The Bottom Line: Expressions of Opinion

Martha Siegel's Open Forum piece "Anarchy, Chaos on the Internet Must End" (Jan. 2) is so full of exaggerations, errors and outright falsehoods that the critical reader might suspect that Ms. Siegel has an axe of her own to grind in the matter.

Ms. Siegel implies that there is no regulation on the internet. In fact, there are a number of rules that the user is expected to follow. As an example, users of Usenet newsgroups are expected to post only material that relates to the subject of that newsgroup. Last year a pair of Arizona lawyers -- one of them, by a strange coincidence, also named Martha Siegel -- flagrantly violated this rule by cross-posting to every possible newsgroup a very long message advertising an expensive, and unnecessary, "service" they provided (registration in the Green Card lottery). This act tied up billions and possibly trillions of bytes of space on hard disk drives all over the world, all for a single thousand-word message fired at random in all directions. When their service providers, under pressure from the net community, asked them not to do this again, they stated that they would continue to advertise in this way, despite the wishes of those who had to share the net with them. Their providers then basically said "Fine, just do it from somewhere else," and cancelled their accounts for violation of Usenet's rules. This, one presumes, is the source of Ms. Siegel's complaint about such providers assuming "the role of censors, arbitrarily closing accounts of those whom they disapprove".

Ms. Siegel also excoriates the Anonymous Server in Finnland, using words that suggest some sort of mafia-like behavior. In point of fact, the AS administrator has stated that he will close the account of anyone who misuses the Server; and a criminal message such as Ms. Siegel's hypothetical "death threat" can be traced back, and the name of the sender placed in the hands of the authorities, much more rapidly than could be done (if it could be done at all) in the case of an anonymous letter or a harassing telephone call. But one must admit that those who hide behind the AS are certainly more able to state honest opinions without fear of harassment by lawsuit on the part of litigious lawyers than are the rest of us.

Ms. Siegel complains about "computer insults, called flames" aimed at business people. Net flammage is an unavoidable result of the ability that the net confers to honestly express one's own opinions about other people's opinions; everyone on the net, not just business people, "enjoys", if that is the word, being flamed from time to time -- and engaging in a bit of flaming themselves. A wise man once said, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." Ms. Siegel's expressed feelings on the matter of flaming would indicate that she should eat only take-out food from now on.

Ms. Siegel wants "an international standard of recognizing laws existing at the point of origin as controlling the message sender". This is so silly as to be unbelievable. Suppose an American posts a message from a Russian BBS (hardly an impossibility!) critical of Boris Yeltsin's policy in Chechnya. Is the U.S. government then to arrest and prosecute its own citizen for this "illegal" act?

The simple fact is that the net was created to be independent of any central authority -- its entire architecture is oriented that way. It polices itself. Ms. Siegel's personal gripes notwithstanding, new laws and authorities to regulate the net's current freedom are not needed.

By the way, congratulations on the on-line edition of the Chronicle! I enjoy it immensely!

Beverley C. Meyer's letter on the Russian suppression of the Chechen rebellion (Jan. 2) gives one food for thought. While I would in principle tend to support the Chechen desire for sovereignty, I'd prefer not to say so publicly, just because of that double standard which Ms. Meyer opposes.

Ms. Meyer brands Russia as "the world's prize aggressor nation since the beginning of the seventeenth century". The Russians have indeed added many new peoples to their empire during that period. But most of these peoples have managed to keep their ethnic identities; the Chechens, for instance, remain Chechens, with their own culture, religion and language, despite more than a century of Russian domination. One could point to another major nation, on another continent, whose entire territory was seized, during the same period of time, from indigenous peoples who were completely displaced, absorbed, or, for the most part, simply exterminated. I suspect that there are a (very) few readers of the West County Times today who could wish that their ancestors had been treated as well by those who seized their land as the Muscovites have treated the Chechens and others.

