WORM'S EYE

More of Sunni vs. Shiite here:

Op-Ed Contributor: Iraq’s Real Holy War

March 6, 2004By Vali NasrNew York Times

MONTEREY, Calif. - The first celebration of the Muslim holiday Ashura since the fall of Baghdad has been particularly bloody for Shiites - and ominous for American foreign policy. Some 140 Iranian and Iraqi Shiite pilgrims died in suicide bombings in Baghdad and Karbala this week, and 43 Pakistani Shiites were killed in Quetta, Pakistan.

The attacks brings to light a grave problem facing America: the Shiite revival in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein has reinvigorated a Sunni militancy that in turn threatens peace and stability in a broad swath of Asia from Pakistan to Lebanon.

American authorities may well be correct that the bombings were the work of the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Al Qaeda operatives who see sectarian violence as the means to subvert American plans for the country. However, it would be a mistake to view the anti-Shiite violence in Iraq as the work of a small group of terrorists and limited to Iraqi politics.

Anti-Shiism is embedded in the ideology of Sunni militancy that has risen to prominence across the region in the last decade. Wahhabi Sunnis, who dominate Saudi Arabia's religious affairs and export their philosophy to its neighbors, have led the charge, declaring Shiites "infidels" and hence justifying their murder. (The legacy of Wahhabi violence against Shiites dates back to at least 1801, when Wahhabi armies from the Arabian Peninsula invaded southern Iraq and desecrated the holy shrine at Karbala.)

These anti-Shiite beliefs have spread to South Asia and Afghanistan, where the Taliban government used them to justify massacres of Shiite civilians. Even with the fall of the Taliban, widespread killings of Shiites and bombings of Shiite mosques and community centers in both Afghanistan and Pakistan have continued.

Many of the Sunni militants responsible for the attacks were trained in the same camps in Afghanistan as the Qaeda fighters and the Taliban soldiers. They fought side by side when the Taliban secured its grip on Afghanistan, notably the captures of Mazar-i-Sharif and Bamiyan in 1998, during which at least 2,000 Shiite civilians were murdered. And Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted of planning the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, is also a prime suspect in the bombing of the Shiite shrine of Mashad in Iran in 1994.

The point here is that the forces that are today killing Shiites in Iraq have their roots all over the region. It is a network of Arabs and non-Arabs, South Asians and Middle Easterners, Wahhabis and non-Wahhabis. And if these men succeed in starting a sectarian civil war, it will quickly spread beyond Iraq's borders.

While Shiites make up only 10 percent to 15 percent of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, 120 million of them live in the Middle East. They are the majority populations in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Iran and Iraq, the largest community in Lebanon, and sizable minorities in various Persian Gulf emirates, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

The American-led invasion of Iraq has produced a Shiite cultural revival there that is shifting the balance of power between Shiites and Sunnis. Political events have further angered Sunnis outside Iraq - especially the creation of the Shiite-dominated Iraqi Governing Council and the virtual veto power over it exercised by the Shiites' religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

It is virtually unthinkable to many Sunnis that one of the most important Arab countries - the seat of the Abbasid Empire from the 8th to 13th centuries, which established Sunni supremacy and brutally suppressed Shiites - would pass from Sunni to Shiite domination. In militant Sunni circles, it is taken as proof of an American conspiracy against them and against Islam as a whole. Thus Sunni militancy is not only inherently anti-Shiite, but anti-American as well.

What the United States is facing in Iraq is not just a Qaeda operation against American control, but the vanguard of a broad movement. It is based on the premise that violence against Shiites will not only derail Iraq's transition to democracy, but will also incite Shiite-Sunni violence throughout the Muslim world.

To contend with Sunni militancy in Iraq, America must contain it throughout the Middle East and South Asia. Among other things, this means putting pressure on countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to stem the tide of anti-Shiite rhetoric in their mosques and media. It also means insuring that Iraqi Sunnis do not feel left out of the emerging democratic Iraq, and working with Ayatollah Sistani to quell Shiite rage over the attacks. What happened in Karbala must not become a sign of things to come for the whole region.

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Vali Nasr is a professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005 /09/19/muslims_and_the_holocaust/ Muslims and the Holocaust By Cathy Young | September 19, 2005 RECENTLY IN England, four Muslim-staffed committees appointed to advise Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Cabinet on issues related to Islam have come up with a recommendation: Get rid of an official event viewed as offensive to Muslims. What event would that be? A celebration of the Crusades, perhaps? No, Holocaust Memorial Day. In the words of one committee member, ''The very name Holocaust Memorial Day sounds too exclusive to many young Muslims. It sends out the wrong signals: that the lives of one people are to be remembered more than others." That ''one people," of course, are the Jews. The committees aren't exactly proposing that the Holocaust commemoration be scrapped outright. They want it to be folded into a ''Genocide Memorial Day" that will also include such crimes as the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda and the massacres of Bosnian Muslims by the Milosevic regime. Unfortunately, even against the bloody backdrop of the 20th century, there are strong reasons to regard the Nazi extermination of the Jews as a unique atrocity. It was the first, and so far the only time that, as Cornell University historian Stephen Katz put it in his 1994 book ''The Holocaust in Historical Context," that ''a state set out, as a matter of intentional principle and actualized policy, to annihilate physically every man, woman, and child belonging to a specific people." But the problem with the proposal goes far deeper. The other ''genocides" for which they want recognition include the Israeli killings of Palestinians. Clearly, Palestinians have suffered under the occupation. Over 4,000 have been killed since the renewal of violence five years ago. Some of these dead were completely innocent victims; others were fighters, violent protesters, or suicide bombers. (Nearly 1,000 Israelis have died as well.) This death toll is tragic; but to call it ''genocide" is to cheapen the word. Any equation between the Holocaust and Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is absurd. The effect of such a parallel is not to promote ''inclusiveness" -- it is to erase and minimize the tragedy of the Jews as past victims of genocide by slanderously assigning them an equal role as its present-day perpetrators. The committees are formally presenting their proposal (backed by the head of the Muslim Council of Britain) to the government later this week; the Home Office has already reportedly indicated that it does not plan to act on the recommendation. What's frightening, however, is that such a proposal could come from a group of people charged with the task of helping the government combat extremism. Alas, this is not a unique case. The same issue of the London Daily Telegraph that reported the attack on Holocaust Day carried another remarkable story. Ahmad Thomson, deputy chairman of Britain's Association of Muslim Lawyers and occasional adviser to the prime minister, recently claimed that Blair had been pressured into entering the Iraq war by a sinister conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons. In his 1994 book, ''The Next World Order," Thomson (a convert to Islam) claimed that the Holocaust is a ''big lie" and that the presence of US soldiers in Saudi Arabia is especially outrageous because many of them are Jewish. These two stories illustrate an uncomfortable truth: The infection of anti-Jewish bigotry is alarmingly widespread in the Muslim community today, not only in predominantly Muslim and Arab countries -- where the media routinely circulate anti-Semitic libels and conspiracy theories while preachers and editorialists compare Jews to pigs and monkeys -- but in Western democracies as well. Some apologists on the left blame this virulent hatred on the Israeli occupation of the territories. But is it plausible to believe that a state of Israel within its 1948 borders would be less hated by those who believe all of its land rightfully belongs to Muslims? This is not to tar all or most Muslims with the same brush, or to deny that anti-Muslim bias and paranoia exists, too. (In the United States, some right-wing bloggers have been shrieking that the proposed memorial to the victims of 9/11's Flight 93 is shaped like - - horrors! -- a crescent.) Nor is it to say that Islam is inherently intolerant: All religions and ethnic groups have their bigots and haters. For a variety of reasons, the bigotry and hate in Islam are perilously close to the mainstream. Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine. Her column appears regularly in the Globe.

