Who Is Edward Hasbrouck?Greetings! I'm Edward Hasbrouck, "The Practical Nomad".
Who am I? The superficial answer is my current professional biography.
Few people are easily pigeon-holed, however, and I hope that I'm not one of them. (My high-school classmates voted me "Class Enigma" as well as "Most Intellectual", and my hometown newspaper once headlined a feature about me, "Who Is Edward Hasbrouck, And Why Is He Doing These Things?") Certainly my professional biography doesn't tell the whole story of who I am. I've done a variety of things, even a variety of noteworthy and publicly noted things; been involved with a variety of issues and organizations; and written and spoken about a variety of topics. There are links to this page from many sites. It's hard for me to predict what will have brought you here -- travel, international airfares, ICANN, privacy, civil liberties, flag-burning, draft resistance, youth liberation, or Kashmir, for example.
What follows is a somewhat long, digressive, and self-analytical autobiography. It's intended for people who already know me, or who have already read some of my other writings -- on the Internet or in print -- and are curious about how I define myself, or how I see my work and my persona fitting together. Don't take it as representative of my other writing. You'll get a better sense of my usual writing style, and what I have to say, from the rest of my Web site.
So who is Edward Hasbrouck, anyway? It's a surprisingly difficult question for me to answer, as the coherence of my interests and activities isn't always easy for others to see--or for me to explain.
I grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston on the Route 128 belt highway. At the time, Route 128 was known as the world's foremost center of computer and other high-technology research and development. On my father's side of the family, I'm the child, grandchild, and great-grandchild of engineers. My father started working as a computer programmer in the 1950s, and spent more than 20 years with Digital Equipment Corp., ending in their international division. He was proudest of his two years with a NASA contractor during the space race, during which we got a taste of life in Texas. Our junior high school in Wellesley had computers available to students by 1970. I've never been a hacker, but computers and technology have never held any fear for me either.
I consider myself primarily a political activist. I started down this path as a child, fighting back against my violent and abusive father, and I continued my resistance to the violence of illegitimate authority as an elected but nonvoting student representative to the local school board and activist for peace, disarmament, and students' rights. My first book was a handbook for high school students on their legal rights which I co-authored in the summer of 1977, between high school and college, as an intern for the student service bureau of the Massachusetts Department of Education. (The last time I checked, an updated edition was still in print.) I majored in political science at the University of Chicago until I left school to pursue direct involvement in political work.
In 1980, after a five-year hiatus, the U.S. government reinstated the requirement that all young men register for military conscription with the Selective Service System. In 1982, I was selected for criminal prosecution by the U.S. Department of "Justice" as one of the people they considered the most vocal of the several million nonregistrants for the draft. As one of 20 nonregistrants who were prosecuted before the government abandoned the enforcement of draft registration, I was convicted and "served" a six-month sentence in a federal prison camp. The high-profile trials of resistance organizers proved counterproductive for the government. Our trials served only to call attention to the government's inability to prosecute more than a token number of nonregistrants, and reassured nonregistrants that they were not alone in their resistance and were in no danger of prosecution unless they called attention to themselves. Registration remains the law, but the attempt to enforce was abandoned long ago. In the USA no one has been prosecuted for resistance to registration or the draft in more than 10 years. Nonregistration -- mass direct action against draft registration -- has prevented reinstatement of the draft. I'm proud to have played the role I did in that campaign.
I remained active in the peace movement and the National Resistance Committee, moving to San Francisco in 1985 to join the editorial and production collective of Resistance News, the national newspaper of the draft resistance movement. I remained involved in the anti-draft movement through its revival during the Gulf War, when the U.S. government came very close to reinstating a doctor draft of health care workers. With the draft once again a threat in 2004, I've once again made available updated versions of some of the NRC's resources on draft registration and draft resistance.
For the next several years, I earned my living mainly as a freelance graphic artist and publications coordinator for everything from a bicycling magazine to a distributor of laboratory apparatus. Meanwhile, I led preparation sessions for nonviolent direct actions and civil disobedience and became increasingly involved as a volunteer legal worker, legal educator, and participant in legal defense and organizing collectives for arrested peace and disarmament activists from various campaigns.
