Magic Dave has been spotted in Waterbury, CN, via Youtube. Therault and colleagues are the Wastebusters, a Mythbusters parody to debunk IDLING MYTHS. It’s a PSA for a new Connecticut law against idling cars.
Before Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Al-Quds remarks could be translated, Zionist mouthpieces were fomenting outrage about a new “Holocaust Denial.” By the time DC, London, Paris and Berlin were pushed to repudiate the Iranian president’s statement, and real transcripts hit the stands, newspapers have had to downgrade it as a Holocaust Jibe. Ahmadinejab didn’t deny the Holocaust, he denied the “Holocaust Myth.” The part justifying the state of Israel. Official narratives promoted by Holocaust Museums prominently feature the conclusion that Jews can only escape extermination by occupying to the Middle East.
At the Al-Quds rally, marking the day of solidarity to support the continuing struggle of the Palestinian people, Ahmadinejad did say:
“The very existence of this [Israeli] regime is an insult to the dignity of the people.”
“They [the Western powers] launched the myth of the Holocaust. They lied, they put on a show and then they support the Jews.
“The pretext for establishing the Zionist regime is a lie… a lie which relies on an unreliable claim, a mythical claim, and the occupation of Palestine has nothing to do with the Holocaust.”
“This claim is corrupt and the pretext is corrupt. This regime’s days are numbered and it is on its way to collapse. This regime is dying.”
Found this brilliant submission in the Start-Propaganda collection. The Reichtag Fire false- flag attack will have nothing on the debris of the WTC. For your 8th commemoration of the enigmatic event which is still used to justify the occupation of Afghanistan, check out the Italian documentary ZERO. My favorite segment is George Bush on the perpetrators of 9/11: “It’s hard for Americans to imagine how evil the people are who are doing this.” Less and less so.
In keeping the anniversary of 9/11, we also revisited the sentimental documentary by the Naudet brothers, whose video had captured the impact of the first plane, and the ensuing action of the firefighters inside Building One. Excised from the final cut were the firehouse discussions of other explosions they’d heard and their observations that the collapses resembled demolitions. Those clips are accessible online, and now you’ll recognize the individual firemen. Perhaps those details were deemed inappropriate for the CBS audience in 2004.
It’s also sad to look upon these interviews of men who later worked ceaselessly at Ground Zero, often without masks, and wonder how many are now dead, or dying of respiratory ailments, victims of the government fraud about the safety of the environment in the aftermath of the disaster.
Watching the doomed firemen ascend into the WTC without a thought that the towers might collapse, and being shown the buildings vaporize, narrated by uncritical newspeople, we cannot wonder now but did they take American viewers for idiots?
Among the many documentaries which question the official version of events, Italian Telemaco’s ZERO: an Investigation into 9-11 takes the least sensational approach. Italian celebrities, a laughing physicist (and Nobel laureate), and Gore Vidal shrug off the sheer pretense of the USA narrative.
Watching the original 911 exposés like 911 Loose Change and 911 Conspiracy – In Plane Sight gets old doesn’t it? Not because their presentation is shrill, but because unanswered, what can they do but repeat themselves?
The mainstream response has only been to dismiss the 911 Truth movement as Conspiracy Theory. Throw Alex Jones’ Prison Planet TV into the mix with his 9/11 The Road To Tyranny and alternative versions of September 11th, 2001, begin to look paranoid.
For a fresh perspective from the UK, check out 911 and the British Broadcasting Conspiracy.
Remember, the mainstream media which dismisses 9/11 truth seekers as conspiracy theorists, is the same media which is now telling us that the American public does not want universal health care.
The same media which has been “questioning” Global Warming now puts the onus for change on whether an American public will believe Global Warming.
The same corporate media is owned, and speaks for, big agra, big pharma, big oil, and the arms industry.
Is there a Monsanto/Cargill/Archer-Daniels-Midland conspiracy to monopolize the food supply? Is there a military industrial conspiracy to foment war and instability? Is there a globalization conspiracy to harness developing world resources while enslaving all peoples?
Who is the corporate media to defend the 911 myth against accusations of conspiracy?
What the impregnability of the accepted 9/11 story means to me, is that the 911 Truth Movement clings to an outdated notion that what the population knows matters. In a post-democratic world it doesn’t. The people can believe their feudal overlords to be ogres, so long as it isn’t uttered with intent to dethrone. Then it’s heresy.
The Rock Creek Free Press is available online, but if you want it in print, the DC monthly is available in Colorado Springs at the Bookman, 3163 W. Colorado. The September issue features a speech given by legendary Australian journalist John Pilger on July 4th in San Francisco.
Here’s the RCFP transcript:
Two years ago I spoke at “Socialism in Chicago” about an invisible government which is a term used by Edward Bernays, one the founders of modern propaganda. It was Bernays, who in the 1920s invented public relations as a euphemism for propaganda. And it was Bernays, deploying the ideas of his uncle Sigmund Freud, who campaigned on behalf of the tobacco industry for women to take up smoking as an act of feminist liberation calling cigarettes “tortures of freedom”. At the same time he was involved in the disinformation which was critical in overthrowing the Arbenz government in Guatemala. So you have the association of cigarettes and regime change. The invisible government that Bernays had in mind brought together all media: PR, the press, broadcasting, advertising and their power of branding and image making. In other words, disinformation.
And I suppose I would like to talk today about this invisible government’s most recent achievement, the rise of Barrack Obama and the silencing of much of the left. But all of this has a history, of course and I’d like to go back, take you back some forty years to a sultry and, for me, very memorable day in Viet Nam.
I was a young war correspondent who had just arrived in a village in the Central Highlands called Tuylon. My assignment was to write about a unit of US Marines who had been sent to the village to win hearts and minds. “My orders,” said the Marine Sergeant, “are to sell the American way of liberty, as stated in the Pacification Handbook, this is designed to win the hearts and minds of folks as stated on page 86.” Now, page 86 was headed in capital letters: WHAM (winning hearts and minds). The Marine Unit was a combined action company which explained the Sergeant, meant, “We attack these folks on Mondays and we win their hearts and minds on Tuesdays.” He was joking, of course, but not quite.
The Sergeant, who didn’t speak Vietnamese, had arrived in the village, stood up on a Jeep and said through a bullhorn: “Come on out everybody we’ve got rice and candies and toothbrushes to give you.” This was greeted by silence. “Now listen, either you gooks come on out or we’re going to come right in there and get you!” Now the people of Tuylon finally came out and they stood in line to receive packets of Uncle Ben’s Miracle Rice, Hershey Bars, party balloons, and several thousand toothbrushes. Three portable, battery operated, yellow, flush lavatories were held back for the arrival of the colonel.
And when the colonel arrived that evening, the district chief was summoned and the yellow, flush lavatories unveiled. The colonel cleared his throat and took out a handwritten speech,
“Mr. District Chief and all you nice people,” said the colonel, “what these gifts represent is more than the sum of their parts, they carry the spirit of America. Ladies and gentlemen there’s no place on Earth like America, it’s the land where miracles happen, it’s a guiding light for me and for you. In America, you see, we count ourselves as real lucky as having the greatest democracy the world has ever known and we want you nice people to share in our good fortune.”
Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, even John Winthrope sitting upon a hill got a mention. All that was missing was the Star Bangled Banner playing softly in the background. Of course the villagers had no idea what the colonel was talking about, but when the Marines clapped, they clapped. And when the colonel waved, the children waved. And when he departed the colonel shook the Sergeant’s hand and said: “We’ve got plenty of hearts and minds here, carry on Sergeant.” “Yes Sir.” In Viet Nam I witnessed many scenes like that.
I’d grown up in faraway Australia on a cinematic diet of John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Walt Disney, and Ronald Reagan. The American way of liberty they portrayed might well have been lifted from the WHAM handbook. I’d learned that the United States had won World War II on its own and now led the free world as the chosen society. It was only later when I read Walter Lippmann’s book, Public Opinion, a manual of the invisible government, that I began to understand the power of emotions attached to false ideas and bad histories on a grand scale.
Now, historians call this exceptionalism, the notion that the United States has a divine right to bring what it calls “liberty” to the rest of humanity. Of course this is a very old refrain. The French and British created and celebrated their own civilizing missions while imposing colonial regimes that denied basic civil liberties. However, the power of the American message was, and remains, different. Whereas the Europeans were proud imperialists, Americans are trained to deny their imperialism. As Mexico was conquered and the Marines sent to Nicaragua, American textbooks referred to an Age of Innocence. American motives were always well meaning, moral, exceptional, as the colonel said, “There was no ideology” and that’s still the case.
Americanism is an ideology that is unique because its main feature is its denial that it is an ideology. It’s both conservative and it’s liberal. And it’s right and it’s left. And Barack Obama is its embodiment. Since Obama was elected leading liberals have talked about America returning to its true status as, “a nation of moral ideals”. Those are the words of Paul Krugman, the liberal columnist of The New York Times. In the San Francisco Chronicle, columnist Mark Morford wrote,
“Spiritually advanced people regard the new president as a light worker who can help usher in a new way of being on the planet.”
Tell that to an Afghan child whose family has been blown away by Obama’s bombs. Or a Pakistani child whose house has been visited by one of Obama’s drones. Or a Palestinian child surveying the carnage in Gaza caused by American “smart” weapons, which, disclosed Seymour Hersh, were re-supplied to Israel for use in the slaughter, and I quote; “Only after the Obama team let if be known, it would not object.” The man who stayed silent on Gaza is the man who now condemns Iran.
In a sense, Obama is the myth that is America’s last taboo. His most consistent theme was never “change”, it was power. “The United States,” he said, “leads the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good. We must lead by building a 21st century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people.” And there is this remarkable statement, “At moments of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world; that we stood and fought for the freedoms sought by billions of people beyond our borders.” Words like these remind me of the colonel in the village in Viet Nam, as he spun much the same nonsense.
Since 1945, by deed and by example, to use Obama’s words, America has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements and bombed countless men, women, and children to death. I’m grateful to Bill Blum for his cataloging of that. And yet, here is the 45th (sic) president of the United States having stacked his government with war mongers and corporate fraudsters and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, promising, not only more of the same, but a whole new war in Pakistan. Justified by the murderous clichés of Hilary Clinton, clichés like, “high value targets”. Within three days of his inauguration, Obama was ordering the death of people in faraway countries: Pakistan and Afghanistan. And yet, the peace movement, it seems, is prepared to look the other way and believe that the cool Obama will restore, as Krugman wrote, “the nation of moral ideals.”
