A couple of years ago Americans were in an uproar about eminent domain. In the state of Connecticut a town had taken (forcibly bought) residences from citizens in order to sell them to a project developer. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that is okay. More typically eminent domain is used to take private land for something like a new road, so it becomes public property. In the U.S. Constitution the power of eminent domain, and the requirement of paying compensation, is recognized in the Fifth Amendment: "nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation." [See also eminent domain at Wikipedia and eminent domain at ExpertLaw.]
Arguments about, and discontent with, eminent domain in the U.S. are more typically about the amount of compensation given for the land the government takes.
Most Americans are big believers in private property. Eminent domain seems to be the exception that proves the rule. We are usually okay with losing our homes to eminent domain when we can walk away with the cash to buy an equivalent or better property. We would be totally up in arms if the government just took our houses without paying for them, whether or not the government kept the property or handed it over to some corporation for development. But we understand that sometimes a road has to be built, and a straight line of a road usually makes a lot of sense.
Most Americans would also agree that everyone in the world should have private property rights, that they are one of the most important human rights. If someone has freedom of speech, but can have their land or personal possessions taken away by government whim, what do they really have?
But there is one big loophole in our world view. We don't give a rat's exit hole about the private property of Palestinians. We don't care if the government of Israel took land in Palestine by eminent domain, paid or unpaid.
Before 1946, when Jewish settlers obtained land in Palestine, Zionists obtained land by buying it. This sometimes created an upset because Arab land title holders would sell land that peasants could have sworn was communal land. Still, the British were still in charge and deemed these transfers to be legal.
Then the terror began, but it began as Zionists killing British officials [See Irgun]. After the United Nations (with no authority beyond its own arrogance) decreed that there should be a semi-autonomous Jewish government of part of Palestine, the ethnic cleansing began. In 1948 large numbers of Palestinians were killed or scared off their lands during what became an war to create the state of Israel. When the war was over the new government of Israel allowed only extremely limited numbers of exiled Palestinians to return to their land inside the new state. A variety of subterfuges were used to confiscate the land. The theft was sometimes cloaked with legitimacy by seizing the land in lieu of taxes. Sometimes private sales were faked and duly recorded by the Israel land office. But mostly the land was just declare to belong to the State of Israel, then sold or parceled out to Jewish immigrants.
If you, as an American, are upset by eminent domain, should you not be upset when a government steals land from people, giving no compensation at all?
The takings have gone on and on, decade after decade. Acre by acre the land of Israel has been stolen. Wouldn't you be mad if you owned land and some government, any government, stole it from you?
It would be nice to see one of the zealous private-property rights organizations in the United States take up the cause of the Palestinians. Where's that Hoover Institute, or the Cato Foundation, when they are needed? Oh, all too busy helping corporate lawyers rape and pillage the world. Too busy to demand that the U.S. government recognize the private property rights of Palestinians.
One of the problems, in getting the United States government to support rights for Palestine, has been the leftist orientation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Had they named themselves the Palestinian Private Property Defense Organization, they might have gotten more sympathy in the U.S.
Showing posts with label Palestinian Liberation Organization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Palestinian Liberation Organization. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Monday, June 18, 2007
Democracy, Ethiopia and Palestine
Before I rag on President George Bush, not as an individual but as the head of the ruling class in the United States of America, I want to demonstrate how universal his problem is.
Today's blog is about democracy and U.S. policy in the world, using Algeria, Palestine, Somalia and Ethiopia as examples.
I know quite a few people who define themselves as democracy advocates and specialists in the U.S. They devote substantial parts of their lives to issues like Instant Runoff Voting and the dangers of voting machines that do not produce paper trails. They rail at Bush for what happened in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004.
Yet even many of them have trouble distinguishing between democracy and their getting their way. They tend to believe that if they are in the triumphant majority, democracy is working. But when they are in a minority when the votes have been counted, they suspect foul play. I've seen this scenario played out within the Green Party and in non-profit organizations too many times to count. I admit I have had this reaction myself.
So why be surprised that George Bush and cronies equate democracy with getting their own way? I believe George Bush believes democracy is a good thing. It is the best form of government. It made him president. He'd like to see a democracy in Iraq, in Somalia and Ethiopia and even in Saudi Arabia. The problem is he wants the people of these nations to democratically decide that they agree with him and with U.S. policy objectives, which are usually set by corporate interests. He's been willing to sacrifice democracy to other goals. You might say it is human nature; but it is still wrong.
Today the New York Times had a good, long article: In Ethiopia, Fears and Cries of Army Brutality by Jeffrey Gentleman. Bush has made the Ethiopian government a major ally. It has, by African standards, a strong army and its rulers are Christian. The nation is roughly half Christian, half Islamic, much like Sudan. Its own political opposition, and rebels, tend to be Islamic. It has the form of a democracy, but in fact the government panicked during the buildup to the 2005 elections and suppressed the opposition by, well, killing as many of them as they could.
