WhirledView

Buddha and Gaia say, “Buy! Buy! Buy!”

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Copenhagen this month has been the scene of an all too familiar drama, a clash between elites in the meeting hall and activists in the street.  Often the substance of such dramas has to do with international trade.  In this case, it’s global warming—how to slow it down and put off the awful day when the rivers run dry and the oceans take over. Even if meaningful measures can be agreed on in Copenhagen, the likelihood that enough people will be willing to  make the costly changes in lifestyle that might actually decelerate the global warming trend is fairly slim.  The preferred course of action is already evident.  Find any and every excuse to shove the sacrifice onto designated culprits.

Over the years, in fact, even in America, there have been many efforts to jump start a lifestyle with a lighter footprint on the planet. Often they combine ecological science with plain old nature loving and/or various sorts of philosophy/religion/spiritualism.  They gain some ardent devotees, but they generally get diluted or subverted by the dominant culture, which is aggressively materialistic.  Gaia is one such route.  Buddhism is another.

I can’t say I’ve read the short, medium long and miscellaneous sutras from beginning to end, but it’s pretty clear that the absolutely most basic Buddhist idea is to make yourself less miserable by hanging on to less—and by getting a good grip on why you cling to anything or anyone at all, especially since nothing will last.  Nothing.  Well, maybe diamonds really are forever.  But that’ll be pretty cold comfort when global warming’s done its damage.  Meanwhile, nothing that matters—like life, like love—comes with a money back guarantee either.

A related philosophy has to do with taking care of the terrestrial organism by emphasizing sustainability: use less, don’t pollute, recycle what you must use.  It’s based on James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis which posits a homeostatic biosphere, but Gaia is more popular as an earth goddess who will take care of us if we take care of her.

Where are the Steeples of Riyadh?

Patricia Lee Sharpe

The news story that voters, by a bare majority, have banned construction of new minarets  in Switzerland seems to have very strong legs.  Western liberals are appalled at the bigotry.  Muslims generally are taking offense. My first impulse, as one of those liberals, was to produce a satire, which I’ll stand by, but I’d like to pursue the matter more directly here.

Heated Rhetoric

Already the web abounds with vehement postings claiming that Christians are free to build houses of worship in various Muslim countries, with or without steeples, with or without permission to ring bells.  There are equally strident pieces to the contrary.  One thing should be clear. Bigotry in one country does not justify bigotry in return—and yet, religious sentiments and human emotions being what they are, tit-for-tat practices are bound to be advocated.

Most Muslim countries are not nearly so restrictive as Saudi Arabia which forbids the importation of a single  Bible for personal use.  But, in or out of the Muslim world, attitudes toward minorities’ religious rights vary so enormously, information touching on tolerance and intolerance is so anecdotal, practice so often departs from noble constitutional language and rhetoric serves mainly to lob verbal missiles across walls of willful misunderstanding and naked impermeable hostility. 

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Sorting out this mishmash is well nigh impossible, so let’s start from scratch, again.  Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which came into effect on December 10, 1948, contains the following language:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

In many places today, constitutions written in consonance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights notwithstanding, there is in fact no freedom of religion or conscience.  In other places, law and practice hew fairly close to Article 18.  However, even in these very happy countries (from a liberal’s point of view), disputes arise over claims of unequal treatment.  Given the degree to which diverse people migrate from country to country and belief communities hive off into new neighborhoods, it might be wise to call an interfaith, interdenominational conference to define more specifically what those universal rights entail, not only on paper, but in practice.  As we all know, various sorts of red tape can and do frustrate many beautifully written, well meant laws.

Made (and Unmade) in Pakistan—and Elsewhere

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I’ve just seen a very engaging documentary about energetic, enterprising young professionals in Lahore, Pakistan, and for over an hour I felt I was happily back in a milieu it’s been my pleasure and  privilege to be part of.  The film is called Made in Pakistan.  It’s a wonderful reminder that most people in most countries, Pakistan included, are focused on living dynamic, responsible, constructive, even creative lives.   So here they are, two women, two men: Waleed, a young lawyer passionately devoted to the rule of law; Rabia, a young writer and mother struggling to put a savvy  new magazine into the black; Tara, a fashionista and event planner whose go-go-go business is expanding into an all-Pakistan operation; Mohsin, a young politician running the family-business which  happens to center on elections.