Not long ago, I visited the American Museum of History in the celebrated Smithsonian Institute in Washington. One of the most popular exhibitions was called “The Price of Freedom: Americans at War”. It was holiday time and lines of happy people, including many children, shuffled through a Santa’s grotto of war and conquest. When messages about their nation’s great mission were lit up; these included tributes to the; “…exceptional Americans who saved a million lives…” in Viet Nam; where they were, “…determined to stop Communist expansion.” In Iraq other brave Americans, “employed air-strikes of unprecedented precision.” What was shocking was not so much the revisionism of two of the epic crimes of modern times, but the shear scale of omission.
Like all US presidents, Bush and Obama have very much in common. The wars of both presidents and the wars of Clinton and Reagan, Carter and Ford, Nixon and Kennedy are justified by the enduring myth of exceptional America. A myth the late Harold Pinter described as, “a brilliant, witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
The clever young man who recently made it to the White House is a very fine hypnotist; partly because it is indeed extraordinary to see an African American at the pinnacle of power in the land of slavery. However, this is the 21st century and race together with gender, and even class, can be very seductive tools of propaganda. For what is so often overlooked and what matters, I believe above all, is the class one serves. George Bush’s inner circle from the State Department to the Supreme Court was perhaps the most multi-racial in presidential history. It was PC par excellence. Think Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell. It was also the most reactionary. Obama’s very presence in the White House appears to reaffirm the moral nation. He’s a marketing dream. But like Calvin Klein or Benetton, he’s a brand that promises something special, something exciting, almost risqué. As if he might be radical. As if he might enact change. He makes people feel good; he’s a post-modern man with no political baggage. And all that’s fake.
In his book, Dreams From My Father, Obama refers to the job he took after he graduated from Columbia in 1983; he describes his employer as, “…a consulting house to multi-national corporations.” For some reason he doesn’t say who his employer was or what he did there. The employer was Business International Corporation; which has a long history of providing cover for the CIA with covert action and infiltrating unions from the left. I know this because it was especially active in my own country, Australia. Obama doesn’t say what he did at Business International and they may be absolutely nothing sinister. But it seems worthy of inquiry, and debate, as a clue to, perhaps, who the man is.
During his brief period in the senate, Obama voted to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He voted for the Patriot Act. He refused to support a bill for single payer health care. He supported the death penalty. As a presidential candidate he received more corporate backing than John McCain. He promised to close Guantanamo as a priority, but instead he has excused torture, reinstated military commissions, kept the Bush gulag intact, and opposed habeas corpus.
Daniel Ellsberg, the great whistleblower, was right, I believe, when he said, that under Bush a military coup had taken place in the United States giving the Pentagon unprecedented powers. These powers have been reinforced by the presence of Robert Gates – a Bush family crony and George W. Bush’s powerful Secretary of Defense. And by all the Bush Pentagon officials and generals who have kept their jobs under Obama.
In the middle of a recession, with millions of Americans losing their jobs and homes, Obama has increased the military budget. In Colombia he is planning to spend 46 million dollars on a new military base that will support a regime backed by death squads and further the tragic history of Washington’s intervention in that region.
In a pseudo-event in Prague, Obama promised a world without nuclear weapons to a global audience, mostly unaware that America is building new tactical nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war. Like George Bush, he used the absurdity of Europe threatened by Iran to justify building a missile system aimed at Russia and China. In another pseudo-event, at the Annapolis Naval Academy, decked with flags and uniforms, Obama lied that America had gone to Iraq to bring freedom to that country. He announced that the troops were coming home. This was another deception. The head of the army, General George Casey says, with some authority, that America will be in Iraq for up to a decade. Other generals say fifteen years.
Chris Hedges, the very fine author of Empire of Illusion, puts it very well; “President Obama,” he wrote, “does one thing and brand Obama gets you to believe another.” This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what the advertiser wants because of how they make you feel. And so you are kept in a perpetual state of childishness. He calls this “junk politics”.
But I think the real tragedy is that Obama, the brand, appears to have crippled or absorbed much of the anti-war movement – the peace movement. Out of 256 Democrats in Congress; 30, just 30, are willing to stand up against Obama’s and Nancy Pelosi’s war party. On June the 16th they voted for 106 billion dollars for more war.
The “Out of Iraq” caucus is out of action. Its member can’t even come up with a form of words of why they are silent. On March the 21st, a demonstration at the Pentagon by the once mighty United for Peace and Justice drew only a few thousand. The out-going president of UFPJ, Lesley Kagen, says her people aren’t turning up because, “It’s enough for many of them that Obama has a plan to end the war and that things are moving in the right direction.” And where is the mighty Move On, these days? Where is its campaign against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? And what, exactly, was said when Move On’s executive director, Jason Ruben, met Barack Obama at the White House in February?
Yes, a lot of good people mobilized for Obama. But what did they demand of him? Working to elect the Democratic presidential candidate may seem like activism, but it isn’t. Activism doesn’t give up. Activism doesn’t fall silent. Activism doesn’t rely on the opiate of hope. Woody Allen once said, “I felt a lot better when I gave up hope.” Real activism has little time for identity politics which like exceptionalism, can be fake. These are distractions that confuse and sucker good people. And not only in the United States, I can assure you.
I write for the Italian socialist newspaper, Il Manifesto, or rather I used to write for it. In February I sent the editor an article which raised questions about Obama as a progressive force. The article was rejected. Why, I asked? “For the moment,” wrote the editor, “we prefer to maintain a more positive approach to the novelty presented by Obama. We will take on specific issues, but we would not like to say that he will make no difference.” In other words, an American president drafted to promote the most rapacious system in history, is ordained and depoliticized by important sections of the left. It’s a remarkable situation. Remarkable, because those on the, so called, Radical Left have never been more aware, more conscious of the inequities of power. The Green Movement, for example, has raised the consciousness of millions, so that almost every child knows something about global warming. And yet, there seems to be a resistance, within the Green Movement, to the notion of power as a military force, a military project. And perhaps similar observations can also be made about sections of the Feminist Movement and the Gay Movement and certainly the Union Movement.
One of my favorite quotations is from Milan Kundera,
“The struggle of people against power is [the] struggle of memory against forgetting.”
We should never forget that the primary goal of great power is to distract and limit our natural desire for social justice and equity and real democracy.
Long ago Edward Bernays’ invisible government of propaganda elevated big business from its unpopular status as a kind of mafia to that of a patriotic driving force. The “American way of life” began as an advertising slogan. The modern image of Santa Claus was an invention of Coca Cola.
Today we are presented with an extraordinary opportunity. Thanks to the crash of Wall Street and the revelation, for many ordinary people, that the free market has nothing to do with freedom. The opportunity, within our grasp, is to recognize that something is stirring in America that is unfamiliar, perhaps, to many of us on the left, but is related to a great popular movement that’s growing all over the world. Look down at Latin America, less than twenty years ago there was the usual despair, the usual divisions of poverty and freedom, the usual thugs in uniforms running unspeakable regimes. Today for the first time perhaps in 500 years there’s a people’s movement based on the revival of indigenous cultures and language, a genuine populism. The recent amazing achievements in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, El Salvador, Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay represent a struggle for community and political rights that is truly historic, with implications for all of us. The successes in Latin America are expressed perversely in the recent overthrow of the government of Honduras, because the smaller the country, the greater is the threat of a good example that the disease of emancipation will spread.
Indeed, right across the world social movements and grass roots organization have emerged to fight free market dogma. They’ve educated governments in the south that food for export is a problem, rather than a solution to global poverty. They’ve politicized ordinary people to stand up for their rights, as in the Philippines and South Africa. Look at the remarkable boycott, disinvestment and sanctions campaign, BDS, for short, aimed at Israel that’s sweeping the world. Israeli ships have been turned away from South Africa and Western Australia. A French company has been forced to abandon plans to build a railway connecting Jerusalem with illegal Israeli settlements. Israeli sporting bodies find themselves isolated. Universities in the United Kingdom have begun to sever ties with Israel. This is how apartheid South Africa was defeated. And this is how the great wind of the 1960s began to blow. And this is how every gain has been won: the end of slavery, universal suffrage, workers rights, civil rights, environmental protection, the list goes on and on.
And that brings us back, here, to the United States, because I believe something is stirring in this country. Are we aware, that in the last eight months millions of angry e-mails, sent by ordinary Americans, have flooded Washington. And I mean millions. People are outright outraged that their lives are attacked; they bear no resemblance to the passive mass presented by the media. Look at the polls; more than 2/3 of Americans say the government should care for those who cannot care for themselves, sixty-four percent would pay higher taxes to guarantee health care for everyone, sixty percent are favorable towards Unions, seventy percent want nuclear disarmament, seventy-two percent want the US completely out of Iraq and so on and so on. But where is much of the left? Where is the social justice movement? Where is the peace movement? Where is the civil rights movement? Ordinary Americans, for too long, have been misrepresented by stereotypes that are contemptuous. James Madison referred to his compatriots in the public as ignorant and meddlesome outsiders. And this contempt is probably as strong today, among the elite, as it was back then. That’s why the progressive attitudes of the public are seldom reported in the media, because they’re not ignorant, they’re subversive, they’re informed and they’re even anti-American. I once asked a friend, the great American war correspondent and humanitarian, Martha Gellhorn, to explain the term “anti-American” to me. “I’ll tell you what anti-American is,” she said in her forceful way, “its what governments and their vested interests call those who honor America by objecting to war and the theft of resources and believing in all of humanity. There are millions of these anti-Americans in the United States, they are ordinary people who belong to no elite and who judge their government in moral terms though they would call it common decency. They are not vain; they are the people with a waitful conscience, the best of America’s citizens. Sure, they disappear from view now and then, but they are like seeds beneath the snow. I would say they are truly exceptional.” Truly exceptional, I like that.
My own guess is that a populism is growing, once again in America evoking a powerful force beneath the surface which has a proud history. From such authentic grass roots Americanism came women suffrage, the eight hour day, graduated income tax, public ownership of railways and communications, the breaking of the power of corporate lobbyists and much more. In other words, real democracy. The American populists were far from perfect, but they often spoke for ordinary people and they were betrayed by leaders who urged them to compromise and merge with the Democratic Party. That was long ago, but how familiar it sounds. My guess is that something is coming again. The signs are there. Noam Chomsky is right when he says that, “Mere sparks can ignite a popular movement that may seem dormant.” No one predicted 1968, no one predicted the fall of apartheid, or the Berlin Wall, or the civil rights movement, or the great Latino rising of a few years ago.
I suggest that we take Woody Allen’s advice and give up on hope and listen, instead, to voices from below. What Obama and the bankers and the generals and the IMF and the CIA and CNN and BBC fear, is ordinary people coming together and acting together. It’s a fear as old as democracy, a fear that suddenly people convert their anger to action as they’ve done so often throughout history.
