-New Year's Eve shows at Revel in Atlantic City tonight. The first of three shows should be memorable and he delivers with what may be his most outrageous performance attire. But if anybody has ...Read More
Shyne Likens His Game Diss Song To Nas' "Ether" & Tupac's "Hit 'Em Up" [Video]
The war of words between Shyne and Game continues. This time the shots were fired via Shyne who in a recent interview with VladTV went even further to try to discredit the Compton rapper calling him disloyal and saying he ...Read More
T.I. Names His Top Albums Of 2012 [Video]
You know those rappers who say they never listen to anyone's music but theirs? T.I. is not one of those rappers. The Grand Hustle head honcho recently sat down with RapUp and revealed his favorite five albums from 2012. T.I's ...Read More
Cardiak Breaks Down Eight More Crucial Records He Produced (Part II)
The beatsmith analyzes his recent bangers with Rick Ross, Joe Budden, T.I. and more...Read More
Waka Flocka Opens Up About Violence In His Music On NBC's 'Nitecap' [Video]
Waka Flocka Flame makes no apologies about the violent content in his music. It's what got him here. And the rambunctious rapper doesn't plan on switching up anytime soon. In the latest installment of NBC's Nitecap with Peter Bailey, Waka ...Read More
Jim Jones "VooDoo" [Video]
Capo's got it bad in this smokey re-do of the Miguel track, "Do You."...Read More
Joey Bada$$ & Pro Era Freestyle On 'Rosenberg' [Video]
Paying homage after the tragic passing of Capital Steez, Roseberg releases this footage of JB and the Pro Era crew going in...Read More
- Listen to Migos, "Pipe It Up"
- Listen to Jacquees Feat. Rich Homie Quan, "Come Thru"
- Listen to Gangrene (Alchemist and Oh No), "Hot Pillow"
- Listen to Justina Valentine Feat. Fetty Wap, "Candy Land"
- Listen to Tech N9ne Feat. B.o.B and 2 Chainz, "Hood Go Crazy (Mr. ColliPark Remix)"
- Premiere: Papoose, "The Plug" (Prod. by DJ Premier)
- Listen to Statik Selektah Feat. Joey Bada$$, Big K.R.I.T. and Chauncy Sherod, "In The Wind"
- Listen to The Game Feat. Migos, "Everybody On The Floor"
Hip-Hop News
- Meek Mill Wishes Nicki Minaj Was Pregnant With His Baby
- Judge Refuses to Dismiss Suge Knight's Murder Case
- Joe Budden Says He'll Apologize to Meek Mill and Nicki Minaj
New Artistsmore >
Today in Hip-Hop
- Today in Hip-Hop: Eric B. & Rakim Release 'Paid In Full'
- Today in Hip-Hop: R.I.P Mausberg
- Today in Hip-Hop: Kendrick Lamar Releases, 'Section.80′
- Modify Watches Releases Wu-Tang Clan Timepieces
- Vans Teams Up With Eley Kishimoto To Launch Living Art Collection
- 10 Food Dishes Named After Rappers
- Check Out The Behind-the-Scenes Video From XXL's Freshman Show in NYC
- XXL Freshmen 2015 Cypher – Part 3 – DeJ Loaf, Fetty Wap & Shy Glizzy
- XXL Freshmen 2015 Cypher – Part 2 – GoldLink, OG Maco & Vince Staples
- Check Out Behind-the-Scenes Photos From XXL's Freshman Show in NYC
- Hip-Hop Reacts to the Supreme Court Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage
- A Brief History of 50 Cent Making Fun of Celebrities on Instagram
- Throwback: Lil Wayne And Birdman Against The World
- Check Out The Game's First XXL Cover Story From 2005
- Chris Brown Tells All In Throwback Cover Story
- 6 Rappers Who Recently Got Engaged
- 24 Rappers Who Don't Have Their Own Artists
- 26 Photos of Bad Boy Over the Years
- Here's a History of Scott Storch's Troubles
- Diddy's Been a Regular at the UCLA Campus the Past Few Months
- 9 Rappers Called Out by Their Exes
- Best Hip-Hop Instagrams of the Day
- 10 of Chris Brown's Emotional Moments Over Karrueche Tran
- 19 Rappers Who Performed in Africa
- Chris Brown's Major Meltdowns Over the Years
- 3 Rappers Who Saved Someone's Life
- 49 of the Most Recent Leaked Songs by Young Thug
- 5 Rap Videos Shot in Africa
- 11 Rappers Giving Lectures at Universities
- 29 Rappers Celebrate Their Mothers On Instagram


text:
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
© Copyright 2015 Gwinnett Daily Post
LAWRENCEVILLE -- The third possibility of a toll road in Gwinnett has emerged -- the "Gwinnett connector."
State Transportation Board officials discussed a list Wednesday of road improvements that could be funded by tolls. Along with Interstates 75 and 285 was a proposed Sugarloaf Parkway extension connecting Ga Highway 316 to Peachtree Industrial Boulevard in western Gwinnett.
"We'd certainly be interested in looking at options in conjunction with (the state)," said Gwinnett Transportation Director Brian Allen, who was not at Wednesday's meeting.
County officials have been interested in creating a limited-access road along the Gwinnett path of the now-defunct Northern Arc since the project was halted in 2002.
Extensions to Sugarloaf are already under way southeast of Lawrenceville, and funding has been set aside to carry the road to Ga. 316 south of Dacula.
But even though the state owns 60 percent of the route north of Ga. 316 and county officials have continued to buy land to preserve the path from development, officials have wondered for years how the road could be financed.
"We can't fund it locally because the price tag would be so high," Allen said. "The federal funds aren't there as they were in the past. ... You have to look at all the options out there. Tolls have to be part of the mix to help the region move forward because there isn't enough money out there."
Allen said officials would need more specifics before endorsing a toll option, but the funding mechanism has gotten stronger looks in the past several months.
Just Tuesday, county officials set up a citizens committee to help review the feasibility to use tolls to finance an extension of Ronald Reagan Parkway to link the road to Interstate 85.
And later this month, state officials will hold another public hearing on a proposal to convert high-occupancy vehicle lanes on I-85 in Gwinnett and DeKalb to high-occupancy toll lanes. There, officials are considering using a congestion-based pricing system, varying from 10 cents to $1 a mile.
Allen said tolls may be the only way to make the northern Sugarloaf extension a possibility in the immediate future, but he said he had no idea how much a toll would cost.
"It sounds as if that's something we'd be supportive of because it sounds like something we'd like to build," Allen said of the connector. "If it's going to be expedited, it may have to be done that way."
A message left Wednesday evening for Rudy Bowen, Gwinnett's representative on the State Transportation Board, was not immediately returned.
More like this story
- ARC PLAN 2040: Local road projects make cut ( July 30, 2011 )
- Officials set to open first stretch of Sugarloaf extension ( January 29, 2010 )
- New Sugarloaf Parkway interchange opens ( December 11, 2012 )
- Gwinnett seeks $3.6B in road funds ( March 30, 2011 )
- County gets state help in funding Sugarloaf Parkway work ( March 8, 2012 )


text:
Silent Strike Rex Compound 50/65 Camo Field Ready Bow Package CO-029MS$99.99
The Silent Strike Rex Compound 50/65 Camo Bow Package CO-029MS is field ready, designed for Men and has an adjustable draw length and draw weight.This bow comes equipped with durable fiberglass composite limbs and a slide modules system.
- Durable Fiberglass Composite Limbs
- Aluminum Alloy Riser with Anti-Slippery Grip Sets
- CNC Machined Cams. Slide Modules System
- BCY 8125 High Quality Shooting. Split Strings
- Ready to Use!
Package Includes:
- 2 - Assembled String Silencers
- 1 - Assembled 3-Pin Fiber Optics Composite Bow Sight
- 1 - Assembled Capture Arrow Rest
- 1 - 3 Arrow Quiver
- 2 - Aluminum Arrows
- Axle to Axle - 28 Inches
- Brace Height - 7-1/4 Inches
- Adjustable Draw Length - 20 Inches to 29 Inches
- Adjustable Draw Weight up to 65 Pounds
Silent Strike Rex Compound 40/55 Pink Field Ready Bow Package CO-029PCS$99.99
The Silent Strike Rex Compound 40/55 Pink Bow Package CO-029PCS is field ready and designed for women who are serious about hunting!! The Rex Bow has an adjustable draw length and draw weight.This bow comes equipped with durable fiberglass composite limbs and a slide modules system.
- Durable Fiberglass Composite Limbs
- Aluminum Alloy Riser with Anti-Slippery Grip Sets
- CNC Machined Cams. Slide Modules System
- BCY 8125 High Quality Shooting. Split Strings
- Ready to Use!
Package Includes:
- 2 - Assembled String Silencers
- 1 - Assembled 3-Pin Fiber Optics Composite Bow Sight
- 1 - Assembled Capture Arrow Rest
- 1 - 3 Arrow Quiver
- 2 - Aluminum Arrows
- Axle to Axle - 28 Inches
- Brace Height - 7-1/4 Inches
- Adjustable Draw Length - 20 Inches to 29 Inches
- Adjustable Draw Weight up to 55 Pounds
LEM 575 Watt Electric Meat Grinder 1113$99.99
Product Features
We hunted long and hard for a grinder that was capable of processing 1-2 deer a year and is built to last. This is the one! The 575 watt motor is powerful, efficient and has forward and reverse speeds. Square aluminum meat tray holds a generous amount of meat to simplify processing. Die-cast aluminum grinder head is built to last. Easy to read power indicator. Includes 2 stainless steel plates (8mm, 4.8mm), a stuffing plate and knife, 7/8" stuffing tube and meat stomper. Compact size for easy storage. UL approved.Learn More
Robinson Outdoors Tree Spider Reflective Safey Line - 3 Pack TSSL3PK$99.97
Product Features:
- Provides safety while ascending and descending from the treestand
- 30 feet of high tensile rope that has reflective strands so it is easy to find
- Klemheist knot used for easy ascent
- Includes carabineer
- Available in single and 3 pack
Bulldog Targets North American Safari Archery Target DHNAS$99.97
Now you can practice on the same archery target that Blaine Anthony practices on! The new North American Safari Signature Series Target has a cool face design that makes aiming fun. The North American Safari team practices a lot and wanted a Lifetime Warranty on it so we delivered!