Ms. Meyer also regales us with the idea that the Austrians, "who are simply south Germans," "overwhelmingly" favored Hitler's anschluss. This will come as a surprise to the Austrians, who do not consider themselves south Germans, and who fought in the resistance and died in forced labor camps in large numbers during the war.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper's desire to control the dissemination of hate-group ideas on the internet to our children (Jan. 11 Open Forum) is understandable. I would guess that he had the Holocaust very much in mind as he wrote his piece.

The problem is that Rabbi Cooper apparently does not understand how the internet works. The net is today a national, and at least in a few fields a global, marketplace of ideas, probably the finest in the history of the world, since it allows everyone to engage in give and take. And when a representative of a hate group puts forward his philosophy, as is his right, others can respond instantly, as is their right. Case in point: several days ago, Tom Metzger of the so-called White Aryan Resistance issued a broadside to a newsgroup which I follow, and another message followed a day later, more strident in tone, answering some of the responses he had received by e-mail. In both cases, at least a dozen people publicly answered Metzger. Some of the answers simply told Metzger to go fly a kite, though often in somewhat less polite terms. Others used the tool of sarcasm to make the man look ridiculous. Still others took his comments and picked his philosophy, knowledge of history, and other "information" apart, piece by piece. Not one person defended Metzger's viewpoint. Metzger has not (as of today) returned to answer these critiques. Which do you think will most impress our impressionable young people -- Metzger's hate-mongering ideas, which were immediately shown to be worth somewhat less than a counterfeit coprolith, or his inability or unwillingness to defend them in the face of reasoned criticism?

Carryl Baldwin (Feb. 3) repeats one of the common "justifications" for the bombing of Hiroshima -- that it was somehow our quid pro quo response for Pearl Harbor.

I've been hearing and watching replays of Pearl Harbor every December 7th since I was a small boy -- back about the time of Hiroshima -- and as far as I can tell it was quite a different affair. It was what would today be described as a "surgical strike" against strictly military targets, aimed at obtaining maximum military effect from limited resources, and resulting, pace Mr. Baldwin, in limited 'collateral damage" -- a modern euphemism for hundreds or thousands of dead civilians and millions of dollars' worth of destroyed civilian property. The purpose was not to kill people, but to destroy naval capability. Most of the American fatalities were military personnel who happened to be sitting on top of targeted materiel -- for instance, the USS Arizona. Honolulu proper was hardly touched. The Japanese apparently did a very good job of planning their attack, too -- much better than the later American imitators of this "day that will live in infamy" at, for instance, Haiphong, Tripoli, and particularly Panama City, where "collateral damage" was proportionally high.

Hiroshima, on the other hand, was aimed at a strictly civilian target -- the city center. In very few of the world's cities -- I would be hard put to name one -- are any significant military targets located downtown; land costs are too high, and anyway governments prefer to keep military sites well away from places where civilians can stumble over them. The purpose was simply to terrorize the Japanese into immediate surrender by killing as many people and destroying as much property as possible. Had the Germans nuked Charleston, or the Japanese Sacramento, in the same way and for the same purpose, the American people would have been screaming for the blood of the responsible war criminals -- and rightly so.

David Broder may see fit to criticize Sen. Mark Hatfield of Oregon for his negative vote on the Balanced Budget Amendment (Mar. 15), but in this particular matter Broder is far off base.

In the first place, if the BBA were, as Broder contends, strictly a matter that fell under Republican party discipline, then the same should be true for the Democrats, since what is saunce for the goose is generally sauce for the gander. If both parties had seen fit to impose such stringent discipline, then the BBA would have failed not by one or two votes but by at least ten or twelve.