This is not really a new view. 20 years ago, in Sept 1975, Ramparts published an article by the biologist Barry Commoner titled "How Poverty Breeds Overpopulation (and not the other way around)" which was reprinted in the martial law underground publication called AGHAM-BAYAN in its Dec. 1975 issue. Today he has become a controversial scientist after he publsihed a long article in 2002 titled "Unraveling the DNA Myth: The Spurious Foundation of Genetic Engineering". You may want to read that too for a critique of the prevailing opinion on DNA and genetic engineering (google for the text) Re overpopulation as a result of poverty. In the province you will find big families among the farmers because the parents think that by producing their own workers they can miximize their gains from the farm yield by saving on wages of hired labor which are also not always available. Thus, they produce more children. They also prefer sons to daughters to daughters because their thinking is that sons can do more work n the field. You can imagine how many kids they would have if the first 3 or 4 kids are baby girls. Mon ===================== How Poverty Breeds Overpopulation (and not the other way around) by Barry Commoner © Ramparts, Aug/Sept 1975, pp.21-25,58-59. The world population problem is a bewildering mixture of the simple and the complex, the clear and the confused. What is relatively simple and clear is that the population of the world is getting larger, and that this process cannot go on indefinitely because there are, after all, limits to the resources, such as food, that are needed to sustain human life. Like all living things, people have an inherent tendency to multiply geometrically - that is, the more people there are the more people they tend to produce. In contrast, the supply of food rises more slowly, for unlike people it does not increase in proportion to the existing rate of food production. This is, of course, the familiar Malthusian relationship and leads to the conclusion that the population is certain eventually to outgrow the food supply (and other needed resources), leading to famine and mass death unless some other countervailing force intervenes to limit population growth. One can argue about the details, but taken as a general summary of the population problem, the foregoing statement is one which no environmentalist can successfully dispute. When we turn from merely stating the problem to analyzing and attempting to solve it, the issue becomes much more complex. The simple statement that there is a limit to the growth of the human population, imposed on it by the inherent limits of the earth's resources, is a useful but abstract idea. In order to reduce it to the level of reality in which the problem must be solved, what is required is that we find the cause of the discrepancy between population growth and the available resources. Current views on this question are neither simple nor unanimous. One view is that the cause of the population problem is uncontrolled fertility, the countervailing force - the death rate - having been weakened by medical advances. According to this view, given the freedom to do so people will inevitably produce children faster than the goods needed to support them. It follows, then, that the birthrate must be deliberately reduced to the point of "zero population growth." The methods that have been proposed to achieve this kind of direct reduction in birthrate vary considerably. Among the ones advanced in the past are: (a) providing people with effective contraception and access to abortion facilities and with education about the value of using them (i.e., family planning); (b) enforcing legal means to prevent couples from producing more than some standard number of children ("coercion"); (c) withholding of food from the people of starving developing countries which, having failed to limit their birthrate sufficiently, are deemed to be too far gone or too unworthy to be saves (the so-called "lifeboat ethic"). It is appropriate here to illustrate these diverse approaches with examples. The family planning approach is so well known as to need no further exemplification. As to the second of these approaches, one might cite the following description of it by Kingsley Davis, a prominent demographer, which is quoted approvingly in a recent statement by "The Environmental Fund" that is directed against the family planning position: "If people want to control population, it can be done with knowledge already available … For instance, a nation seeking to stabilize its population could shut off immigration and permit each couple a maximum of two children, with possible license for a third. Accidental pregnancies beyond the limit would be interrupted by abortion. If a third child were born without a license, or a fourth, the mother would be sterilized." (Quoted from the Environmental Fund's Statement "Declaration on Population and Food"; original in Daedalus, Fall, 1973). The author of the "lifeboat ethic" is Garrett Hardin, who stated in a recent paper (presented in San Francisco at the 1974 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) that: "So long as nations multiply at different rates, survival requires that we adopt the ethic of the lifeboat. A lifeboat can hold only so many people. There are more than two billion wretched people in the world - ten times as many as in the United States. It is literally beyond our ability to save them all … Both international granaries and lax immigration policies must be rejected if we are to save something for our grandchildren." Actually, this recent statement only cloaks, in the rubric of an "ethic," a more frankly political position taken earlier by Hardin: "Every day we (i.e., Americans) are a smaller minority. We are increasing at only one percent a year; the rest of the world increases twice as fast. By the year 2000, one person in 24 will be an American; in one hundred years only one in 46 … If the world is one great commons, in which all food is shared equally, then we are lost. Those who breed faster will replace the rest … In the absence of breeding control a policy of 'one mouth one meal' ultimately produces one totally miserable world. In a less than perfect world, the allocation of rights based on territory must be defended if a ruinous breeding race is to be avoided. It is unlikely that civilization and dignity can survive everywhere; but better in a few places than in none. Fortunate minorities must act as the trustees of a civilization that is threatened by uninformed good intentions." (Science, Vol. 172, p. 1297; 1971). The Quality of Life But there is another view of population which is much more complex. It is based on the evidence, amassed by demographers, that the birthrate is not only affected by biological factors, such as fertility and contraception, but by equally powerful social factors. Demographers have delineated a complex network of interactions among these social factors. This shows that population growth is not the consequence of a simple arithmetic relationship between birthrate and death rate. Instead, there are circular relationships in which, as in an ecological cycle, every step is connected to several others. Thus, while a reduced death rate does, of course, increase the rate of population growth, it can also have the opposite effect - since families usually respond to a reduced rate of infant mortality by opting for fewer children. This negative feedback modulates the effect of a decreased death rate on population size. Similarly, although a rising population increases the demand on resources and thereby worsens the population problem, it also stimulates economic activity. This, in turn, improves educational levels. As a result the average age at marriage tends to increase, culminating in a reduced birthrate - which mitigates the pressure on resources. In these processes, there is a powerful social force which, paradoxically, both reduces the death rate (and thereby stimulates population growth) and also leads people voluntarily to restrict the production of children (and thereby reduces population growth). That force, simply stated, is the quality of life - a high standard of living, a sense of well being and of security in the future. When and how the two opposite effects of this force are felt differs with the stages in a country's economic development. In a pre-modern society, such as England before the industrial revolution or India before the advent of the English, both death rates and birthrates were high. But they were in balance and population size was stable. Then, as agricultural and industrial production began to increase and living conditions improved, the death rate began to fall. With the birthrate remaining high the population rapidly increased in size. However, later, as living standards continued to improve, the decline in death rate persisted but the birthrate began to decline as well, reducing the rate of population growth. For example, at around 1800, Sweden had a high birthrate (about 33/1000), but since the death rate was equally high, the population was in balance. Then as agriculture and, later, industrial production advanced, the death rate dropped until, by the mid-nineteenth century, it stood at about 20/1000. Since the birthrate remained constant during that period of time, there was a large excess of births over deaths and the population increased rapidly. Then, however, the birthrate began to drop, gradually narrowing the gap until in the mid-twentieth century it reached about 14/1000, when the death rate was about 10/1000. Thus under the influence of a constantly rising standard of living the population moved, with time, from a position of balance at a high death rate to a new position of near-balance at a low death rate. But in between the population increased considerably. This process, the demographic transition, is clearly characteristic of all western countries. In most of them, the birthrate does not begin to fall appreciably until the death rate is reduced below about 20/1000. However, then the drop in birthrate is rapid. A similar transition also appears to be under way in countries like India. Thus in the mid-nineteenth century, India had equally high birth and death rates (about 50/1000) and the population was in approximate balance. Then, as living standards improved, the death rate dropped to its present level of about 15/1000 and the birthrate dropped, at first slowly and recently more rapidly, to its present level of 42/1000. India is at a critical point; now that death rate has reached the turning point of about 20/1000, we can expect the birthrate to fall rapidly - provided that the death rate is further reduced by improved living conditions. One indicator of the quality of life - infant mortality - is especially decisive in this process. And again there is a critical point - a rate of infant mortality below which birthrate begins to drop sharply and, approaching the death rate, creates the conditions for a balanced population. The reason is that couples are interested in the number of surviving children and respond to a low rate of infant mortality by realizing that they no longer need to have more children to replace the ones that die. Birth control is, of course, a necessary adjunct to this process; but it can succeed - barring compulsion - only in the presence of a rising standard of living, which of itself generates the necessary motivation. This process appears to be just as characteristic of developing countries as of developed ones. This can be seen by plotting the present birthrates against the present rates of infant mortality for all available national data. The highest rates of infant mortality are in African countries; they are in the range of 53-175/1000 live births and birthrates are about 27-52/1000. In those countries where infant mortality has improved somewhat (for example, in a number of Latin American and Asian countries) the drop in birthrate is slight (to about 45/1000) until the infant mortality reaches about 80/1000. Then, as infant mortality drops from 80/1000 to about 25/1000 (the figure characteristic of most developed countries), the birthrate drops sharply from 45 to about 15-18/1000. Thus a rate of infant mortality of 80/1000 is a critical turning point which can lead to a very rapid decline in birthrate in response to a further reduction in infant mortality. The latter, in turn, is always very responsive to improved living conditions, especially with respect to nutrition. Consequently, there is a kind of critical standard of living which, if achieved, can lead to a rapid reduction in birthrate and an approach to a balanced population. Thus, in human societies, there is a built-in control on population size. If the standard of living, which initiates the rise in population, continues to increase, the population eventually begins to level off. This self-regulating process begins with a population in balance, but at a high death rate and low standard of living. It then progresses toward a population which is larger, but once more in balance, at a low death rate and a high standard of living. Demographic Parasites The chief reason for the rapid rise in population in developing countries is that this basic condition has not been met. The explanation is a fact about developing countries which is often forgotten - that they were recently, and in the economic sense often still remain, colonies of more developed countries. In the colonial period, western nations introduced improved living conditions (roads, communications, engineering, agricultural and medical services) as part of their campaign to increase the labor force needed to exploit the colony's natural resources. This increase in living standards initiated the first phase of the demographic transition. But most of the resultant wealth did not remain in the colony. As a result, the second (or population-balancing) phase of the demographic transition could not take place. Instead the wealth produced in the colony was largely diverted to the advanced nation - where it helped that country achieve for itself the second phase of the demographic transition. Thus colonialism involves a kind of demographic parasitism. The second, population-balancing phase of the demographic transition in the advanced country is fed by the suppression of that same phase in the colony. It has long been known that the accelerating curve of wealth and power of Western Europe, and later of the United States and Japan, has been heavily based on exploitation of resources taken from the less powerful nations: colonies, whether governed legally, or - as in the case of the U.S. control of certain Latin American countries - by extra-legal and economic means. The result has been a grossly inequitable rate of development among the nations of the world. As the wealth of the exploited nations was diverted to the more powerful ones, their power, and with it their capacity to exploit, increased. The gap between the wealth of nations grew, as the rich were fed by the poor. What is evident from the above considerations is that this process of international exploitation has had another very powerful but unanticipated effect: a rapid growth of the population in the former colonies. An analysis by the demographer, Nathan Keyfitz, leads him to conclude that the growth of industrial capitalism in the western nations in the period 1800-1950 resulted in the development of a one billion excess in the world population, largely in the tropics. Thus the present world population crisis - the rapid growth of population in developing countries (the former colonies) - is the result not so much of policies promulgated by these countries but of a policy, colonial exploitation, forced on them by developed countries. A Village in India Given this background, what can be said about the various alternative methods of achieving a balanced world population? In India, there has been an interesting, if partially inadvertent, comparative test of two of the possible approaches: family planning programs and efforts (also on a family basis), to elevate the living standard. The results of this test show that while the family planning effort itself failed to reduce the birthrate, improved living standards succeeded. In 1954, a Harvard team undertook the first major field study of birth control in India. The population of a number of test villages was provided with contraceptives and suitable educational programs; birthrates, death rates and health status in this population were compared with the comparable values in an equivalent population in control villages. The study covered the six-year period 1954-1960. A follow-up in 1969 showed that the study was a failure. Although in the test population the crude birthrate dropped from 40 per 1,000 in 1957 to 35 per 1,000 in 1968, a similar reduction also occurred in the control population. The birth control effort had no measurable effect on birthrate. We now know why the study failed, thanks to a remarkable book by Mahmood Mamdani (The Myth of Population Control, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1972). He