Adrian C. Louis and the reservation of the mind

“I’m writing about my life. I guess deep down I sort of fancy myself as speaking for certain kinds of people who don’t have a choice—for the downtrodden.” 

Adrian C. Louis 

"Faces skyward, we all seek
songs in the whirlwinds
that parch our slow lives."
Adrian C. Louis from Sun/Dance/Song

Sonny’s Purple Heart
By Adrian C. Louis

"But it’s too late to say you’re sorry." — The Zombies

I
Man, if you’re dead, why are you leading
me to drink after five sober years?
Sonny, can I get a witness?
I had a Snow White vision of the prodigal
son returning to America
that day of my final hangover.
I tried to clear the mixture
of cobwebs and shooting stars
from my brain with spit-warm
Budweiser, but the hair of the dog
just was not doing the trick.
I ended up pummeling myself
seven times that day and named each egg
white load for a Disney dwarf.
The first was Dopey.
The final was Sleepy, I think, or Droopy.

II
Last year you scrawled a letter to me
about your first and final visit
to the Vietnam Memorial and how your eyes
reflected off the shiny black stone
and shot back into your brain like guidons
unfurling the stench of cordite and the boy screams
of men whose souls evaporated
into morning mists over blue-green jungles.
You had to be there, you said.
That’s where you caught the cancer, you said.

III
Sonny. Tonight I had a dream of Mom’s death
twenty years too late and now my eyes
will not close like I imagine the lid
on her cheap casket did.
I was not there when she died.
Home on leave from Basic Training,
you stood in for me
because I was running scared
through the drugged-out alleys of America,
hiding from those Asian shadows
that would finally ace you and now, now
in the dark victory of your Agent Orange cancer,
it gives me not one ounce of ease
to say fuck Nixon and Kissinger,
fuck all the generals and all
the armies of God and fuck me,
twenty years
too late.

IV
History is history and thank God for that.
When we were wise-ass American boys
in our fifth grade geography class,
we tittered over the prurient-sounding
waves of Lake Titticaca … Titti … ca-ca
and we never even had the slightest
clue that Che was camping out
en las montañas de Bolivia …
We never knew American chemists would
kill you slicker than slant-eyed bullets.

V
Damn Sonny. Five sober years done squeaked
by like a silent fart and I’m on autopilot,
sitting in a bar hoisting suds with ghosts,
yours and my slowly evolving own.
When we were seventeen with fake I.D.’s,
we got into the Bucket of Blood
in Virginia City and slurped sloe gin fizzes
while the innocent jukebox blared
“She’s Not There” by the Zombies.
Later that drunken night you puked purple
splotches onto my new, white Levis
and a short, few years into your future
this lost nation would award
you two purple hearts,
one of which your mother pressed
into my hand that bright day
we filed you under
dry desert dirt.

(Adrian C. Louis, "Sonny’s Purple Heart" from Vortex of Indian Fevers. Copyright © 1995 by Adrian C. Louis)

The Sacred Circle
by Adrian C. Louis

Numanah, Grandfather, grant me the grace
of a new song far from this lament
of lame words and fossils of a losing game.
No more flat pebbles skimmed between the wetness
of tongue and thigh and eye again!
I never asked to be the son of a stained mattress
who contemplated venison stew and knew
the shame hidden in grease clouds stuck to the wall
behind the woodstove where Grandmother cooked.
I only wanted to run far, so far from Indian land.
And, God damn it, when I was old enough I did.

I loitered in some great halls of ivy
and allowed the inquisition of education:
electric cattle prods placed lovingly
to the lobes of my earth memories.
I carried the false spirit force of sadness
wrapped in a brown sack in the pocket
of a worn, tweed coat.
In junkie alleyways I whispered of forgotten arrows
in the narrow passages of my own discarded history.
Then, when I was old enough
I ran back to Indian land.
Now I’m thinking of running from here.

Pine Ridge, South Dakota
February 1988

(Adrian C. Louis, "The Sacred Circle" from Fire Water World. Copyright © 1989 by Adrian C. Louis.)

Adrian C. Louis is a member of the Lovelock Paiute tribe from Nevada who lives on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He has written ten books of poetry, two novels and a book of short stories.His most recent book of poetry is Random Exorcisms.

