War Crimes and Forgetting

Pete Dolack

Forty years after the long Vietnamese struggle for independence concluded with the capture of Saigon, the mythologies surrounding the war on the other side of the Pacific Ocean have not loosened their grip. The “debate” surrounding the war is a textbook example of corporate media obfuscation.

A strong debate played out in the corporate media outlets of the United States concerning the Vietnam War at the end of the 1990s, and that same debate, with the same parameters, continues today. This debate, however, is only between two “acceptable” viewpoints — an honorable effort that tragically failed or a well-intentioned but flawed effort that should not have been undertaken if the U.S. was not going to be “serious” about fighting.

Left out are the widely held views that the war should never have been fought because it was a war to extend U.S. hegemony or that the U.S. simply had no business fighting in another country’s civil war. Further, the first “acceptable” viewpoint implies, and the second explicitly states, that the U.S. didn’t really fight hard to win the war, ignoring the actual intensive level of the U.S. war effort in which most of North Vietnam’s larger cities were reduced to rubble, much of the farming lands were destroyed and three million Vietnamese were killed.

Thus there was all the appearance of a free and open media at the same time that the media obscured.

Elections only when you do as we say

What were some of the messy things going on in Southeast Asia at the time? (Most of the following is taken from Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Pantheon Books, 1988.) The U.S. sabotaged the scheduled 1956 all-Vietnam election that was a cornerstone of the 1954 agreement that ended the French intervention; an election that was not allowed to occur precisely because Ho Chi Minh would have won. The U.S. set up South Vietnam as an artificial puppet state, overthrew and killed South Vietnam’s “leaders” and installed new “leaders,” who were invariably military thugs.

The U.S. invented the Gulf of Tonkin attack, a deliberate lie to create a cover for increasing the U.S. military role. By the time of the U.S. land intervention in 1965, American aerial bombing, napalming and gassing had already killed 15,000 Vietnamese. The U.S. carried out a policy of rural and urban terror. The military forced peasants in wide parts of the country off their land and into “strategic hamlets” — in reality, rural concentration camps — and killed peasants who refused to leave their homes. Tens of thousands were swept from their homes and sent to camps in single ground operations.

A writer in Foreign Affairs wrote that destroying the countryside and forcing rural residents into cities was necessary because the Viet Cong were “a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist.” The U.S. systematically destroyed by force any South Vietnamese grouping opposed to the installed military dictators, even non-Communist groups such as organized Buddhists.

The U.S. leveled major cities — 77% of the buildings in Hue, one of Vietnam’s biggest cities, were completely destroyed. Dams were blasted away, allowing salt water from the South China Sea to flood farmland, making the growing of food impossible. When North Vietnam agreed to the Paris Peace Agreements in 1972, Henry Kissinger decided not to accept the pact, began demanding major changes to an agreed-upon document, then launched the Christmas bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong when the North Vietnamese government insisted the agreement be signed.

In South Vietnam, 9,000 of 15,000 hamlets were damaged or destroyed, as were 25 million acres (100,000 square kilometers) of farmland and 12 million acres of forest. Killed were 1.5 million cattle. One million widows and 800,000 orphans were left behind.

In North Vietnam, 34 of the largest 36 cities suffered significant damage, with 15 completely razed, while 4,000 of about 5,800 communes were damaged. More than one million acres of farmland and 400,000 cattle were destroyed in the North. The Central Intelligence Agency admitted that at least 30,000 North Vietnamese were killed per year by 1967 by U.S. bombing, with these deaths primarily civilian. The total tonnage of bombs dropped by the U.S. in Vietnam exceeded that of all bombing by all countries during World War II. Reports of the countryside at the end of the war spoke of entire regions as “bare, gray and lifeless.”

No mercy in neighboring countries

Next door, in Laos, following a 1958 election in which a two-party Left coalition won 13 of 21 legislative seats, the U.S. swiftly overthrew the government, with the new government seated by the U.S. vowing to disband the Pathet Lao, which had won the most seats. Two years later, that new government was overthrown by the U.S., which installed a CIA-backed extreme Right-wing general.

In rural Laos, entire districts were wiped out by bombing. A series of articles in Le Monde reported on a district capital that had been deserted for three years because of repeated bombings. This capital was a portion of a 20-mile area stretching into the countryside in which not a single building was left standing and in which were found the remnants of American fragmentation bombs, which are dropped to maximize civilian casualties.

There were areas of Laos where villagers hid in nearby mountains, in caves or in ditches during daytime because of the ceaseless bombardment and who could conduct life only at night. Craters so saturated some areas that it was impossible to distinguish them, and all vegetation was destroyed. More than 350,000 Laotians — more than 10% of the country’s population — were killed and a similar number left homeless.

In Cambodia, bombing by the U.S. during the period 1969 to April 1975 resulted in 600,000 deaths and two million refugees, according to the same Finnish Inquiry Commission that concluded one million people died during the subsequent Khmer Rouge régime. As the bombing was ending in 1975, the U.S. government estimated that deaths from starvation in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, were near 100,000 per year.

This horrific bombing is believed to have played a role in the rise of the Khmer Rouge, which the U.S. covertly sided with during its murderous four-year reign. A U.S. government report in 1975 said 75 percent of Cambodia’s draft animals had died and that it would likely be three years before the country could regain rice self-sufficiency.

The carnage inflicted on Vietnam reverberates still. An estimated 19 million tons of toxic herbicides were applied that has resulted in more than half a century of damage to health and birth defects.

Such is the price of empire, paid by those on the receiving end. If these are not war crimes, then what would be?

Greece: the Confrontation

Bertrand Renouvin

Between Athens and Berlin, supported by Frankfurt [the European Central Bank], the confrontation is political. But it is not a matter of a conflict between two legitimate entities as numerous Eurocrats want us to believe. It is not some democratic European institutions, rooted in representativeness across half a continent, which attempt to assert their legitimate rights in opposition to the democratic institutions of a small country.

Greece is not a great power but we are presently discovering that it has more force than one would expect from the size of its economy and the extent of its territory.

Recall that, in the European Union, Greece can block any decision that requires unanimity as in the case of new sanctions that could be imposed on the Russian Federation.

Above all, Greece has a legitimate government which rests on a parliamentary majority arising from the free decision of a sovereign people. Opposed to Greece are powers and forces which cannot invoke democratic legitimacy, for reasons that have already been laid out on multiple occasions but which the European institutions and the European Central Bank do not want to acknowledge.

The European Parliament resembles a democratic assembly, the Commission resembles a government, the European Council, which brings together the heads of state and of governments, resembles bodies with executive powers – but they are nothing of the sort.

The European Parliament is not a legislative power given that it cannot initiate laws. It does not represent the European people as the European people do not exist. The [2007] Treaty of Lisbon evokes the ‘citizens of the European Union’ but this citizenship is acquired only within the framework of national states which issue European passports to French citizens, German citizens, Greek citizens, etc.

It is the European Commission that exercises legislative power by drawing up European directives whereas it comprises officials vested with executive power: they are given responsibility to enforce such texts which are not laws, for those officials are not representatives of a sovereign people.