This same Ethiopian government was asked by the U.S. to invade Somalia (a war crime) to overthrow the Islamic Justice Courts, a popular democratic (if religious) movement that had brought both peace and justice to most of Somalia. Ethiopian troops are still in Somalia.
This week we also saw the final triumph of corruption in the Palestinian Liberation Organization: the PLO has agreed, in return for money to feed their bellies, to be the puppet government of Israel and the United States over the Palestinian people. Again, there was an agreement to try democracy, backed by the U.S. When Hamas proved to be more popular with the Palestinians than U.S.-approved choices, an economic blockade was established. This was a crime against humanity. Now the PLO, which won only a minority of seats in the Palestinian parliament in the last elections, is claiming to be the legitimate government of Palestine.
This pattern of pretending that democratic governments should be appointed by the President of the United States rather than elected by the actual voters of the actual countries involved is not George W. Bush's invention. It has been around for a long time. It included a CIA-sponsored coup against secular socialists in Iran that led, eventually, to the current Islamic regime coming to power. In Algeria when Islamic parties did well in an election in 1992 the military staged a coup to keep them from running the government. Note 1992 is long before the current War of Terror began.
If people subscribe to the Islamic faith always are kicked out of government when they win an election, what will they think of democracy? Why bother with peaceful methods?
Democracy means allowing for change, even when you disagree with the current majority. While the U.S. was founded as a Republic by a small band of mostly slave-owning rich white men, for the most part as the franchise (right to vote) expanded to other groups we have not had a problem with individuals trying to set themselves up as lifelong dictators. The only exception was President-for-Life Franklin D. Roosevelt, and following his grasp at permanent power the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution was passed limiting Presidents to two terms.
I don't expect George W. Bush to try to mess with the 22nd Amendment. He may be replaced by a like-minded person, or he may not.
Democracy, for all its problems, is the least bad form of government. We should support democracy in other nations, but not by interfering in their internal affairs. This means allowing political parties like Hamas to govern when they win elections. And it means withdrawing all aid from countries like Ethiopia that do not respect the election process.
Background on Ethiopia
Background on Somalia
My blogs on Somalia
Background on Palestine
Today's blog is about democracy and U.S. policy in the world, using Algeria, Palestine, Somalia and Ethiopia as examples.
I know quite a few people who define themselves as democracy advocates and specialists in the U.S. They devote substantial parts of their lives to issues like Instant Runoff Voting and the dangers of voting machines that do not produce paper trails. They rail at Bush for what happened in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004.
Yet even many of them have trouble distinguishing between democracy and their getting their way. They tend to believe that if they are in the triumphant majority, democracy is working. But when they are in a minority when the votes have been counted, they suspect foul play. I've seen this scenario played out within the Green Party and in non-profit organizations too many times to count. I admit I have had this reaction myself.
So why be surprised that George Bush and cronies equate democracy with getting their own way? I believe George Bush believes democracy is a good thing. It is the best form of government. It made him president. He'd like to see a democracy in Iraq, in Somalia and Ethiopia and even in Saudi Arabia. The problem is he wants the people of these nations to democratically decide that they agree with him and with U.S. policy objectives, which are usually set by corporate interests. He's been willing to sacrifice democracy to other goals. You might say it is human nature; but it is still wrong.
Today the New York Times had a good, long article: In Ethiopia, Fears and Cries of Army Brutality by Jeffrey Gentleman. Bush has made the Ethiopian government a major ally. It has, by African standards, a strong army and its rulers are Christian. The nation is roughly half Christian, half Islamic, much like Sudan. Its own political opposition, and rebels, tend to be Islamic. It has the form of a democracy, but in fact the government panicked during the buildup to the 2005 elections and suppressed the opposition by, well, killing as many of them as they could.
This same Ethiopian government was asked by the U.S. to invade Somalia (a war crime) to overthrow the Islamic Justice Courts, a popular democratic (if religious) movement that had brought both peace and justice to most of Somalia. Ethiopian troops are still in Somalia.
This week we also saw the final triumph of corruption in the Palestinian Liberation Organization: the PLO has agreed, in return for money to feed their bellies, to be the puppet government of Israel and the United States over the Palestinian people. Again, there was an agreement to try democracy, backed by the U.S. When Hamas proved to be more popular with the Palestinians than U.S.-approved choices, an economic blockade was established. This was a crime against humanity. Now the PLO, which won only a minority of seats in the Palestinian parliament in the last elections, is claiming to be the legitimate government of Palestine.