In the second place, Broder should remember that Sen. Hatfield's first responsibility is not to those House Republicans who signed the very unilateral "Contract with (or on) America," nor to Sen. Bob "Whiner" Dole, but to his constituents in Oregon. Those constituents are presumably well aware, from Hatfield's forty years of service in the Statehouse in Salem and the Capitol in Washington, of his sometimes very un-Republican sentiments (as for instance when he co-sponsored, with liberal Democrat Sen. George McGovern, the anti-war Hatfield-McGovern bill during the Viet-nam War). For some reason, they keep electing him, so we may presume that (as with his one-time colleague, maverick Sen. Wayne Morse of Oregon), they approve of his views, however un-modish those might be at any given moment.

Broder believes that Senate Republicans should be as well behaved and under as strict a party discipline as Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics. With due respect to Mr. Broder, the Congress is not a baseball team, nor should it be.

It was a pleasure to see James F. Jungles (Apr. 2) contributing to the spread of the latest Northern California urban fairy tale, The Salamander That Caused a Flood. As the media have been pointing out with great relish for at least a week now, there were no endangered species in the Pajaro River basin, and there have never been restrictions on cleaning the river based on the Endangered Species Act. In fact, to the best of my knowledge there has been no case in the state of California in which this Act has contributed, directly or indirectly, to flood events.

But, as a great American sage suggested a century ago, never let the facts stand in the way of a good story. And The Newt That Never Was serves several useful social purposes. It gives us ammunition to discredit those rabid tree huggers who cling to the pernicious doctrine that other life-forms (including Jungles' "creepy creatures") not only have a right to share the planet with us, but even contribute something to our quality of life on it. It allows those individuals who built in a known flood basin to blame their problems on somebody besides themselves. It lets negligent county officials offer a "justification" for not having done their jobs over the past decade. And it gives Governor Wilson an excuse to satisfy his (financially) most important constituents by autocratically and unilaterally suspending a state law that they found at best inconvenient and at worst expensive in terms of reduced profits.

By the way, a salamander is an amphibian, not, as Jungles classifies it, a lizard. A Contra Costan should know this, since the first-ever "newt crossing" in the world was painted on one of our very own roads. The second, I am told, has been established in front of the Capitol building in Washington...

Aly Colon's article on Esperanto ("Scene", Apr. 11) is the best one I have seen on the topic in quite a long time. Congratulations on publishing it.

Two minor quibbles. Ms. Colon quotes the oft-repeated misconception that "[Esperanto] reached its peak of popularity early this century." Before the deterioration of conditions in the early thirties (referred to in the article), a survey by the Reich Institut für Esperanto in Leipzig in the late twenties indicated that the global number of speakers at that time -- probably a pre-war maximum -- was around 130,000. The current figure, as Ms. Colon correctly points out elsewhere in the same article, is somewhere between one and four million speakers.

(Your question: "To what extent should America boost security to prevent terrorist acts like the Oklahoma bombing?")

The real question is, I think, how far are we willing to let the second and fourth articles of the Bill of Rights slide into abeyance to guarantee ourselves perfect security in an imperfect world?

Whatever we do, there will always be terrorists and other crazies, recessions and downsizings, drunken drivers, metal fatigue, crib death, carbon monoxide, burglars, rapists, earthquakes and hurricanes, contractors who cut corners, lightning bolts and tornadoes, rip tides and undertows, wars, dinosaur-killer asteroids, and nearby supernovas. The person who surrenders his freedoms for security is seeking a chimera.

In 1946, after almost four years of war in which his irregulars gave significant aid and comfort to the United States and its allies against the Japanese, a former New York busboy named Ho Chi Minh declared his country independent of France. His declaration of independence quoted at length from our own document, and the U.S. government sent naval warplanes to overfly his new capitol city as part of the independence celebration, in a show of solidarity with the new régime. Things looked good.

Somehow, the U.S. then decided that its interests lay not with its erstwhile allies but with French planters who had spent those four years of war protecting their property by collaborating with the Japanese occupiers. And so, almost half a century later, and after thousands of French deaths, more than sixty thousand American deaths, three million Vietnamese deaths, a million Cambodian deaths, and an as yet untold number of Laotian deaths, we find ourselves back where we were in 1946 -- except that our whole society has been disrupted and our people have learned that their government is, at best, not to be trusted.

