 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||
 |
||||
 |
||||
 |
||||
 |
||||
 |
||||
 |
||||
 |
||||
 |
||||
 |
||||
 |
||||
 |
||||
|
|
||||
|
||||
| Off The Shelves Reviewed by Bookstaff January 2004 POLITICS A Legacy of Torture, by Christian Parenti  Victoria Stanford, Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)One of the most truly horrific wars of the past century was the often-overlooked genocidal campaign waged by the Guatemala state against the indigenous Mayan people of that country’s central highlands. Technically, the government was putting down a guerilla insurgency that lasted from the mid 1960s until the late 1990s, but in reality it was a war of cultural and physical annihilation against Guatemalan Indians as a group, regardless of the their connection or lack of connection to the rebels. Much has been written on this topic but no book yet approaches the thoroughness and raw impact of Victoria Stanford’s new title Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala. Based on Stanford’s fieldwork as a forensic anthropologist helping to excavate mass graves and interview the survivors of military massacres, the book tells a heartbreaking and sickening tale of unbridled human cruelty. During the war there were 625 documented massacres, 440 villages erased from the map, and over 150,000 people killed. And by all credible accounts the vast majority of the violence, more than 90 percent, was perpetrated by the Guatemalan military, an institution that was during the worst years was backed by the US, and led by officers who had trained at the School of the Americans in Fort Benning, Georgia. Most of the massacres occurred in the early eighties. The army’s logic was "drain the sea to catch the fish." If a sizeable minority of Mayans had joined or supported the guerillas the solution was to eliminate the Indians. So the military simply laid waste to huge swaths of countryside in an almost medieval orgy of torture, looting and murder. This history is recounted but so to are the lingering cultural and psychological wounds of the war. Stanford dissects six stages in what she calls the "phenomenology of terror." These stages run from military massacres and torture, to civilian flight and survival in the jungle, to capture and re-education by the military and end with a permanently militarized culture corrupted by constant fear and sadness. The most harrowing part of Stanford’s book is the way in which the Guatemalan army successfully turned Mayan villagers against one another. Torture usually involved mass rape, beatings, burning, and mutilation but the army also forced the Mayan farmers to beat, cut and otherwise hurt each other. A survivor recounted to Stanford how in his village one group of men was forced to jump up and down on another group that was made up of there of their friends and family. This logic of community division was institutionalized in the form of the Civil Patrols— military established militias in which Mayan men were lightly armed with carbines and forced to participate in massacres against their neighbors. The Patrollers also tortured, raped and executed suspected guerilla sympathizers. Tragically, some patrollers took to their tasks with alacrity and in emulation of their military oppressors embraced the raping, looting and killing. According to Stanford some of the richest peasants in the highlands today are those who stole their neighbors’ cattle during the war. In laying bare the reality of the Guatemalan war, Stanford also takes to task some of the military’s more egregious apologists. In particular she blasts anthropologist David Stoll, who made a name for himself by arguing that the guerillas provoked the army and that the Civil Patrols were in fact antonymous Mayan organizations. Never mind that Stoll did much of his fieldwork under the watchful eye of the military, interviewing people from a military re-education camp; Stanford unpacks the more important factual inaccuracies in Stoll’s work. For example he dismisses the close links between the US and Guatemalan militaries during the sixties and seventies; Stanford documents them. Stanford also notes that the guerillas also committed war though on a miniature scale when compared to the military. As they began to lose the war some rebel’s occasionally used summary execution and intimidation to control civilians upon whom they depended for survival. Stanford’s book is an important piece of modern Latin American history and anthropology, but its scope goes beyond any academic discipline. Ultimately, Buried Secrets is an investigation into the lived experience of war, state power, and racism in their most terrible forms. POLITICS Nothing to Fear, but… by Kristian Williams  Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World (Copernicus Books, 2003)Bruce Schneier’s book Beyond Fear serves as a citizen’s guide to security. Rather than obsessing about the dangers of the post-9/11 world, or cheering about the wonders of computer encryption programs like PGP, Schneier explains how to think about security— how to assess risks, detect vulnerabilities, and take reasonable precautions. Without scare-mongering and salesmanship, the principles of security stand out clearly. And once one grasps the principles, the applications are broad— from gauging the reasonableness of the Patriot Act to protecting yourself from theft, from guarding business secrets to thinking strategically about social change. Schneier, it seems, doesn’t just want to demystify security, he wants to democratize it. He wants an informed populace that can weigh the pros and cons of policy options, and he wants an organized rabble that can set its own agenda and see it influence what actually happens. First he gives us the bad news: "The security of the money in your bank account, the crime rate in your neighborhood, and the honesty and integrity of your police department are out of your direct control. You simply don’t have enough power in the negotiations to make a difference." And then, the good: "But there’s a paradox. We’re not only individuals; we’re also consumers, citizens, taxpayers, voters, and— if things get bad enough— protesters and sometimes even angry mobs. Only in the aggregate do we have power, and the more we organize, the more power we have." This may not be what we expect from a man who works as a consultant for the Defense Department and Fortune 500 companies, but insiders tend to know what works and what doesn’t. Schneier specifically takes a hard look at the government’s response to the September 11th attacks, with