Solzhenitsyn Re-Affirms My Low Opinion of Henry Kissinger

My low regard for Henry Kissinger began when I was waking up to what was happening in the world in my later youth. Kissinger was an insider in the Nixon White House, end of story. I was biased, no doubt influenced by a strong feeling that Vietnam was an injustice, and that Nixon corruption was real.

Still, I knew little of the depth of Kissinger's badness. The movie Missing--Jack Lemmon, Sissy Spacek--gives a glimpse of the dark side of our State Department in Central and South America during the 50s and 60s. Kissinger was a major player in the Chile debacle.

Years later, reading Sy Hersh's autobiography Reporter added new dimensions to the kind of malodorous influence Kissinger was. The press seemed to love him, seduced perhaps by his sonorous accent. Yes, he projected something, much like our fascination with British accents and Irish brogue.

The manner in which Hersh was ambushed by Ted Koppel when his book on Kissinger, was released is eye-opening. The establishment, and mainstream media, still loved the guy, decades after the Nixon-Ford era. It's pretty revealing that neither Koppel nor either of the guests who lacerated Hersh in front of a national audience had read Hersh's The Price of Power, the topic of discussion. Hersh had dared to criticize this iconic figure and had to be publicly flogged for it.

More recently I found myself absorbed by Paul Thomas Chamberlin's The Cold War's Killing Fields and who should come up again repeatedly as a scoundrel? Yes, Henry K. When Bangladesh was suffering after a devastating cyclone, and West Pakistan did nothing, Kissinger advised that Nixon and the U.S. do nothing to alleviate the suffering because it would "make the Pakistan government look bad."

And because their government did nothing to help the traumatized East Pakistanis after the monsoons and flooding that caused so much death and destruction, the East Pakistani people voted for the opposition party in nearly every voting district. This pissed off the ruling party, so they sent in the army and slaughtered the masses using U.S. supplied armaments. Millions fled to India.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Kissinger's response to the behavior of West Pakistan toward its Bengali brethren.

Kissinger sneered at people who "bleed" for "the dying Bengalis" and ignored the first telegram from the United States consul general in East Pakistan, Archer K. Blood, and 20 members of his staff, which informed the US that their allies West Pakistan were undertaking, in Blood's words, "a selective genocide" targeting the Bengali intelligentsia, supporters of independence for East Pakistan, and the Hindu minority. In the second, more famous, Blood Telegram the word genocide was again used to describe the events, and further that with its continuing support for West Pakistan the US government had "evidenced [...] moral bankruptcy".

Makes one ill to think about it, but Kissinger was the influencer who again moved the hand of power.

* * * *

And so... As I was last night reading the Writings of Aleksandr Solzenitsyn, edited by Michael Loyd Chadwick, and once again came across some barb comments regarding this man. A chapter titled Henry Kissinger begins on page 75. It's not pretty, and only confirms what I have previously only sensed.

The style of this book is somewhat different. Solzhenitsyn divides each thought into a headline and then a little text, like a news story with more details. I am going to share here only the headlines from this four page article.

Failure of U.S. Judicial Authorities to Uncover the Real Assassins of Kennedy*
Need to Speak Bluntly about the Activities of Kissinger
Kissinger's Policy of Unending Concessions to World Communism Demonstrate THat He Is Anything But a Diplomat
Kissinger Attempts to Put Diplomacy at Its Lowest Level
The Art of Diplomacy Has a Wide Spectrum of Possibilities
The Great Diplomats of the Past
Kissinger's Endless Obscuring of Facts
Kissinger's Opponents Are Always Winning and He Is Always Yielding
Should the U.S. Surrender Its Position to the World?
Kissinger Does Not Possess the High Diplomatic Intellect Ascribed to Him
It Is Not Diplomacy to Negotiate Continual Concessions
The Vietnam Peace Agreement Prepared the Way for the Quiet Surrender of Three Countries in Indo-China
Kissinger's Nobel Peace Prize Was the Ultimate in Political Pornography
Disregard By Israeli Leaders of Kissinger's Shuttle Diplomacy in the Middle East
The Real Goal of Future Convergence of the U.S with the USSR Is Kept Hidden from the American People
Surrender of the West Approaches an Avalanche Stage
The U.S. Government Will have No Emergency Exit
Genocide In Cambodia And Vietnamese Prison Camps Is Not Peace
The Peace Aimed At by Kissinger and His Associates Has No Moral Loftiness

In short, Solzhenitsyn had a pretty low opinion of this "Golden Boy" who loved the spotlight in his time, and the Nobel laureate doesn't mince words.