What lessons have we learned from all this? You tell me. None, I expect.

Clayton Councilman Pete Laurence's comment in his op-ed piece on Vietnam (May 3), that "if the American majority that sent us into Vietnam had not later lost its will" the war would have been won, deserves some sort of response.

This interesting myth, invented in 1975 to explain how we managed to get our tails kicked by a third-world agricultural country with the size and population of the state of California -- half of whom were supposed to be on our side -- overlooks a few inconvenient details. The American majority did not send Councilman Laurence into Vietnam; in 1964 we elected a president (Lyndon Johnson) largely on the basis of his declared intention NOT to involve us in a ground war in Vietnam. Senator Barry Goldwater, who would not declare such an intention, was soundly trounced. A few months later Johnson, at the urging of such militechnocrats as Rusk, McNamara and Walter Rostow, reneged on his promises, but that was hardly the fault of the American majority, who four years later rejected Johnson, his vice-president, and his policies in favor of Richard Nixon, at least partly because of Nixon's touted (but fictitious) plan to end the war. Furthermore, since the American majority had never had any will to fight, much less win, in Vietnam, we could hardly have lost that will.

Anyway, this myth has since been replaced by the belief that the Vietnam War could easily have been won -- if only we had had Rambo to fight it for us.

What a pleasure to find Paul McCracken's relatively mundane complaint about Viacom (May 15) sandwiched in between harsh criticisms of Robert McNamara's recantation of his Vietnam War policy and harsher insistences that President Clinton, in exercising his own right of free speech by criticising (in comparatively mild terms) right-wing talk-show hosts, is engaging in censorship.

McCracken wonders how Viacom could have decided to put four foreign-language channels in among the lowest thirty-six on the dial, given that immigrants to this country are expected (and presumably themselves expect) to learn English. Perhaps a clue may be found in the 1990 census, which showed that between ten and twenty percent of Americans either use some other language than English at home or at least feel uncomfortable using English. English is, after all, a language that is, for adults and under the best of conditions, not easy to learn poorly and extremely difficult to learn well. Combining massive doses of idioms and slang with cultural references that would seem arcane to anybody not raised in the USA, a TV program that helps relax the native American mind becomes incomprehensible and ennervating to the foreign-born American. It is much more enjoyable to watch a bedroom farce in one's own native language than "Married With Children" in English.

We may presume that Viacom, with one eye on federal regulations and the other on the bottom line, simply decided that the number of subscriptions it would gain by adding four foreign-language channels outnumbered those it would lose by reducing the English-language low-number channels from thirty-six to thirty-two. All in all, this seems to me like a reasonable decision.

(Auf Esperanto und Englisch)

Altestimata Bundeskanzler Kohl!

Unue, bonvolu permesi, ke mi pardonpetu pri mia uzado de Esperanto kaj la angla anstatau^ la germana. Tio devenas de la fakto, ke mi bone konas la du menciitajn lingvojn, sed mia sola sperto kun la germana estas unu jaro en la universitato, antau^ multaj jaroj, kio tute ne pretigis min por skribi al persono tiel eminenta kiel vi.

Aperis en la (internacia komputila) reto raporto pri via vizito al Nederlando. Lau^ la raporto, vi deklaris: "Ni ne volas Esperanto-Eu^ropon, sed Eu^ropon, en kiu c^iuj gardas sian identecon." Nu, vi s^ajne ne scias, ke g^uste tian Eüropon deziras parolantoj de Esperanto -- efektive, g^uste tian mondon ili deziras. La celo de Esperanto ne estas homogenigo de lingvaj kaj kulturaj malsamecoj, sed ilia konservado. Tial Esperanto havas tiom da adeptoj en landoj kaj regionoj, kies lingvoj kaj kulturoj premig^as de pli grandaj najbaroj -- ekzemple Litovio, Hungario, Bulgario, Çeh^io, Slovakio, Bosnio, Katalunio, Eu^skio.