Easy arrow removal, a Lifetime Warranty and endorsed by Blaine Anthony! You can't go wrong.
Dimensions: 24" x 24" x 9.5" and approx 24lbs.
LIFETIME WARRANTY ARCHERY TARGETLearn More
Mr. Heater Hunting Buddy Propane Heater F232035$99.93
The Most Popular Portable Propane Heater in North America. This patented radiant 6,000-12,000 BTU Liquid Propane heater connects directly to one 1 lb. cylinder and is the perfect solution for heating enclosed spaces like cabins up to 300 sq. ft. A swivel regulator gives you the ability to adapt usage from disposable cylinders to a remote gas supply with the purchase of a single hose and filter. To light the unit, simply push and rotate the knob. The built in silent electric ignition will take care of the rest. With the Oxygen Depletion Sensor (ODS) and accidental tip-over safety shut-off, you can be sure that you will enjoy years of comfortable indoor safe heat.
Product Features:
- Camo faceplate
- 6,000 or 12,000 BTU per hour
- For use with propane gas
- Heats up to 300 sq. ft.
- Single control start knob
- Hi-Low heat settings
- Silent electronic ignition
- Swivel regulators
- Automatic low oxygen shut-off system (ODS)
- Accidental tip-over safety shut-off
- Connects to one 1 lb. cylinder
- Connects to a 20 lb. cylinder with optional hose
Learn More
Specifications BTU per Hour 6,000/12,000 Heating Area 300 sq. ft. Tank Capacity (min) 1 lb. Propane Cylinder Electricity Required No Weight 16 lbs Model MH12HB Use Hunting Blinds, Deer Stands, Camping, RV, Fishing, Hunt Camps, Tailgating Safety Tip-Over Switch Yes Thermostat No Oxygen Depletion Sensor (ODS) Yes Warranty 1 Year Limited Manufacturer Hose & Regulator Included Sold Separately Fuel Type Propane Heat Type Radiant High Limit Safety Shut-off (HLS) No Ignition Electric Indoor Safe Yes
Big Game Quickshot Trail Camera TV1001$99.99
The Big Game Eyecon Quik-Shot Trail Camera features molded ABS with a non-reflective finish. It has a thin, low profile design. The screen on this scouting game camera is LED backlit and is capable of taking videos and photos. Full color in the daytime and monochrome at night. It has the time, temperature and date mode as well as moon phase, deep bark biters, adjustable strap mounting, molded channel for security cable use and triggered speed of 1.2 seconds. Has a trigger delay of 10, 30, 60 or 300 seconds. Other superior features of this quality game camera include the quick to set. It requires SD card (not included) Up to 32 GB extended usage and up to 40,000 images. The Eyecon carries a one year manufacturer warranty.
- Video and photo capability
- Programming is simple and quick to set
- 1.7 in x 1.1 inch backlit LED screen
- Full color images in daytime and monochrome at nighttime
- Image data including time, date temperature and moon-phase
- Records videos of 10, 30 or 60 seconds
- Requires SD card, up to 32 GB (sold separately)
- Infrared flash with a range up to 50 feet
- 1, 3 or 5 photo burst
- Molded ABS with non-reflective finish
- Thin, low profile design
- Deep bark-biters and adjustable strap mounting system
- Molded channel for security cable use
- Trigger Speed: 1.2 seconds
- Illumination Type: Infrared flash
- Illumination Range: 50 feet
- Camera Delays: 10, 30, 60 or 300 seconds
- Video Length: 10, 30 or 60 seconds
- Requires 6C batteries (not included)
Learn More
Caldwell Lead Sled Solo #101777$99.99
- Ultra stable design
- Great recoil reducing performance
- AR-15/lever action compatible
- Heavy Duty steel frame construction
- Durable non-marring support in front and rear
- Fast, precise pivoting elevation system
- Gun retention strap included
- 25 pound capacity weight tray
Stealth Cam No Glo Infrared Surveillance Camera STC-E38NGC$99.98
The Stealth Cam No Glo Infrared Surveillance Camera is perfect for game scouting, home security, or even job site surveillance! Stealth Cam has enhanced the chances of never having to miss that opportunity to capture elusive subjects with their ultra fast Reflex Trigger Speed and new energy efficient technology.
- 8 Megapixels
- HD Video
- 50 ft. Range
- Time, Date, Moon Phase, and Temperature Stamp
- 38 'Black' IR Emitters
- Operates on 8 'AA' Batteries
- 5-55 sec / 1-55 min Recovery Timeout
- Test Mode
- SD Memory Card Slot up to 32GB
- External Power Jack for 12V Battery Box
- Low Battery Indicator
- USB Output
- Quick Set Fast Simple Setup: sets up in seconds with pre-programmed options
- Side Mount LCD Screen: check camera status and set program settings without triggering camera
- EZ 6 Button Programming: external side mount programming makes camera set up quick and efficient
- Energy Efficient Design: completely re-engineered to optimize energy efficiency
- Burst Rapid-Fire Mode: 1-9 exposures per triggering
- Reflex Trigger: ultra-fast trigger speed, never miss a crucial moment; no missed shots
- Multi-Zone Detection: covers multiple zones of angle and distance, maximizing the camera's triggering accuracy
- 12V Solar Chart Port: use solar power to keep external rechargeable battery (STC-12VBB) charged. Solar panel and battery sold separately.
- Camera
- 4 GB SD memory card
- 8 'AA' batteries
- Mounting strap
Bulldog Targets APA T10 Archery Target DHAPA10$99.97
The only archery target recommended to stop an arrow shot from an APA bow. This archery target is built with an extra tough 10" of stopping power to hold up to the blisteringly fast arrows coming out of an APA bow at 355 FPS!
If you own an APA bow, or even if you just want one heck of a strong target, this is the archery target for you!
Easy arrow removal, a Lifetime Warranty and endorsed by APA! You can't go wrong.
Dimensions: 24" x 24" x 10" and approx 24lbs.
LIFETIME WARRANTY ARCHERY TARGETLearn More


text:
London's new mayor is Thatcher's old nemesis. Is he also a leading indicator?
Travel writing is a dismal art. From Herodotus, wide-eyed (and perhaps more than a little disoriented) in an India of man-eating ants and black sperm; to Ibn Batuta, the fourteenth-century Arab wanderer who endured the thirst and marauding tribesmen of the Sahara; to Graham Greene in lawless Mexico and Redmond O'Hanlon on the untamable Amazon: The classics of the genre are journeys into the night, tales of loneliness and hardship and danger. As Ian Jack puts it, no traveler has written a better--or more exemplary--sentence than Captain Scott, who stood at the South Pole in January 1912 and wrote in his diary, "Dear God, this is an awful place."
Certainly, one would be hard pressed to find many finer sentences in Eastward to Tartary, Robert Kaplan's latest installment of gloom and hopelessness, an account of his travels in the Balkans, the Middle East and the Caucasus. Kaplan likes to quote Shakespeare and Gogol, and he has elsewhere extolled the usefulness of Conrad's writing in political analysis, but his own prose chokes on stilted aphorisms and anodyne observations. "Relative change, more than absolute change, is what history is often about," he concludes at a Romanian border post. Traveling by train between Bulgaria and Turkey, Kaplan comes to the realization that "the idea that the Internet and other new technologies annihilate distance is a half-truth." "You see, Robert," one of his informants tells him, "Hungarian nationalism, Romanian nationalism--they're all bad."
Perhaps the best that can be said about Kaplan's writing is that what it lacks in elegance, it makes up for in earnestness: As V.S. Naipaul--another traveler with a dyspeptic view of the world--has written of Conrad, his vision is flawed and unremittingly "dismal, but deeply felt." As in his earlier books--cataclysmic travelogues with titles like The Coming Anarchy, The Ends of the Earth and An Empire Wilderness--Kaplan shrouds the world in darkness, lamenting the "imprisoning desolation" and "Brezhnevian gloom" of the lands he visits. In the former Yugoslavia, in Africa, even in his own United States, whose decline he predicted in An Empire Wilderness, Kaplan has never met a society that wasn't falling apart. This dogged credo has earned him much notoriety and a considerable degree of influence: A correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, his essays are circulated in the White House and National Security Council, and his portrait of intractable "ancient hatreds" in Bosnia famously led President Clinton to conclude that intervening in the Yugoslav war would result in a quagmire (a dubious achievement that Kaplan has himself disowned). Over the course of two decades, Kaplan has established himself as the leading chronicler of the post-Communist Pax Americana, a grim reaper whose seamy version of globalization contrasts sharply with so many of the sunny--and often flippant--promises of global culture and prosperity.
