Author: Jeffersonian Democrat

X-listed at Eurotribe
OK, I haven’t been pulling my weight; here or in activism in general.  The last thing I did was march in Berlin on the eve of the Iraq war.  Now, I am conducting my second act in activism.

I teach at a German university on a graduate exchange.  Though I am a Germanist, I teach in the American Studies department.  This semester I am teaching a course on avant-garde theater.  I gave my students a choice: do the regular oral referat (presentation) or perform a play that I am teaching.  They chose to perform a play and we are performing “Not in My Name: A Protest Play Against the Death Penalty” from The Living Theater out of New York.  It’s written not only for professional actors but also for activists.

 The great thing about this play is that it is short, simple, yet powerful.  It does have elements of Brecht’s Lehrstücke.  It offers the players creativity, especially in where it takes place.  Since the EU does not have the death penalty, they chose to set it in Turkey.  That is an important decision since Turkey is trying to join the EU and it is an issue that affect Europeans more than placing it in the US.  I tried to install a sense of the last generation, the 68-ers into my students.  I hope I succeeded.  They will perform it on the busiest place on campus on July 19th, the last day of the semester.

If you are interested on how it progresses and the reactions from it, I will continue to write updates and results.  My department is supporting it fully.  The kids seem to be excited.  And I kinda feel good that I am contributing in some way.

 

I just saw a film that I can’t recommend more highly to anyone on the Left.  It’s called Die Fetten Jahre sind Vorbei, or, The Fat Years are past [gone].  Ok, ok, it’s foreign, don’t poo-poo it for that.  The main actor is a guy who starred in Goodbye Lenin, an up and coming talented German actor.
The gist of the movie is this:  Two friends are secret, contemporary radicals in Berlin.  They have a hobby – terrorizing rich people.  They do this by breaking into their houses by bypassing alarm systems while the owners are on vacation.  Once inside they don’t steal or damage anything but rather rearrange all of the furniture (stacking chairs, couches upturned, pictures upside down, etc) and leaving little notes that say “You have too much money”.  Freaks the inhabitants out.  (Kids, don’t try this at home, it’s illegal! – but does sound fun to try, heh, heh).

All is well until a romantic interests is involved and brought along.  After a very nice sex scene, she forgets her cell phone in the house.  Panic!  They go back to get it but the owner comes home.

Now here’s the beautiful part.  They kidnap the owner and take him to a cabin in the Bavarian Alps because they don’t know what else to do.  Sitting around after dinner with their captive, they strike up a joint.  The captive asks for a hit and the kids are surprised.  It turns out that the rich guy who is kidnapped is a 68-er, ex-radical from the sixties.  The movie takes a turn to discovering how an ex-radical became just what he fought against: a cog in the system.  Even a great scene where the captive teaches them a little about the sixties.  He explains his and his wife’s free-love with their group.  Later, one of the younger radicals comes in and in a humorous scene, tells the protagonist and his love interests that he want s free love with them.  No violence in the movie, just interpersonal interaction.  A great, light-hearted, and thought-provoking drama.

The end has a good scene with the German anti-terror police, but don’t worry, it’s a happy and funny end!

I highly recommend this film to both boomers and x-ers.  It’s fabulous.

Ok Booman, since you broke your own rule I take it as a license.  No, really, I don’t watch TV, blogs have become my main source of information as well as online news outlets.

I really, really like the folks over there, despite differing opinions.  IT IS THE NEW SETUP!  Jeez, it is such a pain to navigate now.
So please, Booman, keep the diaries at the right side of the page and front page topics in the center.  I’M PLEADING WITH YOU!  Really, my eyes go buggy with Kos’s new setup.

I stayed out of the pie-wars, not one comment despite strong feelings about it.  In fact, I teach feminist critical theory in my lit. classes (Kristeva, Gilbert, Sontag, Cixious, Butler, etc.) and I am on the pro-pornography side of the very long debate between different feminist factions.  I refuse to argue the subject in a knee-jerk way but rather in an “academic” mode of argument.  So I held my tongue and considered everyone’s position objectively.

So that is definately not why I wrote this diary.  This is a diary pleading with Booman not to muck up the site – if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it!

Thanks for a friendly site on the eyes, Booman, that’s my 2 cents.

This is a much more difficult diary to write that my last on Irag, simply because the inforamtion coming out of Afganistan is much more less.

Below the fold:
Ok, I am not a foreign policy expert.  Nevertheless, my credentials include being an enlisted Green Beret in the Army and then after college (UMich – Russian & Eastern European Studies major), a Naval intelligence officer with experience at SEAL Team EIGHT.  So my take on this comes from a tactical rather than strategical point of view.  Please argue with me if you disagree.

When the whole Afganistan thing started, my best friend (and ex-wife, Olga) said that she never expected to hear “Khandahar” in the news again.  She is from the USSR, yea the old name, in Komsomol and everything.  She is now in the Virginia National Guard and since she is a geological prospecting engineer (specialty in radioactive ores & minerals) as well as a secondary MOS in geo-engineering, I told her to never put on paper her native language.  I don’t want to see her deployed.  Why?

Well, let me let you on a little secret from a non-classified briefing I attended in the spring of 2002.  Since the WOT, we have a military footprint in every country in Central Asia.  Why?  OIL!

