Frank Sinatra and Venezuela's 100,000 AK-47s

As the controversy continues to swirl around Venezuela’s purchase of 100,000 AK 47s I remember Frank Sinatra of Caracas, my final interviewee in Venezuela. I was returning to my hotel room after spending time with people at Panafilm near the towering black PdVsa building. Earlier in the day I had passed a small corner store on the way to visit my new friends at the video collective and I noticed the three posters displayed in the front window of the store. One poster was of Bolivar, one was of Chavez and the third was of Bush, dressed in a Nazi uniform and sporting a hitler mustache. As I took photos of the posters in the window an old bald man, short and muscular, appeared at the doorway. In a gruff voice he asked me what I was doing and who I was. I told him that I was a journalist and that I was taking photos of his posters because I liked them. He gave me a sideways glance to indicate his suspicion of me, looked me up and down and then told me, or rather, ordered me, to return and interview him. I agreed to do so.

I spent more time with my new friends at Panafilm than I had planned so by the time I passed by the store of the old man again it was dark. I felt ashamed and thought briefly that I might be able to slip by unseen but as I passed I heard his gruff voice call out to me in spanish, "Hey, you were going to interview me!" I had no choice but to put my camera on night vision and record what he had to say.

"President Bush is a piece of shit. A shameless bastard with all the defects of the world. And the U.S. Army are also shit. You know why they’re shit? Because when that piece of shit Bush sent them to kill the fathers of children and the husbands of wives, they should have refused. That’s why they’re the same shit as Bush. And you know, if they come here we’ll tear their guts out with our fingers and hang them by their guts from the lampposts so they rot…" I thanked the man for his time and then asked him his name. He paused a moment and then said, "They call me Frank Sinatra. I was named after my cousin, that sack of shit American."

Perhaps Mr. Sinatra was thinking of Fallujah, a city that will define the twenty first century just as Guernica defined the twentieth century. But perhaps he realizes that the shameless, cowardly and ignoble methods of "warfare" practiced by the U.S. military is older than the U.S. itself, practiced by the first Europeans against the incredulous native peoples on their first contact in the New World. As detailed in David Stannard’s book, American Holocaust, the repressed history of the European genocide of Native America, which easily took more lives than Hitler, and with equal cruelty and the same "abstract and ideological compulsion," provided the model for future wars that the U.S. would undertake. The method is remarkably similar in all instances.

Among the Aztecs and most Native Americans, for instance, the seige was "the antithesis of war," it has become the cornerstone of EuroAmerikan warfare. To the Native Americans warfare was a ritual activity undertaken by the bravest and most noble men of the tribe to redress wrongs and challenge insults, the battles of which rarely left more than a few dead on the field, most energy having been concentrated in "counting coups" in which one warrior displayed bravery and prowess by "touching" a warrior on the other side. By contrast with this proud and noble tradition, Stannard, quoting Francis Jennings, points out that "the Englishmen’s most solemn pledge would be broken whenever obligation conflicted with advantage; that the English way of war had no limit of scruple or mercy; and that weapons of Indian making were almost useless against weapons of European manufacture." European warfare resulted in what Stanley Diamond called "indiscriminate, casual, unceremonious killing" characterized, especially among the Anglo-Amerikan Puritans, in the wholesale slaughter of women, children, and the elderly in a scorched earth policy unmatched in cruelty until the coming of Stalin and Hitler.

Fast forward to the end of the twentieth century and note the destruction of Vietnam, or more recently the seige of Iraq and the near-daily bombing of that country during peace time (1991-2003) in which not only the radar stations but the civilian infrastructure was targeted. That seige, represented by the "Oil for Food" program and the various embargoes imposed by the U.S. and the U.K., took half a million lives alone, most of those children under the age of five. And this, before the war and the occupation. The end of this unfortunate target of the Anglo-Amerikan army is a country poisoned with nuclear dust from U.S. weapons, a wrecked economy and national infrastructure and a destroyed nation whose wealth is being siphoned off through the enormous pipelines that empty into the tanks of SUVs in the U.S even as the Iraqi people are instructed to feed on the empty promises of "democracy."

Perhaps all this is behind Frank Sinatra’s rage. Certainly Mr. Sinatra grasped the nature of U.S. imperial war strategy, its cowardly, brutal, arrogant and merciless cruelty. But one night in Caracas he also threw down the gauntlet and offered a challenge to that "shit" U.S. Army. I hope it won’t come to that. I hope that, instead, President Chavez will insure Mr. Sinatra of Caracas, and others like him, get one of those 100,000 AK 47s so that he won’t have to use his bare hands against the U.S. soldiers.