“At a time of universal deceit,” wrote George Orwell, “telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
Thank you.
“Licensed to Kill” was an Ian Fleming invention. His friend Richard Meinertzhagen dropped Fleming’s phrase for guests to infer he was a secret agent. RM’s routine of arriving at diner parties with a smoking gun reinforced whispers that he had been the inspiration for James Bond. Meinertzhagen turned out to be a flake, but the authority to play god is still coveted by espionage idolators. Federal statutes prohibit identifying covert CIA operatives, regardless what they’ve done. Is that the same thing? A mythical supra legem indemnity? Sorry Virginia, nemo est.
Okay, some today are above the law, notable examples being Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Woo, et al. The jury is still out on who will atone for the Bush Co crimes. But should the Neocon exemption cover assassination squads and torturers too?
The US Department of Justice is up in arms -Fox News probably more than anybody- having learned that defense lawyers for terrorist suspects in US custody, have shown their clients photographs of CIA and private contractor interrogators, to learn which of them might have engaged in harsh techniques defined by the rest of the world as torture.
The John Adams Project, run jointly by the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, is an effort to document the US torture in Guantanamo and our secret prisons around the globe. The ACLU assures all indignant patriots that asking the detainees to identify their torturers is completely legal.
Researchers for the project have been snapping pictures outside the homes of retired and active, CIA and intelligence industry interrogators. No names have been released except Deuce Martinez, who’d already been outed by the NYT. Martinez was the agent responsible for interrogating Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, although accounts soft-pedal his participation in the harsher techniques.
That’s the pattern of exposes about torture, those named always claim to have left the room. A remarkably similar motif accompanied the account of CIA interrogator John Kiriakou.
Two well-known names were doctors who attended to the tortured, later opening a consulting firm to train CIA interrogators.
Dr. Jim Mitchell and Dr. Bruce Jessen specialized in maximizing harsh interrogation, and making sure the victim didn’t die.
The defense lawyers have circulated the photographs of 60 suspected perpetrators, but have named only Martinez so far. How are torturers and murderers to be brought to justice, if they are not unmasked?
Need further proof that The History Channel is Fox News for the archives? From rewriting the Vietnam War to mythologizing Harry Truman, The History Channel is determined to paint the televised record askew. For example, even in light of the current climate crisis, you will not find a more glowing tribute to America’s monarch of energy, especially its potential for continuing to supply America’s energy needs.
In this day and age, science has finally located the Black Hole of Human Stupidity and it is centered on Colorado State Senator Dave Schultheis, elected representative of Colorado State Senate District 9. That’s quite a dishonor, but Dave fully deserves the distinction. I mean today, how many public officials have Joseph McCarthy listed as a great American patriotic hero on their website? That’s major league Black Hole of Stupidity if there ever was one and the people of State District 9 elected this twit! Let his love of American fascist Joe McCarthy be expressed in his own words.
Here he answers a man who wrote him opposed to his legislative support for mandatory recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance…
6. Your passing references to McCarthy are noted. I would encourage you to do some reading on Mr. McCarthy. The modern myth about him serves the political agenda of the anti-American crowd, but it does not serve history or the nation very well. McCarthy was a golden boy from Wisconsin, the youngest sitting judge ever appointed in that state, and the youngest man to be elected from that state to the U.S. Senate. He married a Washington beauty queen after moving to the capital. Because of his natural talent and intellectual and moral strength, he was on the fast track to high places. He sacrificed his personal ambitions in order to confront no-kidding Communists who had infiltrated the U.S. at high levels, and his efforts helped lead to the conviction of Alger Hiss and other documented Communist spies. Secret Soviet cables known as the Venona Project which were declassified in 1995 have removed any doubt about this. It may sound far-fetched, given all the modern nonsense you have heard about McCarthy, but his true legacy was not one of forcing patriotism on innocent little children, an association you seem to draw. It was one of courageous, though imperfect, defense of the world’s freest and best political institutions. Again, I commend him to your prudent investigation.
I hope this helps you understand my point of view, and that of others advocating both formal, public patriotism, and inner, personal patriotism. This country is great. This country is good. Loving it deeply enough to advocate public ceremonies which reflect that love is not dangerous, but healthy. Naturally, I would be happy to answer your open letter, should you care to send one, with one of my own.
Best regards to you, and thank you again for taking the time both to write and follow up.
Dave Schultheis
See Rep. Schultheis Responds to Constituent on Pledge of Allegiance
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Want more words of wisdom from this homophobic and immigrant-phobic dingbat, Dave Schultheis? How about his website’s headliner quote against being tolerant? Here it is then…
“Tolerance is a virtue of a man without convictions.” — G. K. Chesterton, who strongly influenced C.S. Lewis
So who is this G.K. Chesterton whose quote Schultheis puts on his website? He became a major Catholic apologist right at the time that the Catholic Church was solidly fascist in its sentiments in countries like Spain and Italy. Here below is part of wikipedia’s description of Chesterton…
Accusations of anti-Semitism
Both Chesterton and Belloc have faced accusations of anti-Semitism during their lifetimes and subsequently.[17] Their criticisms of the “international Jewish banking families” are some of the most important reasons for these accusations. For example, Chesterton, Belloc, and Chesterton’s brother Cecil, were vehement critics of the Isaacs, who were involved in the Marconi scandal in the years before World War I.[18] George Orwell accused Chesterton of being guilty of “endless tirades against Jews, which he thrust into stories and essays upon the flimsiest pretexts.”[19]In The New Jerusalem, Chesterton made it clear that he believed that there was a “Jewish Problem” in Europe, in the sense that he believed that Jewish culture (not Jewish ethnicity) separated itself from the nationalities of Europe.[20] He suggested the formation of a Jewish homeland as a solution, and was later invited to Palestine by Jewish Zionists who saw him as an ally in their cause. In 1934, after the Nazi Party took power in Germany he wrote that:
In our early days Hilaire Belloc and myself were accused of being uncompromising Anti-Semites. Today, although I still think there is a Jewish problem, I am appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities. They have absolutely no reason or logic behind them. It is quite obviously the expedient of a man who has been driven to seeking a scapegoat, and has found with relief the most famous scapegoat in European history, the Jewish people.[21]
The Wiener Library (London’s archive on anti-semitism and Holocaust history) has defended Chesterton against the charge of anti-Semitism: “he was not an enemy, and when the real testing time came along he showed what side he was on.”[22]
Chesterton condemned the Nuremberg Laws, and he died in 1936, as the Hitlerite antisemitic measures were temporarily decreased due to the Berlin Olympics, long before lethal persecution by the Nazis would start.
G. K. Chesterton From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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More? Here is State Senator Schultheis touting sales of a book that decries homosexuals as being just what? …’The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today’! See Intolerant Dave on Homosexuality
Hey, did you know that? They are the principal threat to religious freedom protected by none other than Dave Schultheis! (and CS daily, The Gazette! They share this nutty view that Christians are under major attack, too). Poor Christians…. Who can save them from the fags?
Yes, Dave Schultheis of Colorado State District 9 is lost in a Black Hole of Stupidity, but that’s North Colorado Springs for you! And Dave Schultheis is one of the few remaining living, openly McCarthyite fossils left in America! Incredible! And how he manages to fuse together MLK with Joseph McCarthy is an amazing feat! Only in Colorado do we have such genius! It’s an amazing place!
I am curious as to why a Roman Catholic bishop would risk a second excommunication over the historic particulars of the Holocaust. Bishop Richard Williamson is being labeled a “Holocaust Denier” because he questions the extent, and mechanism, of the official version of the Holocaust. Because Williamson is also criticized for his skepticism about the official 9/11 narrative, and for his praise for the Unabomber’s manifesto, I want to take a closer look, and wonder what is he reading?
Here’s what the outspoken Williamson told Swedish SVT in a November 2008 interview, as transcribed by the BBC:
“I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against, is hugely against, six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler… I believe there were no gas chambers [during World War II]”
First, I’m compelled to pose a naive question: If we can all agree that Jews died in huge numbers by incomparable horrors at the hands of the Nazis, would it matter what the exact death toll was, or which killing method predominated? Why? What is the need for laws to restrict historians who are trying to reconstruct the record from emerging facts? Must preemptive “anti-defamation” laws mandate that historians stick to the official “untold” number and “indescribable” evil?
Even if we postulate, albeit cynically, that Holocaust reverence is critical to upholding American public support for Israel‘s “right to exist” in the Middle East, how could a revision of the casualties, in any case a horrific magnitude, make an difference?
Millions of Jews fell victim to the Third Reich. No one is denying it, and historical revision is not trying to bring the Holocaust victims back to life. Holocaust Remembrance of the Jewish victims has remained a political priority around the world, advocating commemoration in education, literature, civic life, and pop culture. Why then, an aversion to scrutiny?
Last week a fellow Society of St. Pius X member, Rev. Floriano Abrahamowicz was ejected from SSPX for coming to Williamson’s and the Pope’s defense.
While the usual politicians and Jewish community leaders are voicing their indignation, can we ask, are the Bishop’s beliefs really at odds with accepted orthodoxy? The media will reiterate that the Six Million figure has always been beyond dispute. All the while, official scholarship has been recording otherwise. In Germany, revisionist historians are jailed for Holocaust Denial. Yet bit by bit, mainstream historians have been able to publish divergent theses which withstand legal refutation.
For the sake of argument, let’s dismiss all the “deniers” as kooks, and look only at the traditionally vetted voices.
On the subject of Auschwitz, where four million of the total six million Jews were believed to have perished, Der Spiegel managing editor Fritjof Meyer a continued critic of revisionism, summarized in Osteuropa 52, 5/2002, p. 631:
“In 1945, the Soviet Investigatory Commission numbered four million victims in the National Socialist work and extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a product of war propaganda. Under coercion, camp Commandant Höß named three million and recanted. Up until now, how many people actually fell victim to this singular mass murder could only be estimated. The first Holocaust historian, Gerald Reitlinger, assumed one million, while the latest state of research estimated it to be several hundred thousand fewer.”
Naturally even Meyer touched off a firestorm by integrating the sum of official scholarship into the big picture. The difficulties which historians face in reaching variant findings are explained by another mainstream scholar, noted Hitler historian Dr. Werner Maser, Professor for History and International Law, Munich University, Falsification, Legend, and Truth about Hitler and Stalin, Olzog, Munich 2004, on p.332
“To be sure, […] the extermination of the Jews is considered to be one of the best researched aspects of contemporary history […], but that is not the case. […] Indeed, whole regions remain as much terra incognita as ever, […] German historians exhibit timidity about taking on the horrible issue and possibly bringing to light details that do not agree with the accounts which have multiplied for a very long time.”