This pattern of pretending that democratic governments should be appointed by the President of the United States rather than elected by the actual voters of the actual countries involved is not George W. Bush's invention. It has been around for a long time. It included a CIA-sponsored coup against secular socialists in Iran that led, eventually, to the current Islamic regime coming to power. In Algeria when Islamic parties did well in an election in 1992 the military staged a coup to keep them from running the government. Note 1992 is long before the current War of Terror began.
If people subscribe to the Islamic faith always are kicked out of government when they win an election, what will they think of democracy? Why bother with peaceful methods?
Democracy means allowing for change, even when you disagree with the current majority. While the U.S. was founded as a Republic by a small band of mostly slave-owning rich white men, for the most part as the franchise (right to vote) expanded to other groups we have not had a problem with individuals trying to set themselves up as lifelong dictators. The only exception was President-for-Life Franklin D. Roosevelt, and following his grasp at permanent power the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution was passed limiting Presidents to two terms.
I don't expect George W. Bush to try to mess with the 22nd Amendment. He may be replaced by a like-minded person, or he may not.
Democracy, for all its problems, is the least bad form of government. We should support democracy in other nations, but not by interfering in their internal affairs. This means allowing political parties like Hamas to govern when they win elections. And it means withdrawing all aid from countries like Ethiopia that do not respect the election process.
Background on Ethiopia
Background on Somalia
My blogs on Somalia
Background on Palestine
Friday, June 15, 2007
Sad End to a Marxist Experiment in Palestine: The PLO
Today by all reports Hamas has, at least temporarily, eliminated the Palestinian Liberation Organization from power in the Gaza Strip. The PLO still dominates in the West Bank of Palestine and PLO member Mahmoud Abas is still President of the territorial (not national) government, but its dominance is shaky.
The PLO might serve as textbook example of how not to run a national liberation organization. The PLO's record, or course, is mixed by whatever reasonable standards you judge by. Formed in 1964 out of a convention of the Palestinian National Council, the PLO faced a strong Israel with conflicting support from Arab nations. While its ideology was clearly nationalistic, most of its factions were also Marxist, in the socialist-to-communist spectrum. In the mid-1960's and into the 1980's the strength of the Soviet Union and China and the success of Marxist and nationalist wars of national liberation against the U.S. and European empires made the PLO's embracement of Marxism seem rational.
Rather than my repeating more PLO history, please see the Wikipedia article Palestinian Liberation Organization or one of the PLO's own web sites.
The key point is: the PLO engaged in a multi-faceted political and military war to regain Palestine from the Israeli occupation. The did it with very little help from non-Palestinian Arabs. They made enormous sacrifices; many of those who were not killed spent long periods in prisons. They put the plight of the Palestinian people back on the world's agenda. So how did they lose the support of the people in Gaza and the West Bank?
It is only fair to state that failure is always a political problem. With the U.S. supplying and shielding Israel, with the strength the Israeli economy and military, and with little meaningful support from Saudi Arabia, the PLO program of driving off the Israelis had no chance of success. Any organization would have failed given those odds. You can always count on people for blaming the PLO for not doing the impossible; Palestinians, to some extent, blamed the PLO for its failures.
But in other areas the PLO failed when it might have succeeded. They failed to find a way to build an economy. They allowed their leadership structure to become a house of economic corruption. And they failed to provide a workable philosophy for the Palestinians in refuge camps.
Marxism competed quite successfully with the organized, traditional religions between about 1850 and about 1990. It promised pie on a plate rather than pie in the sky. It promised equality for working people and equality for all ethnic groups; it led the world in establishing the equality of women on a large scale. The social-democratic (as opposed to Leninist-dictatorial) style of Marxism is still going strong in some nations. But in the Palestinian towns and refuge camps it began to sound as hollow as Catholicism sounded to many Europeans during the Protestant Reformation in the 1500's.
I did not believe this when I first heard it. I met at political meetings (in Berkeley, of course) two Palestinian students who were Marxists of the Leninist variety. But one day they told me that they were considering switching to supporting an Islamic organization. This was back around 1983. Why would educated, rational people embrace an irrational religion? Because they already knew, way back then, that the PLO was a failure. That its Marxism was a shell; that it had become an organization devoted to fleecing the people rather than leading them to a utopia.
Over the years I have thought back to that conversation many times. I don't care much for organized religion (see my Religion pages). I believe that religious people are just as apt to be hypocritical and corrupt as atheists. But I have observed, in history and in current times, that some times an organization comes together that is not corrupt, and the people in the organization maintain that character for a considerable period of time.
Most of the time most of the people find it easier to put up with corruption than to do something about it. Corrupt organizations usually have the power to punish honest people. But some times situations become so bad that ordinary people will reject corruption and even fight it.
That is what happened in Palestine, and the organization that embodied the purity of spirit necessary to fight corruption just happened to be Islamic. This is not to say that Islam was not founded primarily as a moral and ethical organization; its history clearly shows that it was. But Islam was also corrupted early; for many of its adherents the seizure of booty became its primary attraction even before The Prophet died.