investigated in detail the impact of the study on one of the test villages, Manupur. What Mamdani discovered is a total confirmation of the view that population control in a country like India depends on the economically-motivated desire to limit fertility. Talking with the Manupur villagers he discovered why, despite the study's statistics regarding ready "acceptance" of the offered contraceptives, the birthrate was not affected: "One such 'acceptance' case was Asa Singh, a sometime land laborer who is now a watchman at the village high school. I questioned him as to whether he used the tablets or not: "Certainly I did. You can read it in their books - From 1957 to 1960, I never failed.' Asa Singh, however, had a son who had been born sometime in 'late 1958 or 1959.' At our third meeting I pointed this out to him … Finally he looked at me and responded 'Babuji, someday you'll understand. It is sometimes better to lie. It stops you from hurting people, does no harm, and might even help them.' The next day Asa Singh took me to a friend's house … and I saw small rectangular boxes and bottles, one piled on top of the other, all arranged as a tiny sculpture in a corner of the room. This man had made a sculpture of birth control devices. Asa Singh said: 'Most of us threw the tablets away. But my brother here, he makes use of everything.'" Such stories have been reported before and are often taken to indicate how much "ignorance" has to be overcome before birth control can be effective in countries like India. But Mamdani takes us much further into the problem, by finding out why the villagers preferred not to use the contraceptives. In one interview after another he discovered a simple, decisive fact: that in order to advance their economic condition, to take advantage of the opportunities newly created by the development of independent India, children were essential. Mamdani makes this very explicit: "To begin with, most families have either little or no savings, and they can earn too little to be able to finance the education of any children, even through high school. Another source of income must be found, and the only solution is, as one tailor told me, 'to have enough children so that there are at least three or four sons in the family.' Then each son can finish high school by spending part of the afternoon working … After high school, one son is sent on to college while the others work to save and pay the necessary fees … Once his education is completed, he will use his increased earnings to put his brother through college. He will not marry until the second brother has finished his college education and can carry the burden of educating the third brother … What is of interest is that as the Khanna Study pointed out, it was the rise in the age of marriage - from 17.5 years in 1956 to 20 in 1969 - and not the birth control program that was responsible for the decrease in the birthrate in the village from 40 per 1,000 in 1957 to 35 per 1,000 in 1968. While the birth control program was a failure, the net result of the technological and social change in Manupur was to bring down the birth rate." Here, then, in the simple realities of the village of Manupur are the principles of the demographic transition at work. There is a way to control the rapid growth of populations in developing countries. It is to help them develop - and more rapidly achieve the level of welfare that everywhere in the world is the real motivation for a balanced population. Enough to Go Around Against this success, the proponents of the "lifeboat ethic" would argue that it is too slow, and they would take steps to force developing nations to reduce their birthrate even though the incentive for reduced fertility - the standard of living and its most meaningful index, infant mortality - is still far inferior to the levels which have motivated the demographic transition in the western countries. And where, in their view, it is too late to save a poor, overpopulated country the proponents of this so-called "ethic" would withdraw support (in the manner of the hopelessly wounded in military "triage") and allow it to perish. This argument is based (at least in the realm of logic) on the view, to quote Hardin, that "It is literally beyond our ability to save them all." Hardin's assertion, if not the resulting "ethic," reflects a commonly held view that there is simply insufficient food and other resources in the world to support the present world population at the standard of living required to motivate the demographic transition. It is commonly pointed out, for example, that the U.S. consumes about one-third of the world's resources to support only six percent of the world's population, the inference being that there are simply not enough resources in the world to permit the rest of the world to achieve the standard of living and low birthrate characteristic of the U.S. The fault in this reasoning is readily apparent if one examines the actual relationship between the birthrates and living standards of different countries. The only available comparative measure of standard of living is GNP per capita. Neglecting for a moment the faults inherent in GNP as a measure of the quality of life, a plot of birthrate against GNP per capita is very revealing. The poorest countries (GNP per capita less than $500 per year) have the highest birthrates, 40-50 per 1,000 population per year. When GNP per capita per year exceeds $500 the birthrate drops sharply, reaching about 20/1,000 at $750-$1000. Most of the nations in North America, Oceania, Europe and the USSR have about the same low birthrates - 15-18/1,000 - but their GNP's per capita per year range all the way from Greece ($941 per capita per year; birthrate 17/1,000) through Japan ($1,626 per capita per year; birthrate 18/1,000) to the richest country of all, the U.S. ($4,538 per capita per year; birthrate 18/1,000). What this means is that in order to bring the birthrates of the poor countries down to the low levels characteristic of the rich ones, the poor countries do not need to become as affluent (at least as measured, poorly, by GNP per capita) as the U.S. Achieving a per capita GNP only, let us say, one-fifth of that of the U.S. - $900 per capita per year - these countries could, according to the above relationship, reach birthrates almost as low as that of the European and North American countries. The world average value for birthrate is 34/1,000, which is indicative of the overall rate of growth of the world population (the world average crude death rate is about 13/1,000). However, the world average per capita GNP is about $803 per year - a level of affluence which is characteristic of a number of nations with birthrates of 20/1,000. What this discrepancy tells us is that if the wealth of the world (at least as measured by GNP) were in fact evenly distributed among the people of the world, the entire world population should have a low birthrate - about 20/1,000 - which would approach that characteristic of most European and North American countries (15-18/1,000). Simply stated, the world has enough wealth to support the entire world population at a level that appears to convince most people that they need not have excessive numbers of children. The trouble is that the world's wealth is not evenly distributed, but sharply divided among moderately well-off and rich countries on the one hand and a much larger number of people that are very poor. The poor countries have high birthrates because they are extremely poor, and they are extremely poor because other countries are extremely rich. The Roots of Hunger In a sense the demographic transition is a means of translating the availability of a decent level of resources, especially food, into a voluntary reduction in birthrate. It is a striking fact that the efficiency with which such resources can be converted into a reduced birthrate is much higher in the developing countries than in the advanced ones. Thus an improvement in GNP per capita per year from let us say $682 (as in Uruguay) to $4,538 (U.S.) reduces birthrate from 22/1,000 to 18/1,000. In contrast, according to the above relationships if the GNP per capita per year characteristic of India (about $88) were increased to only about $750, the Indian birthrate should fall from its actual value of about 42/1,000 to about 20/1,000. To put the matter more simply, the per capita cost of bringing the standard of living of poor countries with rapidly growing populations to the level which - based on the behavior of people all over the world - would motivate voluntary reduction of fertility is very small, compared to the per capita wealth of developed countries. Food plays a critical role in these relationships. Hunger is widespread in the world and those who believe that the world's resources are already insufficient to support the world population cite this fact as the most powerful evidence that the world is overpopulated. Conversely, those who are concerned with relieving hunger and preventing future famines often assert that the basic solution to that problem is to control the growth of the world population. Once more it is revealing to examine actual data regarding the incidence of malnutrition. From a detailed study of nutritional levels among various populations in India by Revelle & Frisch (Vol. III, "The World Food Problem," A Report of the President's Science Advisory Committee, Washington, 1967) we learn, for example, that in Madras State more than one-half the population consumes significantly less than the physiologically required number of calories and of protein in their diet. However, the average values for all residents of the state represents 99 percent of the calorie requirement and 98 percent of the protein requirement. What this means, of course, is that a significant part of the population receives more than the required dietary intake. About one-third of the population receives 106 percent of the required calories and 104 percent of the required protein, about 8 percent of the population receives 122 percent or more of the calorie requirement and 117 percent or more of the protein requirement. These dietary differences are determined by income. The more than one-half of the population that is significantly below the physiologically required diet earn less than $21 per capita per year, as compared with the state-wide average of $33.40. What these data indicate is that hunger in Madras State, defined simply in terms of a significantly inadequate intake of calories and protein, is not the result of a biological factor - the inadequate production of food. Rather, in the strict sense, it results from the social factors that govern the distribution of available food among the population. In the last year, newspaper stories of actual famines in various parts of the world have also supported the view that starvation is usually not caused by the insufficient production of food in the world, but by social factors that prevent the required distribution of food. Thus, in Ethiopia many people suffered from starvation because government officials failed to mobilize readily available supplies of foreign grain. In India, according to a recent New York Times report, inadequate food supplies were due in part from a government policy which "resulted in a booming black market, angry resentment among farmers and traders, and a breakdown in supplies." The report asserts further that "The central problem of India - rooted poverty - remains unchecked and seems to be getting worse. For the third year out of four per capita income is expected to drop. Nearly 80 percent of the children are malnourished … The economic torpor seems symptomatic of deeper problems. Cynicism is rampant: the Government's socialist slogans and calls for austerity are mocked in view of bribes and corruption, luxury construction and virtually open illegal contributions by businessmen to the Congress party." (New York Times, Apr. 17, 1974) Given these observations and the overall fact that the amount of food crop produced in the world at present is sufficient to provide an adequate diet to about eight billion people - more than twice the world population - it appears to me that the present, tragically widespread hunger in the world cannot be regarded as evidence that the size of the world population has outrun the world's capacity to produce food. I have already pointed out that we can regard the rapid growth of population in developing countries and the grinding poverty which engenders it as the distant outcome of colonial exploitation - a policy imposed on the antecedents of the developing countries by the more advanced ones. This policy has forcefully determined both the distribution of the world's wealth and of its different populations, accumulating most of the wealth in the western countries and most of the people in the remaining, largely tropical, ones. Thus there is a grave imbalance between the world's wealth and the world's people. But the imbalance is not the supposed disparity between the world's total wealth and total population. Rather, it is due to the gross distributive imbalance among the nations of the world. What the problem calls for, I believe, is a process that now figures strongly in the thinking of the peoples of the Third World: a return of some of the world's wealth to the countries whose resources and peoples have borne so much of the burden of producing it - the developing nations. Wealth Among Nations There is no denying that this proposal would involve exceedingly difficult economic, social and political problems, especially for the rich countries. But the alternative solutions thus far advanced are at least as difficult and socially stressful. A major source of confusion is that these diverse proposed solutions to the population problem, which differ so sharply in their moral postulates and their political effects, appear to have a common base in scientific fact. It is, after all, equally true, scientifically, that the birthrate can be reduced by promulgating contraceptive practices (providing they are used), by elevating living standards, or by withholding food from starving nations. But what I find particularly disturbing is that behind this screen of confusion between scientific fact and political intent there has developed an escalating series of what can be only regarded, in my opinion, as inhumane, abhorrent political schemes put forward in the guise of science. First we had Paddock's "triage" proposal, which would condemn whole nations to death through some species of global "benign neglect." Then we have schemes for coercing people to curtail their fertility by physical and legal means which are ominously left unspecified. Now we are told (for example, in the statement of "The Environmental Fund") that we must curtail rather than extend our efforts to feed the hungry peoples of the world. Where will it end? Is it conceivable that the proponents of coercive population control will be guided by one of Garrett Hardin's earlier, astonishing proposals: "How can we help a foreign country to escape over-population? Clearly the worst thing we can do is send food … Atomic bombs would be kinder. For a few moments the misery would be acute, but it would soon come to an end for most of the people, leaving a very few survivors to suffer thereafter" ("The Immorality of Being Softhearted," Stanford Alumni Almanac, Jan. 1969). There has been a long-standing alliance between psuedo-science and political repression; the Nazis' genetic theories, it will be recalled, were to be tested in the ovens at Dachau. This evil alliance feeds on confusion. The present confusion can be removed by recognizing all of the current population proposals for what they are - not scientific observations but value judgments that reflect sharply differing ethical views and political intentions. The family planning approach, if applied as the exclusive solution to the problem, would put the burden of remedying a fault created by a social and political evil - colonialism - voluntarily on the individual victims of the evil. The so-called "lifeboat ethic" would compound the original evil of colonialism by forcing its victims to forego the humane course toward a balanced population, improvement of living standards, or if they refuse, to abandon them to destruction, or even to thrust them toward it. My own purely personal conclusion is, like all of these, not scientific but political: that the world population crisis, which is the ultimate outcome of the exploitation of poor nations by rich ones, ought to be remedied by returning to the poor countries enough of the wealth taken from them to give their peoples both the reason and the resources voluntarily to limit their own fertility. In sum, I believe that if the root cause of the world population crisis is poverty, then to end it we must abolish poverty. And if the cause of poverty is the grossly unequal distribution of world's wealth, then to end poverty, and with it the population crisis, we must redistribute that wealth, among nations and within them."

