Our Tragic Flaw

I was encouraged to see Bernard Kouchner's eloquent and passionate plea to free the "Gandhi of Burma" in today's New York Times:

PARIS — “Freedom from fear.” These words, uttered by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in 1990, resound more than ever as a call for help at a time when the Burmese junta has initiated proceedings against her that are as absurd as they are unjustified. We are not fooled: This is a poor pretext to prevent her from participating in the upcoming elections.

“Freedom from fear.” How can one not cry out for freedom for this great lady, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1991? I met her in Yangon at the end of 2002, just a few months before her endless enforced isolation began. Since her arrest on Thursday, May 14, the thoughts of all those who admire and support her are with the “Lady of Yangon,” a woman full of dignity and finesse, energy and calm, intelligence and compassion.

“Freedom from fear.” It was the living incarnation of these few words who appeared before an audience both mesmerized and awed by this living legend. Her every word was heard by a silent, respectful public, a public that did not dare to sit while she spoke. Simple, yet firm words. Innocent words. Calm and fearless words.

For over 20 years, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi has been struggling in silence and with unshakeable courage, supported by the conviction that “it is not power that corrupts, but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it, and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.” For over 20 years, her refusal of fear accompanies us, mobilizes us, forces us to defend her against a despicable regime.

How can one accept that a woman, whom some call the Gandhi of Burma, could be considered a criminal so dangerous that she must be kept away from all contact with the rest of humanity? For six years, this incredibly determined woman has been under house arrest. She lives in the sole company of two companions in misfortune. Six years of an enforced isolation, even crueler than prison. Six years with no outside contact other than sporadic medical visits, before the arrest of her doctor; or, even more rarely, a meeting with a diplomat.

Six years of isolation, but in reality 19 years of deprivation of freedom. Since the 1990 elections, which saw the victory of the opposition and which should have made her the leader of her country, the junta has deprived the Burmese people of their rights. Freedom has fled this country. For 19 years, the “Lady of Yangon” has known only brief moments of freedom. Her husband died before she could see him again.

This inhumane isolation could have ended on May 27, with the official end of her house arrest, if new proceedings had not been initiated against her under false pretenses. Once again, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi is being persecuted, even though her health is deteriorating and she risks being sentenced to five years of imprisonment, which she may not survive.

The Burmese regime cannot continue to turn a deaf ear to the appeals from all over Europe, America and Asia calling for her release and that of other political prisoners. It cannot ignore indefinitely the demand made with a single voice by the Asia-Europe Ministerial Meeting on May 26 in Hanoi, or the call for dialogue in Myanmar launched a few days earlier, in an unprecedented gesture, by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations — an organization of which Myanmar is a member.

I reiterate forcefully that the release of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi is a matter of urgency, as Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Nicolas Sarkozy strongly reminded us at their joint press conference on Thursday. Only dialogue with the opposition will bestow legitimacy on the upcoming 2010 elections.

Twenty years after the elections that saw the victory of the National League for Democracy, these elections are vital for the future of this martyred country. Myanmar can no longer remain isolated from the rest of the world. On the contrary, it must rejoin the rest of the world, and the international community is ready to help.

As a start, the military junta should admit that no solution can be found without including Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi in the electoral process. Senior General Than Shwe must understand that she is his best asset to guarantee the unity, the stability and finally the prosperity of the country, and that she is not a threat to his power. If the generals were to listen to the Burmese people, they would in turn free themselves from the fear that their people instill in them.

Bernard Kouchner is the minister of foreign and European affairs of France.

Judging by the media kerfuffle that has surrounded the normination of Sonia Sotomayor for the U.S. Supreme Court, you might think that there is something at stake here.

And there is, but it's not what is important--not by a long shot.

You see, the conservatives want to arrange the deck chairs over on the starboard side of the Titanic and the progressives want to arrange them more on the port side.

The kerfuffle is not about whether Sotomayor is a capable jurist, which I think everyone is bound to agree that she is. It's all about this port-starboard silliness. But, if the Titanic is really sinking (see Chapters 1 & 2 of my book) then Sonia Sotomayor, conservatives, progressives--the whole lot of them are completely mad.

Actually, the problem is the U.S. Constitution itself. This document runs deeper than deck chairs, to be sure, but not deep enough to cure what ails us. The Constitution is a set of legal principles aimed at the world the founders of this country knew in 1787. It is completely inadequate to meet the most urgent challenges of our time--which, of course, those men had no way of foreseeing.

Imagine that medical science had established certain vaccines two centuries ago that cured most of the worst diseases of that time. Wouldn't we think it perverse if physicians today insisted on using the same vaccines now, especially when a host of new diseases had since appeared that were not treated by any of them? Imagine "strict constructionist" physicians who would argue that the founding set of vaccines were the whole sum of medically valid remedies? Absurd.

In a similar way, the political world is much more varied than two centuries ago, and the stakes are much, much higher. This is a change not only of quantity, but of quality: I argue that we live in a pre-apocalytpic world today--which radically transforms the role of society and the burden of laws. Thomas Jefferson could not have anticipated nuclear weapons, the corporate patenting of life forms, global climate change, or a global economic system that makes British colonialism look merciful.