And about the deterrence of the Holocaust Denial laws:
“The sword of Damocles hovers over historians (not only in Germany) who portray the controversial phases of history as they ‘actually were’ – and identify the frequently even officially codified ideological specifications as falsifications of history.”
The question of the gas chambers is raised by the absence of evidence. According to major Holocaust authority Dr. Arno J. Mayer, Professor of Modern Jewish History at Princeton University, in Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History, Pantheon, New York 1990, p. 362:
“Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable. Even though Hitler and the Nazis made no secret of their war on the Jews, the SS operatives dutifully eliminated all traces of their murderous activities and instruments. No written orders for gassing have turned up thus far. The SS not only destroyed most camp records, which were in any case incomplete, but also razed nearly all killing and crematory installations well before the arrival of Soviet troops. Likewise, care was taken to dispose of the bones and ashes of the victims.”
Justifiably, scholars are skeptical that the complete absence of evidence should be taken as proof of its existence and total suppression. Some camps were overrun before the Germans could destroy any part of them. Mayer continues, p. 163:
“In the meantime, there is no denying the many contradictions, ambiguities, and errors in the existing sources. […] Much the same is true of for the conflicting estimates and extrapolations of the number of victims, since there are no reliable statistics to work with. […] Both radical skepticism and rigid dogmatism about the exact processes of extermination and the exact number of victims are the bane of sound historical interpretation”
In light of the before-sited Wannsee Conference documents now being considered post-war forgeries, Mayer explains, p 163:
“To date there is no certainty about who gave the order, and when, to install the gas chambers used for the murder of Jews at Auschwitz. As no written command has been located, there is a strong presumption that the order was issued and received orally”
With no written record of a “Final Solution,” and the implausibility of a completely vaporized paper trail, mainstream scholars have had to improvise an explanation for how an extermination directive was disseminated. University of Vermont Professor Raul Hilberg, member of US Holocaust Memorial Council, author of The Destruction of the European Jews, (Holmes & Meyer, New York 1985), was quoted in Newsday, Feb. 23, 1983:
“But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction [of the Jews] not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They [these measures] were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus mind reading by a far-flung [German] bureaucracy.”
Hilberg himself ran into trouble with the authorized version, because he refused to corroborate tales of Jewish rebellion against their Nazi jailers. His group-think theory extended to the Jews themselves, putting emphasis on their acceptance of being exploited as war industry slave labor.
“I had to examine the Jewish tradition of trusting God, princes, laws and contracts […] Ultimately I had to ponder the Jewish calculation that the persecutor would not destroy what he could economically exploit. It was precisely this Jewish strategy that dictated accommodation and precluded resistance.”
That’s where the extermination camp thesis becomes less probable than the work camp. Perhaps the Jews didn’t resist because they were being worked, not gassed. Worked to death, of course, but dying as more a consequence of wartime Germany’s depleting resources, than from a deliberate eradication effort. Evidence is plentiful of the work camps and dead bodies.
And isn’t that the answer to my innocent question? To doubt whether the murder weapon was a pistol or a knife, means calling into question the crime entirely. That’s why revisionists are decried for being “deniers.” While we presume the distinction makes little difference, because clearly a murder was committed regardless, the prosecutor constructing the accusations wants to prove his motive and not another.
There are many details about which historians have begun to disagree. Many of the witness accounts have been proven to be unreliable. Even Elie Wiesel was compelled to reclassified his memoir as a novel. The Holocaust as later generations have come to know it was not as the WWII generation saw it. Even those soldiers who encountered the atrocities themselves.
Professor Hilberg recounts studying at Brooklyn College under Hans Rosenberg, a fellow Jew. Even in the wake of the haunting newsreels of the concentration camps, Hilberg records that Rosenberg remarked in a 1948 lecture:
“The most wicked atrocities perpetrated on a civilian population in modern times occurred during the Napoleonic occupation of Spain.”
I don’t really subscribe to the idea that the Holocaust is diminished by learning that the WWII concentration camp victims died from systemic and despotic abuse, starvation and exhaustion. But those holding the secrets believe that the concept of the Holocaust being the greatest evil perpetrated upon mankind falls apart if cracks are allowed to form in the accepted narrative.
Perhaps the German population, and for that matter, the Catholic Church, did not intercede more vigorously because there was no premeditated extermination program. We can say now that German reinforcements being sent to the Russian Front knew they were being sent to their deaths, but this is only with hindsight.
Is this Bishop Williamson’s interest in revisiting the Holocaust, to rehabilitate the church’s role? I doubt it. The Catholic church cannot escape culpability for its instrumental role in support of the Nazis, guilty of ware crimes and crimes against humanity, initiating a war of aggression being the chief charge at the Nuremberg Trials for example, before even taking into account the concentration camps.
Perhaps the American industrialists and bankers who knew about the camps did not interfere because they understood the camps were for the supply of slave labor. Isn’t this a key enigma of the Holocaust, as we grapple with it? How could we have not known? How could this have been allowed to happen?
Perhaps the signs above the camp gates which read ARBEIT MACHT FREI, work earns freedom, meant what they said. They might have been inescapable ironies, but not the cruel mockery of which we accuse the Germans.
Why would factories like IG Farben and Krupp want to liquidate their valuable cheap workforce? Why would camps meant to exterminate have infirmaries? Why would the wardens treat inmates for illness while simultaneously sending incoming transports to directly to ovens?
Today the popular conscience has been saturated with the ghostly images of the concentration camp victims. How to explain the emaciated inmates discovered by the liberating troops, many of whom could not be saved from dying, even under the administration of the liberators? Dr. Arno J. Mayer concedes this explanation, p. 365
“[…] the whole of Auschwitz was intermittently in the grip of a devastating typhus epidemic. The result was an unspeakable death rate. […] There is a distinction between dying from ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ causes and being killed by shooting, hanging, phenol injection, or gassing. […] from 1942 to 1945, certainly at Auschwitz, but probably overall, more Jews were killed by so-called ‘natural’ causes than by ‘unnatural’ ones.”
This is not to diminish the crime of the Holocaust one iota. The German people, the industrialists, the church, the anti-Semites, are far more guilty because the crime against the Jews was banal and common. It was not devised by agents of unspeakable evil.
Other aspiring genocidal nations and peoples cannot excuse their acts because their methods fall demonstrably below the mythic proportions of the Holocaust.
Something more the War-mongering Freaks can bitch whine and snivel about, Welcome back, David Haddad errr “Mary”
So, since unabashed ChickenHawks like Glenn Beck like to “donate” Tax Deductible stuff like free airtime on their “news” shows, and the USO is begging for money for the families of the troops…
How, then, can the Recruiters claim in other (taxpayer funded) advertisements that the Military is a Good Career?
A few background items, if you will.
Glenn Beck, Chickenhawk, in 2007 participated in a “charity” Auction and one of the articles he donated (For a Tax Break…) a really really butt-ugly painting.
The bidding on it at the point where I tuned in, was 3400 dollars.
That means, for a few minutes of his time, about $10 worth of paint and a $30 canvass, he was getting a Tax Break to the tune of $3400.00
And publicity for his show, which consists almost entirely of licking Government Boot for an hour at a time.
He earns Is GIVEN his pay for Promoting The War and thus the very poverty/slash/hardship conditions the Military Personnel have to endure.
An Establishment Media Whore like that then gets to Pretend that he gives a damn about the Soldiers, their wives and children/slash/widows and orphans…
Gets paid to spew his drivel on the Air and then gets paid again by “donating” something to the USO.
His equally Cowardly Loud-mouthed War-Monger Friend who bought the painting also got to take an equal tax deduction
So far, that was $6800 dollars taken off their taxes,
The Same Taxes Which Form The Basis For The Costs Of The War
So they’re not only getting OTHER People to Fight for their Obscene profit Margins Ooops I was supposed to say “our Freedom”, thus putting the Soldiers and their families in dire financial straits…
They’re Getting Paid To Sell the “necessity” of THEIR War to those of us who DO pay taxes, and thus PAY THEIR BILLS for THEIR War…
On a show that gets Government Subsidies as well,
And make a huge Show of Concern for those poor families of the Soldiers.
The Soldiers who are being aggressively recruited even before they leave high school, whose Parents are being told several times an hour to support the decisions of their sons and daughters Sign The Papers Allowing Their Underage CHILDREN to drop out of school and join the Killing Machine.
Because being an Imperial Storm Trooper is such a Good Economic and Educational Opportunity.
It’s Payday today. because the 1st is on a weekend.
Since the middle of the month Military families have been seeking donations to just feed the kids until the end of the month.
People who get Food Stamps.
That’s not a slur against the families or the soldiers themselves.
The “Welfare Cadillac” Food Stamp Queen (who is invariably depicted as Black, although our Republican “Friend” tells us that the propaganda they put out is not Racist at all in any way, shape or form) Is And Always Was a Mythological Construct.
People don’t get rich off being on welfare.
Although the Right Wing Professional Liars, like for instance Glenn Beck, tell us that they do.
Remember though, in the Information Age, their lies about How Righteous and Noble the War is, how we’re obviously Winning the War, how Everybody in the Army Loves The War, How Great a Career The Army is…
Get shown simultaneously with advertisements begging for relief for their families, ads for the Army recruiting CHILDREN to quit school, give up any chance of a real educational opportunity, and Join The Storm Troopers… because they can’t retain enough of the soldiers who are already in their Glorious Wonderful Marvelous Career to keep fighting a war that was supposedly won 5 years ago.
Excuse me, that last figure is inaccurate… it was 5 1/2 years ago.
I wonder if the AIPAC Anti-Semitic types who post all these long letters that say “blah blah blah Israel is always right blah blah blah you’re ignorant to say otherwise blah blah blah how DARE you criticize people for being Babykillers blah blah blah”
I wonder if they’re getting a tax-break for it, or maybe just making money from the “Defense” Industry which is supplyin’ the (Israeli Puppet) Army with the tools of the Trade?
Or is it
D) All Of The Above.
Pardon, your hypocrisy is showing.
Barack isn’t president yet, Barack is just one man, Israel is handing Barack a fait accompli, Barack can’t buck The Establishment, Oh Poor Barack the Impotent! What can the poor man do?
According to Rasmussen Americans (are) Closely Divided Over Israel’s Gaza Attacks. However, these are not just ‘Israel’s Gaza Attacks, now are they? They are America’s Gaza Attacks, America’s Attacks on Hamas, America’s Attacks on the Palestinians, and that damn Barack Obama is America’s Commander in Chief, now as much as in 2 weeks. So why all this myth making about Barack the Impotent?
