The World Health Organization (WHO): Testing Times for ‘Medical Internationalism’

First of two parts of “Who’s Responsible:  The WHO, Internationalism, and the Coronavirus Pandemic”

(Ninth in a series of articles on the implications of the coronavirus for our times, for human history, and for the fate of the earth.)

The World Health Organization (WHO), which is today the face of international cooperation, or what remains of it, has kicked off yet another controversy as it seeks to lead the world out of the coronavirus pandemic.  On June 5, nearly two to three months after public health authorities in most countries had directed people to start wearing masks, the WHO’s embattled Director-General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced at a press conference that the organization recommended that people living in areas experiencing “widespread transmission” of COVID-19 adopt a face covering.  That it took the WHO this long to issue such a note of guidance controverts the

*Turmoil in the Great City: Shahrukh and the Shiv Sena

Lebensraum for the 'Maratha Manush': Thackeray and Hitler, Soulmates

The Shiv Sena are at it again.  This band of troglodytes and common thugs cannot rest for more than a few months without causing a huge stir.  Many things animate their passions, many are their grievances and the imagined humiliations that arouse their hostility.  They have some steady targets against which they fire away at will, but there is also an equally steady stream of moving targets.  In recent years, their most sustained agitations have been against those deemed foreigners, by which the Shiv Sena means non-Maharashtrians.  Indeed, one suspects that non-Indians (barring, of course, Pakistanis and all Muslims, whatever their country of origin) pose no problems as such for the Shiv Sena, since the Sena reserves its animus for those, such as Punjabis, Biharis, and others from the great Gangetic plains who are suspected of having ‘stolen’ jobs from Maharashtrians.  Some months ago, India’s supreme cricketing icon, Sachin Tendulkar, himself a Mumbaikar, received a stinging rebuke from the Sena for daring to suggest that Mumbai belonged to all of India rather than to Maharashtrians alone.  One can say, then, that the Sena is democratic in at least one respect, resolutely upholding the law of equal opportunity.  The mighty and the low, the famous and the obscure – none are spared if they do not meet the exacting standards of xenophobia, prejudice, and outright hooliganism established by the Sena.

Shahrukh Khan, often described as the reigning star of Bollywood, is the most recent enemy of the nation identified by Bal Thackeray, the aging and agitated but still agile leader of the Shiv Sena.  The sin with which Shahrukh is charged is none other than the suggestion, aired by some others as well, that the cricket teams which comprise the Indian Premier League (IPL) may have done an injustice to the Pakistani players by failing to make a bid for a single Pakistani player.  Why the IPL teams did not make any such bid is an interesting question in itself, and what it says about the sentiments which predominate among the truly moneyed classes in India, is a matter that I shall have to leave aside for the moment.   Shahrukh is alleged to have betrayed the nation by his remarks, but of course the matter is more complex.  As a Muslim, he has always been suspect; and one of the canards to which the Sena subscribes is the view that the first loyalty of Indian Muslims is to Islam [the ummah] rather than to the Indian nation.  Shahrukh and the other Khans of Bollywood, Salman and Aamir, and now Saif Ali, have long been resented for their domination of the Hindi film world.

Many people in Mumbai are anguished that the threats to Shahrukh reflect poorly on the city often imagined as India’s greatest metropolis.   There are many considerations that are germane to this discussion.  It is less important whether the reputation of Mumbai is diminished in the eyes of outsiders, or whether Mumbai will fail to make the grade of a ‘world-class city’.  Mumbai has survived many indignities and assaults, and, much as New York did in the aftermath of the September 11 bombings, it attempted to respond in one voice and assert ‘the spirit of Mumbai’.  These appear to be laudable sentiments, though they disguise the indignities to which millions in a city such as Mumbai are subjected every day. Of perhaps more lasting significance is the fact that the Indian state appears to be powerless and certainly unwilling to reign in lawless elements and subject Shiv Sena cadres and their leaders, not least of them Thackeray and much of his thuggish clan, to the rule of law.   The public sphere cannot be held hostage to those who perceive themselves as beyond the reach of law, and the fact that must be faced squarely is that the Shiv Sena represents the most fundamental repudiation of the very idea of democracy.