* * * *
The title of this book of Solzhenitsyn's writing is World Communism: A Critical Review. It begins with an intro by Michael Loyd Chadwick, who edited this volume.

In 1975, a year after Solzhenitsyn had been exiled from the Soviet Union, the author had been invited to Washington D.C. to speak to the AFL-CIO. The became a grave problem for then sitting president Gerald Ford. Shouldn't this great advocate for freedom be invited to the White House? Should we not welcome the man who put his life on the line to reveal to all the cold brutality of Soviet totalitarianism?

But no, Henry Kissinger stepped in and beseeched President Ford to not do such a thing. Why? Because befriending Solzhenitsyn would be bad for detente, and evidently Detente was Kissinger's life force.

Not only did Kissinger interfere with (ultimately blocking) the White House visit, he also said it would be "diplomatically inadvisable" for the president to attend the banquet at which Solhenitsyn was speaking. Members of the State Department and NSC whom had been invited were quietly pulled away and did not attend either.

Much more can be said, but I think you get the picture. It's only a small section of the book but when I entered into it, the story leaped off the page.

Related Links
George Harrison & Friends: The 1971 Concert for Bangladesh 
Reporter by Seymour Hersh is a Must Read for all young journalists
*Murder Most Foul: Dylan Dishes Up a New Meal with a Feast of References
Solzhenitsyn Indictment of the West Still Stands

George Harrison & Friends: The 1971 Concert for Bangladesh

Madison Square Garden, 1971

For Dylan fans it was one of his rare public appearances between the Woodstock motorcycle incident and the Rolling Thunder Revue. The Concert for Bangladesh, initiated by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, served two important functions. First, it drew attention to a major catastrophe in a remote region that few Americans were even aware of, overnight turning Bangladesh into a household name. And second, by being the first concert of its kind to bring a host of famous rock musicians together for a charitable cause. The achievements and mis-steps would help future such efforts by famous musicians to bring aid to needy causes.

My aim in this blog post is to shed a little light on what was really happening in Bangladesh in the previous ten months before the concert. If you are like me, you only seem to remember the tragic cyclone, a natural disaster of epic proportions.

* * * *
There were actually two trigger events that led to the concert, the first this natural disaster, and the second a monumental man-made disaster. I've just finished reading Paul Thomas Chamberlin's The Cold War's Killing Fields, subtitled Rethinking the Long Peace. I can't recall when I've been so moved by a single book. While reading it I have mentioned to several friends that "this is the saddest book I've read in my life." The underreported human suffering that has been perpetrated in the course of our lifetimes since World War II is nothing short of shocking when you lay it all out in one book. What Chamberlin does, probably unique, is to show how a single thread actually connects all these disparate atrocities, that thread being the cold war and corresponding fears of the major superpowers.

So much of what has happened these past 70 years was delivered through the media piecemeal so that Americans not only were left in the dark much of the time, the general impression has been that Americans have always been the good guys, the white horse heroes. The tragedy of Bangladesh was two-fold. The first was a destructive cyclone of historic proportions that devastated the country and left as many as 500,000 dead in its wake. Because East Pakistan was located 1000 miles from Pakistan there was a move for liberation which led to a military incursion by the Pakistan army that resulted in the deaths of a quarter million civilians and seven million refugees fleeing to India. This latter had been building for years and did not occur overnight, but the timing of its escalation couldn't have been worse.

The Chamberlin book outlines how WW2 changed the face of the world's power game. We tend to forget that before the World Wars European powers were colonialists whom for hundreds of years had their fingers in every corner of the known world. Suddenly this all changed. The aftermath of WW2 resulted in a variety of complicated conflicts as groups within various regions struggled for freedom and autonomy. Looking back, we've forgotten, or failed to notice, the relationship between the collapse of Colonialism and the various mini-wars in all corners of the world.