Yes, folks, this is about oil.  This is about getting a pipeline to the ocean with minimum danger.  The smokescreen is Iraq, watch Iraq but that is not where the interests lies.  We’re talking Azerbaijani oil fields and stable countries to export that oil.  Well, Iran is the most stable country to have a pipeline through, but before Afganistan was our best bet (and you really thought we cared about human rights?).  The Taliban kept the country stable much like Tito in Yugoslavia.  But now, we have a problem.  The only stable country is Iran, we would like to see a pipeline maybe to Turkey, but that means going through unstable countries.  We can’t abide Tehran, so it must be Kabul.

But as I said in my last diary, we must have the Auxiallry on our side.  Unfortunately, these are the folks who are growing a great product that I try out everytime I visit Amsterdam.  We are eradicating their means of production.  This will turn them against us and toward the warlords.

As my ex said, it wasn’t until the Soviets went after the imams that the populace turned against the occupying power.  Well, like Columbia, we’re turning off the populace by going after their livlihood.

So, we need Afganistan for the oil pipeline, but we’re losing it by oppressing the average farmer.  I am not advocating the growth of drugs here, just expressing my vision of cause and effect.

Until we cater to the will of the populace, or support an alternative crop production, we will find ourselves in the Soviet dilemna.

Those are my thoughts.

(x-posted at dKos)

Susan Hu replied to a comment I made and suggested that I write a diary.  So here it goes.  I believe that we are losing if not already lost Iraq because we are fighting a resistance movement.  Please do not call this an insurgency, it’s not, that is Pentagon spin.  Resistance and Insurgency are apples and oranges, just like minutes and memos.

More below
An insurgency begins as an action against an established government while a resistance is what is left of a defeated force fighting an occupying belligerent power and the subsequent installed government (think Vichy France).  This is what we in the Army Special Forces community calls UW, or Unconventional Warfare.

A resistance movement is made up of several elements.  First you have the the umbrella organization of the Shadow Government, aka government in exile that may exist covertly and/or overtly and operate covertly and/or overtly.

Second you have a guerrilla force that acts as the paramilitary arm of the shadow government.

Third, you have the Underground, which is mainly in urban areas that carries out duties such as passive resistance (demonstrations, sit-ins, etc) and active resistance (the factory worker who puts the wrong size ball bearings in the tank on the production line as a means of sabotage).

Fourth, and most importantly, you have the Auxilliary.  These are your sympathizers in the populace who provide logistics, food, water, shelter, communications and other means of active/passive support to the other elements.

Now, Iraq.  We have a full blown resistance here that our government is trying to spin as an insurgency.  Why?  Because a resistance is far more serious and very rarely winable.  Iraq’s shadow government is operating out of most likely Syria.  Former Baathist with LOTS of money.  This is the only reason Syria is in our sites, because Iran & NK are far higher on the hit lists but Syria is becoming a pain in the ass.  Next you have the guerrillas.  I’m not talking the terrorist jihadists (terrorist are a whole different animal all together) but the resistance fighters THEY ARE NOT INSURGENTS!  I can’t stress that enough.  They’re adapting to our tactics like all good guerrillas will, witness the use of shape charges lately.

Then, what I consider the most important, you have the Auxilliary.  These are the civilians we are pissing off.  These are the people that we have to win over, the target of “hearts & minds”.  Because without them, we’ve lost.  What we are doing is exactly what most conventional military commanders have done throughout history: we putting our boots on their necks, so to speak.  Most people would probably not support the resistance (as we saw in the beginning) if we weren’t taking their relatives away in the middle of the night and degrading them.  Of course they are going resist!

Now the reason I say we lost is because (some one fact check me on this) I believe I saw a recent poll of 90% want us out – that means our newly installed (Vichy) government wants us to stay to protect them.  I consider that 90% (or whatever it turns out to be) the auxilliary.  If that high of a percentage is an auxilliary member of one of the various factions, WE LOST THE WAR.  It only remains to be seen on how many dead service members come back before our population realizes that fact.

Solution?  I don’t have one, but I have an idea.  PULL OUT! How?  Well, my idea is this.  Make the CIA work for their money.  Contact the shadow government and say “hey, let’s stop this mess and bloodshed.  We will pull out and leave the country for you to work out amongst yourselves.  However, we will entice you with reconstruction and humanitarian aid if you do so peacefully.  If you are worried, as well as the other factions, of sectarian strife or not a voice in the government, then we will send UN blue helmets in to help keep the peace that we obviously can’t.  Let’s come to the table because we know that you really don’t want anymore of your sons and daughters killed, neither do we.”

I am sure that people with much more foreign policy expertise may take that idea for a solution apart.  Please feel free to do so as I submit it as a starting point for a discourse and maybe through dialectical thinking we can come to a real solution.

Thanks for reading.

I see the welcome wagons are out and about.  I checked out Booman because I’m on with with Eurotribe and it was referenced.  So I stopped by and saw so many familiar kossacks, that I signed up too.

Why do I have a guilty feeling of coming to the dark side?

I am especially excited to see a euro version set up…now, to roll up our sleeves and make sure Bush’s groupie, Angela Merkal, doesn’t get elected Chancellor!