Only a few months ago, on a visit to the US to promote his film ‘My Name Is Khan’, Shahrukh was detained at Newark airport and held for questioning.  That created uproar in India, though one wishes that there would be similar umbrage when lesser-known people are harassed or deprived of their liberties.  As Shahrukh’s film is released in India, the Sena has promised to disrupt screenings of ‘My Name Is Khan’.  That would be a fitting tribute to Shahrukh, and surely an unintended endorsement of the film which is an exploration of the travails of being a Muslim in the post-9/11 world.  The recent incidents, however, suggest that the Shiv Sena, which has competed in elections but is most in its element when its members and hired guns are out in the streets terrorizing common people and creating disorder, is in its death throes.  Its electoral support has diminished over the last few years and, as is well known, Thackeray’s family is exceedingly dysfunctional.  Like bullies elsewhere, the Shiv Sena’s cadres have no appetite for a real fight, and the most ample sign of their cowardice is the indisputable fact that in the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai they quickly went into hiding.  It is much too late for Thackeray to return to cartooning, an art in which he excelled and where, had he persisted, he might well have made a name for himself as India’s most imaginative cartoonist.  Now he should be happy if, in a few years from now, he it at least remembered as a character somewhat out of cartoons.

*Terrorism’s Drones: Cowardice and the New Front of American Warfare

Mrs. Clinton, we are told, has been having a tough time in Pakistan, where students and journalists have apparently been subjecting her to some ‘grilling’. The intellectual standards of American media being what they are, namely pathetic, one should not marvel at the fact that any serious questioning is immediately termed ‘grilling’. It is not any less interesting that such ‘grilling’ as takes place occurs largely in countries that the US otherwise imagines as ‘unfree’.

Under the “remorseless gaze of the Pakistan news media”, says today’s New York Times, Mrs. Clinton returned punch for punch. She castigated Pakistani officials for allowing al-Qaeda safe havens, and in turn was asked whether she did not think that American predator drone attacks in South Waziristan and elsewhere in Pakistan’s frontier areas constitute terrorism. “No, I do not,” Hilary Clinton replied.

Terrorism, as we all know, is not something that the Americans engage in: it has long been an article of faith that America wages (just) wars, engages in defensive conduct, or otherwise acts to free the world of the scourge of terrorism. In recent years, Americans – functionaries of the state, policy experts, and the numerous ‘independent’ commentators whose sole ambition appears to be to authorize the actions of the state — have been particularly insistent in advancing the view that their actions always seek to minimize civilian casualties, and that technological advancements have given them the capacity to wage relentless war with precision attacks that spare civilian lives.

The most notable, and increasingly visible, arsenal in American warfare technology is the invisible predator drone. The drone attack has become the new front of American warfare, and its incidence has increased markedly over the last two US administrations, and most notably since Barack Obama occupied the White House. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, especially, drone attacks are bitterly resented, but not only because many civilians have been killed. To take one instance, only into the third day of Obama’s administration, on January 23rd, one of two predator strikes run by the CIA eliminated the entire family of a pro-government tribal leader just outside Wana in South Waziristan.

Whatever the rhetoric about precision attacks and the reverence for life that is the supposed feature of American liberal democracy, there is but no question that drone attacks permit the execution of an untamed and aggressive foreign policy in new and unheralded ways. Though President Gerald Ford’s executive order of 1976 banning American intelligence agencies from carrying out political assassinations has in principle never been repudiated, predator attacks are only the latest and most shameless instantiation of the repeated violation of this order. That some of the people who have been assassinated, such as the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud — killed (along with much of his family) by a Predator drone in early August — themselves led lives of violence is not disputed. There is yet a more significant consideration: if histories of war stress, in ancient times, the face-to-face combat and the rules of chivalry that guided combat, we have now moved to the other extreme where the entire intent is to wage as faceless a war as is possible. Apparently bravery, in an extension of merciless air power, now consists in bombing people into extinction, all the while ensuring that no lives should be lost on one’s own side.

As Obama struggles to reach a decision on American involvement in Afghanistan, an increasing number of voices purport to take the middle ground. The US, these voices argue, cannot win the war in Afghanistan, certainly not without a major escalation of the conflict and increase in commitment of troops; on the other hand, the US cannot merely abandon Afghanistan. The question of ‘losing face’ aside, the ‘Great Game’ must continue, unless the US is prepared to concede ground to all others who have eyes on Afghanistan, including Iran, China, Russia, and Pakistan. The war, then, must be waged off-shore, with a full deployment of intelligence, cruise missiles, drones, guerrilla units, and so on. What rules of conduct will apply to this warfare? The military and the CIA, as a policy of matter, already do not make public any information on drone attacks, but the entire idea consists in ensuring that there shall be no accountability for American attacks. This is indeed the new front of American warfare: faceless, cowardly, geographically indeterminate, indeed groundless in every respect. Let us recognize terrorism’s drones for what they are.