In the study of World History, Central Asia is an anomaly. There isn’t a lot of civilization originating out of there, but a whole lot of civilizations get involved with it. It’s not really entirely part of any other region because of all the influences on it. It’s also one of the last things empires touch before they fizzle out into the shades of history.

The people of Afghanistan have a saying, “Nobody wins in Afghanistan, not even the Afghans.” Consider:

* Medes: take it and then get overthrown by the Achaemenids

* Achaemenids: they start out with Central Asia, but it’s only a matter of time for them before Al the Great cleans their clock.

* Alexander the Great: conquers Bactria, dies soon thereafter, empire collapses.

* Selucids: they can’t hold the area and hand it over to the Mauryans, then get owned by the Romans.

* Mauryans: They lose Bactria to a Greek rebellion, then fall apart

* Bactria: Does not end well for them. Overrun by nomads. Not a good way to go, at all.

* Indo-Greek Empire: Conquers Bactria, then implodes due to civil war.

* Han China: gets out that way, then collapses.

* Parthia: Takes the region from the Scythians, then loses it in rebellion, then collapses as an empire

* Persia: rises in glory, conquers Central Asia, fights with the Byzantines and then is utterly destroyed by the rise of Islam

* Islamic Caliphate… gets out that way, then the Umayyads fall and their empire collapses.

* Tang Dynasty: undone after a disastrous Central Asian battle.

* Khwarezmids: They proudly conquer Central Asia in 1205. Mongols arrive in 1219, which is bad news for the Khwarezmids…

* Mongols: Like Alexander, they take Central Asia early on, then their empire fractures and fades.

* Timurids: They start off as a Central Asian empire. It does not end well for them, although one of their rulers has a great re-invention as the founder of the Moghul Empire in India… never gets Central Asia back, though…

* Safavids: They take Afghanistan, and then stir up a massive uprising there that results in the Afghans invading Persia and ruining the place… then the Persians rise up and destroy the empire of their Afghan rulers, conquer Afghanistan, then collapse as an empire utterly.

* Durranis: Local dynasty that manages to rule for about 70 years, then collapses due to infighting.

* British: They lose an entire army in Afghanistan in the 1840s and don’t take over the place until the 1880s… and then their empire starts to unravel in a series of increasingly successful independence movements.

* Russia: Takes over Central Asia after running out of Siberia and Europe… completely destroyed in revolution soon afterward.

* Soviet Union: Yeah, like *they* had staying power. They didn’t even last as long as the Durranis before things started to unravel for them in 1989… a collapse accelerated by their attempt to take Afghanistan.

* Taliban: Nope. They did not win in Afghanistan, and they’re still ruining everyone’s day over there.

* USA: oooh, this is the raw nerve… but the sad fact remains that when a nation’s soldiers are being shot at by weapons soldiers traded to the resistance for drugs, it’s not going to win that war.

I admit a bit of a cavalier approach in some of my assessments… stretching points here and there… but it’s a nice survey of Central Asia, all the same.

Come Visit Beautiful Central Asia: Graveyard of Empires!

When a friend posted a link to a New York Times graphic gone all wrong – it labeled Arizona as Nevada and Minnesota as Wisconsin – my mind went back to another time when the NYT got the story all wrong… and won a Pulitzer for it.

Walter Duranty went to the USSR back in 1921 and lived there until 1934, but continued to spend several months a year in Moscow. He interviewed Stalin in 1929 and that just made everyone fawn all over him. It made his name, so to speak. Just like the New York Times has “a name.”

That’s a huge problem in humanity. We are quick to grant vast leeway and place incredible trust in those names. The worst offenders in the recent banking panic were the big “names” of Wall Street. Some of the biggest “names” among Civil War generals weren’t necessarily the best generals… but their memoirs were the most popular. We are too quick to trust in a king, a pope, or a president simply because of the position the man holds, without knowing a shred of truth about the man in that position.

What’s worse are the people that help perpetuate that cult of greatness. Walter Duranty picked up a Pulitzer in 1931 for some articles that were to journalism what t-ball is to major league baseball. You can find them linked from the Wikipedia article on Duranty. For every criticism, there are a dozen praises for Stalin’s regime. Of particular note to me was Duranty’s assertion that minority problems in the USSR were a thing of the past, thanks to the overarching bonds of Communist Party unity.