The European Council [previously Council of Ministers] (configured according to appropriate domains of competence) is not a government as it co-produces texts with the Parliament and the Commission and approves the annual budget, while the Parliament is restricted to the right to disapprove of details of the Commission’s decisions.

The European Court of Justice decides arbitrarily on the matters that come before it: it creates European law while bypassing the legislative prerogatives of democratic national representative assemblies. The Court has actually established the principle of the absolute primacy of Community law over national law, national Parliaments having the obligation to integrate the former into the latter. This is worse than a government of judges, given that this Court of Justice does not operate within an institutional framework set by a Constitution. We are confronted by an autocratic body that constitutionalizes its laws and interprets them according to its own pleasure.

In the strict sense, the European Union has no institutions – that would presuppose a Constitutional order – but only instruments which do not respect the principle of the separation of powers, however essential in countries which respect the rule of law.

In any case, this Union cannot be considered a state. It is only a “juridical union founded on international law”, according to the unimpeachable definition given by the German federal Constitutional Court at Karlsruhe. This [fiction] doesn’t prevent the creation of a kind of ‘economic constitution’ – by establishing, for example, budgetary equilibrium as a principle – according to the ideological norms, whereas the so-called ‘European Constitution’ has in fact been rejected by France and the Netherlands.

In short, these are non-democratic bodies – the European Central Bank, the Eurogroup [Commission, Parliament, European Council, Court of Justice] – which attempt to subjugate a democratic government. These bodies can invoke the legality of the treaties but nothing that they impose can be legitimate for they are not the expression of a sovereign power.

Greece is, on the contrary, a sovereign state in which the government must satisfy the legitimizing criteria of popular sovereignty and of national sovereignty. It is this strength that the German government, the European Central Bank and the president of the Eurogroup are attempting to crush by technocratic mechanisms involving financial blackmail pure and simple.

We hope on behalf of the whole of Europe for a victorious resistance of the Greek government and of its people.

The Great Falshak

John Helmer

Moscow.

Works of art are only reliable investment assets if the trade in them is tested and transparent enough to prove they aren’t stolen goods, forgeries, or what is known in Russian as falshak (фальшак), a term originally applied to counterfeit coins.

Naturally, as the art trade generates higher and higher prices for individual works, the lure of expensive objects becomes irresistible for those with cash on the run. That is, if it can be laundered, er exchanged, through international auction houses like Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Bonhams – institutions less regulated, and apparently more reputable than banks. Just as these house names claim to be setting records for auction prices for their goods, the margin of profit to be gained from fraud and forgery attracts almost as many well-heeled crooks for sellers as for buyers.

The relatively short time in which Russian art has been traded in international markets has meant that the swiftly earned riches of the Russian oligarchs have been bidding up auction house prices for objects with dim histories, uneducated demand, and short or non-existent records of ownership. For a London auction house like Bonhams, the record-setting value of Russian art it has been able to find for sale has turned into an opportunity for exchanging the auction house itself for cash. If the privately-owned Bonhams, whose turnover is a tenth of the two bigger houses, were to trade at the price to earnings ratio (P/E) of Sotheby’s, it might fetch over £530 million. But prices like that don’t fetch if there is slightest suspicion of falshak.

Bonhams has been selling itself, according to the Financial Times, for its success at taking a corner on two markets – vintage cars and Russian paintings. It has set the market record for “the most expensive Russian painting sold at auction: the ‘Madonna Laboris’, by Nikolai Konstantinovich Roerich, fetched £7.9m.” At the time – June 2013 – Bonhams claimed ^[1] the Roerich work was “the most valuable Russian picture ever to be sold in a Russian art auction.” Last November, Christie’s beat the Bonhams record with the sale of Valentin Serov’s Portrait of Maria Zetlin for £9.2 million; for that story, and the Russian record table, click here ^[2].

Bonhams’ cars have turned out to be pricier than its Russian paintings, and there’s the rub. One of the priciest, a Ferrari 375 Plus, turns out to be stolen goods. That’s according to at least five, maybe six claimants now in court in the US and in London. As for Russian painting, Bonhams ^[1] was lucky to “rediscover” the Roerich Madonna; since then it has been unable to sell Russian paintings for anything like a record, either for lot or for batch.

Worse, there is still controversy among Russian experts over an attempt Bonhams made in 2008 to sell a work by Alexandra Exter ^[3], an artist of the Russian Avant-Garde of the 1920s. That painting (lead image), ‘Study for Venice’ of 1924, was withdrawn from sale in circumstances the experts and auctioneers aren’t willing to discuss on the record.

A Russian art expert, Yevgeny Zyablov (right), chairman of the board of Art Consulting ^[4], concludes that “the reliability of Christie’s
and Sotheby’s is higher. More controversial things, or things without attribution or elaboration, you can meet at Bonhams.”

So what has become of the Financial Times ^[5] attempt to promote the sale of Bonhams itself? According to the newspaper’s report of July 2014, “people close to the group said they were hoping to complete a sale by the autumn.” The newspaper claimed Poly Culture of China was one of four bidders – the others were Bain Capital, CVC Capital and Bridgepoint. CVC is a shareholder in Formula 1; neither it, nor Bain and Bridgepoint had taken an equity stake in a business like Bonhams; their names may have been planted. A few weeks after the Financial Times reported, Bain, CVC and Bridgepoint were reported ^[6] to have dropped out, leaving Poly Culture, the only one of the four to operate within the fine arts, with a price offer for Bonhams reported to be “several hundred million pounds”.

Poly Culture ^[7] was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in March 2013, initially valued at HK$33 per share ^[8]. It then jumped to $45, but steadily slipped over the past two years. Its current share price of HK$24 gives Poly Culture a market capitalization equivalent to £512 million. It is trading on a price-earnings ratio of 11.5. So based on Bonhams’ reported financials for 2013, the Chinese ratio should give Bonhams a valuation of about £300 million. If Bonhams were valued on Sotheby’s P/E of 20.5, it might be worth £533 million ^[9].

The Poly group says it originated as a joint venture in the 1980s between the People’s Liberation Army and CITIC, a giant state-owned conglomerate, best known in China for its CITIC Bank. Poly Group’s current lines of business include military technology, real estate, and popular entertainment, as well as art auctions ^[10]. The company hasn’t said a word about its reported interest in Bonhams; it refused this week to answer questions about its reported bid.

Bonhams ^[11] is jointly owned by two businessmen: Robert Brooks (below, left) and Evert Louwman (right), a Dutchman. Both were racing car drivers; both traders of new and used cars. Brooks was also an auctioneer ^[12] for Christie’s, and the owner of the London premiseswhich Bonhams rents out.

By mid-September Poly Culture was reported ^[13] in London to have dropped out of the Bonhams bidding – and there was noone left. A source claims Bonhams was asking for £350 million, whilst the source claims the Chinese were only willing to offer between £250 million and £275 million. Independently, Reuters reported bank sources as claiming they had put together a loan of about £200 million to back the bidding. By then, Bonhams had acknowledged an outright sale to a single investor was the only chance it had to generate an equity profit, all earlier attempts to find underwriters for a stock exchange listing having failed ^[12].