Under the U.S. Constitution, it is perfectly legal to build and deploy weapons of mass destruction, to commodify all aspects of farming and water delivery systems, emit greenhouse gases to our hearts' content, and grind the global South under the boot of the excessive prosperity of the North. Indeed, it is perfectly legal to work actively to promote such an ecological collapse that human civilization, and possibly life itself, would come to a sudden, gloomy, and ignominious end.

So, this whole argument about Sotomayor is not only a complete waste of time, but in fact a very insidious thing, because it distracts us from the fact that the present legal system is entirely inadequate to the urgent crisis of our time and, as far as we humans are concerned, all time.

Update on Wednesday, July 1, 2009 at 07:12AM by Parke Burgess

I realize upon re-reading this post that I left myself open to the usual charge that it should be the legislature, not the judiciary, that makes laws that reflect emerging realities--such as nuclear weapons, global warming, and so on.

Tis true.

But I am making a different point. We have seen just how difficult it is to, say, ratify a constitutional amendment. And we know that entrenched interests (such as oil and gas, or, worse, the Pentagon itself) will fight tooth-and-nail for the status quo and worse. Against these inertial forces, the political game we play ends up taking little account of the emerging realities that matter most, as I have argued.

I am suggesting that the legal principles embedded in the U.S. Constitution are themselves inadequate to our pre-apocalyptic moment. It seems to me that an adequate document would need to require, explicitly, that long-term ecological sustainability form the very bedrock of all legislative and judicial judgment.

In such a world, Supreme Court justices would be required to apply a sustainability test to all cases, for example. Can you imagine how much better off we would be?

(Of course, this could be achieved by constitutional amendment, and I would applaud and support an effort to make it so!)

In my book, Our Tragic Flaw: A Case for Nonviolence, I specifically cite Monsanto's horrifying record of disdain toward democratic processes and public safety in its relentless pursuit of power and profits. A new chapter in this record has recently opened, and it may be the most terrifying of them all.

The U.S. House and Senate are currently considering a bill, the "Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009" (H.R. 875), strongly supported by Monsanto, that ostensibly aims to secure food safety, playing on recent concerns that have made big news. It is currently being considered by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and the House Committee on Agriculture.

This bill consolidates virtually total power over the food supply chain into one administration within the Department of Health and Human Services (to be called the Food Safety Administration) and concentrates much of that power in one person, the Administrator.

This centralization of power in the federal government hands Monsanto and other enormous special interest lobbies unprecedented leverage to use the regulatory system to wipe out its competitors. By the same token, it places small farmers, organic farmers, and family farmers even more at the mercy of onerous bureaucratic requirements intended to push them out of business.

Please do whatever you can to make sure this bill dies in committee! You can take action here. (I found the template letter at this link far too weak, so I cut-and-pasted a few choice paragraphs from this blog into the top of the letter.)

Undoubtedly, food safety is important. But let us not be distracted from the fact that this bill uses food safety as a Trojan Horse to sneak in even greater abuses of power on the part of Monsanto than they have already managed to perpetrate on the American and world public.

Consider this: According to the CDC, "foodborne diseases cause approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year." But the CDC also recorded 43,664 deaths from automobile accidents in 2006 out of more than six million car accidents, which included some 3 million injuries, about two-thirds of which will be permanent.

In short, our food system is far safer than our principal transportation system. Your chances of dying in a car accident are almost nine times greater than dying of a food borne illness. And your chances of suffering a permanent injury in a car accident are more than six times greater than being hospitalized for a food borne illness.

We should be concerned about food safety, to be sure, but not hysterical. And the very last thing we ought to do is to allow the fox into the henhouse (quite literally). Monsanto has no business dictating food safety to anybody! After all, it was Monsanto that audaciously proclaimed:

"Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the F.D.A.'s job" - Philip Angell, Monsanto's director of corporate communications. "Playing God in the Garden" New York Times Magazine, October 25, 1998.

You are encouraged to read the bill. It makes fascinating reading for the student of the corruption of power and the insidious creep of totalitarianism.

I have kept my mouth shut for too long. I must unburden myself.

I have kept my mouth shut in part because I felt that what I had to say was so utterly obvious that there really shouldn't be any need to say it. But, alas, I was wrong.

I am tired of hearing lawyers of various stripes defending the special tribunals that are being set up to deal with the Guantanamo detainees. Have these people forgotten what they learned in 7th grade civics class?? Have we all??

Here's a quick refresher:

Our nation was founded on the idea that justice could only be guaranteed if ALL PEOPLE were subject to the same legal process when alleged to have committed a crime. This wild notion is known in legal circles as the RIGHT TO DUE PROCESS.

Let me clarify. The founding fathers said nothing of this being an anomolous American thing. It's not like due process is good for Americans, but really has nothing to do with the principle of justice on other continents (or other islands in our continent, for that matter). Justice is justice, and according to fundamental American values, justice REQUIRES due process.

Another point. This funny principle of due process does not vary depending on the crime. I don't recall Thomas Jefferson ever proclaiming anything like, "All people shall have an equal right to make their case before a jury of their peers...unless they have done something we really, really don't like. Then we should just waterboard them or, like, kill them or something."

Either we take democracy seriously or we don't. We can't have our democracy and eat it too. That is: we can't get all high and mighty about how virtuous we are, and then throw out the very principles of democracy whenever we can get away with it!

Wait...that's what we (the U.S.) do all the time, isn't it?

Never mind.