It is simply that American liberals don’t want to admit that they voted this in. Tonight I sat at a talk and discussion about the Israeli destruction of Gaza with 14 others, all who voted for Barack the Impotent. They were talking about in 2 weeks the ‘regime change’ supposedly going to occur. What regime change I asked? There is no regime change taking place in 2 weeks. You are making it all up as you go, since this is the same ‘bipartisan’ group of gangsters as before. Let’s not talk about regime change when, in fact, there is none.
How long are American liberals going to play stupid like this? Your guess is as good as mine? The myth gets further defined as Barack the knowledgeable and Decent, Barack the Educated Man of the World. But when it comes to Barack the Man with a Penis; go figure? He don’t have one and is Barack the Impotent now, or all at least for 2 weeks more. Then The Penis of Barack will rise like Jesus Christ after Crucifixion, I guess? Your guess is as good as mine? Until then, Barack can’t do it!
What is it with Americans who want to individualize a Machine of Little … well you know what I mean… who want to indivualize a group of Ivy League-Chicago School Politician Hacksters like the Barack crowd is? Air Force Air Head Cadets! Locked in Lockheed Shits! Barack is the Liberal Impotent made into a Deity of Change here! Or can he? ….the myth goes on and on and on. Can he? Barack, the He Really Wants to Do-Right Guy, Barack the Community Organizer, Barack the Man of Rainbow Color, Barack the Gentle Giant surrounded by Treacherous Dwarfs! Barack the Noble, Barack the Man of One?
Good grief, the Liberal Community can give one the Heebe Jeebies. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has to put up with the suffering America’s moronic pseudo liberal communities help deliver to them. God Bless…. Well God Bless Anybody but US!
If there is a Hell, it will be full of moronic Americans discussing about how Impotent Barack the Impotent is, with Satan looking on in disbelief! Oh Barack! He just can’t do anything yet! He needs more Viagra than even John McCain! After all, John had Sarah but all Barack has is…. well he’s got Hillary! He’s Barack the Impotent Man! No wonder he’s planning to rape Afghanistan yet more. Can the liberals who voted for Barack the Impotent even find the country on a map?
There is an aspect about the Cheyenne Mountain High School drug bust story that most interests me. An insider aught to be able to confirm it: Did the student who narc’d on his druggie friends really have to move –siblings, household and all– straight out of town? That weekend, the rumor goes, so terrified was his/her family of the wrath of the “¡MEXICAN NATIONALS!”
No need to reveal the student’s name, and I’m certainly not going suggest the Xanax-stowaway did anything wrong to break the silence, of apparent consent, on the Cheyenne Black Tar Breakfast Club.
But someone who knew the student’s name, could look up his/her address –in the school directory if the address in unlisted, then go straight to the spot, or talk to the neighbors, or of course consult friends you might have in common, to confirm or debunk the hysteria.
Did Family Xanax pull up and go, moving van and all, to parts unknown, protected by the same White Mountain keep-our-troubles-to-ourselves White Witness Protection Program which kept a lid on its untroubled heroin trendies?
I’d like to know, who is it the family thinks is after them, the so-called “Mexican National” devils? Weren’t the two suppliers arrested? Is there a Mexican drug cartel that must avenge what happened? That must keep rich kid students cow-towed in fear, lest the next frightened Xanax-abuser, think little enough to squeal on the next Mexican foot soldiers to take on the rich-kid-malaise HS gold mine?
Why do I doubt it?
Could it be instead, the other white rich parents of whom the Xanax-parental-gardians are more afraid?
It occurs to me now, thinking of a past acquaintance with another local high school, two in fact: Manitou and Coronado, to name them, that their chief drug supplier, a few years ago, lived in the Cheyenne Mountain school district! I visited his house, actually. It was quite spacious, and his father was in on the action, also ran a chop-shop, as I recall.
Now that’s someone the neighbors would know to fear. Is that guy still around? Probably there’s some kind of expiration date for how long a recent HS grad can hang around school without becoming conspicuous.
Am I the only one who thinks there’s a story here? Violence between dealers is commonplace; are customers also kept terrorized? If User X and family did have to skip out of town, who did they flee? Brown-skinned outsiders? Or white skinned bad boys still here?
It’s one thing for affluent Cheyenne Mountain families to keep mum and take their substance-abuse challenge lumps. It’s another to acquiess to drug use like it’s their child’s rite-of-passage, spelled “right.” I’m not sure they don’t think it’s spelled the same. For some privileged folk, it seems a person’s ability to afford something is the only determinant of whether it’s right. Laws do not apply to freedoms they will not be denied.
And of course, the chief benefit derived from propagating the urban-mythic Family Hightails It Out-of-Town story, is that it reinforces a code of silence. We don’t betray our own.
And it slams shut the barn door. There’s nothing further to talk about, they’re gone. Don’t re-ignite the issue lest you invite the attention of the bogiemen out for revenge.
Bearing False Witness
Worse, to me, might be to let the storytellers lay the whole mess at the feet of the White Mountain non-whites. Cheyenne Mountain households are the same conservatives crying for blood at our southern border. They support harsher measures to stem illegal immigration, yet they rely on the undocumented workforce for their domestics. Those who are rich developers, builders and car dealers hire an enormous share of the local illegals. This disparate attitude is not contradictory. Unforgiving immigration policies keep wages low.
And then the opportunist-hypocrites want to blame their children’s drug problems on the same victims.
Let’s find out the truth to that white-flight story. What good is served –to amplify the potentially false stigma– by remaining un-skeptical about such a salacious rumor?
It’s that time of year again, where fairy tales abound. Ho-Ho-Ho!
America’s fairy fairytale of Biblical proportions is the one about the President guiding a caring capitalism forward to the little American kids. On, Dancer! On, Torturer! On, Sniper! On, Bomber! We’ve got presents of democracy, liberty, and freedom to deliver to you all!
You gotta believe in the God of American capitalism though, otherwise a great horde of locusts will descend on your tribe! And our Almighty President will OK it that we rape your women, kill your first born sons, and then rain down a flood of horror which will awash your lands, and sink all except the aircraft carrier with the American flag! …if you do not believe? The President cares, but you must believe or? … well else!
Moses first brought the fairy tale of the caring Almighty God! Then Paul spread the message of the Almighty God’s son, who cared for those sinners… as long as they believe in him. Otherwise, this gentle man and his father promised an eternal Hell to you.
Today our Almighty caring president promises his caring capitalism will free your souls through the power of your faith in it all. You Must have faith in America’s Biblical fairy tale! Children, sleep! Inaugeration Day comes soon! The President cares, and caring capitalism will be your Almighty Salvation! Onward, Silly Christian soldiers carrying the Cro… no the caring Capitalism forward to the Turks! Ho-Ho-Ho! Seasons Greetings!
Most people can easily conjure the cinematic image of Gestapo officers blocking train passengers, demanding “Your papers please.” That such a scene could ever develop in America, haunts citizens opposed to national identity cards or embedded microchips. But with modern surveillance methods as pervasive as cellphones, perhaps today’s state security services have less need to verify who we are. I’ll assert the US Department of Homeland Security is charged more with making Americans feel the heavy boot print of authoritarianism.
I think that in the wake of 9/11, this nation has indeed mobilized a “papers please” law enforcement policy.
The proof is there in black and white in the Patriot Act; you can see it in the Civil Liberties-free zone which immigration officers have been empowered to enforce to 100 miles inland from our borders; and you can see it at our airports. Last night’s 60-Minutes questioned the punitive aspects of the TSA measures to which today’s airline passengers are subjected. Less surprisingly, CBS also suggested their probable ineffectiveness.
Having just paid a holiday visit to DIA, I was inclined to see more. Yes, this is another holiday post.
Credit where credit is due? It’s no coincidence this is about shoes.
Papieren Bitte
First, I’d like to deconstruct the film mythology, which originated in wartime, from Hollywood Home Front propaganda meant to demonize the Hun. Certainly the trench-coated SS officer, or leather-jacketed Gestapo detective, asking for your documents, cut a villainous figure. But they were, in reality, as out of the ordinary as today’s FBI or CIA agents. Have you ever happened upon a one of those?
More often by far, during WWII, the job of asking for a traveler’s “Legitimacion” was assigned to the gendarmes of the occupied countries, or to the collaborators who’d been deputized. These were ordinary constables and men who otherwise were unfit to serve in combat. Old frumps, maligned and bitter. If you can picture the run-of-the-mill TSA troll, you see where I’m going.
Public Transportation
Where travelers a half-century ago were taking trains, today the public city-to-city lattice is airborne. Today we queue for planes, not trains. And instead of producing our “papers” –I should say, IN ADDITION to producing our papers– we are required to remove our shoes, all sorts of articles, submit to searches, and refrain from carrying certain items, in order to thread the needle that allows us access to public travel. I’m not sure if today’s security screening isn’t the equivalent of the depiction of the 40s silver-screen.
Before you argue that I’m being alarmist, please consider that most Germans during the war, indeed the overwhelming majority of citizens of occupied Europe, had little to fear by being asked for their documents. You or I are not insurgents on the lam, nor aspiring bomb-throwers. We do not fear being sent to Guantanamo.
Indeed, you might remember, the movie heroes who sweated the Nazi checkpoints were always resistance fighters, saboteurs, or escaped Allied prisoners. Today, ask yourself how an enemy of the USA would fare trying to use an airport. If you have become aware now that our US Homeland does not show reticence to torture, or disappear, persons of interest, would modern airport security be any less a terrifying prospect for people who may not be in lockstep with the ever rogue-ideology of the current global administrators?
And so, what was the main purpose of policemen monitoring the trains of occupied Europe? To prevent illegal travel, or to deter the thought of sedition? Both. But those were the days of imperfect intelligence.
Today, we know that even the 9/11 hijackers were tracked well in advance of their boarding at Boston Airport. Since then, we know that intelligence agency Fusion Centers also parse the surveillance data of persons of mere tangential interest. We know that the NSA records all phone calls. We know the telecoms are doing something for which they are very insistent about receiving preemptory immunity.
Potential terrorists/hijackers have everybody on their tail.
The TSA fat bastards are for the rest of us.
Airport Fear-mongering
Do you remember the days when you could linger as you dropped off your loved ones at the airport? You could wait with them, or you could meet them as they walked off the plane. Now you are greeted by concrete barriers at the curb, you can’t help anyone with their bags. America’s airports have become high security zones, unwelcoming to all.