Law, politics, journalism, fashion—these are four essential professions that, believe it or not, thrive in urban Pakistan, and Made in Pakistan shows us how four very appealing practitioners manage lives as fascinating and complex as those of their counterparts in New York or London.  Producer Ayesha Khan wants us to understand this, not from grim statistics but by sharing moments with people whose unscripted authenticity is insidiously appealing.  She wanted us to see that there is more to Pakistan than narrow religiosity and violence.  And she has succeeded.

So check it out, when you can.  Made in Pakistan was one of the favorites at the just closed Santa Fe Film Festival.  You’ll see why.

First They Razed the Minarets—

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

 Can you believe it? A bunch of foreign fanatics wants to desecrate our traditional skyline with toothpick towers they call minarets from which they’ll yodel I don't know how many times a day, and we’re supposed to sit by, mum as mice, while Switzerland becomes Switzerlost.  Minarets!  Impaling clouds!  Making a Swiss cheese of the heavens.  No way! No new minarets! As for those built already, down with every one of them!   If these terrorists-in-the-making don’t like it, well! we’ll sic the Swiss Guard on them.  A good Swiss pike can repel any raghead—and aren’t those puffy pants cute?

Wouldn't you know it!  The United Nations is in a snit, as if we were discriminating, not merely asserting our right to be Swiss.  So we’ll have to level the playing ground, it seems.  All steeples and bell towers will also have to go, which may be just as well.  Their upkeep, so to speak, is murder.  What’s sauce for the Muslim goose is sauce for the Christian gander, it seems.  Of course, the carillons and bell ringing are done for, too, which may not be so bad.  We’ll be able to sleep in on Sundays.  Anyhow no one needs bells or calls to prayer, for that matter, in the modern world.  We have watches.  Swiss watches.

Speaking of watches, the clock towers are doomed.  The economic levelers say it’s not fair to put timepieces on a pedestal if you can’t erect Swiss Army knife towers and that won’t do, according to the environmentalists.  A tall, sleek, gleaming blade, evidently, would have a genocidal impact on migrating geese and ganders.  Ditto the scissors and the corkscrew.  I’m tempted to use the tweezers to tweak certain noses, but there we are.

Ah, skyscrapers!  With all other towers razed, they make a grand silhouette against the sky.  But the Jungians are whining about the baleful psychological impact of all those Freudian phallic symbols.  Either we en-womb Basel, Geneva, Zürich and every cow-ridden village geodesically or they’ll be googling explosive formulas from Islamist websites.  Once upon a time—sigh!—we’d have dome-sticated fast.  But the U.S. has declared war on tax evaders, kleptocracy is under attack and the banks can’t mint money in the good old Swiss way. So ker-boom!  It’s cheaper to destroy than to build.

The Obligation to Protect: Is There One?

Patricia Lee Sharpe

An important new doctrine in international law is incubating: the obligation to protect.  I want to approach it by indirection, by looking at the evolution of family law in recent times.  

Most everyone agrees that the “family,” must be respected and protected.  There has been a longstanding, almost universal disinclination to interfere when families are troubled. Up to a point, this delicacy is beneficial.  Family cohesion is important economically, sociologically and psychologically.  But families can also be toxic.

The Sacred Threshold

Not so long ago police in the United States would not intervene in a “domestic dispute.”  A woman could be black and blue and bleeding, but the cops would respect the threshold.  Even today,  when a badly battered female complainant reverses her testimony, the case is generally closed.  “I fell,” the woman says.  It’s clearly a lie, but that’s that.  

For that matter, within living memory, certain American “Christians” have said that a husband may discipline a stubborn unruly wife by beating her.  As for marital rape, the term raised hoots of laughter when first introduced a couple of decades ago.  Marriage, by definition, meant enforceable conjugal rights for husbands. Wives lacked the right to say, “No.”

Laws and Mores Change

But laws and mores have changed.  When men get violent, a more supportive climate of opinion makes it easier for women register a complaint of rape or battery, and makes it harder for the police to look the other way.  What’s more, honor killing, that apex of domestic horror, is no longer sanctioned in the West, although it happens.  Unfortunately it is still widely countenanced in the Muslim world.  In Pakistan, for example, honor killing is usually not registered as a crime by the police.  Even there, however, honor killing is less predictably brushed aside as a “family matter.”

Children, too, are no longer the unconditional property of parents in many parts of the world.  When children are abused or endangered, the state can step in.  And yet the notion of the the sacredness of the family palisade is so strongly ingrained that many children still die, in the U.S., at least, not only because some case workers are negligent, but from misplaced delicacy in administering the law. 