Like those of many doom-mongering travelers--and like Conrad, memorably called a "bloody racist" by Chinua Achebe--Kaplan's jeremiads against the rot of the non-Western world have drawn charges of ill-informed prejudice. The Somali writer Nuruddin Farah has even suggested that Kaplan's forlorn vision of Africa was the result of a mefloquine-induced hallucination. But while it is true that Kaplan sometimes slips into mortifying disquisitions on "Asiatic" despotism and "the exotic confusion of the Orient," he deserves to be taken more seriously. In retrospect, what's striking about his books is not so much their bleakness as their prescience. Balkan Ghosts, written in 1989 and rejected by fourteen publishers before it was finally published at the start of the Yugoslav war, was an unheeded warning of the disintegration to come. In 1997, as the West was only beginning to awaken from its "end of history" delirium, Kaplan published a provocative essay in which he asked if "democracy was just a moment." (The essay coincided with an influential article by Fareed Zakaria, then the editor of Foreign Affairs, in which he similarly lamented the rise of "illiberal democracy.") The Coming Anarchy, whose eponymous essay has earned Kaplan the greatest opprobrium, was less pessimistic than downright hysterical. But it, too, evinced a remarkable ability to pierce the self-serving delusions of an African revival being bandied about by Western policy-makers. Today, as Central Africa burns amid what Madeleine Albright has called "Africa's first world war," Kaplan's portrait of civil war and disease and institutional meltdown is sadly accurate.
Eastward to Tartary returns to many of Kaplan's pet themes--indeed, one of the troublesome aspects of the book is that it sometimes seems like a not-altogether-comfortable imposition of old ideas on new geography. Traveling through some fourteen countries, Kaplan finds the familiar "erosion of [the] nation-state," pull of "blood loyalties" and evidence that "democracy was leading to separation, not reconciliation." It's hard to discern an overarching argument within the book's peripatetic structure, but the general thrust of Eastward to Tartary appears to be a return to the inferno. "Anarchy in some form or other, as I had seen, was almost everywhere," Kaplan writes near the end of the book, foreseeing "revolutionary upheaval" and "disintegrated" nations in a region where institutions are weak and ethnic strife is filling the vacuum left by the Soviet Union's collapse. The book is also a restatement of Kaplan's philosophy of political realism, a cynical faith--with intellectual roots in the writing of Thucydides and Machiavelli, both of whom Kaplan cites repeatedly--that politics is the exercise of self-interest. "What had I learned?" Kaplan asks as he ponders 4,000 miles of travel. The answer: "That power and self-interest would shape the immediate future, at least in this part of the world."
These aren't cheerful thoughts, but I fear that Kaplan's Hobbesian vision will once again prove prophetic--although, as in those earlier books, only partly so. The problem with Kaplan's bleakness is that it tends to overreach, as though driven as much by a craving for attention as by the urge to report faithfully. Kaplan's gloom is narcissistic; in love with itself, it can't get enough of its own darkness, always grasping beyond the limits of reasonable skepticism toward apocalypticism. The result is a certain misalignment of vision: Taken with the momentum of his own morose logic, he misses the real story. This tendency was notoriously pronounced in The Coming Anarchy, in which Kaplan not only foresaw (quite reasonably) a "bifurcated world"--one populated by comfortable citizens of the West, the other by the deprived denizens of the Third World--but went on to argue that, gradually, the boundaries between the two worlds would blur. "West Africa's future," he wrote, "will also be that of most of the rest of the world." What's more, Kaplan suggested, casting the shadow of his pessimism even wider, Africa (and the rest of the Third World, where Kaplan saw similar anarchy) would be responsible for the West's collapse. Like insidious viruses, the shantytowns, civil wars and tribal hatreds would slip through the borders of disintegrating nation-states, infecting the West with a "terrifying array of problems that will define a new threat to our security."
The irony, of course, is that the tragedy of the earth's wretched is in many respects precisely the opposite: that they will never escape the centrifugal pull of their collapsing societies, that today's electrified fences and immigration counters keep misery in its place more effectively than the mountains and deserts and icescapes that separated nations in an earlier age of travel. Kaplan's ambition is large: He claims allegiance to "the lay of the land" and the stories of "individuals," but, setting himself alongside Herodotus and Gibbon (to whose contemporary relevance The Coming Anarchy includes a paean), his real master is the grand sweep of History.
Under such tutelage, Kaplan becomes an incorrigible didact, turning every anecdote into an occasion for explication and instruction. The "extortionist cost" ($45) of a Turkish visa, he writes, was "part of a larger political story...that had not quite made it through the world media filter." While getting his shoes polished on the street in Turkey, he reflects that "commonplace but elaborate traditions such as baking bread and shoe maintenance...[allow] Turks to enjoy the benefits of global materialism without losing their identity." Apart from making him sound like the quintessential American tourist, Kaplan's determination to squeeze meaning out of every incident strains credibility. Just outside a decrepit train station in Bulgaria, Kaplan sees "a city of homeless youth and impoverished gypsies." This innocuous scene of poverty surrounding a railway station--ubiquitous in transport centers throughout the Third World, or indeed, visible in New York's Port Authority terminal--is proof for Kaplan that "tyranny creates a social vacuum," evidence that "social anarchy was never far from the surface here." Such moments verge on the incomprehensible: Kaplan's barren moonscapes are so devoid of redemption, so overflowing with suffering, that they appear as from a different reality.
To be fair, Eastward to Tartary's prognosis is, overall, more reasonable than The Coming Anarchy's, but it displays the same propensity for exaggeration. Kaplan is probably right that the countries he visits--the Caucasus in particular--are a caldron of ethnic hatred and political instability. He may be right, too, that a democratic free-for-all could exacerbate that instability (which is not an argument against democracy but against demagogic practitioners of democracy). But Kaplan is not satisfied with these insights. Donning his soothsayer's mantle, he prophesies Yugoslavia Round Two. "In the Caucasus, tribe and clan--not formal institutions--have always been the key to politics," he argues, apparently resurrecting the "ancient hatreds" that got him into such trouble in Balkan Ghosts. And, in fact, close on the heels of his recycled tribalism come predictions of Bosnia-style implosion. Eastward to Tartary, billed as a sequel to Balkan Ghosts, is overflowing with analogies and references to another war, in another part of the world. Indeed, part of Kaplan's purpose in writing this book is to "introduce Tartary (known today as Central Asia) as a place that has more in common with the Western Balkan countries than with the Oriental images conjured up by its exotic name." Thus, in Jordan, Prince Hassan shares with Kaplan his fears of a "balkanized Middle East with ethnic-sectarian conflict"; in Georgia, Kaplan hypothesizes that "the West would have to prove as muscular...as in the Balkans if it chose to keep these states alive"; and the Caucasus in general, for which Kaplan reserves his most ominous warnings, is destined to slide into chaos, abandoned and ignored by the West, "the Balkans of the future."
This is too dire, and sits uncomfortably with some of Kaplan's own observations. Although he pays less attention to it than might be expected, Kaplan discusses what the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, referring to the nineteenth-century quest for empire in Central Asia known as "the great game," has called "the new great game" of pipeline politics. In Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, Kaplan discovers the scramble for oil wealth that has transformed what would no doubt be another neglected corner of the world into a game of "geostrategic poker." At times, discussing this game of stakes, Kaplan seems to backtrack on his grim predictions that the West will abandon Central Asia to its fate. But the clouds never lift completely, and he is soon back on song, remarking skeptically that "remaking this part of the world...would take both the resolve of a missionary and a sheer appetite for power that the West could probably never muster." This is a curious--not to mention naïve--position for someone so wedded to the belief that states act in their self-interest. Surely the lesson of the Gulf War is that the West is quite prepared to go to battle over oil? Bosnia is a poor prism for this part of the world. Despite all the pieties about the West's fundamental interests--motivated in no small part by memories of Sarajevo's ignition of World War I and a questionable faith in the cyclical nature of history--the greatest threat posed by the implosion of Yugoslavia to its powerful neighbors was never more than a wave of refugees (and a certain aesthetic discomfort). There was no oil to defend in Bosnia; as David Rieff and Michael Ignatieff, among others, have consistently argued, the case for intervention was always based on an idealistic commitment to the alleviation of misery, and that commitment--as evidenced by Boutros Boutros-Ghali's infamous assertion to the citizens of Sarajevo that he could list at least ten places in the world worse off than they were--never ranked very high in Western priorities.
So why, despite his own apparent misgivings, is Kaplan so stubbornly attached to his trope of the Balkans? Ego may have something to do with it, as may, ironically, a certain sentimentalism. Tucked between the lines of his hard-nosed realism, Kaplan often displays a certain missionary zeal to save the miserable societies he visits. "Travel writing is only a vehicle to do something else," he has said. But a vehicle for what? Read enough of Kaplan and you start thinking that he protests too much--that all the sound and fury could well be partly an attempt to frighten the West into action. Perhaps this explains the poignant sense of loss, the almost elegiac quality, that sometimes infuses his descriptions of political and social breakdown. In Turkmenistan, in a vacant lot "filled with rusty metal and the omnipresent smell of oil," Kaplan meets his friend Anna, part Armenian, part Azeri Turk. Anna admires a rose; Kaplan reflects that, in this dismal landscape, "you must learn to extract pleasure from small things." Anna tells him--"in anguish"--about the loss of her cosmopolitan world and the rise of ethnic politics that has followed the Soviet Union's collapse. Kaplan sums it up in a line: "An empire had collapsed," he writes, "and all that remained were blood loyalties."