Inquirer News Service

Updated 10:53pm (Mla time) Jan 10, 2005

Editor's Note: Published on page A10 of the January 11, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

THE RECENT tsunami disaster, the fatal heat wave in Europe in 2003 and the stronger and more violent storms that have hit various parts of the earth in the past four or five years should set the world thinking about the abrupt climate and geological changes and what could be done about them.

Scientists are agreed: Global warming and climate change are no longer in the realm of computer forecasts; they are very much upon us. Among the signs of these changes are:

• The heating up of the world -- the temperature has risen one degree F over the past century. The 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 was the warmest year on instrumental record.

• The melting of glaciers and breaking up of ice shelves -- snow cover and ice extent have decreased by about 10 percent since the late 1960s.

• The rise in sea level -- the rate of global average sea level rise during the 20th century is in the range of 1 to 2 millimeters per year, with a central value of 1.5 mm/year.

• Increase in global ocean heat content since the late 1950s, the period for which adequate observation of sub-surface ocean temperatures have been available.

• A shift in seasons -- shorter winters, the earlier arrival of spring, hotter summers and fiercer heat waves and the later arrival of autumn. (The heat wave in Europe in 2003 killed 35,000 people.)

• Longer periods of drought -- warmer episodes of El Niño have been more frequent, persistent and intense since the mid-1970s, compared with the previous 100 years.

• The drying up of rivers and streams, shrinking of lakes and the erosion of the coasts.

• The bleaching and dying of coral reefs, depriving fish of habitats -- 1998 was the worst year on record, when 16 percent of the world's coral was left bleached or dead.

• Changes in the animal kingdom -- habitats change, plants flower earlier, birds nest earlier, exotic species appear and amphibians are disappearing.

• The fast spread of diseases.

• Changes in the intensity and frequency of storms. Conflicting analyses, however, make it difficult to draw definitive conclusions, especially on extra-tropical or hurricane activity.

These data are telling scientists -- and us -- that the earth is definitely heating up and that climate is changing. Scientists agree that the burning of fossil fuels like oil and coal causes greenhouse gases to escape into the air and these gases are causing most of the global warming. Another major cause is deforestation, for trees absorb carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases, from the air.

Global warming is very difficult to solve. It is very easy to say that everyone should use less energy, but a growing, developing world requires the use of more energy, and fossil fuels, particularly, at this time.

The Kyoto Protocol offers a start toward the solution of the problem. It would commit the parties to individual, legally binding targets to limit or reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. But although 84 countries signed the protocol, indicating that they intended to ratify it, many were reluctant to do so and thus bring it into force. One of the reluctant countries is the United States, which should be exercising moral and political leadership in solving global warming but is not.

Even the Kyoto Protocol does not offer the ultimate solution. Jeremy Mahlman of the US National Center for Atmosphere Research said that controlling the increase in greenhouse gas emissions "would take 40 successful Kyotos. But we've got to do it."

A long-term solution would be a fundamental change in the way the world powers its economy, shifting from uncontrolled use of fossil fuels to an increased and more efficient use of renewable sources of energy such as the sun, wind, water, waves and the heat coming from the bowels of the earth (geothermal).

The way has been pointed out by the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 with the adoption of Agenda 21, a wide-ranging blueprint for action to achieve sustainable development. Although Agenda 21 has been watered down by negotiation and compromise, it is considered the most comprehensive and effective program of action approved by the international community.

Global warming and climate and geological change have become very urgent and immediate social and personal concerns, as the shocking death tolls from the horrific tsunami, fierce storms, massive floods and long droughts have testified. The world cannot wait for the oceans to boil or for hell to freeze over before all nations join hands in taking aggressive action on global warming. It has to start now.

By WILLIAM SAFIRE OP-ED January 10, 2005

Washington - In the aftermath of a cataclysm, with pictures of parents sobbing over dead infants driven into human consciousness around the globe, faith-shaking questions arise: Where was God? Why does a good and all-powerful deity permit such evil and grief to fall on so many thousands of innocents? What did these people do to deserve such suffering?

After a similar natural disaster wiped out tens of thousands of lives in Lisbon in the 18th century, the philosopher Voltaire wrote "Candide," savagely satirizing optimists who still found comfort and hope in God. After last month's Indian Ocean tsunami, the same anguished questioning is in the minds of millions of religious believers.

Turn to the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible. It was written some 2,500 years ago during what must have been a crisis of faith. The covenant with Abraham - worship the one God, and his people would be protected - didn't seem to be working. The good died young, the wicked prospered; where was the promised justice?

The poet-priest who wrote this book began with a dialogue between God and the Satan, then a kind of prosecuting angel. When God pointed to "my servant Job" as most upright and devout, the Satan suggested Job worshipped God only because he had been given power and riches. On a bet that Job would stay faithful, God let the angel take the good man's possessions, kill his children and afflict him with loathsome boils.

The first point the Book of Job made was that suffering is not evidence of sin. When Job's friends said that he must have done something awful to deserve such misery, the reader knows that is false. Job's suffering was a test of his faith: even as he grew angry with God for being unjust - wishing he could sue him in a court of law - he never abandoned his belief.

And did this righteous Gentile get furious: "Damn the day that I was born!" Forget the so-called "patience of Job"; that legend is blown away by the shockingly irreverent biblical narrative. Job's famous expression of meek acceptance in the 1611 King James Version - "though he slay me, yet will I trust in him" - was a blatant misreading by nervous translators. Modern scholarship offers a much different translation: "He may slay me, I'll not quaver."

The point of Job's gutsy defiance of God's injustice - right there in the Bible - is that it is not blasphemous to challenge the highest authority when it inflicts a moral wrong. (I titled a book on this "The First Dissident.") Indeed, Job's demand that his unseen adversary show up at a trial with a written indictment gets an unexpected reaction: in a thunderous theophany, God appears before the startled man with the longest and most beautifully poetic speech attributed directly to him in Scripture.

Frankly, God's voice "out of the whirlwind" carries a message not all that satisfying to those wondering about moral mismanagement. Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal "I read the Book of Job last night - I don't think God comes well out of it."

The powerful voice demands of puny Man: "Where were you when I laid the Earth's foundations?" Summoning an image of the mythic sea-monster symbolizing Chaos, God asks, "Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?" The poet-priest's point, I think, is that God is occupied bringing light to darkness, imposing physical order on chaos, and leaves his human creations free to work out moral justice on their own.

Job's moral outrage caused God to appear, thereby demonstrating that the sufferer who believes is never alone. Job abruptly stops complaining, and - in a prosaic happy ending that strikes me as tacked on by other sages so as to get the troublesome book accepted in the Hebrew canon - he is rewarded. (Christianity promises to rectify earthly injustice in an afterlife.)

Job's lessons for today:

(1) Victims of this cataclysm in no way "deserved" a fate inflicted by the Leviathanic force of nature.

(2) Questioning God's inscrutable ways has its exemplar in the Bible and need not undermine faith.

(3) Humanity's obligation to ameliorate injustice on earth is being expressed in a surge of generosity that refutes Voltaire's cynicism.

E-mail: safire@nytimes.com

===============================================

January 11, 2005

Questioning Faith After a Disaster (4 Letters)

To the Editor:

I agree with "Where Was God?," by William Safire (column, Jan. 10). We humans can in no way make sense of the human catastrophe that has overtaken so many innocent families. However, as an Israeli, I find myself conflicted. Did not mankind sit back and watch with equanimity the deliberate and cold-hearted killing of men, women and children in the name of political goals? Have our television screens not been filled with the anguish of grieving parents and orphaned children, product of Muslim extremists who target theatergoers in Moscow, schoolchildren in Beslan, bus riders in Tel Aviv?