The subsequent power struggles occurred against a new backdrop, the Cold War. The big players in this new game interpreted events through their own lenses. Pakistan was an ally of the U.S. so when it began committing horrors against its own people, President Nixon and his advisors chose to support Pakistan with arms and did nothing to restrain the genocidal horror under the pretext that we need an ally like Pakistan in this part of the world. China was breaking with Moscow, and we wanted to be tightly embedded in the region.

After the cyclone the United States initially wanted to help alleviate suffering, but then National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger weighed in, indicating it would make Pakistan look bad in the world's eyes if we did more than they did for their own people. After West Pakistan's bungling relief efforts, a December election showed how divided East Pakistan sentiments were from West Pakistan. In their divine wisdom the West Pakistani leaders decided in March that instead of meeting needs they would invade and slaughter, using American made M-24 tank units. Within a few days there were radio reports of three hundred thousand killed.

Reports like this were easily dismissed as Bengali exaggerations, but when Nixon's own foreign office reported how brutal the atrocities were Nixon and Kissinger applauded the success of the Pakistan army in crushing the "uprising."

I don't need to repeat all the details, only that U.S representatives in Pakistan wrote a scathing indictment of our leaders that begins with this: "Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy." The London Times reported "This is genocide, conducted with amazing casualness." Millions of refugees fled to India. Cholera and smallpox began breaking out, taking even more lives.

You can be sure that all these horrors weighed heavily on Ravi Shankar, the Bengali musician who  taught George Harrison how to play the sitar which is featured on "Within You, Without You," the opening track on side two of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album. Ravi Shankar, who had remained a friend of Harrison since that time, had relations in East Pakistan and he (Shankar) was well aware of the trauma there.

The Concert for Bangladesh took place at the beginning of August featuring "a supergroup of performers that included Harrison, fellow ex-Beatle Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, Leon Russell and the band Badfinger. In addition, Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan – both of whom had ancestral roots in Bangladesh – performed an opening set of Indian classical music. Decades later, Shankar would say of the overwhelming success of the event: 'In one day, the whole world knew the name of Bangladesh. It was a fantastic occasion.'"*

The  account here is much abbreviated from that which is in The Cold War Killing Fields.  When I think back on that period in my life I can't recall a single word about the atrocities that took place after the initial devastation of the cyclone. The war in Viet Nam was the focus of our media and the complexities surrounding the political struggles of these various nations made it easy to not really say much. Americans were too distracted by other things to really try to figure out what was happening here or what happened in Indonesia where in 1965-66 500,000 to a million civilians were similarly slaughtered by their own government for reasons of their own while the U.S. simply stood by and watched.

All this to say that it was a beautiful thing what these performer did. But it makes me sad to reflect on how little I knew about the world we've lived in all the years. And this is but one chapter.

Related Links
Bob Dylan's 18-minute set during the Concert for Bangladesh
The Feature Film of the Concert directed by Phil Spector

"Still my guitar gently weeps..."

*Wikipedia

One More Thing To Worry About

"My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared." ~ P. J. Plauger

In late May North Korea tested a nuclear device.

A May 31 story by Time journalist Robert Baer began, "It's not what we know about rogue states and their nuclear bombs that should scare us — it's what we don't know. North Korea's test of a nuclear device on Monday may not have come as a surprise to Washington, but only in the sense that Washington knew Pyongyang was defiant enough to set one off. Beyond that, truth be told, Washington is completely in the dark about North Korea's intentions. It can only expect the worse and hope for the better."

Then there's the nuclear activity in Iran. In recent speeches President Obama has defended the right of Iran to have nuclear power, despite fears in some camps that they are simultaneously developing nuclear weapons. Some paint this picture with very dark pigments as if it were something new, but remember that it was the U.S. that helped the Shah develop nuclear power during its "Atoms For Peace" program in the 1950's. This was long before the Ayatollah threw out the Western blasphemers during the Carter era.

I do not know what to think about the North Korea news. The news that did scare me last week was that the Taliban army was approaching Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. It's hard, from this distance to know what these news accounts mean. Pakistan's President, Mr Asif Ali Zardari states that it is a real threat only if the West does not help Pakistan keep democracy stable over there.*

In other words, send money. Are we being extorted? Is this a bribe? "Help our country and you will be able to sleep better at night." That's what it sounds like to me.