Krome estus bone, diris Kohl, se turistoj ne nur kus^us sur la plag^o kaj trinkus frankfurtan pomvinon, sed penetrus en la kulturon de la vizitata lando, oni raportis. Denove, g^uste tion faras la parolantoj de Esperanto, c^ar, havante lingvon komunan kun la vizitatoj, ne necesas, ke ni sidu en restoracioj kaj mang^u bovburgojn (frankfurtan pomvinon ni usonanoj ne konas); ni povas konatig^i kaj interparoli kun tiuj vizitatoj. Cetere, ec^ por tiuj el ni, kiuj ne povas vojag^i, Esperanto estas bonega "fenestro" al aliaj kulturoj; ekzemple, per Esperanto mi eksciis, ke la sorc^ista metilernanto ne estis inventaj^o de Walt Disney, sed naskig^is elsub la plumo de Johann Wolfgang von Goethe -- certe tion ne scias la plimultaj miaj samlandanoj.

Altestimata Bundeskanzler, mi dankas vin pro via esperata atento, kaj mi finante petas, ke se estontece okazas, ke vi hazarde mencios Esperanton en publika loko, mi esperas, ke vi rememoros c^i tiun atentigon. La germanan kaj Esperantan versiojn de la konerna raporto mi fiksas post c^i tiu letero. (La en Esperanton tradukinto estas germana fizikisto nun provizore laboranta en Kanado.)

First, please allow me to apologize for my use of Esperanto and English instead of German. This comes from the fact that I know the first two languages very well, while my only experience with German was one year at university, many years ago, which did not prepare me at all to write to a person as eminent as you.

On the internet a report has appeared about your visit to the Netherlands. According to the report, you declared: "We do not want an Esperanto Europe, but a Europe in which everyone protects his identity." Well, you seem not to know that it is just that sort of Europe that speakers of Esperanto want -- really, it is just that sort of world that they want. Esperanto's goal is not homogenization of linguistic and cultural differences, but their preservation. That is why Esperanto has so many adherents in countries and regions whose languages and cultures are under pressure from larger neighbors -- for example Lithuania, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bosnia, Catalonia, Vizcaya.

In addition it would be a good thing, Kohl added, if tourists didn't only lie on the beach and drink Frankfurt cider, but would penetrate into the culture of the country being visited, it was reported. Again, this is exactly what the speakers of Esperanto do, because, having a language in common with the persons being visited, it is not necessary for us to sit in restaurants and eat hamburgers (we Americans have no knowledge of Frankfurt cider); we are able to get acquainted and talk with those we are visiting. Furthermore, even for those of us who are not able to travel, Esperanto is an excellent "window" to other cultures; for example, it was through Esperanto that I learned that the sorceror's apprentice was not an invention of Walt Disney, but was born from the pen of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe -- certainly the majority of my countrymen do not know this.

Thank you, Chancellor Kohl, for your hoped-for attention, and in closing I beg that if in future you should by chance mention Esperanto in a public place, I hope that you will remember what I have brought to your attention here. I append the German and Esperanto versions of the report in question at the end of this letter. (The person who translated it into Esperanto is a German physicist now temporarily working in Canada.)

Den Haag. Bundeskanzler Kohl hat Befürchtungen zurückgewiesen, kleinere EU-Staaten wie die Niederlande könnten durch den europäischen Einigungsprozess ihre Einzigartigkeit verlieren. Vor dem Parlament in Den Haag sagte Kohl wörtlich: "Wir wollen kein Esperanto-Europa, sondern ein Europa, in dem alle ihre Identität behalten." Am zweiten Tag seines Besuchs in den Niederlanden rief Kohl die Schüler und Studenten beider Staaten erneut dazu auf, einen intensiveren Austausch zu betreiben. Ausserdem wäre es schön, so Kohl, wenn die Touristen nicht nur am Strand liegen und Frankfurter Apfelwein trinken, sondern in die Kultur des jeweiligen Landes eindringen würden.