step-by-step analyses of the current trends— official secrecy, military campaigns, the Terrorist Information Awareness network, the USA PATRIOT Act, the Computer-Assisted Passenger Profiling System, ID checks at airports, color-coded alerts, and the Department of Homeland Security. For the most part, he finds these efforts ridiculous: "When you examine the details, only two effective antiterrorism countermeasures were taken in the wake of 9/11: strengthening cockpit doors and passengers learning they need to fight back. Everything else— let me repeat that: everything else— was only minimally effective, at best, and not worth the trade-offs." Schneier makes the point, clearly and forcefully, that security always requires trade-offs— but he also notes that those trade-offs don’t have to include liberty and privacy. Put another way, rights can be seen as security measures. Of the USA PATRIOT Act and other measures that "give the government broader powers of surveillance and spying," Schneier writes: The problem with giving powers like this to the state is that they are far more likely to be used for the benefit of those in power than to protect citizens, and the reason the U.S. Constitution and the court system have put limits on police power is that these limits make all citizens more secure. We’re more secure as a society because the police have limited powers. It follows, then, that removing the restrictions on police power makes us less secure overall. Perhaps (but only perhaps) we are now somewhat safer from bin Laden and his minions, but we are more vulnerable to other kinds of attacks— including attacks from our own government. Meanwhile, overseas, American military action may also be creating more problems than it’s solving. Schneier writes: "If sending troops into this or that country to kill some Muslim extremists fans the flames of anti-Americanism throughout the Muslim world and creates even more terrorists in the process, then it’s not worth it." But perhaps the emphasis on terrorism is wrong to begin with. Schneier offers some numbers: In 2001, 3,029 people in the U.S. died in terrorist attacks; 3,433 died from malnutrition; 41,967 died in car accidents; 71,252 from diabetes; and 156,005 from lung cancer. Judging from the actual damage they’ve done, we have more to fear from Philip Morris and General Motors than from al Qaeda. Schneier asks us to "Consider what we’re willing to spend per year to cure diabetes or increase automobile safety, and compare that with the $34 billion [and more] we’re spending to combat terrorism. The response to the terrorism threat has not been commensurate with the risk." Beyond Fear is clearly written, engaging, and sometimes even humorous— but its real virtue lies in Bruce Schneier’s refusal to surrender rational thought to either fear or complacency. Schneier reveals how much of the debate about security is colored by panic, paranoia, and government opportunism, and by way of initial remedy, he administers a heavy dose of critical thinking. Kristian Williams is a member of Rose City Copwatch, in Portland, Oregon, and the author of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America (due out from Soft Skull in 2004). POLITICS A Game of Risk, by John Reed  Lutz Kleveman, The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia (Grove Atlantic, 2003)What’s the next hotspot? Where will it be? A remote country in the Middle East? In Central Asia? What war will drive the journalists of the world to uncover the story? Will it be the diamond mines in Africa? Will it be simple starvation, somewhere else? Where will suffering suddenly erupt, disturbing the placid waters of the New World Order? Perhaps the silliest of assumptions in the present-day media is the notion of "the story." There is the idea that unhappiness and conflict represents a sort of brushfire in the landscape of the world— one that the world’s firemen, whether they be U.N. peacekeepers, or U.S. troops, or television pundits, will rush in with their trusty hoses to quell. But the fact is, there is a troubled reality to most of the globe, and, as Lutz Kleveman points out in The New Great Game, the angry young men of Al Qaeda make up only a fraction of the rage that threatens all of us. Oil, yes. Kleveman maps out an introduction to the impact of U.S. and international strategies on Central Asia. The area, known in the last century as "the black hole of the Earth," is an increasingly vital interest to those nations which make up the four percent of the global population but that consume twenty-five percent of global energy. Massive untapped oil reserves in the area of the Caspian Sea make the region a constant focus of international coercion and interference. Kleveman projects that "by 2015 the Caspian region could reach a share of five to eight percent of the world market." The final result of this apparent wealth in oil is a bevy of damaged states in the area of the Caucasus and Central Asia. Kleveman, touring the region, documents nations that range in aspect from the oppressive legacy of Stalin in Georgia, to the often surreal megalomania of the Turkmenistan president, Sapamurat Nyazov. In a creepily entertaining chapter called "Stalin’s Disneyland: Turkmenistan," he describes the small nation in detail: Appointed life-long dictator by a rubber-stamp parliament, Nyazov is convinced of his own divinity, and has reinvented his country as a gigantic theme park, with the only theme being himself. Almost every street corner in the capital has multiple portraits of the sixty-year-old stocky man with a soft and somewhat simple face. On some he looks like Burt Reynolds, on others like a genetic blend of Leonid Brezhnev and the German politician Franz-Joseph Strauss. All public buildings were decorated with banners proclaiming the state slogan Halk, Watan, Turkmenbashi (‘One People, One Fatherland, One Leader’). Kleveman brings lucid witness to these incomprehensible realities. Flowing easily from the big picture to the small, The New Great Game dimensionalizes peoples and crises that have often exceeded the reach of popular consciousness. |
 |
Out now: |
| Archives>> |
|
The Rail invites you to a reading with Jason Flores-Williams and Brian Carreira, along with musical guest Steve Strunsky of the Lonesome Prairie Dogs. Thurs., Sept. 22, 8:30 p.m. Vox Pop--Flatbush, Brooklyn www.voxpop.net |
|
OFF THE RAIL FALL 2005 at the Central Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library - Grand Army Plaza |
|
The Independent Press Association-NY recently honored The Brooklyn Rail with the following awards: |