Financial reports filed by Bonhams reveal that in 2013 it valued its assets at £112.9 million. Revenue was £127.1 million; earnings (Ebitda) £26 million; profit £15.7 million. These numbers were all up healthily over 2012.

Between the start of the bidding for Bonhams and the drop-outs, a group of claimants to a Ferrari Bonhams had sold went to the High Court. The lead claimant, Leslie Wexner (right), an American underwear merchant, demanded that Bonhams return of more than £12 million – that covered the purchase price of the car which Bonhams had auctioned on June 27, 2014, plus legal costs. This story hit the newspapers in November of 2014.

The disclosure of Bonhams’ financials for 2014 is running late compared to last year. Because of the litigation over the Ferrari, the provision for liability of just over £1 million in the 2013 financial report is likely to rise to the court claim figure, plus legal costs. At about £12 million that may be enough to push Bonhams into loss.

This isn’t the first legal fracas Bonhams has faced for mis-selling Ferraris. In May of 2013, Bonhams had auctioned a 1959 Ferrari, subtitled Ferrari 410 SuperAmerica Series III Coupe, for which a London antiques dealer Thierry Morin paid Bonhams £480,000, following a fiercely contested auction. Bonhams had claimed in sale advertising the car had done “a mere 16,626 km”. Court action followed when Morin discovered the car had almost certainly done more than 200,000 kms.

Had Bonhams been tampering with the odometer — was it lying to defraud? Morin went to the High Court in London for the contract to be cancelled^[14], and his payment, plus costs, returned. The High Court ruled against him, on the jurisdictional ground that it was a Bonhams subsidiary in Monaco which had done the deal, not the London parent. “M. Morin does not have a reasonably arguable case against B&B London that they owed him a duty of care, ” wrote the judge, Jonathan Hirst. but he rule that if Morin sued in Monaco against the Bonhams compay there, “[he] certainly has an arguable cause of action against B&B Monaco in Monesgaque law if he can establish a misrepresentation as I am satisfied he can.”

“If it is right,” Hirst decided against Bonhams, “that the Ferrari had actually done over 200,000 kms, it is a matter of real concern how an international auction house could have stated that it had done “a mere 16,626 kms” when (if Mr Grist’s evidence is accepted) a short road test would have revealed the true position….For this latter reason, I would also conclude that M Morin had a reasonable prospect of showing that B&B Monaco was in breach of any duty of care.”

This year’s Ferrari problem for Bonhams is the evidence that the car had been stolen in 1989 and that Bonhams knew there was an ongoing dispute among several claimants when it told Wexner otherwise. According to court papers available last week, Wexner’s lawyers argue, “Bonhams knew that if it honestly revealed the true position regarding the challenges to title to the car, no-one would even consider buying it. This is apparent on the face of Bonhams’ own evidence… Bonhams knew that to auction the car successfully it had to present it on the basis that the long-running dispute around it had been resolved and that there was no challenge to the sellers/consignors’ title. When it realised that that would not be possible, it could have done the honest thing and pulled the car. But it knew that the financial consequences of doing so would be disastrous. So, instead, Bonhams pushed ahead with the auction and told the world and the Buyers what it knew was not true: that, in short, a purchaser would take the car free of any known risk of challenge to title.”

At this point there are six claimants to the car, including Wexner. No trial is likely before April of 2016. For the time being, according to the court documents, Bonhams is refusing to put in writing what it intended to mean by the pre-auction representations it issued on the Ferrari. One of the claimant buyers has asked the court to order a forensic inspection of the chassis, brake drums, and take metal shavings to determine whether the metal is as old as Bonhams claims the car to be.

In court last week Justice Julian Flaux said: “This case requires momentum and robust case management. The idea that it should maunder on does not seem appropriate.” Evidently frustrated by the competing claims, he demanded that by the date of the next hearing, May 5, Wexner and the others, including Bonhams, should agree on a list of issues to be decided. The judge also suggested that mediation might be a better option, because the longer the litigation goes on, the faster the asset will depreciate. The reputational and financial risks to Bonhams also grow as the case drags on.

Bonhams has issued a press statement: “we are satisfied that any claim is wholly without merit and will be strongly contested.” In court papers Bonhams claims that before the sale to Wexner it had brought the parties together; that the ownership dispute had been resolved; that “all relevant litigation had been settled”; and that Bonhams knew of “no reason why . . . the buyer should not be able to register title in . . . the USA.” Wexner and the other claimants are saying Bonhams is lying. According to its defence, “the idea that Bonhams would have participated in the fraudulent activity alleged against it is absurd”.

The impeachment of Bonhams’ credibility and the failure of its sale to investors cast a shadow over the Russian art market, not only because the mystery discovery of Roerich’s Madonna and the record price it fetched aren’t likely to be repeated. Misrepresentation, fraud and forgery aren’t unique to Russian art, according to Simon Hewitt, international editor of Russian Art + Culture ^[15]. “Russian Art has attracted forgers in specific, lucrative areas, particularly the late 19th century (Shishkin, Aivazovsky) and the early 20th century Avant-Garde. In my opinion, there is as much forgery of Flemish old masters as there is of late 19th century Russian paintings.”

“The Avant-Garde is a case apart,” Hewitt adds, “because the KGB set up something of a forging industry in the field as a way of accessing gullible foreign cash. They had access to materials dating from the 1920s which enabled many of their fakes to pass chemical testing with flying colours. When researching a piece for ART + AUCTION a few years ago I was informed by one high-profile source that the post-KGB forging industry continues, with practitioners based in ships off the Israeli coast (as well as Germany).”

It has been much easier also to get away with forgery in Russian art, at least in the 1990s. “Spurious authenticity certificates could be had from chronically underpaid and easily corruptible Russian museum officials for a pittance until quite recently, but this is less and less the case.”

Pyot Aven (below, right) of the Alfa Bank group, and one of the largest collectors of Russian art, has called in experts to authenticate the paintings in his own collection. In 2011, he called a press conference to report that a criminal gang based in France and Switzerland was flooding the market with fake watercolours by Natalia Gonacharova (left). “[She] never did watercolour versions of her oil paintings”, Aven said ^[16].

Aven’s collection is reported to hold 400 paintings, with a value estimated last November ^[17] by Forbes at $500 million. They are works of the late 19th century and early 20th century. Vyacheslav Kantor ^[18], owner of the Acron fertiliser group, has an equal sized collection; he specializes in Russian Jewish artists of the early 20th century, whose collection value is also estimated by Forbes at $500 million.

In Forbes these are advertisements for asset value, resale profit, collateral credit. The loopholes in the Forbes calculation are authenticity and dealer fraud. In November the publication claimed Dmitry Rybolovlev’s (below, left) collection was worth $700 million. This month fraud indictments in Monaco, France and Switzerland, initiated by Rybolovlev against his art dealer Yves Bouvier (right), reveal that the paintings were over-valued and Rybolovlev over-charged.

