South Asia Citizens Wire - 18 November 2014 - No. 2840 [since 1996] --------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents: 1. State racism and sexism in post-war Sri Lanka | Chulani Kodikara 2. Bangladesh: Sociology professor ’hacked to death’ - The Islamists are suspected (selected reports from the media) 3. Reviving the left in Pakistan | Yasser Latif Hamdani 4. Pakistan: How to get away with murder | Marvi Sirmed 5. Marvi Sirmed: Does a secular or even ‘liberal’ party exist in Pakistan? 6. India: The cloud over Burdwan | Sanjib Baruah 7. A New Head for India's Head of State: a satirical take 8. India: Transplanting Elephant head on human body! - The magic of mythological fiction | Ram Puniyani 9. India: Tirupati's labour rules aren't divine | Brinda Karat 10. The Whys and Whats of NREGA, India's Rural Jobs Scheme | Reetika Khera 11. India: Recommendations by Global Hindu Foundation to Ministry of Education "Teach about Godse, the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi as national hero . . ." 12. Supreme Court of India Orders Day to Day Trial in Gulberg Case | background and case status 13 Nov 2014 13. India: When T-shirts become Seditious - Press Release by Peoples Union for Democratic Rights 14. Video: Education & Teaching in an de-intellectualised and Obedient Society - interview with Apoorvanand 15. Recent Posts on Communalism Watch ::: FULL TEXT ::: 16. Book Review: West End Boy | Adam Shatz 17. USA. Death Wears Bunny Slippers | Josh Harkinson ========================================= 1. STATE RACISM AND SEXISM IN POST-WAR SRI LANKA | Chulani Kodikara ========================================= Central to the resurgence of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism in post-war Sri Lanka is a redefinition of gender role and identities. Familial ideology is a key pillar of this discourse with serious adverse implications for women and gender equality http://sacw.net/article10007.html ========================================= 2. BANGLADESH: SOCIOLOGY PROFESSOR ’HACKED TO DEATH’ - THE ISLAMISTS ARE SUSPECTED (selected reports from the media) ========================================= Suspected Islamic militants have hacked to death a university professor in western Bangladesh, several years after he led a push to ban students wearing full-face veils, police said Sunday. http://www.sacw.net/article10005.html ========================================= 3. REVIVING THE LEFT IN PAKISTAN | Yasser Latif Hamdani ========================================= Whether one disagrees with the programme and solutions put forth by the left for organising society or not, there is no denying that the existence of a credible left wing in a country's politics is essential for a political balance in national discourse. Even otherwise it is the left wing in any country that produces its intellectual and cultural voices and creates that very important space for dissent and alternative points of view. http://sacw.net/article10004.html ========================================= 4. PAKISTAN: HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER | Marvi Sirmed ========================================= Too afraid of the law to kill someone ? If you're in Pakistan, law should not be a problem. We have a special recipe of getting away with murder, lynching, arson and loot. Trust me you can do all of this with impunity and turn it into an ‘honorable act'. Let me tell you how. Just invest in a cleric, lure an Imam Masjid into giving an emotional khutba (religious sermon), accuse the person-in-question of blasphemy and you are sorted. Within hours a mob will gather and assist you doing the job with full protection from the law. http://sacw.net/article9993.html ========================================= 5. MARVI SIRMED: DOES A SECULAR OR EVEN ‘LIBERAL’ PARTY EXIST IN PAKISTAN? ========================================= The religious right wing became redundant as the global geo-political forces (and Pakistan’s own establishment) quashed their lifelong partnership with the religious establishment especially political Islam. Being religious got outdated. Being liberal became politically lucrative compared with right-wing ideologies and safer compared to being ‘secular.’ That dirty expletive: ‘secular!’ http://sacw.net/article9987.html ========================================= 6. INDIA: THE CLOUD OVER BURDWAN | Sanjib Baruah ========================================= Prior to the October 2 Burdwan blasts, the Jamaat ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) was notorious for the 459 near-simultaneous improvised explosive devices detonated all across Bangladesh in the summer of 2005. Bangladesh’s security forces subsequently arrested hundreds of its members and killed its entire top leadership, including its founder, Shaikh Abdur Rahman. But despite being seriously weakened, according to a March 2010 report of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG), the JMB is still active and dangerous. http://www.sacw.net/article10008.html ========================================= 7. A NEW HEAD FOR INDIA'S HEAD OF STATE: A SATIRICAL TAKE ========================================= A satirical poster following India's prime minister's take mixing mythology with science. http://sacw.net/article10003.html ========================================= 8. INDIA: TRANSPLANTING ELEPHANT HEAD ON HUMAN BODY! - THE MAGIC OF MYTHOLOGICAL FICTION | Ram Puniyani ========================================= While individuals can harbor the reality of mythology, the matters will be difficult if the chief of state has belief in these fictions being part of History. That will be a big set back to the progress of scientific, rational thinking and enterprise. This combination of mythology, religion and politics will make the matters worse. http://sacw.net/article10002.html ========================================= 9. INDIA: TIRUPATI'S LABOUR RULES AREN'T DIVINE | Brinda Karat ========================================= The worst is the plight of the 4,000 cleaners and sanitation workers.Most of them are dalits. Any time of the day or night you will see women and men in uniforms with brooms, cleaning up after the pilgrims have left, making sure the toilets are clean. What are they paid? Less than Rs 6,500 a month. They have no benefits, no ESI, no provident fund and not even a weekly off. This virtual slave labour is employed by Sulabh International which has got one of the contracts for cleaning. http://sacw.net/article10001.html ========================================= 10. THE WHYS AND WHATS OF NREGA, INDIA'S RURAL JOBS SCHEME | Reetika Khera ========================================= (Indiaspend.com, November 4, 2014) The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) was enacted in September 2005. It promises up to 100 days of employment per rural household to all adults at the minimum wage. Any adult residing in rural areas could demand work and was entitled to get it within 15 days of asking. If the government failed to provide employment, such adults were entitled to an unemployment allowance http://sacw.net/article9991.html ========================================= 11. INDIA: RECOMMENDATIONS BY GLOBAL HINDU FOUNDATION TO MINISTRY OF EDUCATION "TEACH ABOUT GODSE, THE ASSASSIN OF MAHATMA GANDHI AS NATIONAL HERO . . ." ========================================= Nathuram Godse, the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi is a “national hero” who “fought for independence from the British” and whose reputation has been tarnished by previous governments and who should figure prominently among the new list of national heroes to be taught in all government schools. http://sacw.net/article9994.html ========================================= 12. SUPREME COURT OF INDIA ORDERS DAY TO DAY TRIAL IN GULBERG CASE | background and case status 13 Nov 2014 ========================================= Today i.e.. November 13 2014 the Supreme Court of India Ordered Day to Day Hearing of the Gulberg Trial and completion of the Trial within 3 months. It did not Its Vacate Stay on the Trial Court Judgement (operative since