As Duranty wrote those, Stalin was already plotting the genocide of those minorities. His plan for the Jews in Russia was long-term: collect them in the Far East in a remote enclave on a spur of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, then sever the rail links when they were all there. They would all starve to death there. World War Two postponed that action, and Stalin’s death in 1953 canceled it entirely – but he was set to kick it off in 1954 or 1955. But there was another Holocaust that Stalin was gearing up for. His target was Ukraine, and like his plan to liquidate the Jews, involved starvation. The Holocaust of Ukraine is also known as The Holodomor.

When it started, Duranty denied it was happening. After it happened, Duranty denied it ever took place – in public. Privately, he admitted up to ten million may have perished in the famine. But his private confession did nothing to tarnish the reputation of the man he had built up in order to win his Pulitzer. His public lies kept up the good PR for Stalin, when Stalin had done nothing to deserve such praise.

Duranty’s reports even undermined his own paper’s editorial views on Russia. While the op-ed men wrote of Stalin’s horrors, Duranty’s ace reporting made it seem like the USSR was just a few roller coasters shy of being a true worker’s paradise. Thanks to Duranty and men that followed in his wake, we in the USA turned a blind eye to the deliberate starvation in the Ukraine and seriously contemplated becoming more like the USSR.

To this day, the New York Times still keeps Duranty’s Pulitzer in its trophy case. Its own editors have since disparaged and discredited Duranty’s work and the paper hired a historian to research the accuracy of Duranty’s work. The historian found Duranty’s reporting to be so many fluff pieces on Stalin and said the Pulitzer committee should take the prize away. The Pulitzer guys, however, decided that Duranty’s reporting wasn’t deliberately misleading and that the prize should stay with the NYT. The Times shrugged its mighty, named shoulders and kept the prize, presumably against its will.

Granted, the prize was awarded for a series of articles on Russia and not Duranty’s Holocaust denial. All the same, it was another case of the Pulitzer going to the best work of fiction to be passed off as news. The Times admits the reporting was terrible, but left it up to the prize committee to decide whether or not to revoke it. That’s unacceptable.

I mean, how hard would it be for the Times to get some bubble wrap and a box and ship the award back to where it came from? Or if the Pulitzer committee refuses to take delivery, how about shipping it to Kiev for the next Holodomor Remembrance Day? And if they don’t want it, there’s the Holodomor Memorial in DC. The Times has many more options than sitting on its hands and keeping a Pulitzer they themselves admit has no validity.

Duranty helped Stalin to tell the Big Lie time and time again – he made a name for himself in so doing. He made it possible for the Holodomor to be denied, and for those who denied it to be esteemed as plausible scholars and journalists. Worse, he showed the way for journalism to become subservient to the prevailing powers and to grow fat from the crumbs that fell off the table. Journalism needs to be about viewing the men and women in power through a critical eye and holding them to account. If the Times were to send back that prize, it would be a powerful signal that it was not willing to accept the idea of journalism as propaganda for the powers that be and that it was on the side of the powerless, who all too often wind up as pawns in the grand schemes of the rich and powerful.

Or is the Times not ready to send that signal? Sure, it can distance itself from the toady reporting of the past, but is it ready to make that break in the present?

Which then begs the question, how much of our news is actually news as opposed to being carefully-orchestrated propaganda?

I just finished watching the 2000 film, Lumumba. Devastated is the word I want to use to describe how I feel about the events depicted in it. I’ll easily concede that Lumumba made a wide range of political mistakes when he became PM of the Democratic Republic of Congo back in 1960… but there were forces trying to strangle Congo in its crib, and they were the ones that took down Lumumba.

They took down a whole host of other people, including UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. I don’t care that nobody can prove it. It’s obvious that it happened, and it needs to be said: the people behind the Katanga secession were the ones that killed Dag Hammarskjöld just as surely as they killed Patrice Lumumba.