He has been a journalist, editor of tribal newspapers and magazines and has taught at Lakota College and in the Minnesota public university system. He is editor for Lakota Times and Indian Country Today and co-founder of the Native American Journalists Association.

On his writing Adrian Louis said:

"Early on in my writing, I did a lot of speaking from behind masks. The older I got, the more honest and direct I became. I think that’s simply human nature. As we grow older, we learn that in the end, a lie will always return to bite you on the ass. But, I am no hero, no shaman/warrior. I am simply a common man. Even though I’ve gotten an education and have written books, I am still a person who grew up using an outhouse. I think people react strongly to my writings for varied reasons. Life can beat you down and I’ve survived my share of trauma, a lot of it self-inflicted. People can relate to that and to the fact that in a lot of my poems I don’t take any prisoners. I think many readers like to find a poem that in some way reflects their own complicated lives."

An online collection of poems is here. His website is here & interviews are here and here.

Paul Celan: What is remembered and what is known

"Reality is not simply there; it must be searched for and won"

Paul Celan

"A poem can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the–not always hopeful–belief that, somewhere and sometime, it could wash up on land.”
Paul Celan

Paul Celan, 
A LEAF, treeless for Bertolt Brecht:
(trans by Michael Hamburger)

"What times are these
when a conversation
is almost a crime
because it includes
so much made explicit?'

To a Brother in Asia
Paul Celan

the self- transfigured
guns
travel skyward,

ten
bombers yawn, 

a rapid fire blossoms
just surely as peace,

a handful of rice
dies away as your friend.

Amanda Joy's generous gift of the book Romanian Poems by Paul Celan translated by Nina Cassian has sent me searching deeper into the life and work of Paul Celan.

Paul Celan (1920-1970) was a Romanian born German speaking poet and translator, considered one of the great German language poets, along with Rainer Marie Rilke. 

Born Paul Antschel- Paul Celan was the pseudonym he wrote under- he was born into a German speaking Jewish family in Czenowitz, Bukovina in Romania. He began writing poetry as  a teenager, when he was active in Jewish socialist organisations. In 1938, after finishing school he went to Paris to study medicine but because of Jewish quotas in Universities, he returned to Romania before the outbreak of war.

During WW2 he was forced into the Romanian ghetto where he translated Shakespeare and continued to write poetry. In 1942, the Nazis  rounded up ghetto inhabitants and sent them to concentration camps. His parents were deported to a concentration camp where his mother was shot and his father most likely died of typhus. Celan worked in a Nazi labor camp for 18 months before escaping when the Red Army advanced into Romania. An uncle died in Birkenau Concentration camp.

After the war he lived in Bucharest between 1945-47 and fled to Vienna after the Russian occupation of Romania and establishment of the Communist regime. His first collection of poetry was published in Vienna. He moved to Paris in 1948, where he lived until his death. He became a French citizen in 1955.

His poetry began to gain recognition after 1952. Celan's early pre-war poetry was lyrical and complex, however  he shifted dramatically in the post war years embracing more sober, factual and practical language.

Celan is best known for his post war poem Death Fugue, a poem set in a the death camp. 

Black milk of morning

we drink you at dusktime we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night 

we drink and drink

we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie

 There’s a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes who

writes

when it’s nightfall nach Deutschland your golden

hair Margareta

he writes it and walks from the house and the stars all start

flashing he whistles his

 dogs to draw near

whistles his Jews to appear starts us scooping a grave out of

sand

he commands us to play for the dance

extract from Death Fugue by Paul Celan 

© 2005 by Paul Celan and Jerome Rothenberg

His poetry speaks of the tyranny and horror of the war and postwar years. While much of his poetry speaks profoundly of the Holocaust and the death of his parents and family members, Celan was not just a Holocaust poet.

Celan wrote poetry in German, registering in their own language the horror the Nazi's created. Of language after Auschwitz, Celan wrote:

"Only one thing remained readable close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could re-surface 'enriched' by it all."

Celan took his own life in April 1970 in the Seine River in Paris.

John McGregor who produced an ABC radio feature on Paul Celan wrote of  Paul Celan's poetry:

'But the surprise, the discovery, was reading the poetry of Paul Celan. It was a shattering experience, its impact upon me difficult to encompass in a bland sentence or two. Celan's vision is at once one of immense grief - the grief of exile, of bearing witness to the Holocaust, of facing history and personal loss in the one moment - and also a vision of what can only be called 'a terrible beauty'. Reading his work I found myself frequently breathless, at other times in tears, or astounded by the beauty he conveyed in startling images, suffused through with arcane and complex allusions."