May 2010) (as requested by SIT). The state of Gujarat tried to confuse the issue but fortunately our team, Ms Aparna Bhat had a detailed status report prepared by us which was read out to the Hon'ble Court. http://sacw.net/article9990.html ========================================= 13. BANGLADESH: WHO WAS GHULAM AZAM? | Garga Chatterjee ========================================= The masses with memories of Jamaat-assisted butchery watched incredulously as Ghulam Azam was rebranded into a wise old Islamic scholar http://sacw.net/article9989.html ========================================= 14. INDIA: SWACHCHH BHARAT & DIRTY POLITICS | Antara Dev Sen ========================================= The PM may call for a moratorium on communal violence, but having reaped the benefits of sectarian polarisation, can he now stop his Hindu undivided family from spreading such hate? Like the vacuum cleaner salesman in the joke found out, your grand machine may not always be able to clean up the rubbish you have dumped. http://sacw.net/article9988.html ========================================= 15. INDIA: PHOTOS OF DELHI PROTEST MARKING 30 YEARS OF BHOPAL UNION CARBIDE DISASTER ========================================= Mukul Dube’s photos of the on going protest dharna at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi on 12 November 2014 http://sacw.net/article9985.html ========================================= 16. INDIA: WHEN T-SHIRTS BECOME SEDITIOUS - PRESS RELEASE BY PEOPLES UNION FOR DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS ========================================= Peoples Union for Democratic Rights has time and again critiqued the use of draconian laws, of which sedition is a putrid kind, to stifle political dissent and eliminate political and ideological opposition. However, the recent use of the law of sedition shows its widening use in a manner which takes this defacement to the basic freedoms of individuals to express and conduct themselves in public spaces. Acts such as wearing T-shirts of a rival cricket team or cheering for it and not standing up for the national anthem in a theatre are regarded as offence enough to be charged under the law of sedition. These cases of sedition are far from being sporadic and random and are part of a chain of events along the slippery slope of majoritarianism. http://sacw.net/article9977.html ========================================= 17. VIDEO: EDUCATION & TEACHING IN AN DE-INTELLECTUALISED AND OBEDIENT SOCIETY - INTERVIEW WITH APOORVANAND ========================================= The history of the national movement is being re-written to manufacture an RSS role, which did not exist in the struggles against British rule. Dinanath Batra’s books, already a part of the Gujarat curriculum, are sought now to be introduced at the national level. He is same Dinanath Batra, from whose books, Modi drew “inspiration” to prove that in Mahabharata times, India had discovered genetic engineering and plastic surgery! Subramanian Swami wants book burning, starting with books of secular historians like Romila Thapar. RSS leaders have recently met HRD Minister Smriti Irani to discuss revision of text books. Education is being used as a tool to create communal divide. http://sacw.net/article9970.html ========================================= 18. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH: ========================================= available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/ - India: The city adminsitrators should stand firm against the Far Right Bajrang Dal that has forced Victoria statues out of Agra park - India: Interview with Y Sudershan Rao, Chair ICHR (Ritika Chopra, Economic Times, 17 Nov 2014) - India: Puritans in fear . . . this one complains of the low morality of students at IIT madras who have been found kissing each other - Hindutva groups have stepped up their activities in Chhattisgarh’s tribal region - India: Why do elected officials of a secular state inaugurate places of worhip in their official capacity ? - The magic of Mythological Fiction (Ram Puniyani) - India: PIL over ban on women in Haji Ali inner sanctum - India: Parsis, pandas & procreation (Farrukh Dhondy) - India: Vedic Science Nonsense Popular Among Top Leaders of the BJP - India: A Haryana godman sant rampal, defies state power - India: Muslim Right MIM to lead Muslim and Dalit social coalition in the Maharashtra ? - India: Karnataka police circular asking officers to scrutinize passports of Christians and Muslims - Orignary fascism of ordinary folks - Calcutta Medical Students maim and kill a thief - India: Textbook of our Time (Apoorvanand) - India: Here's what the education minister's been told by the Hindu Right to modify the textbooks - SN Balagangadharan who triggered a slugfest at the 2014 ICHR - Maulana Abdul Kalam Memorial lecture is also speaking at the World Hindu Congress - India: Valerian Rodrigues on Nehru and Politics of diversity - India: Bangladeshis should be given refugee status, not citizenship, says Supreme Court - Jiyo Parsis Ads - the ministry of minoriy affairs has funded this absurd campaign seeking multiplication of Parsis - Why Nehruvian secularism is still alive and kicking, despite BJP's body blows (Shoaib Daniyal, in Scroll, 14 Nov 2014) - India: The Modi development model will drive India over the cliff - Anand Patwardhan (Rajendra Mathur Oration) Part II - India: Maharashtra the second most affected by communal violence incidents (2013 data) - India: Statement in Lok Sabha showing communal incidents data 2010 to March 2013 (07.05.2013) - Criminal Case filed in Australia against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi - Press Release by American Justice Center ::: FULL TEXT ::: ========================================= 19. WEST END BOY by Adam Shatz ========================================= (London Review of Books, Vol. 36 No. 22 · 20 November 2014, pages 11-12) A Norwegian Tragedy: Anders Behring Breivik and the Massacre on Utøya by Aage Borchgrevink, translated by Guy Puzey Polity, 299 pp, £20.00, November 2013, ISBN 978 0 7456 7220 5 BuyAnders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia by Sindre Bangstad Zed, 286 pp, £16.99, June, ISBN 978 1 78360 007 6 Before he went on his mass killing spree in 2011, Anders Behring Breivik was a regular at the Palace Grill in Oslo West. He looked harmless: another blond man trying to chat up women at the bar. ‘He came across as someone with a business degree,’ one woman recalled, ‘one of those West End boys in very conservative clothes.’ Indeed he had tried his hand at business, though he’d never completed a degree, or much of anything else. And he was a West End boy, a diplomat’s son. Yet there was the book he said he was writing, a ‘masterwork’ in a ‘genre the world has never seen before’. He refused to say what it was about, only that it was inspired by ‘novels about knights from the Middle Ages’. He did little to hide his obsessions. One night in late 2010, he was at the Palace Grill when a local TV celebrity walked in. Breivik launched into a speech about the Muslim plot against Norway, and about the Knights Templar. The bouncers threw him out. On the street, he said to the celebrity: ‘In one year’s time, I’ll be three times as famous as you.’ This story appears in Aage Borchgrevink’s superb book, and it plays like a scene from a horror film because we know the barfly will make good on his promise. Breivik was hard at work on 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, a 1518-page screed exposing the Muslim plot to conquer Christendom. In large part a compendium of extracts from counter-jihadist websites, 2083 was posted online on the day of the attacks under the name ‘Andrew Berwick’, one of Breivik’s several aliases. The signs of Europe’s creeping Islamisation were everywhere, he argued, from Bosnian independence to the spread of mosques in Oslo. Muslim men were having their way with European women, while declaring their own women off-limits to European men. Breivik and his fellow white Norwegians were ‘first-generation dhimmis’ – a term for non-Muslim minorities under Ottoman rule which, like most of his ideas, he’d found online – in what was fast becoming ‘Eurabia’. Worst of all, Europe’s ‘cultural Marxist’ elites had caved in, like a woman who would rather ‘be raped than … risk serious injuries while resisting’. Even the Lutheran Church – ‘priests in jeans who march for Palestine and churches that look like minimalist shopping centres’ – had surrendered. Fortunately, there were ‘knights’ like Breivik who had the courage to defend Europe’s honour. 