The problem with this situation is that it involves words like Hammarskjöld, Lumumba, and Katanga. It’s a shame, but in this age of Twitter, we’ve lost our ability to concentrate for more than three syllables. This situation won’t be helped by my mentioning Carlucci, Mobutu Sese Seko, or Union Minière du Haut Katanga. So let me start somewhere that’ll grab your attention and won’t let go:

ATOMIC BOMBS.

As in, that mining company I mentioned in the part of Congo that broke away was the company that sold the uranium to the USA that made the first atomic bombs. And now you know why the CIA was so very interested in the Congo back in 1960. The head of the CIA operation in Congo was one Frank Carlucci, as in the same Frank Carlucci that later served as Secretary of Defense under Reagan and also as chairman of the Carlyle Group and is the former head of Wackenhut. Carlucci swears he had nothing to do with the murder of Patrice Lumumba, by the way.

Investigations into Lumumba’s murder, however, link it to that mining company, the rebel government of Katanga, and the Belgian-British interests behind the mining company. The investigations also point squarely at the CIA as having aided and abetted the murder of Lumumba. Carlucci was running the CIA show in Congo, but he swears he had nothing to do with Lumumba’s murder.

So why do I mention his name? It’s because when I was watching the film, there’s a scene where the Congo government, with foreign observers sitting in, votes to have Lumumba killed. At the end of the vote, one of the ministers turns to a white guy that speaks with an American accent and asks, “Mr. BLEEEEP, do you want to cast your vote?” In the credits, there’s one actor credited with a role, but the name of the individual he portrayed is blacked out.

What Carlucci can’t bleep out is that when the PM after Lumumba met with JFK, the first thing he asked was, “Ou est Carlucci?” Kennedy had no clue who Carlucci was and why the recently-installed Prime Minister of the DRC would want to see him. Technically, I can’t accuse Carlucci of having been the agent of the US government that enabled powerful mining interests to subvert democracy in a brand-new African state and murder its elected officials. It would be improper for me to suggest that Carlucci’s actions led to bloodstains on America’s honor. I could be sued if I were to state that Carlucci did something so horrible all in the interests of securing the US uranium supply and not letting it fall into the hands of the Russkies, in spite of the fact that Lumumba had first turned to the US to help his country out.

Congo is a terrible mess, by all accounts. Yes, yes, there are good people there doing good things, et cetera, but it’s still a hellhole, thanks to the subversion of its democracy back in the 60’s, the US-sponsored dictatorship of Mobutu, and the lack of assistance to that nation when it went into freefall in the 90’s.

The film itself is outstanding. It’s not rated by the MPAA, so I’ll give a breakdown on it: very light profanity, just one bad word, really… but it’s got a big ol’ body count. The biggest likely objection to it will come from people that think it portrays the US unfairly. I’ve been a student of the history there for some time, though, and I’m sad to report that it is quite fair in its depiction of US involvement. Just because the USA is a free nation does not mean it is immune from wicked people abusing power and having it vault their successful careers.

The illegal actions of the Belgians, British, and USA all served to keep Congo’s mineral wealth from being nationalized and that meant the profits continued to flow into Belgian, British, and US hands. Dag Hammarskjöld was en route to Katanga to try and get it to settle peacefully with the rest of Congo: Harry Truman was quick to point out that Hammarskjöld had been murdered, and that his plane going down was no accident. The UN Secretary-General was getting too close to the truth, and the money men involved obviously had to have him killed.

And so the money kept flowing… when Mobutu took over in 1965, thanks to more CIA involvement, he found a way to reward his friends and punish his enemies, all the while stealing foreign aid for his own benefit. The US helped him to keep crushing his rivals at home, making our nation in no small part responsible for the political vacuum that sucked half of Africa into its maelstrom when the Cold War ended and we quit propping up Mobutu.

Of course, Mr. Carlucci insists he’s innocent of the murder of Patrice Lumumba. He’s got the censored film to back up his point. All I have to ask is this: if he was running the CIA mission in the Congo at the time, and the CIA was involved in the events surrounding the murder of Lumumba, what was Carlucci doing? Is this another case of being stupid if he didn’t know, and dishonest if he did? That’s all too common in US foreign policy. In the case of the Mossadegh coup in Iran, the CIA chief there was intimately involved and later couped Arbenz in Honduras. So why wasn’t the CIA guy behind Lumumba’s death? Who dropped the ball on that one?