The biblical flood that devastated the world at the time of Noah was sent to the world because, the Bible says, it was steeped in violence. Whether or not God is trying to tell us something with this disaster, might all mankind not learn from it that the manmade orgies of innocent civilian deaths are something all of us must oppose and uproot, because no one is immune from heartbreak and tragedy that cannot be prevented?

Naomi Ragen
Jerusalem, Jan. 10, 2005

To the Editor:

In response to "Where Was God?," I would humbly say that sometimes just a mere personal prayer or a silent moment will take us much further than rationalizing God's behavior and discussing the merits of biblical interpretations, which as Mr. Safire points out result in "prosaic" conclusions.

World literature is abundant with examples where our creator's demand of obedience and unconditional love is questioned and debated, but right now our prime objective should be to extend our hand to help the survivors rebuild their lives.

Varoujan Froundjian
Manhasset, N.Y., Jan. 10, 2005

To the Editor:

The theological anguish of religious apologists like William Safire over natural disasters like the tsunami always makes me wonder why they don't just accept the obvious conclusion that God does not exist. To be sure, there are always convoluted theological explanations for why predictions of a benign universe ruled by a loving deity are so often violated. But when scientific theories fail to agree with observation, they are modified or replaced by better theories. The accurate atheist prediction that such tragedies are natural occurrences, bound to happen in a morally neutral universe, has the virtue of avoiding such unnecessary psychological pain.

Douglas E. McNeil
Baltimore, Jan. 10, 2005

To the Editor:

In his column explaining the Book of Job, William Safire allows that "it is not blasphemous to challenge the highest authority when it inflicts a moral wrong." Neither, I might add, is it unpatriotic to challenge our highest authority when he commits the nation to a moral wrong.

George R. Woolfe
Wilmington, N.C., Jan. 10, 2005

Computer users of the world have united behind Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig-and what they're doing is much more important than his critics realize.

By Dan Hunter

Legal Affairs (Nov-Dec 2004)

AT SWARTHMORE COLLEGE, the crowd is mostly students, and maybe a few professors and interested outsiders. It's a typical turnout for a public lecture by a well-known law professor. But there is something different and a little odd about this group. Swarthmore doesn't have a law school, so the audience includes no young men in suits that still have the label attached, and no young women with high-heeled shoes so new the soles aren't scuffed. And there is something else, something funny about the T-shirts. Everywhere you look, there are T-shirts with slogans, not logos. No "Tommy Hilfiger" and "Ralph Lauren" here. Just shirts with references too obscure to parse. What is "Downhill Battle"? Or "Grey Tuesday"? One kid has a shirt with the picture of a skull and crossbones on it, and written boldly across it are the words "Home Taping is Killing the Music Industry." Look closer, and you'll see, in tiny type, "(And it's fun)."

A couple of students get up to introduce the speaker. They're nervous, disorganized, and rambling. Now you notice the handmade signs: "Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons" is taped to the lectern, and "Free Culture" is written on the wall. It starts to become clear. This isn't just a lecture; it's a political rally. People start to shuffle; the students are losing their audience as the garbled introductions continue. But when the speaker gets up to start, the shuffling ends and there is a ripple of excitement. He is Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor, known to this crowd as Larry. Dressed in black and wearing a pair of spectacles that could have been handed down by Ben Franklin, he waits until the crowd settles. And finally, you get it. Outside, lightning is cracking, but the smell in the air is not the ozone from the thunderstorm. It's the smell of revolution.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY-"I.P.," AS IT'S CALLED-revolves around three basic property interests granted by federal statute: copyrights, patents, and trademarks. Copyrights cover _expression by authors of various sorts, including books, plays, music, and so on. Patents protect underlying ideas of useful inventions and processes, such as a chemical reaction or an inventive mechanical device. And trademarks cover business brands. For much of the 20th century, these I.P. interests (and other close cousins such as trade secrets, unfair competition, and celebrities' publicity rights) were narrow and uncontroversial. Businesses in the industrial era cared about the factory, the production line, and the land needed for them. But as the modern era rolled on, the importance of industrial production waned. No longer were heavy machinery and physical plants the predominant means of production; no longer was physical inventory central to industry. In the developed world, control over intangibles came to dominate the business agenda, and so too the political agenda.

First introduced in the United States in 1790, copyright was limited in its infancy to protecting musical, dramatic, literary, and artistic works for 28 years, and it was later broadened to encompass photography, video, and software for a period often in excess of 100 years. Patent scope was widened, first to include computer algorithms and then business methods-including those such as Amazon.com's patent for one-click online purchases-and then life itself. In 2000, companies including Celera Genomics and Incyte started receiving patents on sequences of the human genome. Trademarks too were set loose from their historical moorings. Not only was the trademark term extended, but the prototypical application of a physical brand to a physical product was no longer the limit of trademark. The sound of the Harley-Davidson exhaust for motorcycles or a distinctive color of dry cleaning pads was equally protected.

Though I.P. rights are private property there has long been some sense that the public also has interests here. The concept of the public domain was first advanced in 1896, when the Supreme Court noted that upon the expiration of a patent the invention "fell into the public domain" and was free for anyone to use. But over the decades that I.P. rose in importance, the concept of the public domain was ignored, or defined at best in negative terms. It was the carcass left over after the I.P. system had eaten its fill.

Still, the seeds of the movement that Larry Lessig now leads blossomed. In the late '70s, prompted by cases examining whether the heirs of Bela Lugosi and Rudolph Valentino could control the current and future representations of these dead actors, a young Duke University law professor named David Lange attended an entertainment law symposium to present a paper on celebrities' rights to their public image. Lange was surprised at the distress of the screenwriters who attended his talk and who argued that expanded publicity rights would reduce their ability to adapt, use, or reimagine these characters and their histories. As Lange described it, "the law of publicity was dispossessing individual creators in order to benefit the interests of celebrities." From this epiphany, Lange recast the public domain. Rather than the negative leftovers, he wrote in an influential article 25 years ago, the public domain was a vital, affirmative entity, the publicly accessible collection of knowledge, ideas, history, and _expression on which creators draw in order to make new works.

The movement in defense of the public domain soon started to grow. Academic works in the '80s and '90s by law professors Jessica Litman at Wayne State University, Wendy Gordon at Boston University, Pamela Samuelson at the University of California at Berkeley, and James Boyle at Duke University explored the public domain's importance. Then, with the 1998 introduction of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (or DMCA), the public woke up.

These statutes extended copyright terms, renewed copyrights on some works that had already fallen into the public domain, and forbade cracking digital locks on copyrighted material like DVDs. But they also motivated public interest groups as never before. Before then, corporate interests lobbied for I.P. expansion without much public comment. This changed overnight as the acts were widely seen as driven entirely by corporate interests, particularly Disney's fear that the first film featuring Mickey Mouse would soon fall into the hands of the public. Unanticipated uses of the DMCA also drew widespread attention. The first incident occurred when a Princeton computer science professor was threatened with prosecution if he disclosed research that he and his lab had performed in breaking a music encryption system. Then a Russian student was arrested while presenting a conference paper that demonstrated how he had cracked digitally encrypted electronic books. By the time students at Swarthmore College were threatened in 2003 with a DMCA injunction against posting details of a potential e-voting election scandal, the message was clear. The restrictions on speech, the threat to research and inquiry, the quashing of dissent, the jailing of researchers-all of Lange's worst fears and then some-were now being realized.

The consequent backlash came at a bad time for I.P. owners. The rise of file-sharing systems threatened severe damage to the music and movie industries, and perhaps television networks. And social reformers were beginning to question other parts of I.P. For example, the patent system came under attack for the damage it inflicted on developing countries that had been strong-armed by the United States into adopting U.S.-style I.P. laws. This led to an increase in I.P. enforcement around the world, but it also demonstrated the clear injustices in forcing the poor to dance to the I.P. tune of the rich. American pharmaceutical manufacturers were vilified because they refused to provide drug therapies for HIV/AIDS in Africa for less than their patent-monopoly-controlled price. All the claims that drug manufacturers needed this monopoly to produce other important drugs rang hollow with the millions of people in the developing world dying from AIDS and their sympathizers.

Thus was the culture war joined. This is not a war between cultures, but a war over culture-who owns it, who can use it in the future, and how much it will cost. On one side are the I.P. owners, with the money and the ear of government. Against them stand research and advocacy institutes, with names like Creative Commons or the Center for the Public Domain, and political action groups such as the Electronic Freedom Foundation and the ACLU.

RECRUITING AND LEADING A BATTALION FOR THIS WAR is what Larry Lessig is doing at Swarthmore on a wet night in April. He's talking about his new book, Free Culture, in which he argues for scaling back the copyright system. Lessig is a prodigy of the legal academy: Now 43, he earned a B.A. in economics and a B.S. in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in philosophy from Cambridge, and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He clerked for Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and for Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, and he was a professor at the University of Chicago and Harvard Law Schools before Stanford lured him in a competition with Yale and Harvard. His rZsumZ lists four books and 61 law review articles produced in his 15-year career as a legal academic. But not everything he has touched has turned to gold. While he has written about aspects of the Constitution dealing with subjects other than intellectual property, the constitutionalists in the academy greet some of that work with derision and even his admirers often consider him an extravagant self-promoter.

With his dazzling academic record, fiery rhetoric, and prolific writing, however, Lessig has become the most recognizable voice to articulate why it was a bad idea to privatize the open environment of the Internet, and how the expansion of I.P. threatens future innovation. Tonight he's lending support to a student protest group, one formed by the students threatened when they exposed the electronic voting scandal. Like other student groups, this one is renouncing private I.P. interests, has the word "commons" in its name, identifies with the I.P. have-nots, and invokes a class struggle. Means of production, communal ownership, class struggle, students with slogans on their shirts. Sounds like a Marxist revolution.