Permit me to interject the observation that there has not been a single domestic airport attack to justify the draconian measures which have impacted American tranquility. We abide being yelled at, for absolutely no reason except the scare-phrase “Remember 9/11.” Remember the Maine? Remember Pearl Harbor? Japanese Internment Camps anyone?
If you are the traveler, you have to strip yourself of dignity before a thick-necked tin-pot. Now airports are even replacing the metal detectors with X-ray gateways. You are required to raise your arms for a virtual strip search, where digital images of your nakedness are reviewed by the airport security. Official TSA statements explain that these digital records go no further than their desks.
You can choose to believe that, or believe that all our faces are being blurred, or that our corresponding identities are not matched with the images.
(A digression on the subject of intelligence files:
Meanwhile, consider that the NSA is recording ALL satellite borne phone calls. International and domestic. They get around the “wire-tapping” restrictions by addressing it as “packet collecting.” To their devices, it’s an altogether new technology, thereby unencumbered by civil right legislation protection.
Our imaginations cannot fathom how spooks can listen to all the world’s satellite calls, but their imaginations know that someday the software will be developed to accomplish that task. Won’t they be kicking themselves later if they hadn’t stored as much as they could of our conversations BEFORE anyone suspected all telephones were eavesdropped upon?
-By the way, did you miss the memo that every cellphone is capable of being an eavesdropping device, even when it’s not engaged in a phone call? Would it be beyond the pale to imagine that if a near infinite number of calls are recorded, another near infinite amount of off-line talk is being aggregated in addition? If you can store more on your iPod than you can read in 100 lifetimes, supercomputer storage can probably lap your imagination by 100 to the 100th, I’m just thinking.)
Respect Authority
Well look at me, I’m only underlining where the DHS is happy to have us all place emphasis. FEAR. The security at today’s airports won’t keep box cutters off of airplanes, but it will keep a citizenry from daydreams of dissent.
So much ado,
And not enough DO? You already know what to do. Respect authority? Disrespect false authority! Take a lead from Comrade al-Zairi, you too can make it about the shoes.
We’ve all of us, you know it, mouthed to ourselves the defiant retort, rehearsed for if and when that imaginary Nazi hits us up for our papers: “Papers? I don’t need to show you no stinkin’ papers!”
From LA, I remember a variant which Hispanics directed at La Migra. They wished.
Anyone WITH papers can defy authority with the full confidence that comes from “I am an American” impunity. But can undocumented immigrants say it? Can Middle-Eastern-looking gentlemen say it? Not hardly.
YOU CAN.
My brave little fantasy insurgent, why not offer that rebel yell to the TSA? Tell them you don’t need to remove your stinkin’ shoes! (Double- entendre unintended.) They won’t let you on the plane, but that’s where beloved Capitalism provides your audience.
Put your courage where your mouth is
Let the airlines hear your rebel yell. “We don’t need your stinkin’ airplane!” If they don’t remove the Beirut decor concrete barriers, if they don’t send the TSA mini tyrants packing, if they don’t let you travel with toiletries of your damn choosing, you’re not going to take their stinkin’ flights.
If they’re not going to let you park up close to the terminal, where you used to be able to park but now those spaces are let out to valet parking outfits, you’re not going to visit their airport. Period.
Is there anywhere that you need to go in a hurry, besides out of the country for a long, long spell?
Drive, it’s still free
If you’re going to stick around, boycott the airlines. Use your car.
As has been demonstrated at Arizona checkpoints –as seen on YouTube– a car and a video camera can get you anywhere unmolested. If you are stopped at an DHS “immigration” checkpoint, you hold the upper hand. You can persist in being let to pass without answering a single question. If they detain you, you have a lawsuit. In your car, you can say with impunity still “I don’t need to show you no stinkin’ papers!”
THE ODYSSEY,
A STAGE VERSION- Greek myth would be no more complicated than JK Rowling, JRR Tolkien, or GRG Lucas, but I suspect that to impress Homer unto modern audiences might have the disagreeable consequence of educating them.
This weekend Colorado College students staged Derek Walcott’s 1992 The Odyssey in the South Theater of the Cornerstone Arts Building. And performed it brilliantly. Every role, every effect, executed with vitality and aplomb.
Except for the Jamaican nursemaid and Aussie shepherd, the CC actors dropped Walcott’s New World islander accents, but their production honored his post imperialism critique.
My favorite sequence depicted Cyclops as an all-seeing 1984 distillation of mortal man’s inclination toward totalitarianism. The Circe episode is nagging me for further reflection, if I’m to imagine that Walcott would not succumb to the traditional Siren/Mermaid/Nymph misogyny.
If you can’t shake the admonition that rational man’s chief torment is woman, you need look for no literary antecedent before Homer.
Obviously, not all that is Greek is instructional, but wouldn’t it serve our education nicely if, instead of the insipid nuances of fictional worlds imagined by scribes steeped in the decay of Western Civilization, our children could commit to their memories the literary plots –no less compelling– which form the building blocks to a greater appreciation of all art?
We told the kids that the Odyssey was Western Civilization’s first sequel. Of course, the Iliad was a lot to have to recap. Not surprisingly, their experience was “the most random ever.” But while I lamented my missed advance opportunity to have brought them up to speed on the gods and heroes of antiquity, our eleven year old noted, of the lines spoken by the mysterious personages: “Everything they said was always about something else!”
Poetry!
OF FURTHER INTEREST:
Creolizing Homer for the stage: Walcott’s The Odyssey, by Robert D. Hamner, Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2001
Playing With Europe: Derek Walcott’s Retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, by Irene Martyniuk, Callaloo 28.1, 2005
A legacy institution of the Gilded Age is the Waldorf=Astoria Hotel. Most of us only know it from the nutty salad, the mysterious Red Velvet Cake recipe, Thousand Island Dressing and Veal Oscar named for the famous maitre d’ hotel. I encountered the book of recipes collected by “Oscar of the Waldorf” and its cover illustration caught my eye. The coachman and carriage don’t look so opulent to us today, but do you recognize a timeless trapping of affluence? There’s nothing else in the picture but the policeman and his nightstick.
We almost dismiss the incongruity of the attendant police officer. That’s because he’s Officer Friendly to us, circa the 1950s egalitarian economic boom, earned post New Deal and post WWII, when law enforcement began to serve and protect the middle class share of the pie. Before those times, whose order did the police enforce?
Could the Waldorf diorama have featured some other occupation at the curb? A newsboy, a shoeshine, or a traffic director? If the cabbie is picking up late night revelers, why not depict a doorman or lamplighter?
If this scene did not include the policeman, he’d be missing.
The Gilded Age of the soaring wealth of bankers and industrialists, of the steel, coal, and rail robber barons, came at the expense of poverty wages for all the rest. The homeless of America’s eastern cities died in the streets, if they crossed the paths of the leisure class at all. As in London, where the bobbies were celebrated for carrying no guns, cops on the beat didn’t need more than a nightstick to beat back beggars and riffraff.
Just as in the Waldorf illustration, the policeman’s nightstick isn’t holstered, it is fingered idly like a baton. We’ve seen it in countless Chaplin, Keaton, and Keystone reels. The policeman’s baton might be carried idly, and animated mindlessly as a clerk might twirl a pencil, but the gyrations telegraphed a swinging function meant to be understood.
Today, a modern financial crisis has finally hit the post industrial era, and unemployment is taking a precipitous plunge. The repercussions for the American middle class are yet unclear to most, their comforts still too tangible to fathom gone. But our modern times have already seen the resurgence of the Rich And Famous, (to even beyond the lunge of our Super-Lotto winners, who always chose the sub-six-figure annuity). Exclusive cars, toy submarines and tickets into space cost multi-millions, but the rich have that money to burn. Common Americans have also watched the armoring of their police, using weapons which offend us, but which protect the security of institutional wealth. Para-military police forces are the natural escalation of the right-to-bear-arms arms-race, the equivalent of nightsticks to quell our social disquiet.
Already aren’t we seeing the police block the public’s way, lest we soil the red carpet of the well-heeled? Aren’t police blocking free speech in public spaces, when the monied media has decided it wants the backdrop to serve their message? Wait until we are gazing covetously upon the gilded extravagances, from the alley side of the gilded wrought iron gate.
Wiki notes:
Thousand Island Dressing came to the Waldorf from the so-named Lake Ontario waterway where New York’s super rich had their summer homes. The $100 recipe for Red Velvet Cake was the urban myth which resurfaced as the $250 Neiman Marcus chocolate chip cookie.
The original Waldorf Hotel was built by an Astor whose middle name was Waldorf, next door to an aunt with whom he was feuding. Later another Astor convinced her to move uptown and replaced her home with a taller hotel named the Astoria. The two luxurious hotels hyphened via the Peacock Alley, inspiring the popular song “Meet me at the hyphen.” In 1931 the landmark was moved to accommodate the Empire State Building, and was purchased in 1949 by Conrad Hilton who added the double-hyphen flourish, completely in the spirit of gilded ornamentation.
COpper, CObalt and COltan are among the precious resources we are sucking from the COngo. Could their names too derive from a common origin? We’re hearing suddenly of horrendous atrocities from there, although the Congolese have been suffering for over a decade. Has excess violence begun to threaten our mineral supply?
Have you heard of Coltan? It’s the rare material used in cell phones and laptops. The Congo is the world’s chief source of Coltan and supplies other invaluable resources to industry, particlarly weapons and electronics. I would have thrown in Diamonds, Uranium and Oil if they’d started with CO. Western industry takes a wealth of mineral resource from impoverished Africa.
Post-colonial Africa is a myth. Or, it’s not what as it sounds. Colonial Africa, self-liberated in the post war era, remains occupied by white man, in the guise of corporations. It’s just the administrators on the ground who’ve changed color. And the multinational corporations dictate a wholly other civilized set of governing principles. No longer need the natives be clothed or educated, for business it’s enough that they be herded, to staff mines and factories, in gulags or slums. The multinational businesses fund ruthless local regimes to maintain instability, the better for extraction industries to rob the land.
‘Instead we hold our breath in awe of a capable man who will surprise us with his resourcefulness.’ No we don’t, Eric.
In this statement that you made, you are trying to reaffirm here what I would call ‘The Myth of The Man’, a myth that is almost Christian religious in its origins and outlook. Barack Obama and Jesus Christ are two myths of omnipotent men that simply beg out for challenge to the myth, not affirmation of them.