It's an evocative and perhaps even profound sentence--but it also suggests what seems to be the real reason for Kaplan's attachment to Bosnia. His repeated invocations of collapsing empires and orphaned states are indications of his lingering fascination with the death of what the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski has called the Soviet "imperium." Kaplan is a man of his times: He sees the world as a chessboard of competing empires, and his sepulchral vision is filtered through the lens of that era's paradigmatic political disasters. "What Vietnam was to the 1960s and 1970s, what Lebanon and Afghanistan were to the 1980s, and what the Balkans were to the 1990s, the Caspian region might be to the first decade of the new century," he writes. This is formulaic and, eleven years after the collapse of the Berlin wall, anachronistic. The world has moved on, new political forces are emerging--forces that Kaplan, ever with one eye on History, overlooks.
There is an important piece of the puzzle missing in Kaplan's descriptions of Islamic revivalism and Central Asian ferment. Although it does contain a few cameo appearances, Eastward to Tartary has surprisingly little to say about the clerical warriors of the Taliban, whose revolution in Afghanistan is sending tremors across South and Central Asia and reshaping the area Kaplan explores. As Ahmed Rashid argues in Taliban, his excellent insider's account of the continental upheaval, Afghanistan has "held Central Asia in a tight embrace for centuries," and now the rise of Taliban-sponsored fundamentalism is "sending shock waves" throughout the region. Kaplan encounters the pan-Islamic sentiments sweeping the region, but he hardly mentions the movement from which those sentiments are drawing inspiration, and in many cases material support. He describes some of the strange bedfellows emerging in Central Asia, but he only scratches the surface of the geopolitical transformations. From Russia (struggling with Islamic rebellion in Chechnya) to India (bearing the brunt of Taliban-trained militancy in Kashmir) to Shiite Iran (determined to limit the influence of the Taliban's Sunni revolution) to the United States (which has already sent its missiles in search of Afghanistan-sheltered Osama bin Laden), the world's powers are suddenly finding that they have a stake in Central Asia. Russia, which recently bullied its former Central Asian colonies into a security alliance to combat Islamic terrorism, just signed a similar agreement with India. The United States, too, has signed a counterterrorism memorandum with India, and--as Rashid recently told me--it has been conducting talks with Iran on a common strategy to handle the Taliban. China (with a nervous eye on its separatist Muslim province of Xinjiang), Pakistan and the Arab monarchies (confronted with a genie they unleashed but can no longer control), and even Indonesia and Malaysia (where the economic crisis has led to a resurgence of Islamic sentiment) are being drawn into a complex and treacherous struggle for influence in South and Central Asia.
None of this suggests that the region will be spared the mayhem envisioned by Kaplan--in fact, the mosaic of outside interests may only make matters worse. But it does suggest that far from being an orphaned corner of the post-Communist world--another Bosnia--Central Asia is emerging as the fault line in a new ideological conflict. Kaplan's view of the impending chaos is resolutely local: In his version of the post-Soviet vacuum, there is no room for such transnational alliances and interests, only for primeval ethnic and tribal ties, countries tearing themselves apart from within. Indeed, in a recent article on Pakistan, Kaplan discounts the role of the Taliban in South Asian instability, blaming instead the "bewildering complexity of ethnic and religious divisions" in Pakistan. In the process, he ignores the extent to which those divisions are being exacerbated by the fundamentalist influence of the Taliban.
Given his penchant for grand narratives, it's a little strange that Kaplan misses the larger picture, the broad canvas upon which the events he describes are unfolding. But that's the danger of serving history too faithfully. In Georgia, a man named Alexander Rondeli warns Kaplan about this. "All of us," he says, speaking of the stubbornness of ethnic animosity, "have this heavy weight from the past attached to our legs. We can only move forward while looking back." Kaplan is like Rondeli: Standing at ground zero of an emerging geopolitical order, he remains haunted by his Balkan ghosts, predicting the future while staring at the past.
Do we want a Vice President who endorses illegal detention and torture of Palestinians? Anthony Cordesman, a national security type frequently deployed as a television pundit, recently posted a paper on the website for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies recommending that Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority engage in just these practices to repress the latest intifada.
"Halt civil violence," Cordesman counsels, "even if it means using excessive force by the standards of Western police forces." But this is only a warm-up. "Halt terrorist and paramilitary action by Hamas and Islamic Jihad," Cordesman continues, "even if this means interrogations, detentions, and trials that are too rapid and lack due process." Still not clear enough. "Effective counter-terrorism relies on interrogation methods that border on psychological and/or physical torture, arrests and detention that violate the normal rights of privacy, [with] levels of violence in making arrests that are unacceptable in civil cases, and measures that involve the innocent (or at least the not provably directly guilty) in arrests and penalties."
In other words, protected only by the weasel phrase "border on," Cordesman urges that Israel's security forces return to the torture techniques that were finally abandoned under High Court order a year ago. Joe Lieberman is one of the senators belonging to the CSIS Middle East Task Force. Thus far, despite explicit requests for comment, he has not disavowed Cordesman's prescriptions, which have been condemned by Amnesty International USA.
For two months now Israel has laid barbarous siege to Palestinians throughout the occupied territories. The Israeli Army is busily cordoning Palestinian areas behind trenches and barbed wire, making Gaza and the West Bank one vast prison--or rather, many separate prisons, all barred from communicating with one another.
The policy of "closure," initiated after the Gulf War, continued unabated during the so-called Oslo peace process, in violation of Israeli government obligations. The strategy of apartheid and imprisonment is now accelerating, accompanied by bombardment of heavily populated areas, as well as incessant attacks from settlers (all courtesy of the US government, as always, with vast new military subventions rolling in after the Al-Aksa intifada began).
Even the relatively better-informed mainstream accounts fail to convey the brutality of this policy. There are a number of excellent news outlets for those who want unjaundiced reporting. The website for Middle East Research and Information Project is trustworthy (www.merip.org), as is the Electronic Intifada (electronicintifada.net/new.html). For the latter, the intro essay by Nigel Parry gives a useful overview of media coverage. Electronic Intifada also has links to other sites, as does ZNet's Mideast Watch (www.zmag.org/meastwatch/meastwat.htm). Particularly comprehensive is Birzeit University's (www.birzeit.edu/links).
Fair Game
Five fine specimens of Meleagris gallopavo--wild turkey to you--wandered onto my property here in Humboldt County, Northern California, a few days ago. I assume they forgot to check the calendar. Under California fish and game regs, you can shoot them legally for two weeks around Thanksgiving. Out came my 12-gauge, and I loosed off a shot that at some 100 feet did no discernible damage, and after a brief bout of what-the-hell-was-that the turkeys continued to forage. A fusillade of two more shots finally brought down a fourteen-pounder. I hung him for four days, plucked him and by Thanksgiving's end he was history. This was all easier than sporting manuals suggest, where hunters take enormous trouble to decoy the turkeys with fake gobbles.
Wild turkeys haven't been seen in California since earlier in the Cenozoic era, but in recent years two ranchers in my valley imported a few and now they've begun to appear in our neighborhood in Humboldt County in substantial numbers. I've heard reports of flocks of up to a hundred wild turkeys fifteen miles up the Mattole River around Honeydew, an impressive quantity though still far short of the thousand birds counted in one day by two hunters in New England in the 1630s.
The speed with which New World foods spread across Europe and Asia is astounding. Cortez brought turkeys back to Europe from Mexico, and by the 1530s they were well-known in Germany and England. The Puritans had domestic turkeys with them in New England, gazing out at their wild relatives, offered by the Indians who regarded them as somewhat second-rate as food.
Of course, wild turkeys have many enemies aside from the Beast called Man. There are swaths of Humboldt and Mendocino counties where coyotes and mountain lions now hold near-exclusive sway. Ranchers running sheep used to hold off the coyotes with M-80 poison-gas canisters that exploded at muzzle touch, but these are now illegal, and the alternatives are either trapping, which is a difficult and time-consuming job, or getting Great Pyrenees dogs to guard the flock. But the coyotes are crafty and wait till the sheep have scattered, then prey on the unguarded half.
Gabbing on the phone to my friend Ford Roosevelt, who lives in Los Angeles, I mentioned my turkey kill, and he reacted with revulsion, not so much to the fate of Meleagris gallopavo but to the fact that I have a shotgun at all. I told Ford that it was this sort of city-slicker foolishness that cost Gore states like West Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Ohio. Ford, a grandson of FDR, then disclosed that the Democratic National Committee had asked him to campaign in various states, including West Virginia. "Well Ford, didn't you find that the gun issue was on people's minds?" "Yes, as a matter of fact. I was talking to some miners and they brought it up. I told them that as far as I was concerned, guns should be banned altogether. They weren't pleased." "So it was you, Ford, who lost West Virginia." He didn't seem contrite.
A few years back, critics of postmodernism, both left and right, chuckled at the academic sting pulled on the journal Social Text when it published Alan Sokal's bogus article on the socially constructed nature of nature. For conservatives, that the journal ran Sokal's fuzzy call for a progressive postmodern science confirmed the fundamental divide between the politicized humanities and the objective sciences--proof positive of cultural studies run amok. In all the discussion that followed, however, little notice was paid to the origins of post-World War II radical critiques of science. In the shadow of Hitler and Stalin and in the wake of the Vietnam War, theorists from Theodor Adorno to Donna Haraway have been concerned with the ways in which science has colluded with acts of barbarism.
Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado examines the tragic consequences of medical and social science research on the Venezuelan Yanomami and reminds us why scientific practices and theories should indeed be the domain of social critics. White scientists in the jungle have long been central characters in the stories the West tells about itself. Alongside Humboldt and Mengele, Tierney's book now adds to the tropical pantheon James Neel, founder of the University of Michigan's human genetics department, and Napoleon Chagnon, perhaps the world's most infamous living anthropologist.