LIKE MANY OTHER I.P. REFORMERS, Lessig is routinely denounced as a communist. The most recent such attack was by a high-profile technology columnist named Stephen Manes. In several vitriolic attacks prompted by Lessig's Free Culture, Manes described Lessig as "blustering" and "bloviating," a "buffoon" and an "idiot," whose ideas ("droppings") were "nuts" and "laughable." Manes contrasted Lessig's "radicalism" on copyright policy with the stance of "responsible creators" like Walt Disney, and made it clear that the sort of reform Lessig advocates is ideologically suspect because it involves stealing property from copyright owners. Manes proposed renaming Lessig's book, Freeloader Culture: A Manifesto for Stealing Intellectual Property. The allusion to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's Communist Manifesto is hard to miss.

Manes's attacks, though startling in their bile, are hardly surprising. He is a columnist at Forbes, a magazine that urbanely styles itself as the "Capitalist Tool." If any organ is going to spy Marxist leanings in the intellectual property reform movement, it is this one. Manes is not the first to sniff Marxism in I.P. reform proposals. A senior writer at the Ayn Rand Institute accused Lessig of Marxism a number of years before, suggesting that his efforts in the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft, in which Lessig argued for overturning one of Congress's many recent copyright extensions, were shameful and would lead to "cannibalism" of property interests. Mouthpieces for high-profile I.P. owners such as Paramount Pictures also smell "whiffs of Marxism" in the reformer's distaste for corporate control of culture.

The Marxist slur is a simple rhetorical device that paints I.P. reformers as both dangerous and willfully ignorant. Not only do they desire a Bolshevik revolution, and probably a Stalinist purge, but these reformers don't realize that the communists lost the Cold War. Yet this use of the "Marxist" tag is shallow and empty.

When people such as Manes or those at the Ayn Rand Institute charge Lessig with Marxism, they refer to two features of Marxist-Leninism: the rejection of private property, and the civil uprising that Mikhail Bakunin and V.I. Lenin said was necessary to move from capitalism to communism. The kind of social reform of intellectual property proposed by Lessig doesn't involve either of these elements. Lessig isn't some modern-day Pierre-Joseph Proudhon claiming that "intellectual property is theft." His reform agenda is the I.P. analog of the New Deal social welfarism that ameliorated the worst excesses of capitalism, and rescued it from social disaster. It's the recognition that private property systems function better if some limits are placed upon the market. Even many of the most ardent capitalists have learned the Marxian lesson that unrestrained free market capitalism creates a permanent underclass that is much more likely to revolt and overthrow the system. It's a better idea for the wealthy to provide a safety net for the lumpenproletariat than to be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.

ON THE OTHER HAND, WHILE LESSIG'S PROPOSED I.P. REFORM stops well short of the destruction of private property, it stirs a Marxian debate in a much more interesting and crucial sense. For starters, it is clear that I.P. reform is a conflict involving a significant class struggle. There are I.P. haves and I.P. have-nots. And in a world where the means of production are increasingly controlled by intellectual property, the dynamics exist for significant conflict. But the majority of the I.P. have-nots are in the developing world, which is why the globalization debate often involves intellectual property. Any Marxist-Lessigist revolution therefore is likely to be mediated through the cordon sanitaire of international trade, and through the World Trade Organization. The prospect of I.P.-induced violence, at least in the United States, is unlikely.

But more than this, I.P. reform arises out of a genuine Marxism, that of the open source movement. Open source, or "copyleft," as the movement is often called, involves the transfer of the means of cultural and creative production from capital to the worker. It is usually thought to be limited to computer software. The Linux operating system was created by thousands of programmers and has been freely distributed on the understanding that others might amend, fix, improve, and extend it. But while software might be the paradigmatic example of open source, the revolution it promises reaches much further. The widest-read and most influential newspaper in South Korea is Ohmynews, whose motto is "Every Citizen is a Reporter." Ohmynews hires no reporters, and relies wholly on individual contributions of news stories by its readers. Another example is the Wikipedia, an open source, online encyclopedia that is entirely written, edited, and rewritten by anyone who cares to contribute to it. Even though there is no control structure-there are no editors, nor is there a publisher-it rivals commercial encyclopedias in scope and quality of coverage. Or consider the Distributed Proofreader's Project, a group of people who volunteer to proofread and edit vast reams of scanned documents for inclusion in Project Gutenberg, another open source initiative that puts out-of-copyright books online.

Though Bill Gates recognizes Linux as a threat to Windows, it is easy to miss the truly revolutionary nature of this type of cultural production. If you give people the opportunity to create, they will do so, even without economic incentives. The core justification for intellectual property protection is that, without it, no one would have any reason to produce cultural, creative content. They would undertake a rational calculus and go off to become tax attorneys. But the dynamism of the open source movement shows that this fundamental justification doesn't hold. Many people will produce creative content even outside what we can think of as the capitalist underpinnings of I.P. It's a small step to go from this to a Marxist revolution: The open source movement promises to put the means of creative production back in the hands of the people, not in the hands of those with capital.

It is not an accident that open source and Marxist-Lessigist I.P. reform have occurred at the same time, or that Lessig is a prominent advocate of Linux. Open source software demonstrated that the "incentive justification" for I.P. wasn't supported once you put the means of creative endeavor and the means of dissemination in the hands of individuals, as the Internet has done for many fields. So, when the DMCA and other corporate-controlled I.P. expansions came about, programmers weaned on open source code no longer bought the corporations' arguments that these new laws were necessary for innovation and progress to continue. The I.P. reform movement began with software, but it is moving into all types of cultural material: newspapers, magazines, commentary, music, even movies. Given the experience we now have with open source, this is not strange. A Marxist might suggest that it is inevitable. What is unusual is how, in their rush to vilify Marxist-Lessigism, I.P. owners and copyright apologists like Stephen Manes miss the importance of open source, which, as the true creative workers' revolution, threatens the core of their industries. While copyright and patent reform might be the most visible aspect of the Marxist-Lessigist revolution, it is the least significant.

IT'S STILL RAINING AT SWARTHMORE. Larry Lessig is explaining the importance of the public domain as a source for future creativity, when a series of thunderclaps shakes the auditorium. For a moment everybody stops. Lessig jokes about the "black helicopters" of the I.P. owners, and people relax.

At the end of his presentation, student activists swamp him with requests for guidance about what they should do next. They plot how to reverse the enclosure of the public domain. If nothing else, these students are engaged with the political process of intellectual property in a way that has never been seen before. The expansion of I.P. has led to the creation of a movement that is fascinating in two ways: It guarantees that the public will have a voice in future I.P. policy making, and it has created a new kind of student movement that is one of the more active political movements on college campuses. There are no riots, but this movement promises a more socially conscious intellectual property system, one achievable without bloodshed.

But away from the zeal of the student activists, the real revolution is taking place. None of the revolutionaries recognize themselves as such-they're just open source programmers or "citizen journalists." But they promise to upend the intellectual property system because they are creating things for the sake of curiosity, or for the approbation of their peers, or because it's fun. This revolution will just happen, as people take up the means of production for themselves-and even if it won't be televised, it will surely be reported in Ohmynews.

------------------------ Dan Hunter teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

Viruses exist to nab your cells and use them for their own reproductive purposes. They have to, because a virus is nothing more than a few strands of rogue DNA (or rogue RNA, DNA's single-stranded cousin) wrapped in a protein coat to keep the draft out.

They are not cells, and they have none of the internal structures that cells use to go about the business of life, which is, generally, to make more life. No, viruses are just genetic material looking for a free ride--looking to hijack a host cell and make its machinery do the invader's reproductive bidding.

Rule for Viral Success #1:
Mutation, Mutation, Mutation

With so little to call their own, how have these biological pirates survived for so long? The answer lies in two traits that give viruses superb evolutionary advantages: superfast reproduction and genetic mutations.

Viruses live to reproduce. Although they must do this within host cells, once inside, viruses replicate with enough abandon to shame a rabbit. Like some evil biological Xerox machine, they reprogram the machinery that host cells normally use to copy their own DNA and use it to spit out copy after copy of themselves.

Genetic mutations add insult to injury. With so much reproduction going on, viruses can mutate almost as fast as they propagate. And each mutation stands a good chance of conferring advantageous survival and adaptation characteristics on the next generation of viral invaders.

Rule for Viral Success #2:
Pick a Likely Victim

Viruses invade all kinds of cells, including plant cells, animal cells, fungi, even bacteria. Each virus tends to have a very specific M.O., though. Which host cells look like the best victims to any given virus depends on the unique proteins found on a virus's protein coat, as well as on the protein receptors found on the poor target cell.

Some viruses recognize the general receptors that occur on many different kinds of cells. The virus for rabies, for example, can invade so many different kinds of cells that it can span species, infecting rodents, dogs, and humans.

Other viruses are more restricted and can invade only specific kinds of cells. The common cold virus, for example, can invade only the cells lining the human upper respiratory tract. It's a picky thief.

Rule for Viral Success #3:
Make It an Inside Job

Viral entry mechanisms are as diverse as viruses themselves, which is why viruses often elude drug treatments. Some enter a target cell by binding to a specific receptor and passing through the host cell membrane to the cell interior. Others don't even need to enter the cell, but simply attach to the surface and use a needle-like structure to inject their DNA right in.

Once viral genes are inside, the virus begins its cycle of replication. It exploits the host cell's supplies and machinery, forcing it to copy viral genes and to synthesize more viral protein coats. Then, these two components come together to form copies of the virus that emerge from the host cell.

Sometimes they "bud" off the cell, like bubbling on top a simmering stew. At other, more violent times, copies simply fill the cell until it can hold no more; it explodes, releasing its viral hoard into the surrounding area.

Either way, the viral progeny go on to infect new cells--and the cycle starts again. Disease symptoms can and do result from this cellular damage. Most often, though, the sickness you feel is the result of your immune system's response to the foreign invader. And make no mistake, it will respond.