2083 isn’t just a manifesto: it’s also the would-be inspirational memoir of a man who has rejected the ‘Sex and the City lifestyle’ in favour of his sacred duty. The leap from empty hedonism to murderous heroism is also a recurring theme in the biographies of the young men who leave Bradford, Hamburg, Paris and Oslo for Syria. As Borchgrevink writes, Breivik’s hatred of Islam didn’t prevent him from proposing a tactical alliance with al-Qaida against the liberal state he hated even more. The desires that motivated him scarcely differed from those of his jihadist enemies: revenge, adventure and fame. Breivik was born in 1979. His parents never married, and separated before he was two; he was raised by his mother, a nurse, who turned out to be unstable and emotionally abusive. By the time he was four, the home had become so turbulent that the state welfare services recommended he be removed. But the recommendation was never acted on, and Breivik grew up hating his mother, whom he accused of ‘feminising’ him, and idolising the father he rarely saw. He was drawn to tough boys like his pal Rafik, the son of Pakistani immigrants who claimed to know members of the notorious ‘B Gang’ in Oslo East. Breivik was a ‘potato’, a white boy, but under Rafik’s tutelage he bought himself a pair of baggy trousers and learned to steal and speak what Borchgrevink calls ‘Kebab Norwegian’. He ‘bombed the city’ with his graffiti tag, Morg, inspired by a Marvel Comics villain. But the friendship with Rafik gradually unravelled, partly because Rafik and his cohort seemed to be a magnet for the white girls who rejected him. Breivik joined a ‘white pride’ gang, and even found himself a girlfriend – but then she dumped him for a Pakistani. He didn’t do much better in his attempt to become a millionaire, though in his twenties he did make some money selling cheap mobile phone contracts and fake diplomas, mostly to immigrants. He joined the right-wing Progress Party, whose opposition to immigration and higher taxes chimed with his own resentments. But what appears to have transformed him was discovering the writings of Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen, a blogger who wrote under the name ‘Fjordman’. Fjordman’s online manifesto, Native Revolt: A European Declaration of Independence, gave meaning to Breivik’s failures by situating them in a global war between Christendom and Islam. Rafik, he realised, was no mere hoodlum: he was a secret jihadist. ‘The petty-criminal subculture of the 1990s was reborn as a religious conflict,’ in Borchgrevink’s words, and Breivik was now a knight in the war to save Europe. Keen to make contact with his fellow knights, he introduced himself to Fjordman, who found him ‘as boring as a vacuum cleaner salesman’. He turned up at a pro-Israel meeting organised by the Friends of Document.no, a far-right website edited by Hans Rustad, a former soixante-huitard who claimed that Muslim men were using sex as a form of warfare, inflicting a ‘slow castration’ on Western men. Rustad felt ‘there were some inhibitions missing in [Breivik’s] head.’ No one with inhibitions would have wandered into Monrovia during the Liberian civil war, which is what Breivik did in 2002. He told friends that he was going to buy blood diamonds, but his real purpose was to pay his respects to Milorad Ulemek, known as the Dragon, an ultra-nationalist Serb who’d fought in the Special Operations Unit of the Serb army: the Serbs, in Breivik’s view, had been Europe’s front-line defenders in the battle with Islam, only to be cruelly abandoned in their hour of need. Nothing much came of these encounters, but he now felt himself to be part of a community. In 2006 he moved back in with his mother, so that he could contribute to right-wing websites, play video games and work on 2083. But he was afraid of becoming ‘a bitter old goat behind a computer’: ‘Convert your frustration and anger to motivation and resolve,’ he told himself. He began taking steroids, and dressing up in a red uniform covered in badges; his mother thought he’d gone ‘all Rambo’. On the morning of 22 July 2011, Breivik uploaded his manifesto to his favourite websites, and emailed it to 1003 contacts in Europe and Israel. He’d timed the launch to coincide with the events he’d planned for later in the day: a bombing in central Oslo, followed by a strike on Utøya, an island 40 kilometres north of the city where the Labour Party Youth had their annual retreat. He’d been preparing the attack since 2002, he claimed when interrogated by the police. He had bought his Ruger rifle and Glock pistol legally; the rifle bore the inscription ‘Gungnir’, after Odin’s spear. He built the 950 kg bomb with fertiliser he’d purchased for a farm he set up in 2009 on land rented from elderly farmers north of Oslo. Five months before the massacre, a UN-directed anti-terror programme identified him as one of 41 Norwegians who had imported chemicals that could be used for fertiliser bombs, but the Norwegian security services didn’t investigate. They were worried about radical jihadists, not West End boys who lived with their mothers. Breivik placed the bomb in a van parked outside a government building. It went off at 15.22, killing eight people. Disguised as a police officer, Breivik then made his way to Utøya by ferry. A failure at everything else he had tried, he proved to be a highly methodical killer. In little more than an hour, he killed 69 people, 67 of them with shots to the head; two died from drowning in the fjord as they tried to escape. Thirty-two of the victims were under the age of 18. ‘Today you will die, Marxists,’ he shouted. He had chosen his victims carefully. For all his rage against Muslims, he was more angry at the leftists who had allowed them to enter Norway. Generations of Labour Party leaders had received their political, and sentimental, education at the Utøya camp. The ‘left-wing ideological stone in the shoe of the pragmatic governing Labour Party’, Utøya embodied everything that Breivik loathed: feminism, gay rights, and sympathy for immigrants and oppressed Third World peoples. With his ‘pre-emptive’ attack on these ‘cultural Marxists’ he hoped to detonate a civil war. In the eyes of most Norwegians, though, he had attacked not only Utøya but Norway itself. Thanks to Breivik, Borchgrevink writes, Norway discovered that it was ‘rich in more than oil, and 22 July 2011 became a symbol – not of division and weakness, but of strength and solidarity’. Breivik was symbolically purged from Norway: he was a ‘lone madman’, his crime a horrifying but isolated incident. This fable was reassuring but never very persuasive. Before his trial he was described as a paranoid schizophrenic, but the psychiatrist in residence at Ila Prison failed to find any evidence of psychosis or schizophrenia; a second team of psychiatrists concluded that he had narcissistic personality disorder but that he was not psychotic and was therefore criminally liable for his actions. Breivik himself insisted that he was sane, and after a second psychiatric assessment he was deemed sane enough to stand trial and to receive the maximum 21-year sentence. Still, the conventional wisdom in Norway remains that Breivik is a case for psychiatrists, rather than a cause for deeper political reflection. Borchgrevink gives a detailed account of Breivik’s descent into the virtual netherworld of ‘Eurabia’ literature, yet he too blames his radicalisation on a dysfunctional home. He relies heavily on confidential reports by the psychiatrists who had monitored little Anders and his mother – reports that his mother, who died last year, fought successfully to have declared inadmissible as evidence. If it hadn’t been for ‘a deficit of family care’, he implies, Breivik might never have turned violent. Perhaps. But the story doesn’t end there, as Sindre Bangstad argues in Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia. Childhood trauma doesn’t explain why Breivik directed his anger at Muslims and the European ‘quislings’ who colluded with them. And to focus exclusively on Breivik is to miss, even repress the problem of Norway’s relationship to its Muslim population. As Bangstad writes, ‘it is entirely possible to be a lone madman, yet act out ideological fantasies of purity and existential danger which are, in fact, far more mainstream.’ Very few Norwegians would condone Breivik’s actions, even secretly, or understand why his anger at Muslims took the form of killing mostly white teenagers. Yet the anti-Muslim tropes that appear in 2083 are commonplace not only online, but among members of the Progress Party (of which he was a member until 2004) – the country’s third largest party and a junior partner in the Conservative Party government. Anti-Muslim rhetoric has seeped into liberal movements in Norway, too, movements concerned with gay rights, feminism and free speech. One might have expected this trend to be reversed after Utøya, but the opposite has happened. Norwegian ‘unity’ was strengthened by the Breivik massacre, but at the expense of the country’s Muslim minority, who comprise 3.6 per cent of its five million citizens, and who are less welcome than ever. * Tolerance has never been Norway’s strong suit. Jews and Catholics were constitutionally banned from entering the country for much of the 19th century; the prohibition against Jesuits was lifted only in 1956. The so-called tatere – travelling Romani who have been in Norway for several hundred years – were subject to ruthless assimilation policies, including forced sterilisation, from the 1930s until the 1970s. There is no figure in Norwegian history more reviled than Vidkun Quisling, the collaborationist prime minister who was executed in 1945, but he had plenty of company. Yet until the 1980s, Norwegians learned at school only of the heroic men who took to the forests and mountains to fight the Nazis, not of the thousands who volunteered for the Waffen SS’s Nordic Division Wiking, or of the round-ups of Jews by the Norwegian police. By then, Muslims had replaced Jews as the ‘enemy within’ for the far right. The first wave of Muslim immigration began during the oil boom of the 1960s, when guest workers arrived from Pakistan. In 1975, Norway’s parliament passed a ban on immigration which, in effect, applied only to non-Western migrant labour. Since then, most immigrants of Muslim background have arrived either as asylum seekers (the majority from Somalia or the Balkans) or to join an already settled husband or father. At first, Muslims immigrants weren’t identified as Muslims but by their family’s country of origin. That changed in the 1990s. Partly thanks to a feeling that they weren’t fully accepted as Norwegians, piety and social conservatism among Muslims increased, a trend that leaders of mosques – some trained in highly conservative schools in Pakistan – did their best to encourage. More than 80 per cent of Norwegians belong to the Lutheran Church, but almost no one attends services. Muslims increasingly stood out as believers of a different religion in a Christian yet irreligious society. For many Norwegians, a stroll in parts of Oslo East became an unsettling experience. The sounds of Urdu and Arabic, the wearing of the hijab, even the smell of foreign food clashed with their idea of Norway. The country, many began to feel, had a ‘Muslim problem’. The fears that drive this perception are not entirely irrational. Norway’s Muslims are over-represented in the professions, but they are also over-represented among the poor and unemployed. Racism, disenfranchisement, the war on terror and a feeling that their identity as Muslims is under attack have made some of them susceptible to the appeal of radical Salafism. Bangstad provides a thorough account of groups like IslamNet and the Prophet’s Ummah, which has sent volunteers to Syria and held small but incendiary rallies in support of Isis. Yet, as he emphasises, the supporters of radical Islam are vastly outnumbered by Muslims who reject it. And while Muslims protested against what were seen as insults to Islam, from the publication of The Satanic Verses to the Danish cartoons, opinion polls show that they remain supportive of free speech, at levels only a few percentage points below those of ‘ethnic’ Norwegians. Faced with such polls, Norway’s Islam haters say they’re lying, that they’re practising taqiyya, a Shia term for ‘dissimulation’. The spectre of ‘Islamic expansion’ has helped the Progress Party to become a major political force. Its share of the vote may have dropped from 22.9 per cent to 16.3 in the 2013 parliamentary elections, but it was able to enter the governing coalition for the first time. When it was established in 1973, the PP was known as the ALP: Anders Lange’s Party for a Strong Reduction in Taxes, Duties and Public Intervention. The ‘threat’ of racial minorities ranked far below high taxes, toll roads and the price of petrol on its list of priorities at the time. Yet the party has always been infected by a powerful strain of white supremacy. In the late 1980s, the PP turned its attention to immigration, particularly Muslim immigration, drawing inspiration from the success of the Danish Progress Party (from which it took its new name). Lange’s successor, Carl Hagen, warned at a rally in 1987 that unless Norwegians rallied in defence of their culture, ‘Islam will conquer Norway.’ Central to the PP’s message is the idea that the country’s ‘cultural elite’ is stabbing Norway in the back, colluding with what its leader Siv Jensen – Norway’s finance minister – describes as ‘Islamisation by stealth’. Because liberals are ‘failing liberals’, only an aggressive party like the PP can defend Norway’s traditions of social liberalism. Under Jensen, the patriarchal, nostalgic party of Norwegian shopkeepers has rebranded itself as a feminist party, although its feminism mostly amounts to what Bangstad (following Gayatri Spivak) calls ‘saving brown women from brown men’. The ‘polarisation entrepreneurs’ of the PP have a growing audience, and their arguments an increasing cohesion and sophistication, thanks to journalists and bloggers like Fjordman and Walid al-Kubaisi, an exiled Iraqi writer and filmmaker who has played the role of ‘native informant’ much as Ayaan Hirsi Ali did in Holland. Their rhetoric is more extreme than the PP’s, but the overlap is too pronounced to be a coincidence, and some have advised the party. They form part of a much broader network, an anti-Islam international that extends from Scandinavia to the United States and includes such figures as Lars Hedegaard, a prominent right-wing Danish intellectual; the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci; the American neoconservatives Daniel Pipes, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer; and – the maître à penser of the ‘Eurabia genre’ – Gisèle Littman, a British woman of Egyptian-Jewish origin who lives in Switzerland and publishes under the pseudonym Bat Ye’or. (It’s striking how many Eurabia theorists write under pseudonyms when you consider their attacks on Muslim dissimulation.) Eurabia writers believe the West has been weakened by a politically correct cult of victimhood, yet their own writing (like Breivik’s) appears to be driven by a personal sense of injury at the hands of Muslims, reinterpreted, and thereby globalised, through the prism of Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’. Fjordman, an Arabist from a left-wing family, was in Cairo on 9/11 when he saw a group of Egyptians celebrating the attacks. Al-Kubaisi fled from Iraq to avoid serving in the Iran-Iraq war and received asylum – and a state scholarship guaranteeing him an income for the rest of his life – in Norway. Bruce Bawer, an American gay literary critic who moved to Norway in 1999 to be with his Norwegian partner, came to see Muslim immigrants as an irredeemably illiberal fifth column. He denounced Breivik as a ‘murderous madman’ but – in his 2012 book The New Quislings: How the International Left Used the Oslo Massacre to Silence Debate about Islam – lifted two fake assertions directly from 2083: that the Labour Party had employed anarchist militants as storm troops, and that ‘innumerable Norwegians have been killed by Muslims.’ Eurabia ideologues have been given a platform by liberal intellectuals and the Norwegian press. Hysterical polemics about Islam and Muslim immigration are easy to come by in liberal papers like Klassekampen. So are articles that confirm the hysteria, such as a recent interview with a Norwegian admirer of Isis, which appeared in a liberal newspaper without any editorial note questioning his claim to be speaking for all Muslims. Liberal tolerance for anti-Muslim hate speech, Bangstad argues, goes back to the Rushdie affair, when Norway became the first country to publish The Satanic Verses in translation. Four days after Khomeini issued the fatwa, a group of Muslim leaders established the Islamic Defence Council, calling for the novel to be banned and invoking a blasphemy law that had long since fallen into disuse. In 1993, Rushdie’s Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, was shot three times outside his home in Oslo (he survived); the assailant was never found. The government responded by forming a series of commissions that called for expanding the protection of free speech. It was an admirably full-throated defence of Rushdie’s right to publish, but, as Bangstad suggests, since then a kind of ‘free speech absolutism’ has steadily chipped away at any concern for minority protections against racist and discriminatory speech, which are guaranteed by Norwegian law. A popular narrative had emerged that Muslims were uncomfortable with free speech, and that there was an irreconcilable conflict between Norwegian ‘values’ and Muslim ‘culture’. The press became ‘an arena for confrontation rather than dialogue’ – a forum for inflammatory views about Islam. Tolerance for ‘free speech’ has been widely construed as a loyalty test. ‘The right to offend bishops and imams is absolutely central to our way of life,’ Per Edgar Kokkvold, the secretary-general of the Norwegian Press Association, has explained. ‘If they happen to dislike it, they must leave.’ The situation hasn’t improved since the Breivik massacre. The press gave lavish coverage to a tiny protest by radical Islamists outside the US Embassy over the YouTube video Innocence of Muslims, attended by eighty people, but virtually ignored a demonstration of 6000 people organised by the Islamic Council of Norway with support from Oslo’s Lutheran bishop. As Bangstad writes, the press has had a love affair with the ‘young and marginalised Muslims’ who are ‘willing to play the role … which non-Muslim Norwegians have valid reasons to fear’. And the intellectual establishment continues to dote on Eurabia propagandists who insist that these young people represent Islam as a whole. Breivik’s hero Fjordman has graduated from the web to the pages of the Aftenposten, a self-described ‘conservative-liberal’ newspaper. He’s also writing a book about Utøya, partly subsidised by a fellowship from the Fritt Ord Foundation, Norway’s most prestigious free speech organisation. Nygaard, who is now the chairman of PEN Norway, defended Fjordman’s fellowship on the grounds that he ‘does not incite violence’. Norway isn’t the only European country in which the cause of free speech has been travestied by bigots. Throughout the continent, but especially in Scandinavia, demagogic ‘critics of Islam’ have styled themselves as modern-day Dreyfusards willing to speak truths that politically correct liberals don’t dare express. The recent electoral successes of the right-wing Swedish Democrats, France’s Front National and Geert Wilders in Holland have been fuelled by their appeals to anti-Muslim fear. As Bangstad writes, socially liberal right-wing populists now claim to be carrying on the campaign that began more than two centuries ago with the revolt against the superstitions – and privileges – of the church. Its liberal credentials, they say, should be self-evident: why should Europeans give any quarter to those who cover their women and attack the achievements of postwar social movements, from women’s emancipation to gay marriage – not to mention those among them who support jihad? In 1892, Edouard Drumont set up an anti-Semitic newspaper to expose the Jews’ disloyalty to France; he called it La Libre Parole. ========================================= 20. USA: DEATH WEARS BUNNY SLIPPERS by Josh Harkinson ========================================= (Mother Jones | November/December 2014 Issue) Hanging out with the disgruntled guys who babysit our aging nuclear missiles—and hate every second of it. — Along a lonely state highway on central Montana's high plains, I approach what looks like a ranch entrance, complete with cattle guard. "The first ace in the hole," reads a hand-etched cedar plank hanging from tall wooden posts. "In continuous operation for over 50 years." I drive up the dirt road to a building surrounded by video cameras and a 10-foot-tall, barbed-wire-topped fence stenciled with a poker spade. "It is unlawful to enter this area," notes a sign on the fence, whose small print cites the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950, a law that once required communist organizations to register with the federal government. "Use of deadly force authorized." Read more MoJo stories on America's atomic arsenal Map: The Nuclear Bombs in Your Backyard [1] We're Spending More on Nukes Than We Did During the Cold War?! [2] Nuclear Weapons on a Highway Near You [3] 8 of the Wackiest (or Worst) Ideas for Nuclear Weapons [4] Eric Schlosser: If We Don't Slash Our Nukes, "a Major City Is Going to Be Destroyed" [5] I'm snapping photos when a young airman appears. "You're not taking pictures, are you?" he asks nervously. "Yeah, I am," I say. "The signs don't say that I can't." "Well, we might have to confiscate your phone." Maybe he should. We're steps away from the 10th Missile Squadron [6] Alpha Missile Alert Facility, an underground bunker capable of launching several dozen nuclear-tipped Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), with a combined destructive force 1,000 times that of the Hiroshima bomb. Another airman comes out of the ranch house and asks for my driver's license. He's followed by an older guy clad in sneakers, maroon gym shorts, and an air of authority. "I'm not here to cause trouble," I say, picturing myself in a brig somewhere. "Just you being here taking photos is causing trouble," he snaps. An alarm starts blaring from inside the building. One airman turns to the other. "Hey, there's something going off in there." Six hours earlier, I was driving through Great Falls with a former captain in the Air Force's 341st Missile Wing. Aaron, as I'll call him, had recently completed a four-year stint at the Alpha facility. Had President Obama ordered an attack with ICBMs, Aaron could have received a coded message, authenticated it, and been expected to turn a launch key. [7] Also read: "That Time We Almost Nuked North Carolina [7]"—a timeline of near-misses, mishaps, and scandals from our atomic arsenal. We kept passing unmarked blue pickup trucks with large tool chests—missile maintenance guys. The Air Force doesn't like to draw attention to the 150 silos dotting the surrounding countryside, and neither does Great Falls. With about 4,000 residents and civilian workers and a $219 million annual payroll, Malmstrom Air Force Base [8] drives the local economy, but you won't see any missile-themed bars or restaurants. "We get some people that have no idea that there's even an Air Force base here," one active-duty missileer told me. It's not just Great Falls practicing selective amnesia. The days of duck-and-cover drills, fallout