Holocaust Poetry: 5.8.1942 In Memory of Janusz Korczak by Jerzy Ficowski

Jerzy Ficowski's poem 5.8.1942 In Memory of Janusz Korczak can be found in Hilda Schiff's book Holocaust Poetry.

The poem is an elegy to the final act of Janusz Korczak, a Polish-Jewish pediatrician, educator, author who established and ran orphanages in Warsaw for 30 years.

As the principal for children houses (orphanages), a doctor, a publisher of a children's newspaper, as well as an author and expert witness in court, Korczak fought for a better life for children.

When the Nazis created the Warsaw ghetto in 1939, the orphanage was inside the ghetto walls. Korczak lived with the children and his staff under inhumane conditions and although he was offered the chance to escape Korczak refused, choosing to stay with the children.

On August 5th 1942 the entire orphanage, including children and staff, with a thousand others from the ghetto, were marched to the railroad marshaling yard, to be transported east to the Treblinka Concentration Camp. 

 A person in the crowd witnessed the extraordinary drama and lived to describe it (the quotes are taken from an article about Korczak on the website of the Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota):

"Forced into tight formation, body against body, driven by guards wielding whips on all sides, the solid mass of humanity was forced to run toward the train platform. Suddenly the Commandant ordered the Secret Police to pull back . ...

"At the head of a thin line was Korczak! No, how could it be? The scene I shall never forget. In contrast to the mass of humanity being driven like animals to slaughter, there appeared a group of children marching together in formation. They were the orphanage children walking four abreast in a line behind Korczak. His eyes were lifted to heaven. Even the military personnel stood still and saluted. When the Germans saw Korczak, they asked, `Who is that man?' "

Another survivor, who succeeded in fleeing from the railroad platform, remembered the scene as Korczak and the children were put into the cattle cars.

"These children did not cry, these innocent little beings did not even weep. Like sick sparrows they snuggled up to their teacher, their caregiver, their father and their brother Janusz Korczak, that he might protect them with his weak, emaciated body . ..."

The train took them all to the death camp at Treblinka where Korczak, his staff and the children all perished in the gas chambers.

5.8.1942  IN MEMORY OF JANUSZ KORCZAK

What did the Old Doctor do

in the cattle wagon

bound for Treblinka on the fifth of August

over the few hours of the bloodstream

over the dirty river of time

I do not know

what did Charon of his own free will

the ferryman without an oar do

did he give out to the children

what remained of gasping breath

and leave for himself

only frost down the spine

I do not know

did he lie to them for instance

in small

numbing doses

groom the sweaty little heads

for the scurrying lice of fear

I do not know

yet for all that yet later yet here

in Treblinka

all their terror all the tears

were against him

oh it was only now

just so many minutes say a lifetime

whether a little or a lot

I was not there I do not know

suddenly the Old Doctor saw

the children had grown

as old as he was

older and older

that was how fast they had to go grey as ash

Jerzy Ficowski

(translated by Keith Bosley) 
  

Songs as historical markers: Martin Simpson's Jackie and Murphy and the Anzac legend

The myth of Anzac was promulgated to enable Australians to live with the otherwise unbearable carnage of WW1  
Marilyn Lake

Somethings never change Jackie/But perhaps they never will/While the bloodless fools in Whitehall/ They sit in judgement still/
Martin Simpson (final lines from Jackie and Murphy)

Martin Simpson's song Jackie and Murphy is not just a magnificent tribute to John Simpson Kirkpatrick and his donkey Murphy. It is a song that speaks forgotten truths about the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

In recounting the life story of John Simpson Kirkpatrick, the song describes the horror and carnage of the Gallipoli campaign (where Simpson Kirkpatrick was a stretcher bearer for 4 weeks before he was killed).

The song also demonstrates the ways the history of the campaign and the terrible suffering of ordinary soldiers is used to serve political and military agendas.

When I was at primary school the story of Simpson and his donkey was used to indoctrinate us about the history of the Gallipoli campaign and to conceal the truth about Australia's invasion of a sovereign nation and the horror of war. We were schooled into an interpretation of Gallipoli that affirmed a contemporary and conservative view of Australian identity.