Just how little an oligarch’s collection may turn out to be was revealed when liquidators of Boris Berezovsky’s ^[19]estate discovered he had laundered his money too quickly, and carelessly, into works that turn out, on examination now, to be forgeries. Works that Forbes would put up to £50 million turn out to be a fraction.

For litigation by another fertilizer specialist, Andrei Melnichenko of Eurochem, to prove he had been defrauded by a New York art dealer, click here ^[20]; Melnichenko didn’t win. For Victor Vekselberg, who did win in a London court over Christie’s in the case of a fake Kustodiev painting, read this ^[21].

Right now, a St. Petersburg court is hearing criminal charges of conspiracy to commit fraud by Elena Basner in the certification, then sale, of the 1913 painting, “In the Restaurant” attributed to Boris Grigoriev (below). Bringing the charges is the collector, Andrei Vasiliev ^[22]. The Russian press coverage of all sides in the affair, which Basner ^[23] has called a frame-up, is voluminous.

The Russian expertise on which museums rely are the Art Research and Restoration Centre named after Academician Igor Grabar (GRC) and the State Tretyakov Gallery. They say they do not make public comments.

Yekaterina Kartseva, co-owner and founder of  Privatecollections.ru ^[24], says that Russian art forgery is exposed regularly, particularly of 20th century and contemporary works. “Less high-profile cases occur quite regularly; many of my friends who bought a painting at auction cannot obtain confirmation of authenticity at the Tretyakov Gallery. Major Russian auction houses are trying to keep track of their reputation, but many are bombarded with lawsuits. Most problems arise with online auctions, since there it is more difficult to keep track. Major Western auctions rarely bring cases to court. At Sotheby’s, as far as I remember, the buyer has three months in which to return the work. If the work is brought to us, we will examine it, make contact with the experts at Sotheby’s, and if the experts do not agree, there is three months for the buyer to make a decision.”

Kartseva suspects there may be forgeries in well-known collections, such as the collection of cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, which was bought by Alisher Usmanov at Sotheby’s in 2007. Usmanov (right) paid £25 million ahead of the auction, and then presented the works to the state. Paintings by Grigoriev and Roerich led the Sotheby’s estimates, which were roughly five times the prices Rostropovich had paid ^[25].

Suspicion doesn’t always result in an unambiguous certificate, Karsteva concedes. “Authentication may end up with a statement like, ‘the work does not conflict with the brush of a certain author’…the opinion of some experts do not necessarily reflect the opinion of others. The art market is certainly more prone to fraud, which is stimulated by the very high price of some of the works, when it isn’t clear whether the collector’s motive is to buy the painting itself or to demonstrate for all to see the cash equivalent. If you bought an image, is it important for you for the object to be the original or a copy?”

Zyablov of Art Consulting explains that as the economic stringencies being felt by buyers get worse, demand is restricting price, and the circulation of forgery is contracting. “Our company was created in order to protect investors — we have a very tough procedure. For this reason the British market takes our expertise for insurance of private collections. During the growth of the market, investors (buyers) had high hopes for this market. They bought a lot of things that were attributed by some experts without evidence, and sometimes without provenance. Now all these things are out of the market. You can appreciate too that when the market itself has fallen in volume, the number who want to make fakes and sell them is greatly reduced. Market expertise in Russia has also developed strongly to stop counterfeiting.”

A Moscow art market source explains that just as the incentive to forge is bound to grow as art prices grow, so does the expertise to detect it. When prices were in the low thousands of pounds, he said, the gallery or auction house commission would be roughly equal to the cost of high-quality chemical and other testing to authenticate a work. Russian buyers started out naïve, and if prices were low, they didn’t need to be careful. Once prices reached the millions of pounds,though, the demand for expertise intensified, and the cost was affordable for the auction houses.

About the Rostropovich collection, Zyablov says: “of course, things can turn out to be fake, and this might be found in many different collections. For example, Pyotr Aven commissioned us to examine and evaluate his collection for insurance purposes. From a few hundred things we found two things which were wrongly attributed. Pyotr Olegovich was grateful to us, and talked about it at a press conference. So, such cases happen.”

Auction houses like Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Bonhams maintain their own experts, Zyablov adds. “Experts with the same specialization compete for credibility. Those who stand on the side of the market, and are more lenient in their assessments, get promoted by the market. In this way, there’s better business for experts who are less tough. This is a paradox. The trend of expertise to protect the buyer goes against the trend of the market, which favours higher priced sales.”

Remembering the Fall of Saigon

Binoy Kampmark

Despite sharing the same diplomatic table as the United States, and forging ahead with trade agreements, Vietnam still remembers. Remembers, that is, those “countless barbarous crimes,” as the country’s prime minister calls them, committed by the United States during the long wars of the 1960s and 1970s. On April 30, 1975, Saigon was stricken by scenes of evacuation and panic. “Our homeland,” explained Nguyen Tan Dung, “had to undergo extremely serious challenges.”

Both countries provided mirrors of violent change, a form of toxic exchange that seemed share more with disease than nutrition. A distant country that was supposedly off the radar of American homes became a round-the-clock transmission feast of gore and depravity. Then came the battlefield traumas and the counter-cultural response.

The words from President Gerald R. Ford a week before the fall of Saigon before an audience at Tulane University spoke of America regaining “the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam, but it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.” The crowds began gathering for the evacuation – 130,000 Vietnamese leaving the South that April, a projection that made State Department predictions woefully inadequate. Bing Crosby’s White Christmas did the rounds on radio on April 29, triggering the airlift evacuation “Operation Frequent Wind”.

An all to quiet theme behind the commemorations has been one of waste. Waste of life, of resources. In Tim O’Brien’s words on the fall of Saigon and a slew of images, it was “the waste of it all. The dead, the wounded, the money, the psychic energy and the moral energy […] just everything.” Poor planning for the evacuation also saw a prolonging of suffering – the separation of families, the special, God-like power of who would join in the evacuation and who could not. “We separated families in a wink,” remembers Frank Snepp, one of the CIA’s top strategists working in Vietnam, “because we hadn’t planned adequately.”

But a response to defeat and trauma tends to be that of the reassuring fairy tale, the inventive scribe who finds better ways of reimagining horror. “Think of them,” suggests Bill Moyers, “as silver-lining tributes to good intentions and last-ditch heroism that may come in handy in the years ahead.” Hence the fall of Saigon being deemed humanitarian and worthy of remembrance in its tragic meter. American aggression, noted Christian Appy, was given a different pigmentation: that of “a tragic humanitarian rescue mission.”

The very idea of defeat that somehow masquerades as honourable exit started the show. The peace accords of 1973 served as a masking agent. The brutality began to disappear from the screens beaming into the homes. But scores were going to be settled, and vacillation before the advancing North Vietnamese forces would see compromising records fall into the hands of the victors. The CIA, as tends to be the usual pattern, could not be trusted to be reliable on this one – those on their payroll were found in undestroyed records, captured, sent for re-education, be it through ideological patching up or traditional execution.

As Moyers notes, a response of selective remembrance reverberates in the halls of quaint, if somewhat dangerous delusion. Spin doctors with dusters and gloves have gone back into the archives, reshaping defeats as strategic wind downs and “exists”. America, after all, cannot lose, and certainly can’t be seen to sport a broken nose. Corrupt regimes installed by the grace of superpowers become mechanisms of stability. Gambles pay off even when they are ignominious failures. That is the modern legacy of Vietnam, visible in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

Euphemistic bureaucracy thrived in South Vietnam, and has given birth to some terrifying monsters. The language of “body counts” and “free fire zones” entailing practical desserts have not lost their appeal in any shape or form. They have found shape in the broader objectives of the modern American Republic.

Vietnam also provided another pertinent reminder in the context of refugees. The first makeover of anniversary thought was to neglect the enormous internal displacement created by US operations – those arising from the “strategic hamlet program” designed to “pacify” local populations. In a technique all too reminiscent of British strategy towards the Boers in South Africa, millions were forced off their land, herded, encamped. “I never flew refugees back in,” remembers flight chief Jim Soular. “I always flew them out.”

Refugees arising from the conflict chose the sea as a means of passage. They were the “boat people” snaking their way in danger via the Mekong and the South China Sea to make it to countries like Australia. Many were ethnic Chinese that formed the bulk of those expelled by the Vietnamese government in 1979. Government policy to them from Australia, an ally of the southern government, resisted cultural and racial angst. There was no Pacific or extra-territorial repulsion, despite the fear in some circles that white purity was being muddied. But tens of thousands would languish for years in refugee camps in Southeast Asia.

Even now, as the fall of South Vietnam is being remembered, it is providing moments of selective reflection. Whatever happens at these points, the strategists and the dream factory merchants should be kept away from the planning rooms about military interventions. Any reference to Vietnam as precedent is bound to be foolish and misguided, because the wrong questions are bound to be asked.

Glimmers of Hope for the Constitution

Rebecca K. Smith

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a rare glimmer of hope in a case called Rodriguez v. United States. In the case, the court held that police cannot extend a routine traffic stop to use a drug dog to sniff a stopped vehicle for drugs. The court stated: “We hold that a police stop exceeding the time needed to handle the matter for which the stop was made violates the Constitution’s shield against unreasonable seizures.” In other words, police cannot pull you over for a burned out tail light, give you a ticket, and then detain you for another 10 minutes while they use a drug dog to sniff the outside of your car for drugs. However, the dog can sniff the outside of your car for drugs while you are getting the ticket. But after the ticket is issued, police have to let you leave. Basically, the issue is that police cannot detain you any longer than necessary to issue the ticket for the reason that you were pulled over.

This holding is based on the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. Previously, the court held that it was not an unreasonable search to allow a drug dog to sniff the outside of a car for drugs during a traffic stop, even if the owner would not consent to a search and the police did not have a search warrant. That ruling, Illinois v Caballes, was a major strike against the Fourth Amendment’s protection of individual privacy. Last week’s ruling inRodriguez lessens the blow of that case a little bit.

So why did the Supreme Court unexpectedly issue a decision that will limit police power rather than expand it? Perhaps the recent flood of videos of unarmed black men killed by police during traffic stops is having an effect. Indeed, some commenters are referring to this type of impact as “the Ferguson Effect.” Perhaps all of these recent objective video recordings have caused some people to question their own assumptions and biases about what really goes on during police encounters with people of color in this country.

This brings up another recent glimmer of hope related to the struggle against racial profiling. Last week, a federal court in Arizona held a contempt hearing to address whether Sheriff Joe Arpaio should be held in contempt of court for continuing to encourage racial profiling of Latinos after a federal court held that his practices were illegal and unconstitutional. In 2013, in a class action lawsuit, a federal judge in Arizona ruled that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department, led by Sheriff Joe Arpaio, had racially profiled Latino drivers, and unreasonably detained them after traffic stops as part of aggressive and illegal anti-immigration patrols. The judge held that it was unconstitutional to consider race as a factor in determining where to conduct patrol operations, in deciding whom to stop and investigate for civil immigration violations, and in prolonging the detentions of Latinos while their immigration status was confirmed. The judge entered a permanent injunction against the racial profiling practices of the Sheriff’s Department. Two weeks ago, the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court’s permanent injunction against the racial profiling in Melendres v Arpaio.

However, since the original 2013 permanent injunction was issued, Arpaio has continued to instruct his deputies to break the law and engage in racial profiling to implement an aggressive and illegal anti-immigration policy. So last week, the federal district court judge held a contempt hearing to determine if Arpaio should be held in contempt of court for violating the federal court’s injunction against racial profiling. If the federal judge ultimately finds Arpaio in contempt of court, Arpaio could face jail time, which would be an ironic and fitting end to his tenure as Sheriff.

The Rebel, Oronto Douglas

Daphne Wysham

If they knew him at all, the world knew Nigerian Oronto Douglas as the former attorney for the writer, playwright and Ogoni human rights activist Ken Saro Wiwa. Despite Oronto’s and even President Bill Clinton’s best effort, Ken was framed and hanged in 1995 together with 8 other Ogoni men who dared resist Shell Oil’s drilling in their homeland under former dictator Sani Abacha. Or perhaps the world knew Oronto as a top advisor to the former president of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan.

To his friends, Oronto was so much more. He was a man of profound sacrifice, service, love, integrity, and faith. He was a true Christian, taking to heart the message of the rebel Jesus. Like Jesus, he was at his most fierce in taking on the money-lenders in the temple. Oronto’s “temple” was the natural world, and in particular, the lush and verdant landscape of the Niger Delta. In speeches and interviews, he took on the oil companies and their backers, repeatedly proclaiming, “They drill and they kill!” He urged people of conscience to divest from fossil fuel companies.

His fearlessness in the face of violence, torture and even threats of death meant that he carried the message against the planet-plundering oil companies around the world, speaking truth to power, no matter the price.

I first met Oronto Douglas at the Kyoto international climate negotiations in 1997. We were on the same panel which Friends of the Earth had pulled together. As soon as he started to speak, the journalists – all of whom had been sleepily typing away at their computers – rushed to our corner of the hall, riveted by his powerful, personal story.

When I learned this brilliant orator had never been to America, I helped arrange for Oronto to come to the US. I knew Americans needed to hear his message. We traveled together to Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, New York and Washington, DC. Again and again, tirelessly, passionately, he told of the occupation of the Niger Delta by oil companies, the colonialism that predated them, and his love of the NigerDelta and its peoples. At every location, when Oronto ended his speech with a call for divestment from oil and gas companies, I could predict just how many seconds would pass – three, exactly – before the audience would rise to its feet in a standing ovation.