La Hago. Kanceliero Kohl argumentis kontrau^ timoj, ke pli malgrandaj s^tatoj de la Eu^ropa Unio, kiel Nederlando, povus perdi sian unikecon pro la eu^ropa unuecig^procezo. Antau^ la parlamento en La Hago Kohl diris lau^vorte: "Ni ne volas Esperanto-Eu^ropon, sed Eu^ropon, en kiu c^iuj gardas sian identecon." Dum la dua tago de sia vizito en Nederlando Kohl denove alvokis lernantojn kaj studantojn de ambau^ landoj al pli intensa inters^ang^o. Krome estus bone, diris Kohl, se turistoj ne nur kus^us sur la plag^o kaj trinkus frankfurtan pomvinon, sed penetrus en la kulturon de la vizitata lando.

The Hague. Chancellor Kohl argued against fears that smaller states of the European Union, such as The Netherlands, might lose their uniqueness because of the European unification process. Before the Parliament in The Hague Kohl said, word-for-word: "We do not want an Esperanto-Europe, but a Europe in which all protect their identity." During the second day of his visit Kohl again called pupils and students of both countries to a more intensive intercourse. It would also be good, Kohl said, if tourists would not only lie on the beach and drink Frankfurt cider, but would penetrate into the culture of the country being visited.

Clifton Amsbury, in trying to explain the current situation in Bosnia from a historical perspective (June 14), wanders far out into left field to do so -- perhaps further than the situation warrants.

Amsbury suggests that the governments in Zagreb and Sarajevo "rebelled against their federal government as our slaveholders did in the last century." Not precisely. Secession here was decided on by non-representative state legislative bodies, without recourse to popular vote. In Bosnia at least, it was the result of a plebiscite, in which 60% of the population voted to withdraw from the federal government -- and that only after other parts of the country had withdrawn, following the passage of ruling power out of a rotating presidency into strictly Serbian hands. Incidentally, Moslems make up 40% of the Bosnian population -- or did, prior to the beginning of "ethnic cleansing" -- so there must have been at least a few non-Moslems -- a minimum of a third of them -- who agreed with the need to secede.

Amsbury also puts much emphasis on the Bosnian Moslems as long-time aristos and agents of the Turkish rulers, going so far as to mention the Moslem sources of certain parts of many Bosnian names. Let us remember that the Turks haven't been seen in Bosnia for a century or thereabouts, except as diplomats, traders or tourists; and the last aristocrats anybody alive in Bosnia today can remember were the court of the Serbian King, who was installed as ruler of the artificial Kingdom of the South Slavs (Yugoslavia) by the Western governments that created it, presumably as a reward to the Serbs for their role in fighting (and starting!) the First World War. Most Bosnian Moslems today live in village homes or apartment buildings and work at the same jobs as everybody else; they'd be as bemused as anyone if a Turkish beg in full regalia were to parade down the main street of Sarajevo. The argument about names, however, is interesting, and I will have to remember it the next time I see some crypto-Royalist surnamed King or Prince on the ballot.

I don't know whether or not Americans should have the right to desecrate the flag as a form of protest -- since this is not specifically banned by the Constitution, I suspect that they certainly have the right to try. Those interested may wish to consult the ninth and tenth amendments in the Bill of Rights. But I don't know how anyone can succeed in desecrating the flag. By the very definition of the word "desecrate" (the opposite of "consecrate"), you can only desecrate a sacred or holy object. I know of no religion that considers the American flag either sacred or holy. Certainly it is not considered so by our nation's state religion, since we have no state religion. Yet.