Well before Darkness's publication, Tierney's most damning charge--that Neel and Chagnon provoked, perhaps knowingly, a fatal 1968 measles epidemic responsible for "hundreds, perhaps thousands" of deaths--has created a scandal that threatens to distract from the real significance of his research. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the book may create a crisis "unparalleled in the history of anthropology." At a special American Anthropological Association forum in mid-November, defenders of Neel charged libel and politicized agendas. One panelist proclaimed that Tierney's "anti-science views" would jeopardize future vaccine efforts and lead to more deaths from disease. Chagnon, evoking the terms of the Sokal affair, has responded that only "cultural anthropologists from the Academic Left" who "despise the words 'empirical evidence' would take Tierney's claims seriously."
Empirical evidence is not lacking in Tierney's copiously footnoted book. Like all good chronicles of Western rationalists who lose their mind among primitives, Darkness in El Dorado is filled with absurd and disgraceful behavior: a French anthropologist who loses himself for decades in a sexual Eden; the world's wealthy holding a tuxedo dinner catered by helicopters on a jungle mountain; researchers who try to kill one another with machetes or commit suicide after being spurned by a Yanomami lover. But aside from his Joseph Conrad-like musings as to what it is about the Yanomami that made white people crazy, Tierney has written a fascinating, but also frustrating, ethnography of the practices and beliefs of cold war medical and social science researchers.
Tierney focuses primarily on the long and strange career of Napoleon Chagnon, who originated the myth of Yanomami aggression in his book The Fierce People, the all-time-bestselling ethnography. Chagnon portrayed the Yanomami as one of the most violent cultures on earth, where villages went to war to procure women and serial murderers bred at a higher rate than men who did not kill.
Tierney convincingly demonstrates his charge that unethical methodology and false science produced this myth. He also describes its often fatal consequences.
Most cultural anthropologists now believe that the wars Chagnon witnessed were provoked by Chagnon himself. He offered axes, machetes, fishhooks and pots in exchange for ethnographic information, creating tensions among villages that vied for monopoly control of his wares. Within months of Chagnon's arrival in 1964, three different fights broke out between villages that had previously been at peace for decades. Anthropologist Brian Ferguson reports that Chagnon was "very much involved in the fighting and the wars. Chagnon becomes a central figure in determining battles over trade goods and machetes."A Yanomami reports that Chagnon offered him an outboard motor in exchange for help, including the procurement of a Yanomami wife. Shotguns, a seemingly unlimited supply of trade goods and willingness to don feathers, face paint and a loincloth allowed Chagnon to transform himself from an "impoverished Ph.D. student at the bottom of the totem pole to being a figure of preternatural power."
Tierney argues that many of Chagnon's data are simply false. The Yanomami do not have a particularly high murder rate, nor do men who kill reproduce more than those who don't. Neither are the Yanomami particularly well-nourished--a claim that Chagnon uses to argue that men fight over women and not food.
In the United States, Chagnon and his sociobiologist allies continue to portray the Yanomami as an untainted relic of our past--a handy control group used to prove the biological basis of a range of aggressive human traits. In Latin America, the endurance of the myth of Yanomami aggression has reinforced racism and justified indifference. Both the Venezuelan and Brazilian governments have used unfavorable images of the Yanomami to justify their failure to protect them from migrants, who, starting in the late 1980s, increasingly entered the region, resulting in the death from disease and violence of untold numbers of Yanomami.
Tierney is at his best when he discusses Chagnon's career within the cultural history of the cold war. Born poor in Michigan, Chagnon used the expanding university system to climb out of poverty. Like many at the time who through discipline and hard work improved their class standing, Chagnon developed a visceral antipathy toward communism. It manifested itself in an intense masculine persona that earned Chagnon a reputation for barfighting and academic brawling. One of Tierney's insights is that Chagnon's theories had their "genesis during the Vietnam War and its cultural equivalent on the University of Michigan's Ann Arbor campus, where hippies in tepees chanted slogans like 'Make love, not war.' The whole point...was that you had to make war in order to make love--that violence was part of the natural order.... As a cold war metaphor, the Yanomami's 'ceaseless warfare' over women proved, that even in a society without property, hierarchies prevailed."
Tierney is on to something important here. The Fierce People was published in 1968, a particularly tough year for the United States abroad. American officials justified counterinsurgency campaigns that were taking place in the jungles of Latin America, Africa and Asia in decidedly Chagnonian terms. As one 1968 dissenting State Department memo put it: "We have condoned counter-terror.... We suspected that maybe it is a good tactic, and that... murder, torture, and mutilation are alright if our side is doing it and the victims are communists. After all hasn't man been a savage from the beginning of time so let us not be too queasy about terror. I have literally heard these arguments from our people."
Tierney rightly reads The Fierce People as a piece of home-front propaganda. To counter those who argued that war was caused by struggles over resources (a central claim of New Left interpretations of both the cold war and the Vietnam War), Chagnon "engineered a bold creation myth, a ferocious Garden of Eden, where the healthy, well-fed Yanomami fought for... sexual pleasure.... It was not the Yanomami but Chagnon's fellow Americans who belonged, in reality, to one of the best-fed, healthiest societies in history. America enjoyed abundance so delirious that it seemed, for a short time in the 1960s, that its citizens would not agree to the stress of world combat against Communism.... At that critical moment, The Fierce People... came to reverse a dangerous complacency, proof that the battle is never won, that the fight can never be abandoned."
By the late 1980s Chagnon was in trouble. Tierney misses an important opportunity to discuss how the decline in Chagnon's fortunes was tied to the end of superpower tensions. At home, a generation of anthropologists critical of its discipline's role in justifying US foreign policy came into professional power. In Venezuela his former research subjects were demanding that he be barred from entering their territory. And reflecting the post-cold war extension of economic activity into areas previously off-limits, gold miners poured into the Amazon, causing widespread ecological destruction and social dislocation. Challenged by his liberal colleagues, harangued by feminists, threatened by dark-skinned peoples and adrift in the new post-cold war economy, Chagnon became an international version of the angry white man.
Chagnon did what many did at the end of the cold war--he went private. He teamed up with a flamboyant Venezuelan industrial gold miner, who turned "tracts of forest into mud soup," and the mistress of the Venezuelan president, who has since fled the country following indictments for corruption and fraud. The three came close to establishing a private biosphere in Yanomami territory that would have given them political authority over the Yanomami and monopoly rights over mineral and scientific claims. In order to muster international support for their scheme, they shuttled journalists and scientists in and out of remote Yanomami communities on lightning helicopter tours, without providing protection against possible contagion. Newspapers and television news ran stories of recently discovered "lost villages," while "foreign scientists carried out huge amounts of plant and animal samples."
When Venezuelan and international opposition scuttled his plan to set up a fiefdom in his former field site, Chagnon, now largely shut out of anthropology journals, stepped up efforts to disseminate his theories in the popular press. Although Chagnon often casts himself as an embattled truth-seeker--the preferred role of most biological determinists, no matter how much funding or open access to the media they have--Tierney points out the "abject admiration many male journalists apparently felt for the great anthropologist." He cites a fax that Matt Ridley, the science reporter at The Economist, sent to Chagnon apologizing for not writing a more sympathetic piece: "I have written it in the way that the International Editor wanted, which means 'impartially.' (She is a bit PC, herself.) So you may find it less unambiguously sympathetic to you than you might have hoped, but it is about as far as I dare go.... I do hope you like it."
What will make and, unfortunately, probably break Darkness in El Dorado is its description of the deadly 1968 outbreak of measles that coincided with the arrival of an expedition, funded by the Atomic Energy Commission and headed by Neel and Chagnon, to collect Yanomami blood samples.
Tierney's speculation that Neel may have been responsible for the epidemic is based on Neel's decision to use what was by 1968 an antiquated vaccine, Edmonston B, which was contraindicated for isolated populations such as the Yanomami. Tierney suggests that Neel chose this vaccine to prove that American Indians were not genetically vulnerable to European germs. Since Edmonston B produced the same level of antibodies as an infection of real measles, follow-up antibody tests would allow for a comparison of European and Yanomami immune systems. This may be why, according to Tierney, Neel opted for Edmonston B even though it was known to cause measleslike symptoms among isolated groups and even though a cheaper, safer vaccine (but one that did not produce antibodies comparable to the disease) was available. Tierney argues that because Edmonston B produces symptoms similar to measles, its use may have ignited the outbreak; he goes even further by proxy, citing a medical historian who ventures that Neel may have intentionally started the epidemic.
Tierney unfortunately has presented his case in a way that allows for easy dismissal. He provides compelling evidence that Neel and Chagnon did indeed treat the vaccination campaign as an experiment. For instance, by Neel's own telling, in the first village, before the epidemic, the team inexplicably vaccinated only forty Yanomami out of a total population of seventy-six, even though it had enough doses for all. Combined with the fact that most in this village had been tested for measles antibodies two years earlier, the inoculation of half the village created a fortuitous control group for Neel's published findings. It also seems that the vaccine did induce fevers and rashes in many Yanomami. Nevertheless, the fact that Tierney gives no direct evidence to back up his most serious conjecture--that the measles epidemic was caused by the vaccine--threatens to discredit his entire study. (Also, in response to the pre-publication controversy, most medical experts insist that it is impossible for a vaccine, no matter what symptoms it may bring on in the inoculated, to spread as an epidemic.)
Tierney's missteps here speak to a larger problem with his book, which draws its inspiration more from The X-Files than from the Frankfurt School. Tierney tries too hard to link the actions and motives of the individuals involved in a tight net of intrigue, misrepresenting cold war social science as a secret society of an elected few.
