{"id":215631,"date":"2022-06-27T12:00:13","date_gmt":"2022-06-27T11:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=215631"},"modified":"2022-06-24T05:46:32","modified_gmt":"2022-06-24T04:46:32","slug":"fear-and-loathing-the-us-travel-guide-to-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/06\/fear-and-loathing-the-us-travel-guide-to-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Fear and Loathing: The US Travel Guide to the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

The US state department really wants travelling Americans to be wary of the \u2018dangerous\u2019 world their country helped create.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

[Getty Images]<\/p><\/div>\n

21 Jun 2022 – <\/em>The current US state department \u201cLebanon Travel Advisory\u201d, updated on June 6, urges US citizens to \u201creconsider travel\u201d to the diminutive Middle Eastern nation \u201cdue to crime, terrorism, armed conflict, civil unrest, kidnapping and Embassy Beirut\u2019s limited capacity to provide support to US citizens\u201d. Three significant \u201chigh-risk\u201d sections of Lebanese territory have been assigned the even more dramatic \u201cDo Not Travel\u201d warning: the Lebanese-Syrian border, the Lebanese-Israeli border, and refugee settlements.<\/p>\n

As a US citizen myself, I can definitively say that the greatest danger I felt during my recent 10-day stay in the country \u2013 where I have been a frequent visitor since 2006 \u2013 was at the top of Beirut\u2019s seaside Ferris wheel, which somehow continues to make its rounds despite the notorious Lebanese electricity shortage that has plunged much of the landscape into darkness.<\/p>\n

Years ago, the Ferris wheel operator commented to me that the only time the giant wheel had ceased functioning for an extended period of time was during the Israeli invasion<\/a> of Lebanon in 1982. This incursion killed tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians, primarily civilians, and culminated with the Israeli-backed massacre<\/a> of up to several thousand unarmed people in the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila \u2013 speaking of the \u201cdangers\u201d of refugee settlements.<\/p>\n

The US, it so happens, gave the Israeli government the green light for the whole 1982 affair. Twenty-four years later, just prior to my inaugural visit in 2006, yet another bloody Israeli attack on Lebanon transpired with considerable assistance from the imperial hegemon, which went about rush-shipping precision-guided bombs to the Israeli military while also endeavouring (ultimately unsuccessfully) to charge its own citizens hefty fees for the luxury of evacuation from Lebanon.<\/p>\n

Makes you wonder about US priorities \u2013 and about \u201cEmbassy Beirut\u2019s limited capacity to provide support to US citizens\u201d.<\/p>\n

At any rate, the upshot is that the state department has no business warning about \u201cterrorism\u201d and \u201carmed conflict\u201d in Lebanon when it has spent various decades underwriting Israel\u2019s literal terrorisation of the country. And yet the only mention of Israel in the travel advisory occurs in the context of the \u201cDo Not Travel\u201d specification: \u201cThere have been sporadic rocket attacks from southern Lebanon into Israel in connection with the violence between Israel and Hezbollah,\u201d \u2013 the Lebanese political party and armed group that arose as a direct result of the 1982 invasion.<\/p>\n

To be sure, Lebanon has the regrettable distinction of being perennially associated with the phenomenon of \u201cterrorism\u201d \u2013 that catch-all excuse for the US to remain perennially at war and to ensure that the arms industry never goes hungry. The general US public, however, has never quite been up to speed regarding the precise details of the Lebanese situation beyond the often fabricated, politically expedient sensationalism that is regularly on display in the establishment media as well as, of course, in the travel advisory section of the state department website.<\/p>\n

And guess what: Americans who are toxically and debilitatingly conditioned to fear the outside world, and particularly specific parts of it, are unlikely to ever rectify their misconceptions to allow for the possibility of common humanity \u2013 or for the possibility that there should perhaps be travel advisories for, say, US elementary schools<\/a> and other recurrent venues for mass shootings<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, my own country\u2019s established role in making much of the world very dangerous for much of humanity has not prevented me from being on the receiving end of an almost obscene level of hospitality from the residents of assorted \u201cDo Not Travel\u201d areas. Hitchhiking through Lebanon<\/a> a month after the 2006 war, my female travel companion and I were relentlessly welcomed and cared for along the Lebanese-Syrian border, the Lebanese-Israeli border, in Palestinian refugee camps, and throughout other areas the US had helped reduce to rubble.<\/p>\n