Oronto came from a village in Bayelsa State where human rights were routinely violated, the earth was scorched in decades-old caked oil spills, the water was polluted, the air rained toxins from endless gas flares, and troops routinely gunned down or tortured those who protested. Nevertheless, he quickly came to recognize that climate change and the oil companies operating in Nigeria were an even greater threat than the government itself – and not just to Nigeria, but to the entire planet. And so he and his fellow Ijaws, the largest ethnic nationality in the Niger Delta, determined in 1998 to usher in the New Year with “Operation Climate Change,” a maneuver which required the cooperation of all of the oil workers of the Niger Delta and thousands of protestors, to draw attention to the rights of the Ijaw to self-determination on their territory. Their declaration of independence was released in the now For a few days, he and his fellow activists and the oil workers managed to shut down all of the oil flow stations, shutting in over half of all of Nigeria’s oil production. As troops fired on demonstrators, his friends knew Oronto was a hunted man.

Try as we might to generate news coverage of the political motivations behind “Operation Climate Change” in the U.S. and the cause of the Ijaws, we failed. It was over the holidays between Christmas and New Year’s, and every journalist seemed to be on vacation or unwilling to cover such an obscure topic. Our fear was that Oronto and his comrades would be hunted down in the creeks where they were hiding and killed without any international press attention. So a group of us decided we would raise the funds to take out a full page ad in one of Nigeria’s largest news dailies, with signatures from activists and world leaders, and the statement: “The World is Watching: Peace in the Niger Delta.”

It was on another of his trips to Washington, D.C., when we decided we needed to do more to elevate Oronto’s status in the international press, so we arranged for him to meet President Bill Clinton. Oronto was able to have a photograph of him shaking hands with Bill Clinton, which we immediately ensured was sent to the press in Nigeria, with the caption, “Oronto Douglas meets President Clinton.” We had determined the higher Oronto’s profile, the safer he would remain. Little did we know that, try as we might to protect him from an assassin’s bullet, it was the pollution–the drillers’ and spillers’ carcinogenic fossil fuels–that would end up killing him.

Oronto was compassionate, joyful, hard-working, tireless, determined to work for justice, environmental protection and peace. His spirit and example inspired me to take more risks, to be more fearless, to do more than I was doing to be of service. He made a point of always lifting up those around him, no matter how heavy his sorrows and important his work. He may be taking a call from the president of Nigeria, he still had the scars of torture on his back, but he made time for the smallest of concerns in his friend’s lives. This was particularly the case if children were involved–he loved children and they loved him.

Oronto had a grand vision of a united Nigeria, one held together not by the outdated boundaries of colonialism nor torn apart by the dangerous animosities of tribal identities but by the agreement of a sovereign national conference. I hope one day that dream of his becomes a reality. It is sorely needed, particularly as oil prices have fallen and the budget for Nigeria’s government, 80 percent of which comes from oil revenues, has dropped with it. In the interim, Oronto played a pivotal role in helping Nigerian elections become more free, transparent and fair, which became evident when President Goodluck Jonathan quickly ceded power to Muhammadu Buhari despite a close election.

I saw him on numerous visits to the US, always finding out about them at the last minute, days or maybe even hours before his arrival. Sometimes he was in the US meeting with the State Department. Other times he was getting treated for cancer. Had I known that the last time I saw Oronto would be my last visit, I would have done more than just accompany him to see his doctor. If he had had the time or energy, I would have held a press conference and shouted to the rooftops: Here walks a modern day hero, a man who can show us the way back to the temple, a man who is far more powerful than the money lenders, the oil companies and the politicians, a man unafraid of the killers and the drillers. Here walks the one and only Oronto Natei Douglas! But, of course, he would have none of such fanfare.

To all of you who loved Oronto, and I know there are many, he was indeed our beloved Oronto, but he was also God’s beloved Oronto. And he is now most certainly in God’s embrace. May God bless his widow and his sons and lift them up at this most painful time, as Oronto did for all of us, and may his spirit and the supreme example of a life of service and love that he led live on in all of us. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

The Problem With Boycotts

David Macaray

One of the difficulties in mounting a boycott is not knowing in advance whom you’re going to hurt. While the whole point is to influence the behavior (e.g., hiring practices, working conditions, wages and benefits) of a retailer or manufacturer by threatening to limit their profits if they don’t become more “enlightened,” there are risks involved. Instead of hurting an employer, a boycott can punish the very employees it’s trying to help.

Boycotting Wal-Mart qualifies as a “good” boycott. Obviously, because Wal-Mart can afford better wages and bennies, a big, splashy national boycott (coupled with employee protests) could just be the public relations tool to influence them. Given Wal-Mart’s aversion to organized labor, increasing employee compensation in order to keep the unions out would be viewed by the giant retailer as the lesser of two evils.

Another example of a “good” boycott, was the one directed at the Coors Brewing Company, back in the 1970s. Because Coors had such vehement, anti-union sentiments (some of which were deemed “illegal”), and had been accused of discriminating against African-Americans, Latinos, women, and gays in its hiring practices, the AFL-CIO called for a national boycott in 1977.

By all accounts, the Coors boycott was moderately successful. In addition to actor Paul Newman, in a show of solidarity, making a dramatic announcement that he was switching from Coors to Budweiser, a wide-scale public relations campaign was launched.

Accordingly, sales of Coors in California dropped from 40-percent in 1977, to 14-percent in 1984. It was reported that every union hall and every gay bar in California had stopped serving Coors. The AFL-CIO’s national boycott was called off in 1987.

Conversely, an example of what is probably a “bad” boycott is the one aimed at Third World textile manufacturers, specifically textiles made in Bangladesh. After a disastrous fire, in 2012, that killed more than 120 workers, people began calling for a boycott, one that would pressure textile factory owners to improve employee safety and general working conditions.

The problem with a textile boycott is that it would cause poor Bangladeshis to become even poorer. Textiles aren’t just important, they’re the basis of its economy. Bangladesh (population: 157 million in an area smaller than West Virginia) is the world’s second-leading exporter of apparel (behind China). A “successful” boycott would not only cripple the industry, it would basically ruin the country.

As for working conditions, the bitter truth is this: Countries (including the early 20th century U.S.) that move from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy go through a messy stage. They don’t enter the industrial arena by resembling a sleek, state-of-the-art production facility in Detroit, Michigan. They enter it by resembling a “sweatshop.”

And not to be glib, but historically, the institution that was clearly the most effective in improving the working conditions and welfare of employees during this “messy” transitional period wasn’t the government or the church or the media or charities. It was organized labor.

It’s a fact. American sweatshops didn’t begin to improve significantly until labor unions began representing their workers. Accordingly, if we truly wish to help Bangladeshi textile workers, it won’t be by refusing to purchase the apparel they produce. All that will do is destroy their livelihoods.

Rather, the goal should be to promote the Bangladeshi labor movement. Keep the marketplace healthy, but let labor do what labor does best: represent the interests of the workers. Another fact: Child labor in the U.S. was abolished through the efforts of labor unions, not politicians. If you don’t believe it, look it up.

Suppressed at Home, Neglected Abroad

Graham Peebles

The first duty of any government is to protect its citizens from harm, at home and abroad – no matter who they are, or where they are. This is the primary moral and constitutional responsibility of the EPRDF government of Ethiopia, which, as with a vast array of such obligations, they fail to meet, or even acknowledge.