Rule for Viral Success #4:
Avoid the Cops

Your immune system's first-responders act like beat cops on patrol 24/7. Should they see anything amiss while walking the body's beat, they will make arrests. One kind of cellular cop, the phagocytes, will engulf strange viruses and digest them. Another kind, natural killer cells, recognizes suspect changes on the surface of infected cells and will release chemicals to disintegrate both virus and cell alike.

After spotting the infection, your body can launch a more specific and intensive attack. Proteins called antibodies surround, bind to, and neutralize viruses and other invaders in your bloodstream. Killer T-cells mercilessly destroy infected cells and halt systemic infection. Both help your body remember the infection and mount a faster response to the same invader next time.

Still other players merit mention. When a cell does get infected with a virus, sometimes it manages to secrete small proteins called interferons that serve to warn neighboring cells of an imminent viral invasion. These "Paul Revere" proteins work by encouraging neighboring cells to synthesize proteins that can interfere with viral replication.

Christina Catron and Michael Himick
October 27, 2004

Want to learn more?
Read what the CDC says about the flu virus
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease.htm

Get answers from the CDC about the flu vaccine
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/0405season.htm

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The World Health Organization is worried--worried that the world is due for another killer flu, as bad as the one that killed millions at the end of World War I. The influenza chief of the United Nations, Klaus Stohr, even goes so far as to say, "We believe that we are closer to the next pandemic than we ever were."

The question is, what can the world do about it? Yesterday and today, health experts from governments and vaccine companies worldwide have gathered in Geneva to come up with answers. At KnowledgeNews, we're looking back at the 1918-19 flu, which is exactly what the experts fear most.

Today's Knowledge
The Deadliest Flu Ever

In 1918 and 1919, nearly one-fifth of the world's population caught the flu. And not just any flu--the deadliest flu ever, one of the worst pandemics in human history.

Before it was over, 2 to 3 percent of those infected had died. That's at least 20 million people worldwide, more than twice the number killed in all of brutal World War I.

Swift and Fatal

Military bases served as incubators for the virus, in America and Europe especially. In fact, a huge number of casualties in World War I came from the flu, rather than from enemy fire. Within months, following troop movements and trade routes, the virus had traveled around the world.

The illness was so fast and so deadly that doctors couldn't even believe it was influenza. It wasn't like any flu they had seen before. A patient who started to feel under the weather on Monday was often dead by Wednesday. Many patients turned a blue-gray hue, as fluid built up in their lungs. "It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes, and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate," reported a doctor at a military base near Boston. "It is horrible."

Even worse, this virus devastated people for whom flu is normally just an inconvenience. Healthy men and women in their twenties, thirties, and forties were dropping dead on the street on their way to work or the market. How could this be the flu? Some even speculated it was a plot by the Germans, or a side effect of the mustard gas used during World War I.

Dramatic Mutation

But it was the flu--a horrible new strain, but just the flu. Every few decades, the flu virus, which mutates at least a little bit every year, undergoes a dramatic change. This new virus is especially dangerous because no one has built up an immunity to it. The virus of 1918-19, from the time it likely got started in Asia, was this kind, different enough from previous strains that few people were immune.

Because flu spreads through the air, it was also frighteningly easy to get infected. All you had to do was breathe the air that a sick person had just coughed or sneezed into. The most dangerous place you could be was in a crowd.

Unfortunately, it was hard to avoid crowds in 1918. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were being packed into barracks and onto troop ships. And huge military parades and war-bond rallies helped the virus make the leap from soldiers to the civilian population.

Flu Crosses the Nation

By autumn of 1918, life in big cities had become nightmarish. In one month--October 1918--nearly 200,000 Americans died from flu. Medical care was hard to come by, because so many doctors and nurses had been dispatched to Europe to care for the troops (and because many of those who stayed got sick, too). Churches, theaters, and taverns closed. In some cities, even funerals were limited to 15 minutes.

When one person in a family got sick, the flu usually spread to everyone else in the house. Volunteer nurses, arriving with broth and clean sheets, were seen as saviors by people too ill or too poor to get to a doctor. "In some cases," a New York City nurse wrote, "the nurses were even locked in the house by the patient's friends, or kidnapped on their rounds, so panic-stricken had people become."

The East Coast was ravaged in September 1918, and it took only a few weeks for the epidemic to spread to the West. In San Francisco and Seattle, wearing gauze masks was required by law. In Prescott, Arizona, the town council made it illegal to shake hands. Other towns quarantined themselves, forbidding trains from stopping, only to fall ill when they welcomed the postman. On the playground, children had a new jump-rope rhyme:

I had a little bird, and its name was Enza
I opened the window, and in-flew-Enza.
It’s a Small World

By the time it had run its course, the 1918-19 flu killed more than half a million Americans. Beyond the United States, the death toll was even more appalling. What Americans called the "Spanish flu" (incorrectly believing that was where it started) cropped up all over the world.

Germany, France, and the United Kingdom each lost at least 200,000 civilians between June 1918 and May 1919. More than a half a million Italians died. In poorer and more densely populated areas, the death toll was catastrophic. In parts of Mexico, more than 10 percent of the population perished. On South Pacific islands, more than 20 percent did. In India, at least 12 million people died from flu.

The death toll for the whole world is difficult to know, but the most conservative estimate is that 20 million people died. Many researchers double that number, and some go so far as to say that the death toll could have reached 50 million.

The 1918-19 pandemic was extreme, but not unprecedented. The World Health Organization has records showing that there have been 31 documented influenza pandemics since 1580, most recently in 1969. The bad news is that medical researchers say we are overdue for another devastating flu.

Colleen Kelly
November 12, 2004

Want to learn more? See how the flu spread across the United States http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/influenza/maps/index.html

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Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Write to us at info@knowledgenews.net.

Theo van Gogh: his views; and after
Freedom of speech - 08.11.2004 17:48

Theo van Gogh, murdered in Amsterdam. Was he a hero, anti-Semite, misogynist, or Islamophobe? To find out, we have to look at his own words, translated for English speakers. What will be the consequences of this murder?

Theo van Gogh: hero, anti-Semite, misogynist, or Islamophobe? His own words

The murder of Dutch film maker and columnist Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam on 2 November 2004 in Amsterdam shocked many people. Not only in The Netherlands, but also abroad, reactions were, understandably, often emotional. Many of them described Van Gogh as a martyr for free speech. That leaves the question: free speech for himself and people of his views, or also for his targets?

Many reactions by people in, e.g., England, were by people who didn't know the writings of either Van Gogh or his critics first hand in Dutch.

I will try in this article to help provide this information, necessary for a rational assessment.

So, first, the murder is terrible, should be condemned, and everyone should make an effort to prevent violence like this from happening again.

However, if I would keep saying that one plus one makes three; and then someone murders me; I hope no one will write that I was a mathematics genius (as at least some people seemed to do on Van Gogh; not mathematics, but you get the point).

Theo van Gogh's inspiration were films like A Clockwork Orange; and French author Louis-Ferdinand Céline (a supporter of Hitler during World War II), both with human depravity as central theme.

So let us see, from what Van Gogh himself said:

1. Van Gogh on Jews

2. Van Gogh on women (including MP Ayaan Hirshi Ali)

3. Van Gogh on war and socialism

4. Van Gogh on immigrants from Muslim countries

5. Who killed him and why?

1. Van Gogh on Jews

"fornicating yellow stars [which Jews had to wear during Nazi occupation] in a gas chamber ... What a smell of caramel today. Today the crematoriums burn only diabetic [in Dutch literally: sugar-sick] Jews". Van Gogh, in Moviola magazine, 1991. The court then fined him 1000 guilders for anti-Semitism.

He pictured Jewish TV presenter Ms Sonja Barend in a concentration camp. Jewish author Leon de Winter he pictured in "Treblinka [camp] style fornication with barbed wire around his dick."

When Jewish historian Ms Evelien Gans criticized Van Gogh, he wrote in Folia Civitatis magazine: "I suspect that Ms Gans gets wet dreams about being fucked by Dr Mengele [Nazi doctor at Auschwitz]." He hoped (Volkskrant, February 1995) Ms Gans would sue him: "Because then Ms Gans will have to explain in court that she claims that she does not get wet dreams about Dr Mengele."

2. Van Gogh on women (including MP Ayaan Hirshi Ali)

Van Gogh’s last, a few minutes long, film, was written by a Dutch MP, Ms Ayaan Hirshi Ali, naturalized refugee, from the ex-royal family of Somalia. See on her, in Dutch, http://www.tijdschriftlover.nl/artikelen/artikelen_islam.html an article by Surinamese Dutch Black (not Islamic) feminist Troetje Loewenthal.

On http://www.sp.nl/include/sh_opinie.php?code=406 another critical article on Ms Ali; this one by Anja Meulenbelt; arguably the best known Dutch feminist and now Socialist Party Senator.

Ms Ali is MP for the VVD party: in government; the most openly pro- capitalist party in Parliament. Arguably, they are the Dutch equivalent of the British Tory party (though more "secular" than especially the Christian fundamentalists in the Tories). The VVD, and Ali, and Van Gogh, enthusiastically support all wars of George W. Bush; and government expulsion of ten thousands of refugees from The Netherlands; including Somali women refugees from female circumcision; who now have to fear it if the responsible VVD minister succeeds with her expulsion plans.

Female genital mutilation, by the way, is not an Islamic custom, as it happens in Somalia and among Christians in Kenya. Not among Turks or Moroccans, the biggest groups of immigrants from Muslim countries in The Netherlands. Ms Ali proposed in a Parliament speech to give the African continent not a cent of aid any longer.

Anja Meulenbelt quotes Theo van Gogh, who said that feminists should stop campaigning against husbands' violence in marriages: "Gentlemen who give a tough hiding are quite attractive to some ladies really." That remark was on women in general, not especially on Muslim women. But as we know, about a hundred years ago, Lord Cromer was the boss of the anti-women's suffrage league in Britain; and in colonial Muslim Egypt, sounded very "feminist".

