Tribune correspondent charged as spy in Sudan

Paul Salopek, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, was charged with espionage and two other criminal counts in a Sudanese court Saturday, three weeks after he was detained by pro-government forces in the war-torn province of Darfur.

Salopek, 44, who was on a freelance assignment for National Geographic magazine, was arrested with two Chadian citizens, his interpreter and driver. If convicted, they could be imprisoned for years.

He entered the country without a valid visa.  Which is not a good thing.  But it's not proof of espionage either.  

I'm just going to get this out of the way now.

I. Don't. Care.

It's true.  Maybe it is outrage fatigue.  But I don't think so.  I read a nice diary on kos with all the historical maps.  I didn't care.  Maybe war just drains me.  But I don't think so.  I still have the energy to go to protests and vigils and write my reps.  It might be that it's so far away from my reality.  But I don't think so.  I mean, I'm just a little obsessed with what goes on in Russia.  Might be that I'm an anti-Semite.  But I don't think so.  My boyfriend is Jewish.

I don't care who is right and who is wrong because there is nothing in the world to justify what has happened this week.

 

In my "when everyone votes for a dictatorship" diary, someone pointed me to an article by Stephen Cohen in The Nation.  I stopped reading The Nation after we did not renew our subscription during our post-election depression.  One can only take complaining about Bush and sweatshops for so long before one gets the point already.  So, it is with great relief that I see they've pulled themselves back from the brink of insignificance and have published something not just important, but necessary.

I have my qualms with people like Stephen Cohen for reasons stated elsewhere.  But My God if I thought that personally delivering this article to each member of Congress would make an inch of difference, I'd do it myself right now.  

Here's an excerpt for the sake of bloggyness even though you'll only truly appreciate it if you read the whole article:

Since the early 1990s Washington has simultaneously conducted, under Democrats and Republicans, two fundamentally different policies toward post-Soviet Russia--one decorative and outwardly reassuring, the other real and exceedingly reckless. The decorative policy, which has been taken at face value in the United States, at least until recently, professes to have replaced America's previous cold war intentions with a generous relationship of "strategic partnership and friendship." The public image of this approach has featured happy-talk meetings between American and Russian presidents, first "Bill and Boris" (Clinton and Yeltsin), then "George and Vladimir."

The real US policy has been very different--a relentless, winner-take-all exploitation of Russia's post-1991 weakness. Accompanied by broken American promises, condescending lectures and demands for unilateral concessions, it has been even more aggressive and uncompromising than was Washington's approach to Soviet Communist Russia. Consider its defining elements as they have unfolded--with fulsome support in both American political parties, influential newspapers and policy think tanks--since the early 1990s:

~A growing military encirclement of Russia, on and near its borders, by US and NATO bases, which are already ensconced or being planned in at least half the fourteen other former Soviet republics, from the Baltics and Ukraine to Georgia, Azerbaijan and the new states of Central Asia...

~A tacit (and closely related) US denial that Russia has any legitimate national interests outside its own territory, even in ethnically akin or contiguous former republics such as Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia...

~Even more, a presumption that Russia does not have full sovereignty within its own borders, as expressed by constant US interventions in Moscow's internal affairs since 1992.

That interventionary impulse has now grown even into suggestions that Putin be overthrown by the kind of US-backed "color revolutions" carried out since 2003 in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, and attempted this year in Belarus...

~Underpinning these components of the real US policy are familiar cold war double standards condemning Moscow for doing what Washington does--such as seeking allies and military bases in former Soviet republics, using its assets (oil and gas in Russia's case) as aid to friendly governments and regulating foreign money in its political life...

~Finally, the United States is attempting, by exploiting Russia's weakness, to acquire the nuclear superiority it could not achieve during the Soviet era.

Frequently asked questions:

Is Chavez a Dictator, or does he respect Democracy?  

Is Putin an Autocrat or Strong Leader?  

Is the US a Representative Democracy or a Plutocracy?  

Is Nationalism always Fascism?  

Can Co-ops be Capitalist?  

Can Socialism and a Free Market co-exist?

I'm an expert in neither political science nor economics, and don't want to survey in one blog entry what academics will spend their entire lives trying to wrap their brains around. Not unless someone's offering me tenure.

But I have the unsettling feeling that we've entered a chapter in history when the dictionary is failing us.  Words have lost their meaning.  And we are confused - not just by the insanity we read in the news, but by our own inability to express just what's insane about it.  First I though it was just me, in the throes of shock, having witnessed my own dear country's tail spin into despotism.  Then I read that diary about our brains and was reminded once again that when you have a square and life hands you a circle, it might just be that what you've been calling a square is, in fact, not one at all.

So I'd like to take a step back and shine a light on some things we've been taking for granted, which have been the foundations for our positions on all issues, and suggest that they are just ill formed ideas (the nerve, I know...) and that any solutions will require radically altering our way of describing the world.  I'm not advocating "re-framing" but putting these words into the museums where they belong.