shelters, and No Nukes protests are fading memories—nowhere more so than in the defense establishment. At a July 2013 forum [9] in Washington, DC, Lt. General James Kowalski [10], who commands all of the Air Force's nuclear weapons, said a Russian nuclear attack on the United States was such "a remote possibility" that it was "hardly worth discussing." But then Kowalski sounded a disconcerting note that has a growing number of nuclear experts worried. The real nuclear threat for America today, he said, "is an accident. The greatest risk to my force is doing something stupid." Lt. General James Kowalski Lt. General James Kowalski Air Force "You can't screw up once—and that's the unique danger of these machines," points out investigative journalist Eric Schlosser [11], whose recent book, Command and Control [12], details the Air Force's stunning secret history of nuclear near-misses [7], from the accidental release of a hydrogen bomb that would have devastated North Carolina to a Carter-era computer glitch that falsely indicated a shower of incoming Soviet nukes. "In this business, you need a perfect safety record." Once the military's crown jewels, ICBM bases have become "little orphanages that get scraps for dinner." And a perfect record, in a homeland arsenal made up of hundreds of missiles and countless electronic and mechanical systems that have to operate flawlessly—to say nothing of the men and women at the controls—is a very hard thing to achieve. Especially when the rest of the nation seems to have forgotten about the whole thing. "The Air Force has not kept its ICBMs manned or maintained properly," says Bruce Blair [13], a former missileer and cofounder of the anti-nuclear group Global Zero [14]. Nuclear bases that were once the military's crown jewels are now "little orphanages that get scraps for dinner," he says. And morale is abysmal. Blair's organization wants to eliminate nukes, but he argues that while we still have them, it's imperative that we invest in maintenance, training, and personnel to avoid catastrophe: An accident resulting from human error, he says, may be actually more likely today because the weapons are so unlikely to be used. Without the urgent sense of purpose the Cold War provided, the young men (and a handful of women) who work with the world's most dangerous weapons are left logging their 24-hour shifts under subpar conditions—with all the dangers that follow. In August 2013, Air Force commanders investigated two officers in the ICBM program suspected of using ecstasy and amphetamines. A search of the officers' phones revealed more trouble: They and other missileers were sharing answers for the required monthly exams [15] that test their knowledge of things like security procedures and the proper handling of classified launch codes. Ultimately, 98 missileers were implicated for cheating or failure to report it. Nine officers were stripped of their commands, and Colonel Robert Stanley, the commander of Malmstrom's missile wing, resigned [16]. The Air Force claimed the cheating only went as far back as November 2011. Ex-missileers told me it went back decades: "Everybody has cheated on those tests." The Air Force claimed the cheating only went as far back as November 2011 [17], but three former missileers told me it was the norm at Malmstrom when they arrived there back in 2007, and that the practice was well established. (Blair told me that cheating was even common when he served at Malmstrom in the mid-1970s.) Missileers would check each other's tests before turning them in and share codes indicating the correct proportion of multiple-choice answers on a given exam. If the nuclear program's top brass, who all began their careers as missileers, weren't aware of it, the men suggested, then they were willfully looking the other way. "You know in Casablanca, when that inspector was 'absolutely shocked' that there was gambling at Rick's? It's that," one recently retired missileer told me. "Everybody has cheated on those tests." Cheating is just one symptom of what Lt. Colonel Jay Folds, then the commander of the nuclear missile wing at North Dakota's Minot Air Force Base, called "rot" in the atomic force [18]. Last November, Associated Press reporter Robert Burns obtained a RAND study [19] commissioned by the Air Force. It concluded that the typical launch officer was exhausted, cynical, and distracted on the job. ICBM airmen also had high rates of sexual assault, suicide, and spousal and child abuse, and more than double the rates of courts-martial than Air Force personnel as a whole. The morale problems were well known to Michael Carey [20], the two-star general who led the program at the time the cheating was revealed. Indeed, he pointed them out to other Americans during an official military cooperation trip to Moscow, before spending the rest of his three-day visit on a drunken bender, repeatedly insulting his Russian military hosts and partying into the wee hours with "suspect" foreign women, according to the Air Force's inspector general [21]. He later confessed to chatting for most of a night with the hotel's cigar sales lady, who was asking questions "about physics and optics"—and thinking to himself: "Dude, this doesn't normally happen." Carey was stripped of his command in October 2013. The embarrassments just keep coming. Last week, the Air Force fired two more nuclear commanders [22], including Col. Carl Jones, the No. 2 officer in the 90th Missile Wing at Wyoming's Warren Air Force Base, and disciplined a third, for a variety of leadership failures, including the maltreatment of subordinates. In one instance, two missileers were sent to the hospital after exposure to noxious fumes at a control center—they had remained on duty for fear of retaliation by their commander, Lt. Col. Jimmy "Keith" Brown. This week, the Pentagon is expected [23] to release a comprehensive review of the nuclear program that details "serious problems that must be addressed urgently." "Their buddies from the B-52s and B-2s tell them all sorts of exciting stories about doing real things in Afghanistan and Iraq. They end up feeling superfluous." Stung by the recent bad press, the Air Force has announced pay raises, changes to the proficiency tests, and nearly $400 million in additional spending to increase staffing and update equipment. In the long term, Congress and the administration are debating a trillion-dollar suite of upgrades to the nuclear program, which could include replacing the existing ICBMs and warheads [24] with higher-tech versions. But outside experts say none of the changes will address the core of the problem: obsolescence. "There is a morale issue," says Hans Kristensen [25], who directs the Federation of American Scientists' Nuclear Information Project, "that comes down to the fundamental question: How is the ICBM force essential? It's hard to find that [answer] if you sit in the hole out there. Their buddies from the B-52s and B-2s tell them all sorts of exciting stories about doing real things in Afghanistan and Iraq. They end up feeling superfluous." launch switches A missile commander's launch switches. National Park Service Indeed, on my first night in town, over beer and bison burgers, Aaron had introduced me to "Brent," another recently former missileer who looks more like a surfer now that his military crew cut is all grown out. Brent lost faith in his leaders early on, he told me, when he saw the way they tolerated, if not encouraged, a culture of cheating. He'd resisted the impulse, he said, and his imperfect test scores disqualified him for promotions. But the worst part of the gig, the guys agreed, might be the stultifying tedium of being stuck in a tiny room all day and night waiting for an order you knew would never come. "Any TV marathon you can stumble upon is good," Brent said. "Even if it's something you hate. It's just that ability to zone out and lose time." Aaron chimed in: "I would sit on alert with CNN up and just hit refresh, hoping to God something would happen in the world. I'm just like, 'Please, something change. Oh my God! I am so tired and I