Articles by dispatch

Your monthly media supplement of seven recommended readings from beyond the briarpatch.

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1. Shakespeare and War
By Robert Fisk
The Independent
March 31, 2007

The wasteland and anarchy of Iraq in the aftermath of our illegal 2003 invasion is reflected in so many of Shakespeare’s plays that one can move effortlessly between the tragedies and the histories to read of present-day civil war Baghdad.

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by Gary Schoenfeldt
Straight Goods
April 24, 2007

The business lobby group, the CD Howe Institute, held a quiet luncheon meeting in Regina on April 20, 2007, hosted by a local entrepreneur, at the venerable Hotel Saskatchewan. A modest $40.00 bought lunch and a chance to hear the latest spin from Alberta and BC on the subject of the Trade Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA), presented by senior representatives of the governments of those two westernmost Canadian provinces.

Lunch was served behind closed doors in a funereally — decorated Victorian style dining room, complete with tasseled and tightly closed embroidered drapes. The diners were crammed in like 19th century boys in an upscale private academy. A fussy and seemingly bashful duo consisting of Gerry Bourdeau, Deputy Minister, Alberta International and Intergovernmental Relations and Don Fast, Deputy Minister, British Columbia Ministry of Economic Development entertained the crowd over dessert.

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Government was told detainees faced ‘extrajudicial executions, disappearances, torture and detention without trial’

By Paul Koring
The Globe and Mail
April 25, 2007

The Harper government knew from its own officials that prisoners held by Afghan security forces faced the possibility of torture, abuse and extrajudicial killing, The Globe and Mail has learned.

But the government has eradicated every single reference to torture and abuse in prison from a heavily blacked-out version of a report prepared by Canadian diplomats in Kabul and released under an access to information request.

Initially, the government denied the existence of the report, responding in writing that “no such report on human-rights performance in other countries exists.” After complaints to the Access to Information Commissioner, it released a heavily edited version this week.

Among the sentences blacked out by the Foreign Affairs Department in the report’s summary is “Extrajudicial executions, disappearances, torture and detention without trial are all too common,” according to full passages of the report obtained independently by The Globe.

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Eric Margolis
April 16, 2007

The death last Sunday of six Canadian soldiers in southern Afghanistan reminds us of Santayana’s famous maxim that those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it.

The soldiers were killed near Maiwand, a name meaning nothing to most westerners. But there, on 27 July, 1880, during the bloody Second Afghan War, the British Empire suffered one of the worst defeats in its colonial history.

Two years earlier the Raj (Britain’s Indian Empire) had invaded Afghanistan for a second time. The British put Afghan puppet rulers into power in Kabul and Kandahar.

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by Ghada Chehade
ZNet
April 05, 2007

In the so-called war on “terror” the most powerful weapon being deployed is the word itself.

In the post-9/11 geo-political climate, throwing in the word “terrorist” automatically mutes coherent and critical debate. Any valid and necessary criticisms of North American governments and their foreign policy are silenced and demonized with the use of that one word, while opposition to foreign invasion and imperialist plundering can be at once quelled and criminalized by deeming it terrorist.

Canada’s anti-terrorist list is being used in this very way — as a vehicle for stifling, demonizing and criminalizing resistance to the North American imperialist project and Canada’s role in it. At the same time the word acts as subterfuge from the mass terror perpetrated by the US and its imperialist baby brother-Canada.

What Canadian citizens need to ask is just who does this labeling protect? Does it protect the Canadian population who has never suffered at the hands of Hezbollah, or does is protect the Canadian government and business elite who are part of a North American project to ransack the world’s resources while discrediting and eliminating any parties that stand in the way?

To understand the distinction we need to understand imperialism, as well as the one-sided and suspect way in which “terrorism” is currently defined.

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By Dave Oswald Mitchell
Briarpatch Magazine
May 2007

This is written in the night.
In war the dark is on nobody’s
side, in love the dark confirms
that we are together.

JOHN BERGER

RESEARCH FOR, AND feedback from, the last issue of Briarpatch (“Feminism 3.1,” March/April 2007) found me grappling with the claims and ideas of “masculists” and “men’s rights groups.” The experience of wading into a worldview at once so familiar and so fundamentally different from my own was both disorienting and deeply challenging — and it forced me to think long and hard about the concept of victimhood, and how we relate to the suffering of others.

Masculism and men’s rights groups arose in the last couple of decades as a backlash to the gains fought for and won by the feminist movement — a sort of rearguard action in defence of male privilege. Dr. Michael Flood, a pro-feminist sociologist of men’s studies, defines the masculist worldview thus:

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Words and photographs by Jon Elmer
Briarpatch Magazine
May 2007

For four weeks in the fall of 2006, photojournalist Jon Elmer traveled through South Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut — the front lines of Israel’s summer war against Hezbollah — documenting the aftermath of Lebanon’s devastation and Hezbollah’s declared victory.

THIS HEZBOLLAH RECONSTRUCTION tent in Dahiya, a southern suburb of Beirut, is the headquarters for the rebuilding process in Lebanon. Since the bombing ended in August 2006, Hezbollah officials have been meeting with families and merchants to register losses and coordinate compensation.

According to Dr. Bilal Naim, the chief of Hezbollah’s reconstruction effort, more than 5,000 housing units in the Dahiya suburb were destroyed and 17,000 more were damaged. Twenty schools were bombed and three were completely leveled. Entire apartment blocks were flattened under massive Israeli bombardment.

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Briarpatch does gender:

Our gender identities, in all their complicated incarnations, continue to limit the choices and opportunities of many of us. In the face of an ongoing ideological onslaught against equality for women and sexual minorities, Briarpatch throws gender in the blender—and whips up a challenging and thought-provoking blend of ideas and arguments for bending gender hierarchy till it breaks!

Click image to enlarge.

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Three-story-high dumptrucks carry coal out of Cerrejón for export to Canada and other countries.

Words and photographs by Chris Arsenault
Briarpatch Magazine
May 2007

Thirteen years ago, the world turned upside-down for Miluolis Arregoces and his five children.

The family lived in Caracolí, a small farming community in Colombia’s parched La Guajira province, until bulldozers contracted by El Cerrejón, the world’s largest open-pit coal mine, demolished their home. Buttressed by a heavy police presence, mine officials confiscated land from around 30 families in Caracolí. The mine says some residents were compensated. Mr. Arregoces says he received nothing.

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By Ashley Walters
Briarpatch Magazine
May 2007

“We sell water . . . so we’ve got to be clever.”

Senior vice president of Nestle Waters’ Global Marketing and Communications division

IT OFTEN SELLS FOR three times the price of gasoline, and more and more of us are guzzling it — even though we can get the equivalent for next to nothing simply by tapping into the publicly owned infrastructure. It’s bottled water, and it’s a lucrative business. But why would we pay 240 to 10,000 times more for something that we can get for less than a penny by simply turning on a tap?

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