 

As Joan Beaumont argues, this emphasis on Gallipoli and a particular view of the Anzac legend is a distinctive and powerful part of Australia's political culture.

'The Anzac legend today serves particular purposes. One is to reinforce those values which court the Anzac legend such as endurance, sacrifice, mateship. Those values continue to be very important to Australian governments who are trying in a very materialistic and secular and individualistic society to still persuade Australians to be willing to volunteer for war or even to serve as police officers or fire fighters'

 Joan Beaumont also argues that constant commemoration of  Gallipoli and the ANZAC legend works to deflect debate about the legitimacy of war.

'This was very obvious during the Iraq intervention of 2003, when the then-prime minister John Howard made it difficult to criticise the war because it was suggested you would thereby be criticising those who chose to serve. With that goes a silencing of debate about the reasons that those soldiers are being deployed, and that is a concern to a number of commentators.'

Joan Beaumont's brilliant book Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War  challenges the way that Australia's war experience is presented as the predominant historical narrative. 

A review of the book by Marilyn Lake is here.

You can listen to a live version and explanation of Martin Simpson's song here:

Jackie and Murphy by Martin Simpson
(copyright Martin Simpson)

There's a statue of a donkey on Southshield sea front
He's a decorated donkey
and with him stands a man

and the man's name is Jackie he has no decoration

though he was a war hero.
 

Down on the sands Jackie sold donkey rides

His favorite was Murphy

and they waited on the tide 

to give rides to little children and flirt with the pretty girls.
 

And he's joined the merchant navy and he's off to see the world.

Well he sailed the wide world all over Jackie

till he came to Newcastle in NSW

he'd had enough of stoking coals, rollin seas and heavy gales.
 

So you changed your name to plain John Simpson

So you jumped ship and you rambled all down the shore

shearing, droving, larrikin and a new recruit for war.

Give a dog a bad name Jackie

Somethings never change 

a hundred years are almost gone

Not a medal to your name

Somethings never change Jackie

They give a dog a bad name

but your a hero still.

Well I signed up for this army Murphy

Thought I might catch a troop ship home

Maybe change my name again and never more to roam.
But we didn't sail to England Murphy

We sailed right into hell

Now I am a stretcher bearer in the bloody Dardanelles.
 

Now I don't like taking orders Murphy

That's not the way I am

But now we've got this job to do and I'll do the best I can.
You and me are mockers here Murphy

Down here on the sand

I'll whistle and we sing our songs and we'll march to the beat of the band.

Jesus you know I am tired Murphy

Breakfast wasn't ready today

They said they would keep dinner hot

Come on lads we are on our way

Down to shrapnel gully again

To the land of blood, flesh and bone

You have been there so many times

You can damn near fetch them on your own.

Did you hear the machine guns rattle?

Did you feel those bullets tearing through?

I pray that peace and quiet and dark are the last things you know

You saved 300 wounded men

You and Murphy on their own

You died to save the very last but Murphy fetched him back alive.

Give a dog a bad name Jackie

Some things never change 

a hundred years are almost gone 

Not a medal to your name

Somethings never change Jackie

But perhaps they never will.
While the bloodless fools in Whitehall

They sit in judgement still

US war crimes: The massacre at the MSF Hospital in Kunduz

"We tried to take a look into one of the burning buildings. I cannot describe what was inside. There are no words for how terrible it was. In the Intensive Care Unit six patients were burning in their beds."

Lajos Zoltan Jecs, a nurse at the MSF hospital in Kunduz bombed by the US

Last week, staff and volunteers of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) were treating people in the MSF-run hospital in Kunduz Afghanistan when a US 130 gunship attacked the hospital without warning.

The hospital, holding 180 patients, was deliberately targeted and destroyed, in multiple bombing runs that lasted an hour.

With the attack underway, MSF contacted its sources in the US military immediately, pleading for the attack to stop, but to no avail. The bombing continued until the hospital was destroyed

 

Kunduz, in the north of Afghanistan, was recently seized by the Taliban and was the location for fierce fighting as the Afghan Army tried to take back the City. MSF had  informed US and Afghani authorities of the hospital's precise location, something that normally provides protection from attacks.

According to  MSF, the bombing targeted the intensive care unit, emergency rooms, and physiotherapy ward—leaving surrounding buildings mostly unharmed.