Travel and politics first intersected for me on a trip in 1989 to Kashmir. My mother's parents spent most of their lives as expatriates in South Asia, where my grandfather was a university professor in Lahore, Punjab. Until the independence and partition of India and Pakistan, they spent their summer vacation in the Kashmir Valley. (It would later become a major tourist destination, but at that time, there were still relatively few foreign visitors or tourists in Kashmir.) After partition, it became a condition of their continued residence in Pakistan, even as US citizens, that they not visit India. This barred them from the Kashmir Valley, since it was on the Indian side of the Line of Control, which came to separate Pakistani- and Indian-controlled portions of Kashmir.
My grandparents never returned to the Kashmir Valley. But I grew up with my grandmother's watercolors and stories of their summer camp on Nagin Lake. It was with joy that I first went there in 1989, together with the love of my life, Ruth Radetsky (who had talked me into taking my first trip around the world), and my Lahore-born but US-raised mother. We visited both sides of the Line of Control in Kashmir on that trip, as well as other parts of both India and Pakistan. In the Kashmir Valley, we were hoping for a restful vacation within a longer trip that had included some hard traveling elsewhere.
As it happened, our arrival in the Kashmir Valley coincided with the outbreak of the latest stage of the Kashmiri nationalist struggle. It started mainly as a movement for self-determination, and its tactics were those of nonviolent civil disobedience. But as the Indian government responded with crude repression, it increasingly became a campaign for human rights and simple survival. An army of half a million Indian soldiers, police, and spies now occupies most of Kashmir and enforces martial law over ten million Kashmiris. At least thirty thousand and perhaps as many as seventy thousand Kashmiris have been killed since 1989, including many medical and human rights workers and Kashmir's most-respected spiritual leader. Despite some attempts at armed retaliation by Kashmiri guerrillas and terrorists, most of the killing has been done by Indian soldiers, police, and death squads.
While in Kashmir, quite by chance, I met and talked about the situation with the Mirwaiz (a title of spiritual leadership unique to Kashmir) of Kashmir, Mohammed Farooq. I was extremely impressed with his modesty, deference to the will of the people, and recognition of the distinction between his roles as spiritual and political leader. About six months later, Mirwaiz Mohammed Farooq was assassinated by an Indian army death squad. No public funeral was permitted, and an unauthorized funeral procession was machine-gunned by Indian troops, killing more than a hundred people. After the assassination of Mohammed Farooq, his son, Umar Farooq, succeeded him as Mirwaiz.
In the years of martial law that followed, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq used his position, and the minimal tolerance of the Indian regime for religious gatherings even during periods when all other popular gatherings were prohibited (common under martial- law regimes), to catalyze the formation of the All Parties Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference (APHC) as an umbrella nationalist organization and shadow government, of which he was selected as chairman.
Unlike the Dalai Lama of Tibet, with whom he might be compared as the spiritual and political leader of a nation under occupation, Mirwaiz Omar Farooq remained in Kashmir even after his father's assassination. This is commendable, and has kept the APHC much more responsive to the Kashmiri people than it would have become in exile. But it has severely hampered his ability to promote the Kashmiri cause to the world. In April of 1999, for example, with Mirwaiz Umar Farooq under house arrent by the Indian authorities, a delegation of other representatives of the APHC was detained at the airport in New Delhi (India permits no direct air service from Kashmir to anywhere outside India) and prevented from boarding a flight to Geneva to present the Kashmiri case to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. And again in September 1999, Mirwaiz Omar Farooq and another senior leader of the APHC were detained at the airport in New Delhi, their passports and tickets confiscated, and prevented from boarding a flight to New York to present Kashmir's case to the world and the American people.
If anyone is interested in what Mirwaiz Umar Farooq of Kashmir, and other representatives of the Kashmiri people, might have said, had they been allowed to travel to the U.S. and the U.N. and to speak to us directly, here's a transcript of an earlier address to a U.N. subcommittee (several years ago, but unfortunately the situation has to not changed in any significant respect since then), and a profile and interview with him (also from a couple of years ago, but also still relevant and very revealing).