Of course, for many, the actions of the United States during the cold war don't make sense any other way. Consider this history: Neel, who did research on Hiroshima survivors, was funded by the Atomic Energy Commission to collect thousands of samples of Yanomami blood because it was thought it could be used as a baseline to measure degrees of genetic mutation. In 1958 the AEC, which in other instances engaged in deadly human radiation experiments, paid Marcel Roche, a Venezuelan doctor who worked on Neel's 1968 expedition, to inject the Yanomami, without their knowledge, of course, with radioactive iodine to study why they did not suffer from goiters. Tierney should not be entirely blamed if he didn't have a theory, other than conspiracy, to explain this.
Darkness in El Dorado unconvincingly attempts to trace this shameful history directly to Neel ("I felt that Neel was the key"), unfairly describing him as an extreme eugenicist. This is unfortunate, for Tierney could have written a more powerful book by demonstrating how the cold war produced acts of barbarism regardless of individual motive.
This is not to let Neel and Chagnon off the hook. They were instrumental in the creation of a body of knowledge that valued the Yanomami not for their own sake but for what they could provide cold war science. Their blood was believed to contain answers to questions raised by the new post-Hiroshima world, while their culture was thought to be a distilled version of what the West once was and, for some, should be again.
In the documentary made of the 1968 expedition, Neel and others are shown professionally inoculating Yanomami, who are presented as pictures of vibrant health. Sound outtakes reveal a different story. The team was exhausted, sick and panicked as the epidemic escaped their control and ravaged the Yanomami. Neel can be heard ordering the cameraman to stop filming a sick Yanomami. Whatever the cause of the measles outbreak, it is probable that the research team exposed the Yanomami to respiratory infections and other illnesses. The outtakes also reveal that Neel and Chagnon were much more concerned with making the documentary and collecting blood samples than with containing the epidemic. They broke quarantine lines to procure donors and quickly abandoned the area so that their blood would not be ruined in the tropical heat.
Tierney's effort to pin the tragic history of the Yanomami on Neel speaks to a larger problem, both in his book and in current ways of thinking about colonialism. With the failure of socialism and the discrediting of revolutionary movements and governments, many First World activists have thrown their energy into advocating on behalf of the cultural rights of native peoples. Much of this work is profoundly apolitical, justified more by appeals to Indian virtue than by critical analysis. This kind of activism too easily sets itself up for dismissal when it is revealed that Indians may have their own interests and may not be as innocent as portrayed.
This problem is reproduced in Tierney's book. It speaks to the poverty of our political culture that Tierney, an experienced investigative reporter, refuses, either out of ignorance or bias, to discuss the history of the Amazon in reference to colonialism, capitalism or racism. Instead, he searches for the mastermind behind the mayhem. Tierney creates a kitschy Heart of Darkness-like tale and casts himself as Marlow and Chagnon as Kurtz (Neel, perhaps, could be King Leopold). Well before we hear any Yanomami voices, we learn of Tierney's battles against jungle thieves and malaria, heroically rescuing Yanomami children and fending off evil gold miners.
Tierney's narrative rightly demonstrates how objective scientists can be implicated in a history of atrocity--and his gaffes should not distract from this history--but it can't account for the fact that while the AEC was paying for Neel's and Chagnon's jungle excursions, it was also funding the work of Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin, along with other progressive scientists and anthropologists. These scholars became powerful critics of how the supposed objective research of their colleagues served not-so-objective agendas and had not-so-benign consequences. These politicized scholars have served science well--proof positive that Adorno was right, that "science needs those who disobey it."
"Actions approved by the U.S. government aggravated political polarization and affected Chile's long tradition of democratic elections and respect for constitutional order and the rule of law," reads a White House press release that accompanied the November 13 declassification of 16,000 secret government documents on Chile. That statement, contorted bureaucratese for admitting a US contribution to undermining Chilean democracy and backing a brutal dictatorship, falls far short of accepting US accountability for the national and human horror experienced in Chile--an acknowledgment necessary for Chileans and Americans to reach closure on this shameful history.
The release marks the final installment of the Clinton Administration's special Chile Declassification Project. "One goal of the project," according to the White House statement--issued by the press secretary rather than in the name of the President--"is to put original documents before the public so that it may judge for itself the extent to which US actions undercut the cause of democracy and human rights in Chile." Among the 24,000 documents declassified over the past two years are secret cables, memorandums and reports making that judgment perfectly clear.
The new documents dramatically record the imperial spectacle of high-level US efforts to destroy Chilean democracy in order to prevent an elected socialist, Salvador Allende, from governing. In a declassified transcript of a November 6, 1970, National Security Council meeting, President Nixon and selected Cabinet members casually discuss the need to "do everything we can to hurt [Allende] and bring him down." There, in bald terms, the historical record reveals the callous willingness to promote upheaval and bloodshed to achieve this goal. "You have asked us to provoke chaos in Chile," the CIA station chief in Santiago cabled headquarters in October 1970 during covert efforts to foment a coup; "we provide you with [a] formula for chaos." The CIA Chilean coup-plotters predicted at least 10,000 casualties if the military coup went forward. "Carnage could be considerable and prolonged i.e. civil war."
The CIA knew a year before the coup that Pinochet was prone to ruthlessness. An intriguing intelligence report records Pinochet as saying in September 1972 that "Allende must be forced to step down or be eliminated." A Chilean informant, who apparently accompanied Pinochet on a trip to Panama to purchase US tanks for the Chilean military, told the CIA that US Army personnel based at the Southern Command had assured them, "US will support coup against Allende 'with whatever means necessary,' when time comes."
In the United States, revelations of covert operations to destabilize the Allende government caused a major scandal in the mid-1970s. In Chile, where even the pro-Pinochet media have been forced to report on the declassified US records, this history is only now having a major impact on the national psyche. Throughout the country, there is outrage at this dramatic evidence of US intervention in Chile's internal affairs. A group of prominent senators has demanded that the Chilean government formally protest US "violations of our sovereignty and dignity" and have summoned the foreign minister to explain what action the government of Ricardo Lagos intends to take toward Washington. Privately, Chilean government officials have requested that the United States clearly acknowledge actions that helped change the course of Chilean history.
The Clinton White House considered such an acknowledgment to accompany the final documents' release--but in the end decided against it. Some officials fear that Washington could be held liable for covert war crimes in Chile--that the long arm of international justice that nabbed Augusto Pinochet could someday reach US officials. Although President Clinton did apologize to Guatemala for Washington's cold war policy of aiding and abetting repression--"support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression," the President stated in Guatemala City last year, "was wrong, and the United States will not repeat that mistake"--no similar statement on Chile will be forthcoming. With the declassified documents, we now have a fuller accounting of the US role in Chile--but with no accountability.
The President has gone to Vietnam,
A smallish country that we used to bomb
But now would like to send our products to.
And so our corporations take the view
That if the country's ruling class has picked
A form of rule that can be somewhat strict,
That's up to them. And Clinton went to say
That there is nothing standing in the way
Of being friends with them forevermore.
Remind me, please: Why did we fight that war?
This essay, from the December 12, 1969, issue of The Nation, is a special selection from The Nation Digital Archive. If you want to read everything The Nation has ever published on war and human rights abuses, click here
for information on how to acquire individual access to the Archive--an electronic database of every Nation article since 1865.
All the way up the West Bank, from Ramallah and Nablus to Jenin, the remains of burned tires litter the road. The iron-shuttered shops and empty streets and the high-speed Israeli Army trucks--headlights blazing, steel grills over their windows--tell their own story. For this is a land enduring a conflict that is fast turning into a war of Palestinian independence. Along the settlers' roads the convoys hum, the settlers in their family cars with guns in the back, armored buses sandwiched between truckloads of troops. At the entrance to Jenin, the Palestinian police seem surprised to see us. How did we get through the Israeli checkpoints?
We avoided each checkpoint by driving off into the fields and making our way through olive groves and ancient stone villages to detour around the army. So much for Israeli security. Outside Yabad--a cold stone village in a fold of hills between Jenin and the sea--an Israeli officer warned us not to go further. "I wouldn't go there," he said. "There's a funeral." But the only disturbing thing about Yabad was its sorrow. Just a few hours before, Israeli soldiers had shot dead two brothers--Bilal and Hilal Salah--as they stood on a village embankment above a settlers' road. Their eldest brother said they were shouting abuse. Another villager said they may have been throwing stones. They had grown up together, gone to school together, opened a small restaurant together, been shot in the head together and were now buried together.
What was it President Clinton said last week? That he wanted the youth of "both sides" to come together to help end the "violence"? But the youth to whom he was appealing are dying and killing. Bilal and Hilal Salah were 21 and 18, the soldiers who killed them probably little more than 20. The Israeli officer who warned me not to go to Yabad could not have been more than 25. The young are too busy fighting their war to worry about Clinton.
It is a curious reflection on this unfolding tragedy that Israel is able to set the daily news agenda. Can Arafat control his people? Are Palestinians deliberately putting their children in the line of fire? These questions were set by the Israeli government and duly parroted by CNN and the BBC World Service, each question effectively blaming the Palestinians for their own deaths at the hands of Israeli soldiers. Repeatedly, Palestinians shot in the head by Israelis were reported as having died in "clashes" or "crossfire," as if their deaths were attributable to some natural disaster rather than to the wholesale Israeli use of live bullets, which, if employed against protesters by, say, the Serbs, would have elicited a world outcry.