Then there are those Pakistanis who are still bitter that they lost their three wars with India. Most Americans don't even remember those wars because two (1965 and 1971) were during our own Viet Nam distraction. Today both nations are armed with nukes. And with the Taliban army apparently eyeballing the Pakistan arsenal, there really might be something here to worry about.

For now, I have plenty of other things on my plate, and there's nothing I can do about it anyways. It kind of makes you wonder how many other threats there are out there that we don't have a clue about.

* "Nukes could fall into hands of Taliban if democracy fails" HinduTimes Online

Strange Numbers

In a Buster McNutt article titled Ring-Toning in the Holiday Season, Buster McNutt noted that American spent four billion dollars last year on their cell phone ring tones. Like, whoa! What if we had NOT been in a recession?

A second number immediately came to mind. Yesterday, the news wires were abuzz with the revelation that 73 people at the American Insurance Group (AIG) received bonuses of one million dollars or more. I heard this via a CNN feed, but only caught the headline.

AIG was, of course, the nation's largest insurance company who so desperately needed a bailout from our government in order to survive the housing collapse. And what I have subsequently learned is that the bonus money was actually a "retention bonus" to keep these folks on the payroll through thick and thin. (Nice incentive.) Even so, eleven jumped shipped but pocketed the money. Our tax dollars at work.

Does this make us angry? Or is our government so big and our fat cats so fat that we're numbed by it all.

A third set of numbers that comes to mind... the number of people living in slums worldwide with inadequate food and often unsafe water: one billion. Nearly 200 million in China alone. More than 35 million in Pakistan.

At this point, I don't even know what to say, except... if we could take all those ring tone dollars and send them to the real needy of this world, as opposed to those who feel they absolutely must express themselves with an ultra-personalized ring tone... I dunno. Or is that like telling your child to finish his plate because there are children starving in India?

As for those fat cats living the high life off government largess, our tax dollars at work, my prescription for you today is an 89 cent packet of Tums, and a two day break from reading the news. Take a deep breath, count to ten, and listen to some music.

Low Intensity Conflict

One of the most amazing aspects of the Internet is its ability to bring people together who would never meet otherwise. My very first article about the Internet resulted in my being contacted by an African man who was then working for Hitachi in Japan.

I met Agha Amin through an invitation to contribute to his blog, Low Intensity Conflict, somewhere in the middle of 2008. When I told him the photo at the top of his blog was too large (the aftermath of a suicide bomber) and took too long to download, he had it fixed by the next day. It intrigued me how humble, undefensive and open Agha was.

A retired Pakistan army officer, Major Amin was born in Karachi, Pakistan in September, 1961. Like me, he is a writer who graduated with a Fine Arts degree, though he's on the other side of the world, Forman Christian College of Lahore, 1980.

His favorite hobbies today include reading (favorite book War & Peace), music, scotch, trekking, walking, and squash. The following is an interview with this astute man from half a world away.

ennyman: What is the meaning of Low Intensity Conflict Review
Agha: Initially the idea was to discuss the low intensity conflict in Asia. However later a blog member Wil , a lady from the USA questioned the idea and I thought that the idea of the blog should be wider. This lady Wil also did the layout of the blog.

ennyman: When did you start this blog and what prompted you to do it?
Agha: The idea of starting the blog was to interact with people, put my writings on the blog and learn something from others with similar interests. I had learnt about blogging from BBC radio in Kabul in 2006. Actually, initially I had put all my essays on a Yahoo group which I started in October 2005 while i was in Kabul. Frankly I did not know what a blog was when I read some blogs while searching Google in November 2007.

ennyman: What is the biggest thing you have learned since starting this blog?
Agha: The biggest thing that I have learnt is that no knowledge is perfect at every stage in life. You are ignorant about many things and that learning is a lifelong process.