Impermeable No More

Nevertheless, the long centuries of malign neglect, brutalization and murder within the inviolable bounds of the family are drawing to an end.   As the U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said recently,  while promoting his own initiative to eliminate violence against women:  “Our goal is clear; to end these inexcusable crimes – whether it is the use of rape as a weapon of war, domestic violence, sex trafficking, so-called 'honour' crimes or female genital mutilation.”  

Increasingly, in short, if you don’t meet the obligation to protect your own, outsiders may and will.  

Happily, this doctrine is being broadened to challenge the sacredness of national boundaries.  A regime that neglects or brutalizes its people finds it increasingly difficult to enforce a claim of absolute sovereignty.  There is less and less tolerance for granting impunity to regimes that commit genocide and other crimes against humanity within their own borders.  In fact, a new movement is working hard to enshrine the Obligation to Protect in international law.

The Germ of the Doctrine

It’s hard not to believe that germ of this movement springs in some way from the shame and guilt over inaction during and after World War II.  For  many reasons, the Allies did not bestir themselves to stop or limit the Nazi’s slaughter of European Jews.  Foisting Israel on the Arabs of Palestine was, as much as anything, an attempt to assuage a whole civilization’s guilty conscience.  But the guilt festered nevertheless.  

The genocidal ethnic cleansing that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia reawakened that guilty conscience and, to different degrees, stirred the U.S. and Europe to limit the slaughter.  Some of those who were responsible for the mass killings have been tried in the International Criminal Court.  The age of impunity was over.

Then came the genocide in Rwanda, with U.N. troops standing by, watching the killing, obedient to a mandate not to interfere.  So tens of thousands of people died—but not to no purpose, in a way.  Rwanda seems to have been the last straw.  Not only are those responsible for egging on the killers also being tried in the ICC, the question of preventing or curtailing genocide is at last on the table for serious discussion.

The Sovereignty Stumbling Block

Aside from other considerations, in Bosnia and Rwanda—and Sri Lanka, and Myanmar and Zimbabwe and Darfur, a huge impediment to action has been sovereignty.  However horrible a regime’s policies toward a minority of its people, is it ever justifiable for foreign elements to cross the border and meddle in the internal affairs of that country?  Until recently, the answer to that question would have been a simple negative.  But the contrary momentum has been building up and the question has been reformulated: how can mass violations of human rights, anywhere, anytime, be tolerated?

The Responsibility to Protect ("RtoP" or "R2P") is a new international security and human rights norm to address the international community’s failure to prevent and stop genocides, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

To put it another way, every country has an obligation to protect its citizens.  If a country neglects that obligation, then steps of some sort must be available to “help” that country fulfill its responsibilities to its people.

Globalizing Human Rights  

This may be seen by some as an ominous development for the nation state, which is already under siege from many forces more or less beyond its control.  Human-created global warming ignores national borders.  International trade minimizes the importance of national borders.  Modern communications media penetrate national efforts to censure troubling information. 

And now a new human rights doctrine suggests that national borders are not sacred when people are suffering.  It’s important to note that proposed interventions would not be unilateral or whimsical or even merely charitable.  They would have “international” stature and would only be triggered if the horrors and suffering rose to some agreed upon “threshold” indicating that the target country had massively failed to meet its “core protection responsibilities.”  

A good way to learn more about the R2P doctrine, its pros and cons and progress, including the fact that the United Nations General Assembly has now formally taken note of it (UNGA Resolution 308 (2009), is to visit the Responsibility to Protect website.

Indian Embassy Publishes Well-Vetted Text, not Juicy Transcript of PM Manmohan Singh’s CFR Address

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

What a powerful address! I thought. The whole agenda is here.  Boom!  Boom! Boom!  I was watching Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s address to the Council on Foreign Relations via C-Span on Monday night. 

But the question-and-answer period was even more interesting. Perhaps that’s why it was missing from the version I printed out from the Indian Embassy’s website, although the U.S. State Department scrupulously includes such exchanges as well as any prepared presentation when American leaders speak to foreign audiences.  These missing passages were so arresting, in fact, that both American and Indian newspapers quoted them in subsequent new stories.

Fortunately the Council on Foreign Relations provides a full transcript of speaker’s interactions with its audiences on its website.  Here the salient passage:

HAASS: Last question about China. There has been a lot of talk in the literature about the comparison of the Indian and the Chinese approaches to development. A question I had is, why do you believe that India's is preferable, assuming you do, given that China has grown at a higher rate for more years?