The theme of Ali’s and Van Gogh’s film was Islamic wives beaten by their husbands; said to be inspired by the Koran. Beaten Muslim women reacted very angrily to the film on Dutch TV: "I was beaten by that no good husband. Not by the Koran! Making this a Koran issue will just give them an excuse." The film was sort of soft porn David Hamilton-Emmanuelle style naked [Christian Moluccan actress playing an Islamic woman] woman in see through clothes with Koran verses written on it. The women said this cheapened and sensationalized their extremely real issues with their husbands.

On a British Internet forum, a comparison was made between “Van Gogh making films vividly critical of Islam and the likes of Bunuel or Scorsese who made films that challenged the basis of catholicism”. However, there is a difference. Bunuel and Scorcese came from a background were Catholicism/Christianity was the dominant religion, at least during their childhoods. While never-a-Muslim Van Gogh called all Muslims, most of them in The Netherlands a lot more poor or powerless than he was "goatfuckers". Not once: probably a hundred times or more in writing (I did not count).

The Internet message continued: “There is therefore no comparison with the BNP or NF, whose staple diet is attacks and violence by Black men against White women, not intra communal violence.”

However, even though Van Gogh, contrary to Ms Ali, was no party politician: intra communal violence, including hypocritical pity about female circumsision, WAS the staple diet in party political broadcasts by the now defunct Centrumpartij, then the Dutch sister party of the British extreme Right, over 10 years ago.

When, in 2002, Pim Fortuijn (he himself preferred the more “aristocratic” spelling Fortuyn) founded an anti-immigration party, with 4 other people, one was ex Centrumpartij leader J. Boiten (when his past came out after Fortuijn’s death, Fortuyn's [their spelling] party dismissed Boiten as parliamentary assistant. Boiten claims Fortuijn knew all on his Centrumpartij past).

Van Gogh helped Fortuijn write political speeches. Fortuijn wanted him as an MP for his party; but Van Gogh refused, as he hated other prospective candidates.

Can a fascist party be led by an open gay in some individual cases, even though gay bashing is a main point of the extreme Right? Yes it can. Michael Kühnen, leader of the National Socialist Action Front of Germany was openly gay and had a macho theory to justify it. He died of AIDS in 1991. Right now, Dutch Michiel Smit (see photos on http://www.geenstijl.nl/paginas/michielsmit/ ) the leader of Nieuw Rechts, New Right, is openly gay. Though Fascist competitors used and use that against both.

3. Van Gogh on war and socialism

Van Gogh strongly supported George W. Bush's wars, and opposed all socialism in his columns. Van Gogh wrote on Paul Rosenmöller, ex dockworker, then Green Left party leader: "May he get a joy bringing brain tumor. Let us piss on his grave".

4. Van Gogh on immigrants from Muslim countries

As I said, Van Gogh routinely substituted “goatfucker” for “immigrant to The Netherlands from an Islamic country.” Including in his book Allah knows best, 2001: "There is a Fifth Column of goatfuckers in this country, who despise and spit at its native people. They hate our freedom." "Soon, the Fifth Column of goatfuckers will hurl poison gas, diseases and atomic bombs at your children and my children.”

However, nothing justifies the murder of Van Gogh. The main immediate effects of it were further racist backlashes in The Netherlands, with an Islamic primary school in Eindhoven firebombed for the fourth time; mosques and buildings of secular Moroccan immigrant organizations attacked at night. Very many Dutch Moroccans participated in, and/or organized, protests against the murder of Van Gogh. However, that did not impress bigots. Vice Prime Minister Zalm (VVD) declared, in George W. Bush style, “war on extreme Islam.” Though one murderer, however terrible, is not a state’s army in any dictionary. Neither Van Gogh nor his attacker were in military or other state service.

5. Who killed him and why?

The arrested suspect wrote a rambling five page letter and left it at Van Gogh’s body.

Though his parents were from Morocco, he was raised in The Netherlands in Dutch and apparently did not know Arabic. The letter had nothing on Van Gogh. It was a long ramble on purported quotes from the Jewish Talmud. The suspect was said to be upset by his mother's death and TV footage of US soldiers killing wounded Iraqi civilians. There is not any proof that he did not act alone. So, an INDIVIDUAL killed Van Gogh. Not "Islam". Not even "political Islam."

Again: not, NEVER ANY excuse for this terrible murder. It seems murderer and victim had something in common: both fairly intelligent but mentally disturbed. Van Gogh often had depressions, according to Dutch daily NRC. So, indeed, he certainly cannot be equated to a calculating racist politician, who is never alcoholic or takes drugs.

Dutch poet Remco Campert wrote: "De mortuis nil sini bene. [Say only good things on people after they die.] That is a maxim which Van Gogh violated consistently. I think I would insult him if now I would say sugary nice things on him." Campert continued his article with Van Gogh's quotes on Jews. Then: "These are not really the words of a true hero of free speech."

This weekend, Ivory Coast erupted. First, nine French peacekeepers (and one American aid worker) were killed during a bombing raid against rebel forces--the latest move in an on-again, off-again civil war that has split the West African nation since 2002. Then, French troops retaliated by destroying most of Ivory Coast's small air force. In response, thousands of Ivorians grabbed their machetes and took to the streets, protesting France's actions in its former colony.

Until recently, Ivory Coast was a West African success story, a relatively peaceful and prosperous plot in an otherwise deeply troubled place. The papers say that changed two years ago, when mainly Muslim rebels seized control in the north. True enough. But we're here to tell you the Ivorians' issues--with each other, and now with the French--have deeper roots.

Today's KnowledgeIvory Coasting

Portuguese slavers and ivory traders first explored what is now Côte d'Ivoire (French for "Ivory Coast") in the 15th century, but rugged coastline and a shortage of sheltered harbors mostly kept Europeans out to sea until the mid-19th century. Knowledge about life in Ivory Coast before then is sketchy, but we know that Islam likely arrived long before Europeans. As far back as the 11th century, a series of powerful Muslim empires dominated major trade routes in West Africa, and by the 17th and 18th centuries, a handful of Muslim states were flourishing in Ivory Coast's north. Dense rain forest in the south kept villages there more isolated and likely limited the spread of Islam.

We also know that in the 17th century there were plenty of elephants around, since Côte d'Ivoire got its name from a booming 17th-century ivory trade. Sadly, pachyderm profiteering ran amok, and most of the trade was gone--along with most of the elephants--by 1700.

French Coasting

By the mid-19th century, the French were making inroads in West Africa. They moved slowly at first, cutting deals with local rulers who allowed them to build fortified trading centers in exchange for a few francs a year. Disputes over such deals were frequent, but the French wanted to keep at least a toehold in the region--in part to check the expanding influence of their old adversaries, the British. In the 1880s, French colonization efforts picked up steam, as they joined in the "Scramble for Africa," a sort of mad European dash to establish spheres of influence on the continent. In 1889, Britain recognized France's sovereignty over the coastal areas of Ivory Coast. Four years later, Côte d'Ivoire officially became a French colony.

Agreements with neighboring Liberia in 1892 and Britain in 1893 set the colony's eastern and western boundaries. But the northern boundary remained undetermined for more than 50 years as the French tried out different schemes for administering all of "French West Africa," which also included colonies in Benin, Guinea, Niger, Mali, Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Mauritania.

French Roasting

From the start, a sizeable portion of the Ivorian population resisted French colonization, especially as the French military pushed inland to establish new posts. Then, in 1906, Paris appointed a new governor who decided that the colony needed "pacification." On the positive side, the repression that followed stopped illicit slave trading. On the negative, it led directly to the conscription of Ivorians to work on plantations, in mines, and on public projects for the French. In what amounted to taxation-by-manual-labor, French colonial policy actually required every adult male in Ivory Coast to work for the state for ten days a year without compensation. The law was widely abused--and not surprisingly, thoroughly despised.

Colonial policies briefly became even more oppressive (and racist) after 1940, when Hitler's wehrmacht blitzkrieged across France. But before World War II was over, Charles de Gaulle's Free French government had recognized the need to alter the relationship between France and the colonies.

Ivory Coasting

One of the African groups lobbying for such an alteration was the African Agricultural Union, a group co-founded by Ivorian planter/physician Félix Houphouët-Boigny. After a period of mutual animosity with the French, Houphouët-Boigny began to cooperate with the colonizers in the 1950s.

In 1958, Côte d'Ivoire became a republic within the French Community. The following year, Houphouët-Boigny became the republic's premier. Finally, in 1960, Ivory Coast achieved full independence. That year, Houphouët-Boigny was elected president, an office he would keep until his death in 1993.

Generally conservative, pro-business, and pro-French, Houphouët-Boigny ruled Ivory Coast autocratically but efficiently. During his reign, democracy suffered, but Ivorians enjoyed political stability and strong economic growth. While much of West Africa went to war, they went to work, building the fourth largest economy south of the Sahara around cocoa and coffee. Immigrants poured into the country looking for work, especially in the north, where they now account for up to 40 percent of the population.

Ivory Roasting

In 1993, Houphouët-Boigny died in office. His successor, Henri Konan Bédié, quickly moved to change the nation's election laws to exclude a Muslim northerner, Alassane Ouattara, from the upcoming presidential ballot. He also began exploiting anti-Muslim feelings in the south for political advantage. In protest, opposition groups boycotted the 1995 election, and President Bédié easily won reelection.

Then, in 1999, amid cries of corruption, General Robert Guei overthrew President Bédié in a bloodless coup and assumed the role of president. Like his predecessor, President Guei ensured that Ouattara (and other Islamic candidates) were excluded from elections in 2000. But despite doing his best to rig the election before the fact, Guei realized halfway in that he was losing it to another candidate, Laurent Gbagbo.

Not to be held back by anything as airy as an actual vote count, Guei dissolved the election commission and declared himself the winner. But a popular uprising soon swept him out of office, and Gbagbo in. Two years later, Muslim-dominated groups in the north rebelled. Despite French efforts to broker a peace, and a UN-sponsored peacekeeping mission, it's been civil war on and off ever since.

Steve Sampson

November 9, 2004

Want to learn more?Brush up on African geographyhttp://www.africaguide.com/afmap.htm

Download the full Ivory Coast report http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/citoc.html

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