am so bored.'" "You get into that funk," he went on. "You just want to sit there and hope to God that this next 10 hours disappears. Because your partner goes to bed and you, the console, and the missiles are by yourself for 10 hours. My favorite time is when the TV broke! You've never seen more innovative people on Earth. They were taking the back off the TV, splitting wires, sticking paper clips in it. I came out and go, 'What happened?' and he goes, 'The fucking TV broke and I fixed it! I spent an hour and a half, but I fixed it.'" This visit marks the first time Aaron has been in Great Falls since leaving the Air Force, and he still hasn't come to terms with spending five years of his life on a mission he's not sure he believes in. As we walk up to the Malmstrom base museum one morning, he starts to sweat. In the visitor center, he glues himself to a sofa as I hand my ID to a young airman. "Do you want to go inside?" I ask him. "No, not really," he says, and then, once we're back in the car, explains sheepishly, "It's just weird being on base." When Aaron hit on women in bars, he would sometimes lie and say he was a wind turbine technician. Aaron took his first flight, on a puddle jumper, around age 10. An uncle who worked as a pilot later bought him a flying lesson, and Aaron never looked back. He applied and was accepted to the Air Force Academy. But during his senior year, the Air Force ended a waiver program that allowed cadets with imperfect vision—including Aaron—to earn their wings, so after graduation he grudgingly settled for a position at Malmstrom. He was hardly alone in his lack of enthusiasm: According to one study, less than one-third of missileers ever wanted that job. When Aaron hit on women in bars in Great Falls, he would sometimes say he was a wind turbine technician. delta facility blast door A delta facility blast door on exhibit. National Park Service On a typical workday, he would arrive at Malmstrom by 7 a.m. and go through the first of some 50 daily checklists, an inspection of his Air Force-issued Ford Taurus X. For the next few hours, he would get briefings, study checklist changes, or complete exams before hitting the road with another missileer—each team includes a commander and a deputy—and sometimes a facilities manager and a chef, since you can't exactly summon Domino's to such a remote site. A control center bunk. A control center bunk. National Park Service Once he arrived at the launch facility, Aaron would begin a 24-hour shift, known as an "alert," by going 60 feet underground in an elevator and passing through a four-and-a-half-foot-thick blast door. The control center, about the size of an RV trailer, hangs inside a concrete capsule from pneumatic cylinders designed to help it ride out shock waves from a nuclear blast. Each unit controls 10 Minuteman III missiles but can launch up to 50 should the need arise. The temperature is a constant 68 degrees and the tiny bathroom contains a "prison toilet." While one missileer monitors the control panels, his partner sleeps in a bed opposite, hence the unofficial motto: "Death wears bunny slippers." Any suggestion of restfulness is misleading, however. The missile wing slogan "perfection is the standard" extends to the smallest of tasks—like the chef ensuring that the salad dressing hasn't expired. Botching a checklist would earn you a write-up, and could get you pulled from duty. Repeat mistakes could seriously harm your prospects for promotion. In Aaron's view, the job was like a "Pavlovian experiment," with some kind of buzzer going off, it seemed, every 15 minutes. Facing the threat of reprisal for the smallest mistakes, he never got much sleep. It turned out that Aaron had joined the nuclear program at a particularly bad time. In June 2006, the top-secret nose cone fuse assemblies of four Minuteman III missiles were accidentally shipped from Hill Air Force Base in Utah to Taiwan [26], which had requested helicopter batteries; the boxes sat for nearly two years before the Air Force, prompted by Taiwanese officials, finally acknowledged its error. The next year, just four months after Aaron started at Malmstrom, six hydrogen bombs from Minot went missing for a day and a half after a crew mistakenly loaded them onto a plane and flew them across the country. "It was an incredibly serious security lapse," Schlosser says. "The fact that nobody was asked to sign for the weapons when they were removed from the bunker, the fact that nobody in the loading crew or on the airplane even knew that the plane was carrying nuclear weapons, is just remarkable." A string of investigations concluded that the nuclear corps had lost its "zero defect" culture. In response, the Air Force launched a program to "sustain, modernize, and recapitalize its nuclear capability." What that meant in practice, Aaron says, was punishing the rank and file for past mistakes while the colonels swept the bigger problems under the rug. mock launch control center A mock launch control center at Minuteman Missile National Historic Site. National Park Service Rather than take missiles offline to repair a major sewage leak, a colonel ordered launch officers to defecate in a cardboard box. A few months into the modernization program, sewer pipes in two Malmstrom launch facilities ruptured and a deep stew of human waste lingered at the bottom of the capsules. Despite the intolerable stench, the colonel in charge refused to take the units offline for repair. The men were instead ordered to defecate in a cardboard box lined with a plastic bag, but since nobody wanted to carry the box upstairs when it got full, the missileers began relieving themselves from a gangplank directly into the bottom of the capsule. This went on for four or five months. "You are sitting there being told you are operating the most vital system to the defense of the country," says a former missileer who worked in one of the affected capsules, "and then you are shitting and pissing in a bag. It just caused a corrosive lack of faith in our leaders." Since Aaron can't bring himself to set foot on base, we decide to visit Belt, a quaint former mining town nestled in a creek valley. We drive through the old brick downtown, past dog walkers and kids on bikes. "Slow down a little bit," Aaron says, just after we pass the last row of houses. "To the left is a nuclear weapon." Behind a chain-link fence, I spot the 110-ton silo door, which would be sent flying over our heads in a launch scenario. An adversary might try to nuke this missile before it could be used—which is why the Air Force has them scattered over five states. But the neighbors have more to worry about than our enemies abroad. Titan II The Titan II carried a thermonuclear warhead 560 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Rob Schoenbaum/Zuma On September 18, 1980, an airman conducting maintenance on a Titan II missile in a silo near Damascus, Arkansas, used an unauthorized socket wrench to unscrew a cap near the top of the missile. The nine-pound socket came loose, plunged 70 feet, and punched a hole in the fuel tank [27]. Nine hours later, the missile exploded, killing one person, injuring 21 others, and scattering debris over a half-mile radius. The warhead flew 200 yards and landed, thankfully without detonating, in a roadside ditch. It was the largest weapon ever mounted on an ICBM, a nine-megaton hydrogen bomb with more explosive potential than all of WWII's bombs—including the nukes—combined. The Damascus incident, which provided the central narrative for Schlosser's book, illustrated a problem that has plagued America's nuclear program since its inception: Nukes are designed, operated, and maintained by people—and people invariably make mistakes. Between 2008 and 2014, the Air Force reported 1,430 "dull sword" incidents: relatively minor deficiencies such as an unauthorized entry into a launch capsule or a security team failing to respond to alarms. The Air Force has been less forthcoming, however, about the more serious mishaps, known as "broken arrows" or "bent spears," which are often kept classified. But "you