In recent weeks a plethora of atrocities have befallen Ethiopians abroad: in Libya 30 Ethiopian Christians (whom we know of) were murdered (their beheadings shown on video) by demented, Islamic jihadists, marching under a black flag of hate and violence; hundreds of others shiver in fear of being discovered. Earlier this month Ethiopians (together with other African migrants) living in South Africa were dragged through the streets by gangs: burnt alive, beaten, their homes and businesses destroyed, their children attacked. Thousands of Ethiopian men and women are trapped and frightened inside Yemen as that country descends into civil war; hundreds more are amongst the thousands of desperate men and women trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe from Libya. And in the Middle East and Gulf States (MENA), Ethiopian girls, working as domestic workers, are routinely mistreated by employers; many are sexually abused, most suffer psychological violence, all are trapped into domestic slavery.

To each and every one of those Ethiopians suffering upon foreign soil, the ruling regime has offered little or no support. Not content with suppressing the people at home, violating their basic human rights and denying them freedom and justice, the EPRDF government ignores their cries for help. Unlike other nation states (Malaya, Sri Lanka, the Phillipines, for example) they provide no consular support to the vulnerable young workers in the Gulf countries; have failed to organise any major airlifts for those hiding in Yemen, have done nothing to protect migrants in Durban and Johannesburg; and have taken no significant action, save prime ministerial platitudes, to safeguard Ethiopian Christians in Libya.

The government’s neglect is shameful but not surprising, and has enraged the people, who took to the streets of Addis Ababa recently in huge numbers in a powerful display of collective grief and anger. Their peaceful protest was met – again not surprisingly, given the governments intolerance of public assembly – by baton wielding security personnel, who beat men, women and girls indiscriminately and broke up the demonstrations. According to constitutional principle demonstrations are allowed, but in practice they are all but outlawed, as are all types of free expression. The regime is paranoid, as all such totalitarian groups are.

Neither Home Nor Country

The need for a quiet centre from where to face the world is common to us all. For many that haven of security is our country of birth, it comforts and reassures us, holds us gently in its sure embrace, protecting us from the uncertainties and dangers of life. Home is where we feel safe, secure and loved. A wooden hut or a Modernist mansion, home is the refuge we turn to in times of difficulty.

For the thousands of Ethiopian migrants abroad, they have neither home nor country. Abandoned by their government they are homeless, vulnerable and alone; they make easy prey for criminals: the traffickers and the gangs of rapists, kidnappers, jihadists and thugs who patrol the pathways along which the migrants walk.

To the untrained eye, the economy of Ethiopia appears to be developing, and the country gives the appearance of stability in a region of almost total instability. But this is a misleading image of development and hides deep-seated inequalities, endemic corruption, widespread bitterness and simmering fury towards the ruling party. Ethiopia remains one of the poorest countries in the world: it is ranked 173rd out of 187 countries in the UN human development index, and unprecedented numbers of its citizens are migrating in search of opportunity and freedom.

They travel north to Egypt and Libya – hoping to make it to Europe; south to Kenya and South Africa; east to Yemen, where some stay, others continue to try to crawl into Saudi Arabia. Many head to the other Gulf states, Lebanon, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates; countries with virtually no domestic labour laws, endemic racism and sexism, where naïve, uneducated young girls from rural Ethiopia enter into contracts (the Kafala system) with employers that trap them into domestic servitude, and, for many, sexual and psychological torture. Over two thirds make the journey out of the country illegally, entrusting their lives to human traffickers.

They migrate for one of two reasons, economical or political, or should we say humanitarian, for it is the violations of their basic human rights that drive many from their homeland.

Many see no way to build a decent life for themselves and their families: others, particularly journalists and political activists see no hope of freedom from tyranny and are persecuted by the security forces for holding views that differ from the government. For them Libya, Yemen or the Mediterranean are no more dangerous than Ethiopia, Islamic state no greater a threat than the police or military, and so they too step onto the migrant road of uncertainty, in search of a new home in a more peaceful place; a place where there are economic opportunities, better education, and where democracy, justice and freedom exist. All of which, despite the duplicitous, political rhetoric from the EPRDF government, are totally absent in Ethiopia.

The regime systematically violates fundamental human rights, silences all dissenting voices and rules the country in a suppressive violent fashion which is causing untold suffering to millions of people. The upcoming May election, contrary to US Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman’s ignorant, misjudged and widely criticised comments (that “Ethiopia is a democracy that is moving forward in an election that we expect to be free, fair and credible and open and inclusive”), is a hollow piece of democratic theatre; a total sham, with no credibility whatsoever. The result, as everyone in the country and amongst the diaspora knows, is a forgone conclusion.

The government of Ethiopia neglects and suppresses the people at home, ignores and abandons them abroad. They are in violation of a plethora of international covenants, as well as their own constitution, but perhaps more fundamentally they are in violation of their primary moral duty: To care for and protect their citizens, wherever they face intimidation, violence and abuse.

Trial-by-Fire in Syria

Louis Proyect

Recently published by Verso Press, Jonathan Littell’s “Syrian Notebooks: Inside the Homs Uprising” is welcome both as an important document of Syria’s trial by fire as well as an indication of this august publisher’s willingness to break with the pro-Assad consensus that prevails on the left. Although Littell’s chronicle is hardly the work of an FSA partisan, he at least puts a human face on a movement that so many were willing to reduce to one fighter’s shocking act–eating the heart of a fallen Baathist soldier.

Written between January 16 and February 2, 2012, Littell’s notebooks are literally that, a day by day diary of what he saw and what he did in Homs, a city that was a citadel of resistance to Bashar al-Assad, particularly in the working-class neighborhood of Baba ‘Amr, where Littell spent most of his time.

Littell came to Syria in order to gather material for articles in Le Monde. In effect, the book is the rough cut for the finished articles. In his preface, Littell states that the book is a document and not a “work of literature”. While this is obviously true, there is a literary command of the material that one might expect from a novelist who won the Goncourt Prize for his second novel “The Kindly Ones”, a 992-page work about the horrors of WWII written from the point of view of its main character, a Nazi SS officer.

Before he began writing fiction, Littell worked in the Congo, Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan on behalf of Action against Hunger, a humanitarian aid project. So in effect the notebook, the novel and that job are united by a commitment to both understanding and acting on the horrors of modern warfare, so often suffered disproportionately by civilians. This was an everyday occurrence in Homs, where Baathist snipers fired on people shopping for groceries or watering an olive tree in the streets of Baba ‘Amr as if they were terrorists. Indeed, the primary feeling you are left with after reading over two hundred pages of such wanton and senseless slaughter is that Homs was not much different than Gaza, where the distinction between “terrorist” and ordinary citizen was vanishingly thin. Even less so, as this case illustrates:

The child’s name was Muhammad N. and he was thirteen, not twelve. It’s the father who tells us the story. He was breaking wood for the sobia [a wooden pyramid-shaped device that butchers use to clean and cut meat] in front of the house, last night around 11:00 PM. He had a little light and the sniper shot him. I ask if we can publish his name: “We’ve lost the dearest thing we had, it doesn’t matter now.” The child didn’t die right away, they tried to bring him to the clinic, he bled to death.