While Hamas's aim of destroying the state of Israel (See Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement) has motivated its most militant members, I suspect that is not the main reason it has such widespread popular support in Gaza.
Nor do I think the PLO lost support because of its godless Marxism. I don't think many Palestinians have either a free-market capitalist or an anarchist critique of Marxist state-socialism. I don't think they hated Yasser Arafat on a personal level.
It is all about honesty versus corruption.
This is an important lesson for all political organizations. Party leaderships that are filled with parasites, as in the Democratic and Republican Parties in the U.S.A., can survive during periods of moral decay and economic prosperity. But new parties can be built based on honesty and justice, and when times are rough these organizations may grow at surprisingly rapid rates.
The PLO might serve as textbook example of how not to run a national liberation organization. The PLO's record, or course, is mixed by whatever reasonable standards you judge by. Formed in 1964 out of a convention of the Palestinian National Council, the PLO faced a strong Israel with conflicting support from Arab nations. While its ideology was clearly nationalistic, most of its factions were also Marxist, in the socialist-to-communist spectrum. In the mid-1960's and into the 1980's the strength of the Soviet Union and China and the success of Marxist and nationalist wars of national liberation against the U.S. and European empires made the PLO's embracement of Marxism seem rational.
Rather than my repeating more PLO history, please see the Wikipedia article Palestinian Liberation Organization or one of the PLO's own web sites.
The key point is: the PLO engaged in a multi-faceted political and military war to regain Palestine from the Israeli occupation. The did it with very little help from non-Palestinian Arabs. They made enormous sacrifices; many of those who were not killed spent long periods in prisons. They put the plight of the Palestinian people back on the world's agenda. So how did they lose the support of the people in Gaza and the West Bank?
It is only fair to state that failure is always a political problem. With the U.S. supplying and shielding Israel, with the strength the Israeli economy and military, and with little meaningful support from Saudi Arabia, the PLO program of driving off the Israelis had no chance of success. Any organization would have failed given those odds. You can always count on people for blaming the PLO for not doing the impossible; Palestinians, to some extent, blamed the PLO for its failures.
But in other areas the PLO failed when it might have succeeded. They failed to find a way to build an economy. They allowed their leadership structure to become a house of economic corruption. And they failed to provide a workable philosophy for the Palestinians in refuge camps.
Marxism competed quite successfully with the organized, traditional religions between about 1850 and about 1990. It promised pie on a plate rather than pie in the sky. It promised equality for working people and equality for all ethnic groups; it led the world in establishing the equality of women on a large scale. The social-democratic (as opposed to Leninist-dictatorial) style of Marxism is still going strong in some nations. But in the Palestinian towns and refuge camps it began to sound as hollow as Catholicism sounded to many Europeans during the Protestant Reformation in the 1500's.
I did not believe this when I first heard it. I met at political meetings (in Berkeley, of course) two Palestinian students who were Marxists of the Leninist variety. But one day they told me that they were considering switching to supporting an Islamic organization. This was back around 1983. Why would educated, rational people embrace an irrational religion? Because they already knew, way back then, that the PLO was a failure. That its Marxism was a shell; that it had become an organization devoted to fleecing the people rather than leading them to a utopia.
Over the years I have thought back to that conversation many times. I don't care much for organized religion (see my Religion pages). I believe that religious people are just as apt to be hypocritical and corrupt as atheists. But I have observed, in history and in current times, that some times an organization comes together that is not corrupt, and the people in the organization maintain that character for a considerable period of time.
Most of the time most of the people find it easier to put up with corruption than to do something about it. Corrupt organizations usually have the power to punish honest people. But some times situations become so bad that ordinary people will reject corruption and even fight it.
That is what happened in Palestine, and the organization that embodied the purity of spirit necessary to fight corruption just happened to be Islamic. This is not to say that Islam was not founded primarily as a moral and ethical organization; its history clearly shows that it was. But Islam was also corrupted early; for many of its adherents the seizure of booty became its primary attraction even before The Prophet died.
While Hamas's aim of destroying the state of Israel (See Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement) has motivated its most militant members, I suspect that is not the main reason it has such widespread popular support in Gaza.
Nor do I think the PLO lost support because of its godless Marxism. I don't think many Palestinians have either a free-market capitalist or an anarchist critique of Marxist state-socialism. I don't think they hated Yasser Arafat on a personal level.
It is all about honesty versus corruption.
This is an important lesson for all political organizations. Party leaderships that are filled with parasites, as in the Democratic and Republican Parties in the U.S.A., can survive during periods of moral decay and economic prosperity. But new parties can be built based on honesty and justice, and when times are rough these organizations may grow at surprisingly rapid rates.
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