SINGH: Well, there is no doubt that the Chinese growth performance is superior to Indian performance. But I've always believed that there are other values which are important than the growth of the gross domestic product. I think the respect for fundamental human rights, the respect for the rule of law, the respect for multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious rights, I think those have values also.

There are several dimensions of human freedom, which are not always (caught ?) by the numbers with regard to the gross domestic product. So I do believe that even though the Indian performance with regard to GDP might not be as good as the Chinese, certainly I would not like to choose the Chinese, but I would prefer to stick to the India part.

Also, I believe India may appear as indecisive democracy at times. And it does, because many democracies are short-term maximizers. They're not able to take a long-term view.

But I have also believed that once a democracy decides on the basis of a wide-ranging consensus, any reforms that are undertaken will be far more durable, will be far more effective than reforms introduced by the writ of a ruling group in a non-democratic setup.

HAASS: Ladies and gentlemen, you've just been treated to an economist saying there's more to life than GDP. (Laughter and applause.) This is an important moment. (Laughs.)

Based on his administration's record of retaining all too many Bush administration anti-terrorism measures, I’ve come to doubt the strength of President Obama’s commitment to civil liberties, but at least he was willing to sign on to some “shared values” in the Joint Statement issued by the two leaders, who  

noted that the shared values cherished by their peoples and espoused by their founders – democracy, pluralism, tolerance, openness, and respect for fundamental freedoms and human rights – are acquiring an increasingly greater prominence in building a more peaceful, prosperous, inclusive, secure and sustainable world. These values are exemplified by the vibrant linkages between their peoples, which are a unique asset for both countries, and are reflected in the role played by the Indian-American community.

Otherwise, during this five day state visit, it was Manmohun Singh who kept hammering away at the democratic principles that should make for a close and enduring relationship between the U.S. and India.  During the Welcome Ceremony, he said:

India and American are separated by distance, but bound together by the values of democracy, pluralism, rule of law and respect for fundamental human freedoms.

Toasting at the State Dinner, he said:

Mr. President, your journey to the White House has captured the imagination of millions and millions of people in India.  You are an inspiration to all those who cherish the values of democracy, diversity and equal opportunity.

No doubt these bits are digs at China as well as a way of reminding the American president that India really is a more compatible partner. Either way, keep it up, Mr. Prime Minister. American leaders these days tend to forget what America is/was/should be about.

The Borderline Blues

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Walls are always porous in one way or another, yet people keep building them because boundaries are frightening places where various sorts of intellectual and physical miscegenation occur.

The space between armies or warring states is traditionally a no man’s land, a place that’s safe for no one.  As one set of laws and customs meets another, a gap occurs where no writ applies, especially if that boundary coincides with mountains or jungles or pirate-ridden oceans or vast deserts, all of which have always symbolized the unbounded—the savage, the fantastic, the unowned, the undisciplined.  Walled or not, legal or not, borders are essentially arbitrary.  They break down.  They become bones of contention.  They make news.

Borders have been much in the news this week.  The Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago.  That erasure of ideological boundaries was celebrated this week.  Meanwhile, India and China were at odds over the Dali Lama’s visit to Tawang because the two countries cannot agree on where their Eastern boundary runs. Here at home, the U.S. Supreme Court has to decide whether there is an inviolable line to be drawn between adulthood and adolescence when it comes to punishment for violent crime.  Many of the issues in play during the current period of economic recovery have to do with the boundaries between government and private enterprise in our economic lives. The American doctrine of the separation of church and state is also a border issue—as is the application of Sharia Law.  

Dragons and Diplomacy

So far as China is concerned, the dragon has been breathing heavily, in hopes of controlling people and events far from its physical borders.   The Frankfurt Book Fair erupted in controversy when China attempted to dictate which writers of Chinese origin could be featured during the Fair.   Because of its intense concern about its internal boundaries, China breathes heavily on countries that allow Uighur nationalists to speak more freely outside China than they may within Chinese borders; ditto for Tibetans.    As I wrote last week, China’s baleful influence even reached into the White House, preventing President Obama from meeting with the  Dali Lama.  Sanctions and financial manipulations are other ways to achieve, more or less subtly or successfully, cross border influence.