In the final days of the war, Israel had inundated swaths of the country with millions of cluster munitions, many of which failed to explode on impact and which to this day pose a potentially lethal hazard<\/a> to anyone who stumbles across them.<\/p>\n

Talk about reasons to, um, \u201creconsider travel\u201d to certain zones.<\/p>\n

In 2016, I conducted a weeklong solo hitchhiking trip along the Lebanese-Israeli border and was once again subjected to all manner of frighteningly generous hospitality. Ditto for the generosity I encountered that same year in Iran \u2013 which also presently boasts a \u201cDo Not Travel\u201d warning on account of the \u201crisk of kidnapping and the arbitrary arrest and detention of US citizens\u201d.<\/p>\n

In lieu of kidnapping, I was gifted a bunch of books in English by a humble bookseller in the city of Isfahan \u2013 the topics of which spanned Mao Zedong to the KGB to Peg Bracken\u2019s Instant Etiquette Book, published in 1964. This man also escorted me to Soffeh Mountain south of the city, which he said I could not leave Iran without viewing up-close, and provided a snack called \u201cCheetoz\u201d for the excursion.<\/p>\n

And in February 2022 I visited Cuba<\/a> for the second time \u2013 which, like Iran, has long suffered under a pernicious US embargo that amounts to a de facto war. The state department\u2019s Cuba travel advisory, updated June 13, begins with a warning about the perils of the so-called \u201cHavana Syndrome\u201d \u2013 a mysterious anti-American ailment<\/a> that spontaneously materialised in 2016 but that has now been pretty much debunked by the CIA itself.<\/p>\n

My own activities<\/a> in Havana included executing a spectacular fall while jogging on the seaside Malec\u00f3n, where the only witness to the event was a 43-year-old man named Eraudis from the Cuban province of Guant\u00e1namo. Perched atop the seawall, he apologised that he could not carry my scraped-up self back to my house since he had no legs. These, it turned out, had been blown off more than 20 years earlier by a landmine outside the US\u2019s illegal offshore penal colony at Guant\u00e1namo Bay.<\/p>\n

The world is a scary place indeed.<\/p>\n

And, in case the individual US travel advisories are not enough, there is also a handy state department \u201cWorldwide Caution\u201d that is continuously in effect to remind Americans that everyone is out to get them.<\/p>\n

But back to Lebanon and the perils of life for the average Lebanese resident, such as the egregious state negligence that resulted in the August 2020 port explosion<\/a> that blew up a good part of Beirut. Of great public concern, too, are the country\u2019s criminal levels of socioeconomic inequality \u2013 fervently endorsed by the US \u2013 that were far from resolved during the civil war of 1975-1990, and that have now only been exacerbated by the current Lebanese economic Armageddon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Regarding travel to the aforementioned \u201chigh-risk\u201d areas in Lebanon, the state department advises US citizens to \u201cdraft a will\u201d beforehand. Additional totally normal precautions are also encouraged: \u201cleave DNA samples with your medical provider\u201d; \u201cestablish a proof of life protocol with your loved ones\u201d; and \u201cbe sure to appoint one family member to serve as the point of contact with hostage-takers, media\u2026 and Members of Congress if you are taken hostage or detained\u201d.<\/p>\n

A link is furthermore provided to \u201cFBI Travel Tips\u201d, which range from the ostensibly polite but actually Orientalist advice to \u201cplan your wardrobe so that it does not offend the locals\u201d to more patently ludicrous suggestions like: \u201cDo not gossip about character flaws, financial problems, emotional relationships, or other difficulties of your fellow Americans or yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

The FBI also warns that: \u201cUnlike the United States, most other countries do not have legal restrictions against technical surveillance.\u201d This from an agency that is predicated on, well, spying.<\/p>\n

They say that laughter is good for the soul. I suppose I must thus thank the state department travel advisories for providing a source of considerable amusement \u2013 even if politically convenient imperial xenophobia is not really a laughing matter at all.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Belen Fernandez is a contributing editor at <\/em>Jacobin Magazine and has written for the<\/em> New York Times, London Review of Books, Current Affairs, and<\/em> Middle East Eye, among numerous other publications. She is the author of<\/em> Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021),<\/em> Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (OR Books, 2019),<\/em> Martyrs Never Die: Travels through South Lebanon (Warscapes, 2016), and<\/em> The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work (Verso, 2011).<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – aljazeera.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

21 Jun 2022 – The US state department really wants travelling Americans to be wary of the \u2018dangerous\u2019 world their country helped create.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":215632,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,70],"class_list":["post-215631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}