ennyman: When we think of Pakistan, we don’t readily picture school people playing hockey or squash. How widespread are these sports and what other sports are popular in Pakistan?
Agha: In Pakistan the popular sport is cricket which every type of people play. This is a passion, although I do not like it. The next most popular sports are hockey (British type) and football. I have played squash and some badminton. Then there are some more specialized sports like polo and golf. Polo and golf are very cheap for army officers as they can use the army golf clubs and horses. For all others these are expensive. Golf is very cheap for an army officer again, serving or retired , and he can play golf with something like 35 or 45 USD a month including the caddy who carries the kit. These sports are expensive however for civilians. However, polo is very cheap in northern areas including Hunza where every village has a team. There polo is a national sport.

ennyman: When did you begin writing and what kinds of writing do you do?
Agha: I started serious reading around 1973 at age of 12 and started writing around 1975. However as is normal in Pakistan new writers are always discouraged and not published. I wrote many research papers for my seniors in military academy which they published in their own name. My first writing was published as letters to editor in Pakistan army journal in December 1989. First article was published in Pakistan army journal in March 1991. First article in the more exclusive staff college journal Citadel was published in March 1994. Then I was editor of a monthly globe from August 2001 and also of defence journal from August 2001 till May 2002.

I also wrote for newspapers although the papers in Pakistan never pay you in between June 2001 and June 2004. I was also editor of The Journal of Afghanistan Studies in Kabul from June 2004 till September 2005.

ennyman: It all sounds very interesting. What kind of role did you play in the Afghan war against the Soviets in the 1980’s? I know Pakistan had its hands full with refugees.
Agha: During the Afghan war I was in a tank corps and not directly involved except training some Mujaheddin on Soviet BMP tactics as an instructor in tank school in 1990-81. My second cousin Salman was the main man in training these bastards.

ennyman: There are many who believe Osama Bin Laden is alive and well somewhere in Pakistan. Where do you believe he is? Do you think the United States will find him or do they have a different game plan?
Agha: I don't think that OBL is alive. If alive, he is in a main Pakistani or UAE city.

ennyman: The Mumbai tragedy certainly ratcheted up tensions between India and Pakistan again. What will it take to bring a lasting peace between these two nations?
Agha: The Mumbai affair will have long term effects on Indo Pak relations and negative ones.

ennyman: I see that you are a retired major, yet you are quite young. What do you plan to do with the rest of your life?
Agha: My plans are not clear. I want to relocate to some other country, however.

Thank you for your time and your ongoing efforts to bring illumination to issues that are often complex and hidden.

Bread and Circuses

Are Americans indifferent to the events in the larger world because of their preoccupation with bread and circuses?

In the course of a lifetime I’ve often seen writers compare our American empire to that of Rome. As with all the great empires beforehand Rome, too, fell. In Gibbon’s classic analysis, the cratering of that empire was due to internal factors, not external.

By means of bread and circuses the ruling class of ancient Rome maintained their power and control of the people. As long as the masses were happy, their labors could be used to fuel the wheels of progress... or at least maintain the status quo.

Starvation, infant death, malnutrition, terror, slaughter, oppression, torture, violence… these things abound in our world today. Simultaneous to these global maladies, we have in this country a 24 billion dollar amusement park industry, a 30 billion dollar entertainment industry, a 200 billion-plus sports industry, and an even larger gambling industry. (Called “gaming” because gambling has negative connotations.)

Meanwhile, according to the World Hunger Organization, 800 million people go to bed hungry every night, mostly women and children. 24,000 die every day. Two hundred million children under five years of age are underweight due to lack of food, which can lead to mental retardation and stunted physical stature. And while you read this, one child will die of starvation every seven seconds.

By way of contrast, according to A.C. Nielsen stats from a recent year, the average American watches 3 hours and 46 minutes of TV each day (which would add up to more than 52 days of nonstop TV-watching per year). By age 65 the average American will have spent nearly 9 years glued to the tube. A few may be watching educational television, but most are simply watching whatever distraction the channel is tuned to at the time.

As tensions rise between India and Pakistan, most Americans have no clue what the fuss is about. As tens of thousands visit the grave of Benazir Bhutto, how many understand the significance of this woman who was killed in a gun-and-suicide attack one year ago already? How many understand that the Mumbai incident has significance nearly as important as our 9/11? Just because it is not longer in our U.S. newspapers, it doesn’t mean there have been no reverberations set in motion.