 

Twelve MSF staff and ten patients (including 3 children) were killed and 37 wounded. Doctors, staff and patients were incinerated. Six patients were set in fire in their beds.

 

The President of MSF said that MSF doctors had to operate on each other:

 

“One of our doctors died on an improvised operating table — an office desk — while his colleagues tried to save his life.”

MSF labelled the bombings a war crime, as did numerous other commentators. Robert C. Koehlor  wrote:

 

Bombing a hospital, especially with deliberate intent — apparently at the behest of the Afghan government, which has hated the hospital for treating the injured regardless what side they're on — is depraved and utterly reckless. Not only did the US kill patients and staff members from all over the world, who were working there because of a commitment to give help to those in harm's way, but it destroyed one of the few medical centers in a city with a population of over 300,000.

 

The US admitted the attack was a US decision made within the US chain of command. But US spokespersons  changed their account of the attack four times, initially claiming that the hospital was collateral damage from an attack  called by US Special US forces. The story changed with the claim that Afghan forces called the attack because they were under fire. The US also claimed that Taliban fighters were firing from within and near the hospital, a claim vehemently denied by MSF. The US military also clamed the attack was a mistake.

 

US President Obama apologised to the MSF President and promised a full investigation by the very same US military and Afghan authorities responsible for the attack.

MSF were scathing about that commitment, dismissing the proposed investigations  and demanding unprecedented action against the U.S. military by formally launching  a fully independent and transparent investigation of the war  crime by an independent humanitarian commission created for the first time under the 1991 Geneva Conventions.

 

But these attacks are nothing new. The US consistently attacks civilian facilities.

 

Jon Schwartz has published this article on a short history of the US military's bombing of civilian facilities. Schwartz writes:

'the U.S. has repeatedly attacked civilian facilities in the past but the targets have generally not been affiliated with a European, Nobel Peace Prize-winning humanitarian organization such as MSF'

Schwartz documents  U.S. attacks on civilian facilities, such as hospitals or schools since the 1991 Gulf War, including:

• Infant Formulae Production Plant, Baghdad Iraq 1991
• Air raid shelter Amiriyah Iraq (408 civilians killed) 1991
• Al Sifa Pharmaceutical factory, Khartoum Sudan (1 civilian killed) 1998
• Train bombing, Grdelica Serbia (14 civilians dead) 1999
• Radio Television Serbia, Belgrade (16 staff dead) 1999
• Chinese embassy, Belgrade (3 staff) 1999
• Red Cross complex Kabul, Afghanistan 2001
• Al Jazeera offices in Kabul 2001
• Al Jazeera offices in Baghdad (2 journalists killed) 2003
• Palestine Hotel Baghdad (1 journalist killed) 2003

This does not include the estimated 6000 civilians and citizens killed by US drone and missile attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, nor the 458 separate incidents that resulted in as many as 6,481 civilians killed since October 2001 by American forces during the war in Afghanistan.

Anna Akhmatova: If All Who have Begged Help

'If all who have begged help
From me in this world,
All the holy innocents,
Broken wives and cripples,
The imprisoned, the suicidal-
If they had sent me one kopek
I should have become 'richer
Than all Egypt....'
But they did not send me kopeks
Instead they shared with me their strength,
and so nothing in this world
is stronger than I,
and I can bear anything even this"

Anna Akhmatova
If All Who have Begged Help
translated by DM Thomas

The poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) is regarded as one of the greatest Russian poets.

Akhmatova lived in two different kinds of Russia, pre-revolutionary Russia and the post revolutionary Soviet Union. Her writing falls into two periods -the early work (1912–25) and her later work (from around 1936 until her death), which was more political. Her work was condemned and censored by Stalinist and Russian authorities.

For long periods, particularly in the Stalin years and the 1950's, Akhmatova was in official disfavour and many of those close to her died at the hands of the authorities. She was considered an official enemy and forced to live a terribly hard life.

Her first husband was executed by the Soviet secret police, and her son and third husband spent years in Soviet prisons and gulags, where her third husband died. In 1949 her son was sentenced to 10 years in a Siberian prison camp.

 

She survived, partly because her work was so popular and Stalin and the authorities were careful not to attack her directly.

Her most famous poem Requiem documents  her experience at the time of her son's imprisonment. The poem comprises fifteen short poems and explores the grief of mothers for their imprisoned sons and daughters and the suffering and persecution of the Russian people under the rule of Stalin.