In the reincarnated, Barack Obama version of The Myth of The Man, Obama is expected to act God-like just like Jesus,’Son of God’, was once expected to perform miracles. These miracles include rising from the dead, curing the dead, walking on water, and stopping The Empire’s Wars against the actual interests of The Corporate Empire that just put him into its highest office! We are told, as Eric postulates in his comment, to be expecting surprises from this ‘resourceful’ SuperMan, who is godlike in his perfection, expected to rise up from his death-like corporate government bureaucratic surroundings, and expected to perform miracles for the common folk who he has come to rescue from the sins of Power!
The current Myth of The Man depends on all of us to express FAITH, just like over at New Life Church much the same also is asked of Followers. We are asked to suspend judgement by Church Ladies, too. And our very own Reverend MC Thomas is out there shouting that Satan has now been cast out from The Temple of Power! That Fascist Satan is gone he screams! Burn his dead body!
What does all this FAITH, HOPE, sense of Being God’s Messengers in HISTORIC moments imply about the consistency of the on focus message of ‘Not My Tribe’? That there is Myth of Middle Ground’? All this Hoopla for Jesus… no I meant Barack….. shown here, demonstrates religion to me. Political Religiosity, but religious fervor none the less. Hold the snakes in hand and pray for Obama?
OUCH!!!!! You are going to get bit!
I don’t know for sure if the O-man himself bought the food for us, or his campaign people here in town.
Either way it’s a touch of Class that no way in Hell would the McCain people be able to match.
Because Obama, and the people who are working for his campaign, are people who Give a Damn.
None of the StormFront supplied bull-poo about “palling around with terrorists”, none of the “his middle name is Hussein” like that seriously makes three quarters of a measurable amount of difference…
It comes down to People, which is what America the nation is all about.
McCain and Palin, don’t give a damn and they fly their “Don’t-Give-A-Damn'” flag proudly.
They spread the hatred like the toxic waste it truly is and don’t take any responsibility for the consequences.
I didn’t put anything up on Tribe about just yet, nor did I post here about what’s happening to my foot.
Most of the regular Tribe folks have heard about my right foot, about the work accident and all that.
Now, it turns out, the LEFT foot has a similar problem. I guess it’s natural that it slipped under the Medical Radar, what with Texas having neglected the entire damage for 12 years, other than the initial surgeries…
But a bone called the Talus, in my right foot and now, the left one as well, died, necrosed.
That’s another story.
This is about Miss Johnnie, and the Obama Campaign people and Obama himself.
Some of the Right Wing, when they’re not trying to smear and sneer him with the word that’s an insult only to the Right Wing, “Muslim”, like to scream that he’s a Radical Christian.
Let us pause momentarily and meditate upon that… “Radical Christian”…
ok, time’s up.
Hey, he’s famous for quietly being a Radical Christian and allowing his life to be his witness.
If he’s a shill for “No Change At All” I don’t see it.
I wrote to the alfrankenweb forum about it first.
There’s a lot of good back and forth between them and Tribe.
Miss Johnnie is “just another” victim of the Way Things Are…
We’re not remarkable, and that, you see, is the really frightening part.
Our nation has melted down to where only the most extremist Clown Squad could possibly even try to pretend that we have some kind of Leave it to Beaver Because Father Knows Best, Lucy mythical White Suburban utopia.
Just the events of the last year would make your jaw drop to the floor, and …
To a certain mindset, we’re supposed to Just smile, and pretend that everything is Normal.
To the campaign workers, and to Obama himself, I’d like to say Thank you…
To the ones who want us to Vote Fear, Vote Same, Vote Stay-the-course, I’d like to say —k you.
They’ve had quite enough time ruining our nation.
Now, we have to rebuild.
Seems like they let loose an Elephant into our collective living room and he trashed the place, pooped on the floor, drank out of the toilet and punched holes in all the walls.
The cleaning bill alone is going to be monstrous.
Shattering a ‘national mythology’ Shlomo Sand’s book is titled “When and How the Jewish People Was Invented?” and you probably will not find it stacked up on tables for sale in Barnes and Noble or Borders. I don’t expect it to be readily available for Colorado Springs librarian patrons either. Ask for it though.
The Haaretz interview:
Actually, most of your book does not deal with the invention of the Jewish people by modern Jewish nationalism, but rather with the question of where the Jews come from.
Sand: “My initial intention was to take certain kinds of modern historiographic materials and examine how they invented the ‘figment’ of the Jewish people. But when I began to confront the historiographic sources, I suddenly found contradictions. And then that urged me on: I started to work, without knowing where I would end up. I took primary sources and I tried to examine authors’ references in the ancient period – what they wrote about conversion.”
Experts on the history of the Jewish people say you are dealing with subjects about which you have no understanding and are basing yourself on works that you can’t read in the original.
“It is true that I am an historian of France and Europe, and not of the ancient period. I knew that the moment I would start dealing with early periods like these, I would be exposed to scathing criticism by historians who specialize in those areas. But I said to myself that I can’t stay just with modern historiographic material without examining the facts it describes. Had I not done this myself, it would have been necessary to have waited for an entire generation. Had I continued to deal with France, perhaps I would have been given chairs at the university and provincial glory. But I decided to relinquish the glory.”
Inventing the Diaspora
“After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom” – thus states the preamble to the Israeli Declaration of Independence. This is also the quotation that opens the third chapter of Sand’s book, entitled “The Invention of the Diaspora.” Sand argues that the Jewish people’s exile from its land never happened.
“The supreme paradigm of exile was needed in order to construct a long-range memory in which an imagined and exiled nation-race was posited as the direct continuation of ‘the people of the Bible’ that preceded it,” Sand explains. Under the influence of other historians who have dealt with the same issue in recent years, he argues that the exile of the Jewish people is originally a Christian myth that depicted that event as divine punishment imposed on the Jews for having rejected the Christian gospel.
“I started looking in research studies about the exile from the land – a constitutive event in Jewish history, almost like the Holocaust. But to my astonishment I discovered that it has no literature. The reason is that no one exiled the people of the country. The Romans did not exile peoples and they could not have done so even if they had wanted to. They did not have trains and trucks to deport entire populations. That kind of logistics did not exist until the 20th century. From this, in effect, the whole book was born: in the realization that Judaic society was not dispersed and was not exiled.”
If the people was not exiled, are you saying that in fact the real descendants of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah are the Palestinians?
“No population remains pure over a period of thousands of years. But the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendents. The first Zionists, up until the Arab Revolt [1936-9], knew that there had been no exiling, and that the Palestinians were descended from the inhabitants of the land. They knew that farmers don’t leave until they are expelled. Even Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel, wrote in 1929 that, ‘the vast majority of the peasant farmers do not have their origins in the Arab conquerors, but rather, before then, in the Jewish farmers who were numerous and a majority in the building of the land.'”
And how did millions of Jews appear around the Mediterranean Sea?
“The people did not spread, but the Jewish religion spread. Judaism was a converting religion. Contrary to popular opinion, in early Judaism there was a great thirst to convert others. The Hasmoneans were the first to begin to produce large numbers of Jews through mass conversion, under the influence of Hellenism. The conversions between the Hasmonean Revolt and Bar Kochba’s rebellion are what prepared the ground for the subsequent, wide-spread dissemination of Christianity. After the victory of Christianity in the fourth century, the momentum of conversion was stopped in the Christian world, and there was a steep drop in the number of Jews. Presumably many of the Jews who appeared around the Mediterranean became Christians. But then Judaism started to permeate other regions – pagan regions, for example, such as Yemen and North Africa. Had Judaism not continued to advance at that stage and had it not continued to convert people in the pagan world, we would have remained a completely marginal religion, if we survived at all.”
How did you come to the conclusion that the Jews of North Africa were originally Berbers who converted?
“I asked myself how such large Jewish communities appeared in Spain. And then I saw that Tariq ibn Ziyad, the supreme commander of the Muslims who conquered Spain, was a Berber, and most of his soldiers were Berbers. Dahia al-Kahina’s Jewish Berber kingdom had been defeated only 15 years earlier. And the truth is there are a number of Christian sources that say many of the conquerors of Spain were Jewish converts. The deep-rooted source of the large Jewish community in Spain was those Berber soldiers who converted to Judaism.”
Sand argues that the most crucial demographic addition to the Jewish population of the world came in the wake of the conversion of the kingdom of Khazaria – a huge empire that arose in the Middle Ages on the steppes along the Volga River, which at its height ruled over an area that stretched from the Georgia of today to Kiev. In the eighth century, the kings of the Khazars adopted the Jewish religion and made Hebrew the written language of the kingdom. From the 10th century the kingdom weakened; in the 13th century is was utterly defeated by Mongol invaders, and the fate of its Jewish inhabitants remains unclear.
Sand revives the hypothesis, which was already suggested by historians in the 19th and 20th centuries, according to which the Judaized Khazars constituted the main origins of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe.
“At the beginning of the 20th century there is a tremendous concentration of Jews in Eastern Europe – three million Jews in Poland alone,” he says. “The Zionist historiography claims that their origins are in the earlier Jewish community in Germany, but they do not succeed in explaining how a small number of Jews who came from Mainz and Worms could have founded the Yiddish people of Eastern Europe. The Jews of Eastern Europe are a mixture of Khazars and Slavs who were pushed eastward.”
If the Jews of Eastern Europe did not come from Germany, why did they speak Yiddish, which is a Germanic language?
“The Jews were a class of people dependent on the German bourgeoisie in the East, and thus they adopted German words. Here I base myself on the research of linguist Paul Wechsler of Tel Aviv University, who has demonstrated that there is no etymological connection between the German Jewish language of the Middle Ages and Yiddish. As far back as 1828, the Ribal (Rabbi Isaac Ber Levinson) said that the ancient language of the Jews was not Yiddish. Even Ben Zion Dinur, the father of Israeli historiography, was not hesitant about describing the Khazars as the origin of the Jews in Eastern Europe, and describes Khazaria as ‘the mother of the diasporas’ in Eastern Europe. But more or less since 1967, anyone who talks about the Khazars as the ancestors of the Jews of Eastern Europe is considered naive and moonstruck.”
Why do you think the idea of the Khazar origins is so threatening?
“It is clear that the fear is of an undermining of the historic right to the land. The revelation that the Jews are not from Judea would ostensibly knock the legitimacy for our being here out from under us. Since the beginning of the period of decolonization, settlers have no longer been able to say simply: ‘We came, we won and now we are here’ the way the Americans, the whites in South Africa and the Australians said. There is a very deep fear that doubt will be cast on our right to exist.”
Is there no justification for this fear?
“No. I don’t think that the historical myth of the exile and the wanderings is the source of the legitimization for me being here, and therefore I don’t mind believing that I am Khazar in my origins. I am not afraid of the undermining of our existence, because I think that the character of the State of Israel undermines it in a much more serious way. What would constitute the basis for our existence here is not mythological historical right, but rather would be for us to start to establish an open society here of all Israeli citizens.”