In reality, Arafat's "control" is irrelevant. It is the Palestinian people who are setting the limits to this armed intifada, who are effectively dictating the course of their war against the Israelis. There is no controlling agent--neither for stone-throwers nor for Palestinian policemen who fire at the Israelis nor for the mob that lynched two Israeli soldiers. Sheer despair at the perceived injustice of the Oslo agreement--a treaty that seemed certain to cheat them of a capital in East Jerusalem, a return of refugees and an end to massive Jewish settlements on occupied land--simply overwhelmed the clichés about the "peace process" and the need to put Oslo "back on track."
If the new intifada proves one thing, it is that Oslo is dead. Palestinians no longer speak of it in the present tense. They talk only of UN Security Council Resolution 242, the original foundation of the Oslo agreement--steadily whittled away by Israeli and US negotiators--as a possible settlement. That 1967 resolution, so rarely mentioned now by State Department officials, calls for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from territory captured in the 1967 Six-Day War in return for the security of all states (including Israel) in the area. It also insists on the illegality of the acquisition of land through war. And 242, as far as the Palestinians are concerned, means a return to the 1967 borders of Israel. No more occupation of the West Bank or Gaza (or the Golan Heights) or of East Jerusalem, illegally annexed by Israel.
This, of course, has never been on offer to the Arabs--even though then-Secretary of State James Baker said, in private letters to Arab leaders in 1991, that it would form the basis of a Middle East peace. But if the Palestinians hold out, if they refuse to return to the poisoned Oslo negotiating table, the world--or so they pathetically hope--will ask why 242 cannot be implemented, just as other nations (Iraq and Serbia come to mind) are expected to abide by Security Council resolutions.
But is the hope so pathetic? How important is it to keep 200,000 settlers in Gaza and the West Bank, surrounded by Palestinians in a potential Palestinian state? Must every Israeli be held hostage to these often messianic men and women who appear to believe their land deeds have been personally bestowed by God rather than law, whose presence requires thousands of Israeli troops to risk their lives, whose own homes are now--in what may be the start of a deliberate campaign to evict them--coming under Palestinian attack?
Israel claims all Jerusalem to be its unified and "eternal" capital. But this is in fact--if not in theory--untrue. Few Israelis will venture into "their" eastern part of Jerusalem, even in daylight. Few taxis will travel there from Jewish West Jerusalem. With a peace treaty--a real peace, with 242 at its center--East Jerusalem would be Palestinian. But a real peace treaty already allows Israelis to visit in safety the streets of Amman and Cairo. Would they not feel safer walking the streets of an East Jerusalem whose owners were at peace with Israel than one whose population hates their presence in those same streets? Why must Israel own East Jerusalem in order to enjoy it?
These may seem to be idle questions when almost 150 Palestinians, and at least ten Israelis, have died. It has become tasteless to compare the two statistics because they prove that the Palestinians are by far the greater victims--just as the Bosnian Muslims were by far the greater victims of the Bosnian war. But it is a fact that the Palestinians are now dying for a new cause, for a state that must be founded on 242.
True, they grasp too swiftly the easy options that present themselves. Resolution 242 will have to be resurrected and reargued, not just repeated like a mantra by every Arafat spokesman. Every Palestinian family now watches the television station of the Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas, who finally drove the Israelis out of southern Lebanon in May. Fight with weapons, the Hezbollah tell the Palestinians. Liberate your country as we did. But Gaza is not southern Lebanon and Jerusalem is not Beirut. Even if it is true that Arafat's men have a few antiarmor missiles up their sleeve for an Israeli tank thrust into Gaza and a few thousand Beirut veterans to take on Israeli infantry, their people could die in the hundreds before the world demanded an end to the slaughter.
And slaughter there will be if this war goes on. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon ended with the massacre at Sabra and Shatila; the 1996 bombardment of southern Lebanon ended with the massacre of 106 Lebanese refugees by Israeli artillerymen at Qana. How soon before some horror stops this latest conflict dead in its tracks? Arafat is being advised to demand a "multilateral force"--not necessarily a UN one--to protect the Palestinians. It could--indeed, in the eyes of some Palestinians it must--include US troops. Put American troops on the ground in "Palestine," they think, and the safety of US soldiers will take precedence in Washington, even over its alliance with Israel.
But these are early days, and the immediate future will be decided by the street and statistics. Bilal and Hilal Salah were Yabad's first intifada victims. All that is certain after their funeral is that they will not be the last.
If you stand in Tiananmen Square and keep your eyes open on a normal day, you will see the tour groups with their "keep together" flags, and the long line waiting to see the mummified Mao in his mausoleum, and the crowd around the entrance to the Forbidden City. Souvenir salesmen ply their trade where once the students massed around the Goddess of Democracy. And then you notice the militia vans endlessly circling, and the buses parked off to one side. It's a big space to police, and its vast openness makes it impossible to close off. Every few days, a group of supporters of the Falun Gong movement will suddenly unfurl their banners and wave them until the forces of order arrive, sweep them up and carry them away.
In their 1996 book The Next War, former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Peter Schweitzer concoct some troubling scenarios they imagine could confront the United States. One is with Mexico: It's 1999, and a radical nationalist comes to power with the assistance of drug traffickers, resulting in a flood of migrants and drugs across the US boundary. In response, the Pentagon sends 60,000 troops to the border region. Tensions between the two countries mount over the next few years, leading to a full-scale US invasion of Mexico that restores law and order within six months. In constructing this nightmare scenario, the authors draw on a long history of depicting undesired immigrants as invading hordes and the international boundary as a line of defense. Peter Andreas recounts this hawkish vision in his provocative and highly persuasive Border Games: Policing the US-Mexico Divide. He argues that predictions of an inevitable march toward greater levels of militarization in the region--of which the Weinberger/Schweitzer vision is the most extreme--ignore the necessity of maintaining a porous boundary because of the significant and intensifying levels of economic integration between the United States and Mexico.
Still, as part of the US government's war on drugs and "illegal" immigrants in the border region, the enforcement regime has grown dramatically over the past two decades, as chronicled by Andreas. The antidrug budget of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, for example, rose 164 percent between fiscal years 1990 and 1997, while the overall budget for the INS nearly tripled between FY 1993 and 1999, from $1.5 billion to $4.2 billion, with border enforcement the biggest growth area. At the same time, transboundary trade has reached unprecedented heights because of the 1994 implementation of NAFTA. This exacerbates the challenge of "enforcement." As a 1999 government report cautioned, "Rapidly growing commerce between the United States and Mexico will complicate our efforts to keep drugs out of cross-border traffic." With a daily average of 220,000 vehicles now crossing into the United States from Mexico--and only nine large tractor-trailers loaded with cocaine required to satisfy annual domestic demand in the United States--the task facing US authorities is daunting.
Given such practical contradictions, it's the creation of an image of boundary control that has been most significant. As Andreas explains--and this is his well-written book's central point--the escalation of border enforcement is less about deterring drugs and migrants than it is about symbolism. In other words, state elites are more concerned about giving a good performance for reasons of domestic political consumption than they are about realizing the stated goals of boundary enforcement. In fact, the political-economic costs of too much success serve to limit enforcement. As one high-level US Customs official cited in Border Games stated, "If we examined every truck for narcotics arriving into the United States along the Southwest border.... Customs would back up the truck traffic bumper-to-bumper into Mexico City in just two weeks--15.8 days.... That's 1,177 miles of trucks, end to end."
To the extent that there is an appearance of success, however (statistics showing more interdiction, for example), it helps to realize a variety of political agendas. As Andreas contends, "Regardless of its deterrent effect, the escalation of enforcement efforts has helped to fend off political attacks and kept the drug issue from derailing the broader process of economic integration."
Thus, in the case of NAFTA, the deceptive image (one carefully crafted with the Clinton White House) that Mexico under Carlos Salinas de Gortari was having significant success in the binational war on drugs facilitated a reluctant Congress's passage of NAFTA. Moreover, the Administration promised that NAFTA would bring even greater levels of transboundary cooperation in the drug war and lead to more resources for boundary enforcement.
NAFTA also intertwined with the Administration's offensive against unauthorized immigration (a matter Andreas does not discuss), which was, in part, the US answer to massive disruption in Mexico's rural and small-business sectors brought about by growing economic liberalization. While Administration officials promoted NAFTA as a boundary-control tool (by creating better, high-paying jobs in Mexico, went the argument, NAFTA would lead to less immigration from Mexico to the United States), they also understood that NAFTA would intensify pressures to migrate among Mexicans displaced in the name of economic efficiency. As INS Commissioner Doris Meissner argued to Congress in November 1993, "Responding to the likely short- to medium-term impacts of NAFTA will require strengthening our enforcement efforts along the border."
For Andreas, specific developments are often the "unintended feedback effects of past policy choices" as much as the result of particular bureaucratic incentives and rewards. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), for example, led to the legalization of large numbers of unauthorized immigrants as a way of ultimately reducing unsanctioned immigration. IRCA's main effect, however, was "to reinforce and expand already well-established cross-border migration networks" and to create a booming business in fraudulent documents.
These "perverse consequences" laid the foundation for the anti-immigrant backlash that emerged in the early 1990s--most vociferously in California, a state especially hard hit by the recession and feeling the effects of a rapidly changing population due to immigration. In advancing this argument, Andreas cautions that his goal is "not to provide a general explanation of the anti-illegal immigration backlash." Rather, he seeks to show how political and bureaucratic entrepreneurs partially whipped up public sentiment and channeled it "to focus on the border as both the source of the problem and the most appropriate site of the policy solution." While there is much merit in such an approach and the explanation that flows from it, it is insufficient.