Or maybe, just maybe, Mr. Carlucci might be involved in a doubleplusungood untruth.

See ya at the Memory Hole, Frank!

Most of South and Central Texas is in a drought – no dispute about that. It’s hellacious and ferocious and there’s not much anyone can do about it but pray, which means Richard Dawkins would not be greeted kindly at a Hondo ranch right about now.

OK, so it’s hot and dry in Texas during the summer. So what else is new? Maybe what we need is a bit of Dawkins’ rationalism, but ixnay on the eligionray and more to do with common sense.

Y’all need to quit watering your lawns.

Water is a precious resource and there’s no need to fling it on the streets, sidewalks, and yards of the state. I haven’t watered my lawn for about 12 years now. Maybe more. It’s green and thick as ever when it rains. When it doesn’t rain, it goes dormant, like it’s supposed to. It’s survived many a drought and will continue to do so because it’s got a deep root system, thanks to my never watering it.

Lawns made of hoity-toity grasses serve no good purpose that rougher, tougher prairie grass can’t step in and do. The high-maintenance grass in my yard is gone. Prairie grass came on the scene and flourished. It’s not as tightly packed as Bermuda and not as lush as St. Augustine, but it keeps the topsoil from eroding and looks real nice when it rains regular.

It also doesn’t need any fertilizer or pesticide. That means I get to host lots of birds in my yard because there’s plenty of good stuff for them to pick at. I don’t have any bad bug problems at all. Well, if fire ants show up, I grab the Amdro, but that’s it. I will also use chemical killers to get rid of poison ivy, but that’s it on the herbicides.

Turns out, I’m green environmentally by allowing for the fact that I may be brown in a drought. I don’t mind because I know it’s better to do it the way I do in the long run. Now if the rest of y’all would get on board with this, we’d do better as a state, hear?

And as for the golf greens… time to cut that out, too. Head to a rodeo or a futbol match or something more worthy of the great state of Texas. All that water could go to a much better use: our children’s future.

Sure, Honduran president Zelaya is out of a job, thanks to a military coup. But did you know why? Seems as though he betrayed his big business buddies to become a Chavezite populist. He tried to change the constitution to lengthen his stay in office. That’s when the Honduran Congress moved to impeach him. The army jumped the gun and launched a coup before the impeachment could take hold. Now Honduras is in a real mess, government-wise.

Who does Obama’s administration support? Zelaya. OK, so he was the rightfully elected president… but he was also subverting the constitution… The usual argument in such cases is that the president is “friendly to US interests in the region,” but he wasn’t even that. So if we help restore democracy in Honduras, does that mean we have to find a different guy to be president there, one that won’t try to subvert the constitution or install a military dictatorship?

For the record, the elections for later this year are still on. Congress has appointed an interim president, as it’s supposed to do during an impeachment. Sure, Honduras is riddled with corruption at all levels… Zelaya’s probably no better than anyone else climbing the slippery pole of politics over there. If he’s reinstated, look for another coup to happen again, possibly one that kills him. If he’s not reinstated, look for a populist opposition to gain strength against the monied elites of Honduras. Politics have been polarizing in Central and South America, with the sensible folks in the middle having less and less voice as the radicals on the right and left hijack the political processes.

Robert Fisk on the continuing saga of Iraq and Kuwait

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls… this is a mess. Kuwait still wants reparations from Iraq over the invasion of 1990. Iraq’s got its back up against the wall, and Kuwait’s kicking them when they’re down. Fisk asks if this might not just lead to a situation such as what followed the heavy reparations against Germany in 1919? Once the Allied forces ended their occupation, the German economy collapsed and they elected a radical party to their legislature… and then that party used a parliamentary maneuver to gain total control of the government… you know, the Nazis? (By the way, Germany’s still occupied by British, French, and US troops… we have no plans to leave, like in 1919…)

Harsh economic times produce strongmen, and not just in Germany: witness Chavez and others of his ilk. Does Kuwait really want to add Iraq to that list? The US forces go home in 2011…