I’d be half willing to bet that most Americans don’t even know where Pakistan is located, let alone that there was a 1971 war fought between India and Pakistan that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. We were pre-occupied that year with All in the Family, Flip Wilson, Marcus Welby, Gunsmoke, and earning money for our next Disneyland vacation.

I realize I am being a little harsh. Let me say that I am not aiming to impose new restrictions to behavior. (“Don’t smoke, don’t chew, don’t go with girls who do.”) I am simply making an appeal to conscience. We live in a world where there is suffering, and the aim of our lives needs to be something bigger than next weekend’s bash. An Old Testament maxim from the Book of Ecclesiastes comes to mind here. “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure.”

Is it possible that those who control the marionette strings love the power they hold? Who gets the bailouts? Who has the golden parachutes? Who gets the wool when the sheep are fleeced?

A lot of questions in life have no easy, clear cut answers. One of the toughest: What should our relationship be to the culture we find ourselves in? Sure, the gladiators are putting on quite a show for us today. Is that what it’s all about? More bread? More circuses?

Peace In Our Time?

I remember many years ago reading a detailed article by futurist Alvin Toffler about the future of war. (Wired magazine, I believe, in the early to mid nineties.) In the article he made a case for the decentralization of war into world hotspots. Instead of a global war involving all countries lining up in two groups like the Axis and Allies, there would be the kind of world we have come to see today, with military action in Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, etc.

No one has perfect prescience when it comes to things future. In 1963 Decca Records, for example, failed to sign up the Beatles because their internal futurist believed "the guitar is on the way out." In this instance, it appears that Mr. Toffler not only made a good case for his views, history seems to be confirming them. The Mumbai terror assault is only the latest episode in the string.

When events like Mumbai occur, there is no way to predict what will happen next. First, we do not even have all the facts. Who were these people who did this? What was their ultimate objective? Were there really only ten terrorists in this special op? India and Pakistan have been on the threshold of war for years. And the Israel component in this equation is a similar unknown quantity.

Yesterday I addressed the issue of torture. Noting that many reports on the web seemed from one source, I wasn't sure how far to go with regard to pushing this notion. Today, the Jerusalem Post had a story suggesting that the hostages may not have been tortured after all. They were simply so shot full of holes that doctors were appalled by the destruction of human life. Even this matter is as yet an uncertainty.

Some are concerned about Indo-Pakistan relations because the future between these armed powers is potentially nuclear. Both have nuclear weapons; Pakistan 60-80 missiles and India an arsenal of bombs. Re-arrange the word NUCLEAR and it spells UNCLEAR.

The following is an example of the unreliability of prognostication. This is from a blogsite called Understanding Each Other, Diversity & Dissent The writer is a Pakistani named Agha, identified here as pacocalvary.

Having said that I must add one incident that my father narrated when he visited West Germany in 1988. He asked the hosts, " Can the Germanies unite?" "Not in our lifetime," came the reply.... and it happened in 1991. So prophecy in history is not easy. Sometimes all that we assess proves wrong. So let's hope for the best. ~pavocalvary

If you are seriously interested in following the analysis of these troubling events, there are plenty of voices out there in blogs across the cyber-universe striving to help bring clarity. Here's an interesting one: In From the Cold. And here's another: Tikun Olam

And if your only serious interest is pie recipes, Google will help you find those as well.

And So It Goes

Yesterday's action on Wall Street was nothing short of a stampede... this time to the upside. And no doubt a lot of cheering. That's how I picture it anyways. The DOW flew up more than 10% after testing the 8000 region. And it reminded me of a scene in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five.

To describe the scene we'll need to give some background. The hero in Vonnegut's tale is Billy Pilgrim, a character who has unintentionally become "unstuck in time." In short, instead of his life flowing in a natural progression, the various scenes occur in apparently random order so that he is in his suburban home, then back in Dresden during World War II, then in a strange place captured by aliens with all these other humans. Vonnegut uses the technique to form allegorical associations, and creative satirical commentary on our times. And so it goes.

I can't help but think the name of the main character is somehow a reference to this modern Pilgrim's progress, except intead of Christian, he is more existentially alienated.