Akhmatova considered the poem too dangerous to write down, let alone publish, so she carried it around with her as she worked and lived across the Soviet Union. The poem was written between 1935-1940 and remained unpublished until 1963.

During WW2 she witnessed the siege of Leningrad (St Petersburg), and it was there she began work on another of her finest poems Poem without a Hero, a poem dedicated to all those who died at Leningrad, which she worked on for twenty years.

Between 1925-1940 and then after WW2, her writing was officially banned. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Akhmatova chose not to emigrate and remained as  a witness to the Stalinist era.

She died in Lenigrad in 1966.

James Paul: The roots of the European refugee crisis lie with western intervention

"The aggressive nationalist beast in the heart of the political class of Europe and the United States is ready to engage in more military adventures. These leaders are not ready to learn the lesson, or to beware the 'blowback' from future interventions. This is why we need to look closely at the 'regime change' angle, to beware upcoming proposals for more intervention, and to increase public resistance to further war. It is clear enough that the crisis of migration and war has been 'Made in Europe' and 'Made in USA."  

James Paul

As the European refugee crises deepens, James Paul* calls for clear understanding of the roots of the crisis. Paul writes:

 

 "The huge flow of refugees into Europe has created a political crisis in the European Union, especially in Germany, where neo-nazi thugs battle police almost daily and fire-bombings of refugee housing have alarmed the political establishment. There is also the wider crisis in the EU over which countries will take in refuges and how many. The public has been horrified by refugee drownings in the Mediterranean, deaths in trucks and railway tunnels, thousands of children and families, caught in the open, facing border fences and violence from security forces. Religious leaders call for tolerance, while EU politicians wring their hands and wonder how they can solve the issue with new rules and more money.

  "Meanwhile, the refugee flow has been increasing rapidly, with no end in sight. The German government has estimated that it will take in 800,000 asylum-seekers during 2015. The overall flow into Europe for the year will probably be well above a million. Germany and Sweden are the main destinations.

 

Paul writes that: 

 

"Only a clear understanding of the origins of the crisis can lead to an answer, but European leaders do not want to touch this hot wire and expose their own culpability. In the U.S., there is little sensible analysis either

 

He writes  that the political and humanitarian crisis in Europe over refugees has been created by the flood of 'regime change' refugees  from countries torn apart by war and is  a crisis that was largely ‘Made in Europe’, with the active connivance of Washington.

 

James notes that the refugees are all from countries with  vicious conflicts  that  began with Western military intervention, direct or indirect and continued to be fueled by Western intervention.

    "The migrants coming to Europe are mostly fleeing conflicts. The data on origins make that clear. The migrants are coming primarily from Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and Pakistan in the Middle East, and to a lesser extent from Eritrea, Somalia and Nigeria in Africa. These are all countries with vicious conflicts -- conflicts that (with the exception of Nigeria) began with Western military intervention, direct or indirect and continued to be fueled by intervention. In Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia the intervention was very direct. In Syria, Pakistan and Eritrea, it has been less direct but very clear nonetheless. 

    "The term 'regime change refugees' helps focus on where the primary responsibility lies. It changes an empty conversation in the direction of reality. Official discourse in Europe and the United States frames the civil wars and economic turmoil in terms of fanaticism, corruption, dictatorship, economic failures and other causes for which Western governments and publics believe they have no responsibility. The Western leaders and media stay silent about the military intervention and regime change, interventions that have torn the refugees’ homelands apart and resulted in civil war, state collapse and extremely violent conditions lasting for long periods. 

    "Some European leaders, the French in particular, are arguing in favor of further military intervention in these war-torn lands on their periphery as a way to 'do something' and (ironically) 'end the violence.' Overthrowing Assad appears to be popular among the policy classes in Paris, who choose to ignore how counter-productive their overthrow of Gaddafi was just a short time ago and how counter-productive has been their clandestine support in Syria for the Islamist rebels. The intensive Western bombing campaign in Syria (now joined by France), aimed in theory at the forces of the Islamic State, are killing many civilians and further destabilizing the war-ravaged country.

 

* James Paul is executive director of the Middle East Research and Information Project, author of Syria Unmasked  and for 20 years was executive director of Global Policy Forum, a think tank that monitors the UN.