Thus, there are so many ways in which countries attempt to control events beyond their  formal boundaries.  War is one.  The threat of war is almost as effective.  Diplomacy is another way to achieve influence across borders, as is its hand-maiden public diplomacy, which characteristically attempts to distinguish itself from propaganda. The latter is no small debate.  It concerns the borders to be respected when attempting to influence.  At one end of the spectrum is rational persuasion through information and facts; at the other end is emotional manipulation—or worse.  At what point does legitimate persuasion turn into fraud, deceit, duplicity, conning?  All of the latter are usually considered to be immoral and/or illegal, however effective they may be in achieving the manipulator’s ends.  And how about this one—when does psychological pressure or physical discomfort turn into torture?  In domestic politics, a related boundary question is this: when does an inspiring speech turn into demagoguery?  Indeed, much of the debate over health care reform has crossed the border from informed debate to scare-mongering.

Thoughts on South Africa, Zimbabwe, Israel and Palestine

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I was mostly on retreat last week, which is why I wasn’t posting, but only as a commuter, so I was able to sneak a look at two PBS programs that turned out to be entirely consistent with what I was doing during the daytime.  I saw the Masterpiece Contemporary presentation of Endgame, an utterly compelling docu-drama about the secret negotiations that preceded the  official negotiations for the end of apartheid in South Africa and a Bill Moyers interview with South African jurist Richard Goldstone, who led the UN commission of inquiry into human rights abuses by Israel and by Hamas last year.  These are the thoughts that emerged.   They begin with Zimbabwe.... 

Banes of Zimbabwe

Robert Mugabe, I suspect, calculated that a power-sharing agreement with Morgan Tsvangirai would placate the West and bring in the big bucks he needs to provide food and rudimentary survival services to a population he has ravaged and terrorized.  Dutifully, his new prime minister set out on a begging trip, hoping to convince prospective donors that the shotgun marriage was cozy and legit.  When the would-be saviors, U.S. and European, saw through the ruse and refused to cough up enough to suit the white-baiting octogenarian president, Mugabe seems to have lost interest in the PR value of minimal cooperation with Tsvangirai, who is now more or less on strike.  So Mugabe has resumed his well-honed harangue: all of Zimbabwe’s current miseries can be traced to colonialism, even if Zimbabwe was in terrific economic shape when the British left in 1980.

Meanwhile, starving, sick, miserable and thoroughly desperate refugees finally began streaming into South Africa from neighboring Zimbabwe.  The result: murderous local mobs pushing back from South African townships whose residents have not prospered as they had hoped in the years since apartheid gave way to majority rule.  Their cry: how can we share when we have so little?  Although South African police managed to quell the worst of the violence, South Africa has continued its policy of not seriously pressuring Mugabe to reverse course or to resign, despite urging by the U.S. and others.  African nations, for obvious reasons, are very touchy about sovereignty. 

The good news is that South Africa itself has not been destabilized by spillover from disarray next door.  Nor has the post-Mandela leadership adopted the poisonous anti-White propaganda and policies of the Mugabe regime.  Whites continue to be a relatively prosperous minority in South Africa where they have a significant presence in urban and rural economies.  Whites also continue to be personally safe, as far as anyone is safe in South Africa’s crime-ridden cities.  This accord didn’t happen by chance.  Unlike Zimbabwe, where Mugabe is the black mirror image of the implacable white racist Ian Smith, South Africa has produced some remarkable leaders, men who saw that retribution, deserved or not, was no way to achieve stability and prosperity in a post-apartheid country.

South African Treasures

South Africa was blessed with Nelson Mandela, who became the reincarnated country’s first president, with Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu who served as conscience for the reborn country, and with a Boer realist  F.W. de Klerk who knew when the game of white monoply on power was over.  South Africa was also blessed with a nationalist party whose millitant wing  was willing to lay down arms without preconditions and let the party leaders join in the process of writing a new constitution.   Long jailed lawyer and African National Congress leader  Nelson Mandela would have as Vice Presidents ANC activist Tabo Mbeki, who would succeed Mandela as president, and—yes!—that very same F.W. de Klerk.  Finally, instead of setting up a war crimes court, the new government chose to conduct a truth and reconciliation process: tell the world exactly what you did, however horrible, and you’ll be free to build a new South Africa with us. 

Confessing is hard.  Letting go of vengeance is equally hard.  By and large, the process seems to have worked. The new South Africa was made possible by realism and idealism, by mediation, negotiation and diplomacy, plus a willingness to live and work together and a disposition to try and trust one another.  The economics, however, have been a little disappointing. South Africa may be the most prosperous sub-Saharan country, but not all share equally in that GNP.  Some Blacks have become very very rich.  Others are hardly better off than they were under the Boers, which makes for anger.