The scene on Tralfamadore, the place where the aliens have taken him, is as follows. (Or at least, this is my recollection of it.) To make the earthlings feel at home there is a large board with stock prices on it. Many of the earthlings watch it unceasingly, with their emotions rising and falling as these numbers go up or down. But the amusing thing is that the Tralfamadorians do not even have the real stock prices there. The numbers change randomly, but the effect on the stock price watchers' emotions is a direct correlation. The Tralfamadorians are simply replicating what they saw on earth so these earthlings feel at home.

It is a hilarious barb at market watchers whose happiness is totally dependent on variables outside their control and the action of the market. That scene came to mind when I heard at day's end that the market had gone up yesterday.

A second scene also came to mind, that of an impoverished Pakistani woman whose life without prospects and despair had resulted in her walking in front of a train with her children... The incident was reported to me not by news media but by someone from Pakistan with whom I have become acquainted through blogging. He witnessed this and said it has been happening a lot as the Pakistan economy continues to unravel. This is not an isolated incident as lack of food and humane living conditions take their toll throughout the world.

The market went up ten percent yesterday. But more than a billion people live in such dire straits that... well, you do not need my help connecting the dots.

For those interested in more about the Vonnegut book, here is an excerpt from a review on amazon.com:
Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.

And here is an excerpt from from a reader:
One of the major themes of the book is fate. The prayer of serenity appears twice in the book stating that we need to change the things we can and be wise enough to know which things we cannot change. Also the Tralfamadorians speak of fate. They say they know how the universe is going to end, but they do nothing to stop it. Vonnegut seems to say that yes, war is one of those things we cannot avoid, but we need to change the things we can about it, like the atrocious bombing of Dresden.

For the record, the phrase "and so it goes" appears one hundred times Slaughterhouse Five. I probably relate to the sentiments it expresses, which correlate to my own phrase which I have expressed for most of a lifetime: "We'll see what happens."

As a complete aside, if you are interested in reading more about Kurt Vonnegut, you can read my tribute here, written when he passed from this life a couple springs ago.

More Numbers

My September 23 entry on Numbers got good reviews, so I looked forward to the next slow news day as an excuse to assemble another list of numbers. Every picture tells a story, they say. Some numbers tell pretty vivid stories as well.

$9.6 Billion

Amount of money Warren Buffet has lost in his investment holdings in 2008.

$52 Billion
Current value of Warren Buffet’s holdings.

$3 Billion
The current value of Rupert Murdoch’s holdings after losing $3.9 billion in 2008.

1500
Number of employees Yahoo last week announced they will lay off.

7200
Number of workers Merck is laying off in its current restructuring.

24
Number of megacities over eight million in 2004.

1
Number of cites of this size in 1950.

300,000
Population of Lagos in 1950.

13,500,000
Current population of Lagos, Nigeria.

193,800,000
Number of Chinese currently living in urban slums.

35,600,000
Number of Pakistanis currently living in urban slums.

84.7
Percentage of population of Bangladesh living in slums.

5.8
Current percent of U.S. population living in urban slums.

99.4
Percentage of Ethiopians living in slum conditions.

200,000
Estimated number of slum communities in the world today.

4
Number, in millions, of people living in Mexico City’s largest megaslum in 2005.

320
Number of children per thousand who die before age five in Luanda, Angola.

34
Number of inner city slums in Karachi, Pakistan.

66
Number of Karachi slums on the city’s periphery.

107,000
Number of people evicted from slums in Hong Kong in 1950.

In addition to the problems of overcrowding, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, the poor must deal with the constant insecurity of not owning their homes. In recent years, enforced evictions by the State have caused untold disruption in countless lives. Here are some numbers from a few famously awful slum evictions of the past two decades.

1988 ~ Seoul, Korea… 800,000
1990 ~ Lagos, Nigeria… 300,000
1995-96 ~ Rangoon, Burma… 1,000,000
1995 ~ Beijing, China… 100,000
2001-03 ~ Jakarta, Indonesia… 500,000
2005 ~ Harare, Zimbabwe… 750,000
2007-08 ~ Beijing, China… 350,000

Less than 300
Number of toilet seats available to the 480,000 people in 1100 Delhi slum settlements.

Sources
Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2008.
Planet of Slums, Mike Davis
Elements of a slum for the purposes of this report: Overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure.