Whatcha gonna do when McCain and all his McCainiacs run wild on ya?

Otherwise known as the politics of the lowest common denominator.

Embarrassing.

HT, Marc Ambinder.

Sound familiar?

In Zimbabwe this week, the high court has decided to go against the popular vote to anoint a president based on a shady recount.

Sound familiar?

Right.

Historiann on rape and war, and my thoughts

Charming afternoon topic, i know. But since i got pulled in over there and started going off, I thought I'd link to the discussion here, as well. Historiann asks:

Do you think there are some universal–or near universal–laws about rape in warfare, or about rape in general? Do you know of any exceptions to my (informed guess) that in modern warfare, “women’s rights and safety are dramatically degraded in war zones, and that women’s rights are never the priorities of the new governments that rise in the wake of these wars.”

Here's my response, in part:

It is (obviously) well-known that the promise of rape and/or prostitution is a major ‘reward’ held out by armies in all ages to motivate men to fight. I was recently reading a fascinating study of Temur (tamerlane) in which, upon sacking a city, the emperor ordered his men to bring him a certain number of enemy heads — and, amazingly, to rape (a certain number of) enemy women. Thus rape becomes both a quantified punishment to the subject population, and (obviously) a quantifiable ‘reward’ to his troops.

The Comfort Women book mentioned above is, of course, an absolute classic in the field- because it shows how much a modern state can *use* sex as part of the mythologizing of masculinity, and as part of the forced conversion of citizens into soldiers: japanese soldiers apparently didn’t feel like they were prepared for battle unless they’d visited a comfort woman prior to the campaign.

To my mind, there’s only one aspect of rape’s usage in warfare that you don’t touch on in this post: propaganda that the other side is going to rape your women. I’m most familiar with the phenomena in WWII and its aftermath, although I’m sure you could go back far further. In the european theater, both German and Russian propaganda harped almost incessantly on the uncivilized, sexualized barbarians the Huns (Russians) or germans were. Most interestingly to me, though, is the fact that by the end of the war, fear of the (presumed) mass rape of German women by rampaging Russian soldiers became quite possibly the single largest feature of Nazi propaganda on the front. The argument was simple, really, and quite brilliant as a piece of propaganda: implicitly, it was ‘they’re going to do to your wives what you did to theirs’.

What’s even more interesting to me, though, is that this myth- substantiated in part by the widespread actual crimes committed by invading Russian soldiers, became a central plank of the immidiate postwar west german state-sanctioned collective memory.(It’s still incredibly controversial how widespread it was– it’s very hard to research Nazi victims and not be called an apologist to genocide). The Massenvergewaeltigung (Mass rapes), as they were called, began to serve as way for postwar germany to come to terms with defeat, and disgrace, and to re-cast the German nation as a victim. I believe some politicians even made explicit comparisons between Germany, the nation, being ‘raped’ by Nazism and war, and the country’s women, being literally raped by Russian soldiers. (I’ll have to look that up.)

Two more quick asides with which you may or may not be familiar:

When American troops finially landed in France in 1917, the french military, as was established European practice at the time, arranged brothels staffed with French (and some colonial, i believe) women to accompany the American camps. Predictably, Wilson and the american military leadership (I don’t recall names right now) were aghast and adamantly declined. Of course, the brothels sprung up anyway, but without official gov’t sanction.

Which brings me to my final anecdote, also re: the american army: In WWII, all major army bases had ’stations’ for servicemen to disinfect themselves after venturing off-base to visit local prostitutes. Of course, with the moralizing and conservatism on the home front, this couldn’t really be public knowledge– but the army wouldn’t cease offering the prophylactic stations because they were terrified of the stratospheric STI rates some bases were reporting. So they kept them open, but barred photographers from taking any photos and even (i believe) subsumed the budget into something else so it wouldn’t be an obvious expense.

People with too much time on their hands...

...make hilarious mashup youtube covers.

Things that I agree with...

Tenured Radical on Bringing College Drinking back above ground.

Jeremy Young (nonpartisan) on why Mike Gravel was not always this irrelevant.

BiPM on how much David Horowitz (and his Islamofascism Awareness week) is a f*cking useless ass.

The Academy's Bench Warmer on Stanley Fish on how people who are obsessed with postmodernism have missed the point. (A on B on C on D! New, Improved Blogosphere, Now with 100 times more analysis and even less original ideas!)

Echo chamber, indeed.

That's good for now.

On returning to blogging...

So I've decided that i want to go back to school to get a Ph.D. in history, even though

a) There are no job prospects,
b) I'm at a real job making a reasonable salary,
c) I haven't written or researched anything at all in 4 years,
and d) There are no job prospects.

So I've also determined that I need to start actually *thinking* again instead of just obsessively reading the news. So even if i don't have time to post thoughtful responses, I'm going to at least post some links to what I've been reading, to keep me honest.

For what that's worth.

Yes, Mr. Bush, Musharraf is in fact a dictator

So Pakistan is now offically under martial law.

Bush won't do anything and won't cut off funding to terrorism, even though the opposition, made up of lawyers (!) opposing Musharraf's extraconstitutional attempt to be reelected,are being beaten.

With friends like these...

On Waterboarding

I'm just going to post some links here, because I don't have time to comment.

Here's Malcom Nance, former SERE instructor, on why Waterbording is most certainly torture and why intelligence gained from torture is at best useless and at worst devastating.

This is no hippie peacenik--not that there's anything wrong with that. He write in the article that

I would personally cut Bin Laden’s heart out with a plastic MRE spoon if we per chance meet

Yuck. But i get the point. This is not *just* a humanitarian issue. Even if you're a psycho wingnut warmonger, this is bad policy.

Awful.

ATT Whistleblower on Telecom Immunity

Terrifying.

Dodd!

Wow.

Chris Dodd has just placed a hold on the FISA bil, which would extend retroactive immunity to the telecom companies that illegally shared private call records with the US Government. There were enough idiotic, spineless, cowardly democrats (Hello, Diane Feinstein!) to pass the bill-- but Dodd's hold will force the issue to come to a vote-- and theoretically, Dodd could filibuster, which would require 60 votes to overcome.

(Thanks to Kagro X for his excellent analysis of what the hold means.)

This is pretty damn impressive. Dodd is really sticking his neck out. Here's what he says on his web site:

The Military Commissions Act. Warrantless wiretapping. Shredding of Habeas Corpus. Torture. Extraordinary Rendition. Secret Prisons.

No more.

I have decided to place a “hold” on the latest FISA bill that would have included amnesty for telecommunications companies that enabled the President’s assault on the Constitution by illegally providing personal information on their customers without judicial authorization.

I said that I would do everything I could to stop this bill from passing, and I have.

It’s about delivering results — and as I’ve said before, the FIRST thing I will do after being sworn into office is restore the Constitution. But we shouldn’t have to wait until then to prevent the further erosion of our country’s most treasured document. That’s why I am stopping this bill today.

I can't say that I'm officially a Dodd supporter now ( I like Edwards and Obama, for feasible candidates, and Gore as a pseudocandidate) but this is heartening for an activist like me getting more and more cynical about the Democratic majority by the minute.

Just what we needed

Turkey's parliament has voted that the Turkish Military can invade Iraq.

This clusterfuck of a regional war doesn't get any simpler, does it, Mr. Bush?

Accuracy in polling

Brilliant.

Mark Blumenthal, the Mystery Pollster, on how to identify potential spin and bias on every poll.

Starting today we will begin to formally request answers to a limited but fundamental set of methodological questions for every public poll asking about the primary election.

This will be an enormous help to those of us who try to parse the polls this year...

You're joking, right?

The NY Sun and Fox News, unable to acknowledge Gore's Nobel Peace Prize victory without getting their hypocritical, twisted tongues caught in their throats, have wasted no time attacking him for all manner of illogical faults. That doesn't surprise me.

This, though, is something else. You really do have to be living in an alternate universe to nominate General David Petraeus, currently the architect of a major war that's causing, um, anything but peace in the Middle East, for "The Next Nobel".

Oh, wait- half of Congress (and 28% of Americans) are living in an alternate universe.

What's a little torture among friends?

TPM reports that Mitt Romney's security advisor openly supports torturing prisoners, quote:

I'd stick a knife in somebody's thigh in a heartbeat.

When did this become an acceptable form of discourse in America? How did this -- OPENLY SUPPORTING TORTURE -- become the preferred stance for legitimate Republican presidential candidates?

Oh, yeah. Because Gonzales told us so:

physical torture "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."

Frank Rich is right. We are the Good Germans, the Mitlaeufer, the ones who went along and said nothing.
Martin Niemöller:

Als sie mich holten,
gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.

And when they came for me,
There was no one left who could protest.