First, as many have argued, the backlash of the 1990s was not simply against "illegal" immigrants but, to a large degree, against immigrants in general--especially the nonwhite, non-English speaking and the relatively poor. Moreover, as Andreas shows in a stimulating chapter that compares and contrasts similar developments along the Germany/Poland and Spain/Morocco boundaries, the seeming paradox of "a borderless economy and a barricaded border" is evidenced along boundaries that unite and divide rich and poor in other parts of the world. Given the locales of these developments and their uneven impacts on different social groups, there is need for another type of explanation.
How does one explain the differential treatment of the interests of the rich (enhanced trading opportunities) and those of the poor (those compelled by conditions to migrate and work without authorization)? It is in this area that Grace Chang is of great help. Disposable Domestics offers a refreshingly new perspective on immigration control. Chang's tone is overtly political and more polemical than that of Andreas, but her approach is equally rigorous. Her goal is to make poor immigrant women visible, to humanize them, to highlight their contributions and tribulations, and to show them as actively trying to contest their conditions of subjugation.
Chang argues persuasively that poor immigrant women--largely Third Worlders--have become a central focus of "public scrutiny and media distortion, and the main targets of immigration regulation and labor control" in the United States. To show the continuity between past and present, she provides an overview of the long history of imagery portraying immigrant women as undeserving users of welfare services and hyperfertile breeders of children. In doing so, she makes an invaluable contribution, showing how the regulation of immigration and labor is inextricably tied to matters of gender, as well as to those of class, race and nationality.
The author effectively challenges mainstream assumptions that surround the immigration debate. For example, she argues that studies attempting to measure the costs and benefits of immigration--regardless of their findings or the agendas behind them--ultimately reduce immigrants to commodities or investments. Chang sides with an emerging consensus among immigrant advocates that sees such studies as missing the point, and instead emphasizes the human and worker rights of all immigrants. In this regard, she criticizes immigrant advocates who have fallen into the trap of dividing immigrants between good ("legal") and bad ("illegal").
Chang highlights the folly of this approach in recounting the trials of Zoë Baird, Clinton's first nominee for Attorney General. When it came to light that she employed two undocumented immigrants as domestic servants--a common "crime" among two-career, professional couples--her nomination was sunk. What led to public outrage, according to Chang, was more the "resentment that this practice was so easily accessible to the more privileged classes while other working-class mothers struggled to find any child care," rather than the flouting of the law per se.
Throughout, Chang gives us moving accounts of gross exploitation of immigrant women working as domestics or caretakers, showing that relatively well-off households often look specifically for "illegals" to save money and to facilitate their privileged lives. Indeed, "the advances of many middle-class white women in the workforce have been largely predicated on the exploitation of poor, immigrant women." For Chang, this explains why "the major women's groups were conspicuously silent during Baird's confirmation hearings"--a manifestation of the racial and class privileges their members enjoy.
Recent antiwelfare efforts in the United States, which Chang explores in another provocative chapter, also rely on the exploitation and scapegoating of immigrant women. She compares representations of poor women--native and immigrant--used both in the promotion of welfare "reform" and in efforts to regulate undocumented working women. In both cases, poor women are portrayed as exploiters of the system (to facilitate their hyperfertility) and as criminals--either as welfare cheats or as "illegals." For welfare mothers, the resulting backlash is "workfare"--a program that forces them to work (outside their homes, under the assumption that raising children is neither work nor a benefit to society), but not for a wage. They work for their welfare benefits instead, a remuneration usually far below what they would earn as employees. Meanwhile, government officials, corporate spokespersons and household employers mask their exploitation of low-wage employees as beneficence, purportedly providing them with opportunities, training and preparation, and the ability to assimilate into respectable society.
The war on the poor (welfare reform) and that against unauthorized immigrants are also sometimes functionally tied. Virginia's state office of social services, for example, cooperated with the INS to open up jobs held by "illegals" for workfare participants. This, along with INS raids of workplaces in the midst of unionization drives, according to Chang, is a growing trend. It is far from clear, however--at least on the basis of the anecdotal evidence Chang presents--that such events indicate a long-term, upward trend. Indeed, while anti-union employers have long used the INS to undermine immigrant-worker organizing, with a number of especially outrageous incidents taking place in the late 1990s, those appear to have diminished over the last couple of years, apparently due to the outcry from union, immigration and human rights activists. In part, the discrepancy reflects the fact that Chang wrote the book--more a collection of essays stitched together--over several years, with some of the chapters having appeared in previous publications.
Chang tends to see the factors that create and drive immigration and the mistreatment of low-wage immigrant workers as derivative of an overarching economic logic and a resulting set of intentional, goal-oriented practices. Thus, the workfare/INS-raid nexus illustrates the "true function" of the INS: "to regulate the movement, availability, and independence of migrant labor." More generally, immigration "is carefully orchestrated--that is, desired, planned, compelled, managed, accelerated, slowed and periodically stopped--by the direct actions of US interests, including the government as state and as employer, private employers, and corporations." United States elites keep Mexico and other countries in "debt bondage" so that they "must surrender their citizens, especially women, as migrant laborers to First World nations." And the purpose of California's Proposition 187, which would have eliminated public health, education and social services for unauthorized immigrants, is "perhaps" to mold immigrant children into a "category entirely of super-exploitable workers--those with no access to language or other skills and, most of all, no access to a status even remotely resembling citizenship that might allow them the safety to organize."
Such contentions imply a level of unity within the state and coherency in thought among economic and political actors (who are seemingly one and the same) that simply do not exist. They also downplay the agency of immigrants--who appear to be mere pawns of larger forces--and factors internal to their countries of origin driving immigration. Finally, such economic reductionism is puzzling given Chang's emphasis on race, gender and nationality. It seems at times, however, that she thinks that these are mere tools for highly rational, all-knowing and all-powerful economic elites.
This is why we need to appreciate the autonomous roles of race-, class-, gender- and nation-based ideologies in informing much of the anti-immigrant sentiment--factors that do not always dovetail with the interests of capital. Indeed, those elements are frequently at cross purposes. More than anything, anti-immigrant initiatives over the past thirty years have been the work of opportunistic and/or entrepreneurial elected officials, state bureaucrats and the cultural right--often small grassroots organizations and right-wing think tanks--rather than the business sector. Historically, capital has been generally pro-immigration. As the New York Journal of Commerce gushed in 1892, "Men, like cows, are expensive to raise and a gift of either should be gladly received. And a man can be put to more valuable use than a cow." Today, the Wall Street Journal advocates the elimination of border controls for labor. While this probably does not represent the view of most capitalists, it is significant nonetheless. And in the case of Proposition 187--as Chang reports--California employers, while collectively failing to take a public stand on the measure, generally opposed it for fear that they had much to lose if it passed. That said, the author is undoubtedly right to castigate employers for doing little or nothing to stand up for the rights of immigrants from whose labor, and from whose politically induced marginalization, they profit.
Given the divergent emphases and approaches of Andreas and Chang, very different solutions emerge from their arguments. Andreas criticizes the overemphasis on the supply side of unauthorized immigration and drugs. In terms of immigrants, for example, he observes that among wealthy countries, the United States "imposes the toughest penalties on the smuggling of migrants and related activities yet is among the most lenient with those who employ them." Similarly, he criticizes the scant resources available for enforcing existing workplace rules, which would undermine the ability of employers to exploit unauthorized workers, and he chides Congress for failing to develop a forgery-proof identity card system. (His stand on continued drug policing in the border region is less clear, although he calls for framing the drug problem as one of public health rather than law enforcement.)
Andreas seems resigned to the continued emphasis on border controls, too, despite demonstrating their brilliant failure. As one INS official he quotes explained, "The border is easy money politically. But the interior is a political minefield." Ending the border buildup is also a political minefield--one Andreas seems unwilling to enter. He is decidedly critical of the border status quo and aware of the hardships it causes (a topic to which he gives insufficient attention), but he critiques it on its own terms. In this regard, he does not stray outside the mainstream confines of debate.
A law-enforcement approach to unauthorized immigration is destined to fail. The ties between the United States and Mexico (and increasingly much of Latin America) are too strong, migrants are too resourceful and creative, and Americans are too resistant to the types of police-state measures that would prove necessary, to reduce unsanctioned immigration significantly. A far more effective and humane approach would be to work with progressive sectors of Third World societies to address the breakdown of political, economic and social systems and/or institutionalized injustice that often leads to immigration.
De-emphasizing boundary policing will likely reduce the deaths of unauthorized migrants (almost 600 in the California border region alone since 1994). But increased internal enforcement will create other difficulties, such as increased discrimination against those who do not look "American." It will also cause greater hardships in immigrant households, many of which contain people of different legal statuses. Should the US deport a principal breadwinner (an "illegal") from such a household, for example, leaving behind his or her US citizen children and "legal" spouse to fend for themselves?
Although Andreas argues that "the state has actually structured, conditioned, and even enabled (often unintentionally) clandestine border crossings," he discusses this matter in narrow terms, focusing on how previous "solutions" to the putative problems had an exacerbating effect. Meanwhile, he neglects the role played by the government and US-based economic interests in creating the conditions that fuel immigration. Thus, no issues of moral or political responsibility enter the analysis.
Grace Chang, on the other hand, puts a strong emphasis on the responsibility of the United States in fueling outmigration; it benefits from immigrant women's labor and wreaks havoc in Third World countries through the likes of military interventions and the imposition of structural adjustment programs. For Chang, the question is not one of trying to devise the best policy to control the unauthorized but of bringing about the changes needed to realize the rights of immigrants as workers and as human beings. In making this case, Chang correctly calls upon those of us who benefit from an unjust world order to stand in solidarity with immigrants--especially low-wage, Third World women who enable our privileged lifestyles--in their struggle for social justice at home and abroad.