don't have to be an industrial expert to know that accidents happen when people are careless, and people are careless when they don't care about their jobs," says Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a foundation focused on nuclear weapon policy. (Ploughshares has provided funding for Mother Jones' national-security reporting.) The risk of an accidental nuclear detonation in the Minuteman fleet is "vanishingly small," says a leading nuclear safety expert. But "I will not say zero." Bob Peurifoy, who introduced new nuclear safety features as a director of weapon development and VP at Sandia National Laboratories from 1973 to 1991, told me that built-in missile safeguards have improved to the point where the risk of an accidental detonation of a Minuteman-mounted nuke is "vanishingly small." But, he adds, "I will not say zero. I know how to get to zero: Don't put the weapon together" until the moment you need to use it. Peurifoy also believes that the United States needs to step back further from its Cold War-era posture. "In my opinion," he says, the missiles' pinpoint accuracy "is an example of a technology driving a reckless policy, a form of insanity" that encourages both the United States and Russia to continue targeting each other's silos and launch the missiles "on warning" of an incoming barrage. False alarms have nearly triggered accidental war on more than one occasion, Peurifoy notes, the most recent (that we know about) coming during the 1990s. "It's an accident waiting to happen." Two days later, I return to the base museum, where I spot a sign much like the one I'd seen back on the highway. JFK, legend has it, referred to the Alpha fleet as his "ace in the hole" because it allowed him to stare down the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But museum curator Curt Shannon, a retired Air Force "ammo puke" whose job entailed loading nuclear bombs onto planes, assures me the legend is bogus—he personally unearthed a Boeing marketing brochure predating the Missile Crisis that read: "Minuteman: Montana and America's Ace in the Hole." The Kennedy story, Shannon suggests, was concocted by the defense contractor to sell more missiles. We watch a Minuteman III promotional video that is shown to all museum visitors. With a burst of flame, the missile blasts skyward, accompanied by triumphal music. It burns through two stages before reaching outer space, where, with video-game-style sound effects, a spinning warhead pivots and falls earthward, ripping through the atmosphere at 15,000 mph. In the end, it lands harmlessly in the ocean. "Of course, if it hits the water, somebody screwed up," Shannon jokes as he resets the DVD player. What the video leaves out is that if we ever do deploy a nuke, it probably won't be an ICBM, because Russia or China might interpret the launch as an attack even if we were actually aiming for, say, Iran or North Korea. Instead, most defense experts believe that in almost all foreseeable scenarios we'd strike with a bomber or a submarine, deployed from nearby shores or military bases. At a 2012 Senate hearing, a former Joint Chiefs vice chairman testified that ICBMs could be eliminated without leaving America at risk. Why, then, does America bother with land-based missiles? The Air Force argues that it's basically a show of strength, since an enemy would have to take out every silo to disarm us. But that logic no longer seems compelling, even to some high-profile former military leaders. Retired General James Cartwright, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a 2012 Senate hearing that our nuclear stockpile could be safely reduced from 4,800 warheads to 900 mounted in bombers and submarines, with ICBMs eliminated entirely. Ditching the ICBMs would save taxpayers $14 billion over the next 10 years, but not everyone's a fan of the idea: Senators from states where the missiles are based and tested have formed an ICBM caucus that isn't shy to throw its weight around. As a condition for confirming Rose Gottemoeller, Obama's recent pick for undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, the caucus insisted that the Pentagon maintain all 454 ICBM silos, even through it is trimming the number of missiles to 400. (Yes, we will man and maintain 54 empty silos.) At the museum, I meet "Frank," an active-duty missileer and museum volunteer who says he was assigned to the space program before being transferred to missiles at the last minute because they needed workers. When he started at Malmstrom three years ago, his superiors told him not to complain until he gained some experience. Now that he has, he's dying to get out. He nods toward a woman who is milling through the exhibits. "This lady works for Boeing, and she's actually a recruiter," he confides. "I might talk to her afterwards. The lifestyle is not quite what I wanted." Is it really such a great idea, I ask him, to have a bunch of disillusioned guys babysitting such terrifying weapons? "You're hitting a topic that has been talked about and bitched about for a looong time," Frank says with a smile. "Do something for us. Please." Another Minuteman III promo video. (Northrup Grumman used to be [28] a key ICBM contractor.) Source URL: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/11/air-force-missile-wing-minuteman-iii-nuclear-weapons-burnout Links: [1] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/11/map-nuclear-bombs-power-weapons [2] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/11/nuclear-weapons-complex-budget-disarmament [3] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/nuclear-truckers [4] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/11/wacky-worst-nuclear-weapons [5] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/interview-eric-schlosser-command-control-nuclear-weapons-accidents [6] http://www.malmstrom.af.mil/library/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=4677 [7] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/08/timeline-nuclear-weapons-accidents-mishaps-near-misses [8] http://www.malmstrom.af.mil/ [9] http://secure.afa.org/HBS/transcripts/2013/073113ndiakowalski.pdf [10] http://www.af.mil/AboutUs/Biographies/Display/tabid/225/Article/107901/lieutenant-general-james-m-kowalski.aspx [11] http://barclayagency.com/schlosser.html [12] http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780143125785-0 [13] http://www.globalzero.org/our-movement/leaders/dr-bruce-blair [14] http://www.globalzero.org/ [15] http://www.foia.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-140327-017.pdf [16] http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/montana/resignation-letter-from-col-robert-stanley-the-senior-officer-at/article_ffacbf45-f998-5b51-82d9-82bf9e35c34d.html [17] http://www.defense.gov/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=5398 [18] http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/08/us/nuclear-launch-officers/ [19] http://www.ap.org/Content/AP-In-The-News/2013/Study-Nuclear-force-feeling-burnout-from-work [20] http://www.af.mil/AboutUs/Biographies/Display/tabid/225/Article/108381/major-general-michael-j-carey.aspx [21] http://www.foia.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-131219-045.pdf [22] http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/nuke-commanders-fired-disciplined-26666345 [23] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/5/inside-the-ring-nuke-forces-need-fixing/ [24] http://cns.miis.edu/opapers/pdfs/140107_trillion_dollar_nuclear_triad.pdf [25] http://fas.org/press/experts/kristensen.html [26] http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=49362 [27] http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-09-19/how-a-dropped-wrench-socket-almost-incinerated-arkansas-review [28] http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/08/07/devastating-news-for-northrop-grumman.aspx _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ South Asia Citizens Wire Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on matters of peace and democratisation in South Asia. 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