The father, surrounded by friends, dignified, is keeping everything in. Only his eyes, humid and swollen.

Their house is shot at all the time. Riddled with holes. The sniper also killed a mentally handicapped person, another child of fifteen, ten days ago. On the phone of one of the people around us, video of the washing of the corpse of an older man, killed by a bullet to the head by another sniper. He was the brother of the man showing me the video. His eleven-year-old son, on a bike, got hit in the shoulder, he rushed to save him and the sniper shot him. Probably a shabbiha, the shooting came from the Alawite neighborhood of Nezha, from a checkpoint.

Understandably many leftists were horrified by the worshipful treatment of American Sniper Chris Kyle in the mainstream media, and the arguably much less so portrait of Clint Eastwood’s film, but what does one make of a trained Baathist combatant taking potshots at a kid on a bike? Is such behavior more elevated than taking the bite of a dead enemy’s heart, especially when it is planned out and sanctioned by the officer corps?

In early 2012, the Syrian civil war had not yet turned into a sectarian war. But this was certainly in the offing as Littell reports on debates between various FSA fighters who were by no means ideologically unified. Some growing increasingly angry over Alawite attacks were ready to declare jihad and appeal for foreign fighters. Since many of the working-class residents of Homs who had recently arrived from the countryside due to the economic collapse of the agricultural sector were socially conservative, it was not surprising that they were susceptible to Sunni particularism.

In a valuable introduction to the notebooks, Littell reveals how Bashar al-Assad accelerated the sectarian tendencies by playing the “Chechen card”. In 1998, after Chechnya had settled into a state of relative independence after defeating Yeltsin’s invasion, the Russian secret police funded an Islamist militant named Arbi Barayev who had adopted the horrific tactics we now associate with ISIS: beheading “un-Islamic” civilians, kidnapping journalists and aid workers, etc. Barayev was able to drive through Russian checkpoints and generally had carte blanche.

With his close ties to Putin, the leading light of the “axis of resistance” according to some on the left, al-Assad must have decided that what worked in Chechnya would also work in Syria. By giving surreptitious aid to the most bloodthirsty Islamists, he was able to represent himself as defending civilized values against the barbarian, even if that included killing thirteen-year-old boys chopping wood. Littell reports:

The appearance in the Syrian theater of several Chechen brigades, aligned either with Jabhat al-Nusra or Da`esh, has gained quite a bit of media attention, as has the main “Chechen” commander `Umar al-Shishani, now a military emir of Da`esh, who is in fact a former Georgian special forces officer of mixed Christian-Muslim descent whose real name is Tarkhan Batirashvili. Less well known, however, is the fact that behind Omar al-Shishani stands a certain Isa Umarov, who left Chechnya to join him in Da`esh territory and has given him his daughter in marriage. Umarov, one of the oldest and most influential (albeit highly discrete) Chechen Islamist leaders, whose links to the KGB go all the way back to the 1980s when he was one of the founders of the Islamic Rebirth Party, the first anti-Soviet Islamist organization, is a man who played a key role in the interaction between the Russian services and the Islamists he godfathered all through the two Chechen wars; and his role within Da`esh certainly raises interesting questions. But as a Syrian friend pointed out to me, the mukhabarat [military intelligence] too are old hands at these games, and have no need of lessons from their Russian patrons. Their strategic philosophy is explicitly stated in graffiti now very common around Damascus: “Assad or we burn the country.”

“Syrian Notebooks: Inside the Homs Uprising” was written at the very time when the filmmakers behind “Return to Homs” were making a documentary covering the same desperate struggle. The film can now be seen on Vimeo for only $3.99 and is well worth the price for those who are trying to understand events in Syria. Even if you continue to believe that Bashar al-Assad is the best hope for the country, you owe it to yourself to get an alternative view, either from the very fine Verso book or this powerful documentary.

In the opening scenes of “Return to Homs”, we meet the two young principals, star soccer goalkeeper Abdul Basset Saroot and media activist Ossama al Homsi. Both are paradigmatic figures. Basset leads mass rallies in the spring of 2011 in the streets of Homs using the distinctive Syrian call-and-response style. Meanwhile, Ossama is everywhere with his Sony video camera capturing the people as they dodge the snipers’ bullets while protesting peacefully. One might easily surmise that Ossama was a member of a Local Coordinating Committee, a grass roots network of young activists who used Youtube and social media to get the word out.

After Baathist killers cut down one too many peaceful protesters, the young men in Basset and Ossama’s circle decide to arm themselves and defend the movement. Ossama, however, feels that this is a mistake. Peaceful protest must prevail against all difficulties. Basset makes the case that most Syrians made, however. Even though taking up arms created its own risks, it was being forced upon them. They had no choice.

Once that decision was made, Homs became a living hell. Armed with nothing more powerful than AK-47’s and RPG’s, Basset and his comrades stood off tanks, jets, and heavy artillery. In excruciating detail, we see entire blocks of apartment houses turned into rubble, including those of Basset and Ossama. We see them in their former living rooms and kitchens, gazing at the wreckage. Ossama looks in vain for a filter for his Sony and only manages to retrieve a coffee mug. Both young men find themselves on the run as the siege of Homs tightens it grip. A sense of desperation develops even though Basset and the other young fighters vow to fight on despite all odds. In thinking about an analogy for their situation, cities like Leningrad and Stalingrad during WWII, when Hitler’s forces killed both by bullet and by starvation, came to mind.

Eventually Homs fell because of overwhelming Baathist firepower and because a state of siege had left its residents without food, water or medical help. Today Homs remains under Syrian military control, a city that along with Damascus is seen as of key strategic value along the more heavily populated west coast of the country.

In a war that sometimes feels like it has gone on for decades, the momentum has begun to shift away from the Baathists. A coalition of mostly Islamist brigades has taken control of Idlib province and attempts to drive the rebels from Aleppo have failed.

A number of reports have described the Syrian army as groaning under the strains of a war of attrition that has bled the country dry economically and cost the lives of over 200,000 of its citizens. In the U.S. such losses would be equivalent to 3 million souls.

It is difficult to imagine anything coming out of the struggle that will correspond to one’s utopian ideals. Since Bashar al-Assad was spectacularly successful at turning what was once a hopeful struggle for freedom and equality into a horrific sectarian slaughter, the expectations for a post-Assad Syria are guarded at best particularly in light of the failed state that exists in Libya.

Perhaps the best possible outcome would be one in which differences are settled by arguments rather than bullets and that the arguments would be of a political and economic nature rather than which sect is the legitimate heir of Muhammad’s teachings. In trying to understand the future of Syria, it is mandatory to start with its past. As documents of the recent past, when things began to go off the rails, Jonathan Littell’s “Syrian Notebooks: Inside the Homs Uprising” and “Return to Homs” are very good places to start.