Kashmir's struggle for freedom continues today, increasingly unified in its demands but still with little support or awareness abroad. (See, for example, this reprint of an op-ed column on Kashmir by Salman Rushdie, perhaps the world's most famous -- and/or infamous -- person of Kashmiri ancestry, originally published in The New York Times in 1999.) USA policy on Kashmir, as on other regions, is shaped more by US economic and "strategic" interests than by concern for democracy or human rights. India's government continues to betray its long-standing promises of self-determination, promises made not only to the Kashmiri people but also to the United Nations. As a friend of Kashmir, India, and Pakistan, I try to do what I can to call attention to the moral and political entitlement of the Kashmiri people to determine their own destiny, not to have it decided for them by India, Pakistan, or any other foreign power.
Some Indian nationalists will probably think me anti-Indian for my views on Kashmir. But while I deplore the Indian occupation of Kashmir, I actually think that India and modern Indian political thought deserve more, not less, attention and respect in the USA and the rest of the North. It's sad that India's Kashmir policy sullies India's record and is one more obstacle to foreigners realizing how much they could learn from India and Indians. I'm pretty cynical, but I was appalled when I found that a friend's doctoral degree program in political science at a well-reputed US research university did not require any familiarity with Gandhi, Nehru, or any other Southern political thinker or statesperson.
Some will also think me a Muslim dupe for supporting Kashmiri self-determination. I don't think I'm biased toward Islam. I think it's just that, as an atheist, I'm less biased against Islam than is mainstream US Christian opinion. Not all that's bad, or good, about countries where most people are Muslim is attributable to Islam, any more than all that's bad or good about the USA is attributable to Christianity. Religion is only one of many influences. I'm not a fan of religions in general, but I'm fairly neutral among different religions. In any case, I try to base my judgements on what people do, regardless of their beliefs--or lack thereof. Interestingly, the Kashmiri nationalist organization with the most widespread support is the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), which is secular, socialist, and as opposed to Pakistani occupation as to Indian. The same is true of the principal voice of Kashmiri opinion in the USA, the Kashmiri American Council.
[Links to my writings and other resources on Kashmir]
While my partner Ruth, my mother, and I were in India and Pakistan, national flags were burned by dissidents and critics of governments and their policies in both countries, as they had been before and have been since in many other countries. I paid particular attention to these incidents, and the varied public reactions to them, because the USA Congress had that year begun to consider the possibility of amending the US Constitution (and repealing part of the First Amendment) to outlaw the use of USA flags to express disagreement with or hostility to the USA government.
My defense of the right to burn the USA flag to express whatever ideas one wants (and not just to burn flags to express reverence for the government through ritual disposal of soiled flags) was a natural outgrowth of my work on other political trials. I volunteered as a legal worker, organizer, and lobbyist for the defense committees for those prosecuted for flag "desecration" in the 1989 and 1990 Supreme Court flagburning cases. It was an intense, at times surreal, campaign. I was one of few people on speaking terms with both flagburners and Congressional aides. While the issue has largely faded from public view, I've tried to help maintain awareness of the threat it poses. Some of you may have seen me in a nationally televised debate on the Flag Consecration Amendment, broadcast on July 4th, 1997 and rebroadcast since, on the Debates!Debates! show.
I'm proud to have taken a stand on the issue of the flag, free speech, and fascism, but I'm disturbed that the outcome remains in doubt. In 1999, the "Flag Consecration Amendment" to the US Constitution is closer to passage than ever before. The Flag Amendment has been approved by majorities of both the Senate and the House of Representative each time it has been voted on (in 1989, 1990, and 1995), and each time by a larger majority. In 1995, it was approved by 2/3 of the House and fell only 3 votes short of 2/3 in the Senate. In 1997. 1998, and 1999 it was approved again by 2/3 of the House, and it is likely to be debated again in the next session of Congress. For my testimony from the 1989 Congressional hearings, some of my other writings on this issue, lots of other information, and the chance to burn a virtual flag, see The Flagburning Page.
I began working as a travel agent quite accidentally. I was out of (paid) work after one of several periods in my life of unpaid full-time political activism, and I happened to be offered a job with an around-the-world specialty agency willing to give sufficiently well-traveled and quick-learning people a chance at on-the-job training. (There are some trade schools for travel agents, but even most travel school graduates start out as unpaid interns or apprentices.) I've stayed in the travel "industry" ever since, to the surprise of many of my political friends--because of, not in spite of, my values and goals.
My work as a travel agent, travel seminar leader, and travel writer has given me, for the first time, the chance to integrate my paid employment with my global concerns and my work for social change. Much of my activism is rooted in, among other things, transnationalism. It goes back at least as far as my year as a high school student researching and debating the question, "Resolved: that the development and allocation of scarce world resources should be controlled by an international organization." I've long tried to think in global, not national, terms, and to act for the global good, even before I came to draw inspiration from globalist theoretician/activists like Nehru, Gandhi, Ambedkhar, J.P. Narayan, Rajni Kothari, Vandana Shiva, or Martin Khor, or to define myself as an anarchist and a pacifist. Wherever I go, I try learn about local issues, not just see tourist sights, whether with my ongoing interests in South and Central Asia or with places I've visited more recently like Argentina, where I spent a month in 2002 and 2003, or South Africa, where I spent six weeks in 2005.
Working as a travel consultant also paid the rent for more than 15 years, of course, but I didn't stay in it for the money. Frankly, most jobs that would use as many of my skills, or require as much or as diverse knowledge, skill, and expertise, would pay much better. And if my goal were to travel, I'd be better off working another job that would give me more time off and pay enough to more than offset the value of the limited travel benefits of the job. (There's a longer discussion of the work of travel agents, and the lack of respect they get, in The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World.) I stayed in this line of work because of the opportunities it has given me to facilitate learning and to empower people to experience the world for themselves.
Learning isn't necessarily your goal in travel, but experience almost always is. And learning is, I believe, a natural consequence of experience.
It takes real effort to close one's mind enough not to learn from experience. In my opinion, one of the greatest evils is the deliberate avoidance of learning, the willful desire not to know (lest knowledge bring with it an awareness of reasons to change one's actions). But most people want to learn. For me, it's a privilege (and a responsibility) to get paid to help people--travelers--who are choosing to devote a portion of their lives to experiencing, and thus learning about, the world and their place in it.
A corollary of my atheism is my belief that experience and direct perception are the ultimate sources of all truth and real knowledge. More bad things result from ignorance than from malice. Lack of knowledge makes it easier for a few malicious people to get away with things that others wouldn't tolerate were they aware of them. All sorts of exploitation and repression can be rationalized to people who have no direct information with which to rebut the lies of omission and commission. Secrecy and ignorance are the first friends of oppressors everywhere.
One reason, for example, that it's so easy for the USA to get away with big lies about Cuba, for India to get away with big lies about Kashmir, or for China to get away with big lies about East Turkestan (of which there is so little awareness that they scarcely even need to lie) is that almost anything can be made to sound plausible to people who haven't been there and have no direct knowledge of a place or a people.
Does this mean I have a hidden agenda for your travels? No. My agenda is open: to get you to go, to see, and to experience the world for yourself; to draw your own conclusions; and to act on them as you see fit.
Do I insist that you see things my way? Certainly not. Everyone has their own, to them equally true-seeming, sense of truth. Pacifism and anarchism (which to me are different terms for the same concept) imply believing in the illegitimacy of any attempt to force my beliefs on others, and recognizing that the ultimate human right is each person's right to be respected in the sincerity and equal validity of their own sense of truth.
Gandhi defined "Satyagraha" (often translated "nonviolence") as "truth force". By this he meant, I think, to express the equivalence of renouncing violence and relying on people's ability and desire to make decisions for themselves. To renounce coercion, as I do, is to trust that, if my beliefs are valid, others who seek the truth through experience and observation will reach the same conclusions, or persuade me that I am wrong. All I can ask of you or anyone is that you keep your eyes, ears, senses, and mind open to perception, experience, learning, knowledge, and change--as I try to do myself.
Peace,
Edward Hasbrouck
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