In effect you are saying that there is no such thing as a Jewish people.
“I don’t recognize an international people. I recognize ‘the Yiddish people’ that existed in Eastern Europe, which though it is not a nation can be seen as a Yiddishist civilization with a modern popular culture. I think that Jewish nationalism grew up in the context of this ‘Yiddish people.’ I also recognize the existence of an Israeli people, and do not deny its right to sovereignty. But Zionism and also Arab nationalism over the years are not prepared to recognize it.
“From the perspective of Zionism, this country does not belong to its citizens, but rather to the Jewish people. I recognize one definition of a nation: a group of people that wants to live in sovereignty over itself. But most of the Jews in the world have no desire to live in the State of Israel, even though nothing is preventing them from doing so. Therefore, they cannot be seen as a nation.”
What is so dangerous about Jews imagining that they belong to one people? Why is this bad?
“In the Israeli discourse about roots there is a degree of perversion. This is an ethnocentric, biological, genetic discourse. But Israel has no existence as a Jewish state: If Israel does not develop and become an open, multicultural society we will have a Kosovo in the Galilee. The consciousness concerning the right to this place must be more flexible and varied, and if I have contributed with my book to the likelihood that I and my children will be able to live with the others here in this country in a more egalitarian situation – I will have done my bit.
“We must begin to work hard to transform our place into an Israeli republic where ethnic origin, as well as faith, will not be relevant in the eyes of the law. Anyone who is acquainted with the young elites of the Israeli Arab community can see that they will not agree to live in a country that declares it is not theirs. If I were a Palestinian I would rebel against a state like that, but even as an Israeli I am rebelling against it.”
The question is whether for those conclusions you had to go as far as the Kingdom of the Khazars.
“I am not hiding the fact that it is very distressing for me to live in a society in which the nationalist principles that guide it are dangerous, and that this distress has served as a motive in my work. I am a citizen of this country, but I am also a historian and as a historian it is my duty to write history and examine texts. This is what I have done.”
If the myth of Zionism is one of the Jewish people that returned to its land from exile, what will be the myth of the country you envision?
“To my mind, a myth about the future is better than introverted mythologies of the past. For the Americans, and today for the Europeans as well, what justifies the existence of the nation is a future promise of an open, progressive and prosperous society. The Israeli materials do exist, but it is necessary to add, for example, pan-Israeli holidays. To decrease the number of memorial days a bit and to add days that are dedicated to the future. But also, for example, to add an hour in memory of the Nakba [literally, the “catastrophe” – the Palestinian term for what happened when Israel was established], between Memorial Day and Independence Day.”
Yes, there has already been the establishment of ‘a Jewish nation’ and ‘Jewish Homeland’ since the Roman soldiers destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem after its siege in 70 AD.
Most Christian Zionists (like Joseph Biden or Joe Lieberman, for examples) remain rather ignorant of this Jewish history though. The ‘Jewish Homeland’ was established not in Palestine, but in an area between the Black and Caspian seas, just north of what is today’s far Eastern Turkey and far Western Iran. Surprise! Not Palestine at all.
Like the Roman Emperor Constantine who made Christianity today’s dominant religion, Emperor Bulan of Khazaria made Judaism the state religion in this ‘Jewish Nation’ 600 plus years after the sacking of Jerusalem by the Romans. Didn’t know anything about that? Well, it does kind of conflict with today’s mythology around Israel, does it not?
Some might not want you to know much about real Jewish history, including Zionist Jews themselves! See this link for some information about Khazaria The fact that this area of Khazaria was right next to Persia might help explain some of the current President of Iran’s (Ahmadinejad) differing ideas about the origins of the Jewish people, perhaps?
DENVER- Does it look like the COLUMBUS DAY PARADE organizers are practically begging for a comeuppance? Here comes the US cavalry of the American Indian Wars to finish the job Columbus began.
On Columbus Day, the anniversary which has now become a teaching moment about revisiting the Columbus myth, about the holocaust unleashed by the European discovery, conquest and enslavement of North America, isn’t it rather odd to CALL IN THE CALVARY?
I MEAN, a celebration of Italian Americans is one thing. Is Christopher Columbus the only hero they can muster? Why not the Pope? I’m all for diverting Americans from the stereotype of the Sicilian American Sopranos legacy. But make it about pizza, not the frigging conquest of the American West. Columbus’ own diaries confess his exploitive inhumane designs in Hispaniola. White man western expansion was no less genocidal. Who should be celebrating that?
This squad looks like they’re reenacting Colonel Chivington and his raiders freshly back from the Sand Creek Massacre. Perhaps they are retracing the victory lap the soldiers rode in Denver, festooned with the body parts of their victims, women and children, they exhibited as trophies of their victorious raid on the Indian encampment at Sand Creek.
How fitting that for the modern day route, the western revelers drive Hummers. The glorification of the military is not coincidental, nor perhaps is the celebration of the uneducated. 
Do YOU, for example, count Winston Churchill’s WWII England among your ancestors? Here is the invitation to the 2008 parade:
“On Saturday October 11, 2008, at 10:00AM, we will celebrate the American National Holiday which commemorates Columbus’ contribution to the formation of this great nation. It will also remind each one of us of the blood, sweat and tears our ancestors shed so that we might live and enjoy our lives in the land of the free.”
These are the Denver organizers’ own photos of the 2007 parade. In the next you can catch an unedited glimpse of a protester. And what other can that be but a reactionary scowl?
Here’s what those opposed to the Columbus commemoration are putting together.
1. RACE, RESISTANCE AND THE COLUMBIAN LEGACY
Join nationally-known activist Glenn Spagnuolo, co-founder of Re-create 68, for a night of education and dialogue about race in America and resistance to the Columbian Legacy!
When: 5pm Thursday, October 9, 2008
Where: CU Boulder Campus, Hale Hall Room 2402. Columbus Day Resistance March and Rally
The annual protest of the Columbus Day Holiday and the racism that it embodies will begin with a march from Four Winds that ends at the Capitol Building followed by a rally for a better future.
When: March starts at 8 am, Rally at 9am, Saturday, October 11
Where: Start of March is at Four Winds at 5th and Bannock in Denver3. People’s Council
Following the Columbus Day resistance, people will be gathering to organize a new alliance locally that can act as a national vehicle for radicals. Bring your thoughts and cooperative energy. Please come and represent R68.
When: 1pm, Saturday, October 11
Where: The Great Hall at the Iliff School of Theology just past Evans on University Blvd, Denver.4. Student Walk-out on Racism
Whether you are a student or not, join the students of Iliff, CU Denver, CU Boulder and DU as the educate the public about Denver’s hidden racial past on the 101st Anniversary of the Columbus Holiday. There will be a student walk-out, a short rally, followed by a march to locations with a racial history that will end at Civic Center Park.
When: 12 Noon, Monday, October 13
Where: CU Denver’s Auraria Campus, The Plaza Building Lawn
DENVER- Ward Churchill will speak Tues, Oct 7, 12-1pm at DU’s Sturm College of Law, Room 180, on THE MYTH OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM, sponsored by the National Lawyers Guild. Detractors are already raising a stir. They’re not scholars, what stake do they have in repudiating Churchill’s work?
If they are simply cheerleading the Eichmann-remark backlash which led to Churchill’s dismissal, the charges of plagiarism seem to have already been debunked. Churchill’s colleagues have weighed in with their testimony, and leading academics have likewise spoken against the actions taken against him.
Nevertheless, the National Lawyers Guild got some flak for sponsoring this lecture. Here’s a note circulated to its members:
Dear NLG:
I am dismayed that you are sponsoring a talk by Ward Churchill. I do not regard him as a fit spokesperson for the progressive movement. While his firing was undoubtedly motivated by the opprobrium engendered by his outrageous and ill-considered comparison of the people in the World Trade Center to Adolf Eichmann, the grounds cited by the University of Colorado for his firing are plagiarism, a serious breach of academic ethics. Churchill is a fourth-rate thinker, he should not have been granted a doctoral degree in the first place, and he should not now be able to peddle his mediocre cant on the lecture circuit — why are you enabling him to do so, and why do imagine that he is qualified to address the issue of academic freedom in general? It is clear that his comments were not made pursuant to his work as an academic, so whether his firing was justified or not, his case is hardly exemplary of the infringement of academic freedom. I do not plan to attend.
I’ll withhold the idiot’s name. But let’s look into what the email author did not, before opening his trap to parrot the usual disinfo talking points. From Tom Mayer, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado at Boulder:
The research misconduct charges against Ward Churchill are of two general kinds: charges of faulty research and charges of plagiarism. The faulty research accusations have been largely discredited through the efforts of professors Eric Cheyfitz, Michael Yellow Bird, David Stannard, Huanani-Kay Trask, James Craven, Ruth Hsu, and others. These independent scholars, all of whom are intimately familiar with Native American history and culture, have shown that the Report of the Investigative Committee (henceforth called Report) finding Churchill guilty of research misconduct contains numerous errors of omission and commission. The Report improperly converts legitimate scholarly controversies into indictments of the positions taken by Professor Churchill.
…
Procedural fairness in modern jurisprudence requires that accusation, formal charging, decisions about evidence, and imposition of penalties should be clearly separated. This has not happened in the case of Ward Churchill. The CU administration, usually in the person of Provost Philip DiStefano, has functioned as Churchill’s accuser, grand jury, tribunal selector, and sentencing judge. This concatenation of roles makes it easy for political motivations to penetrate the process of adjudication. While a charade of academic due process has been maintained, the treatment of Ward Churchill strongly resembles a political lynching. The plagiarism charges against Professor Churchill are superannuated, unproven, substantively inconsequential, and either wrongheaded or misdirected. His reputation as a scholar has suffered egregiously and unjustifiably as a consequence.
A number of academic luminaries published this May 2007 advert in the NYT Review of Books: An Open Letter Calling on the University of Colorado to Reverse its Recommendation to Dismiss Professor Ward Churchill. An excerpt:
The relentless pursuit of and punitive approach of the University of Colorado at Boulder to Professor Ward Churchill is a revealing instance of the ethos that is currently threatening academic freedom. The voice of the university and intellectual community needs to be heard strongly and unequivocally in defense of dissent and critical thinking. And one concrete expression of such a resolve is to oppose the recommended dismiss Ward Churchill from his position as a senior tenured faculty member.
…
Without nurturing critical thought, learning tends toward the sterile and fails to challenge inquiring minds. For this reason alone, it is crucial that we who belong to the academic community join together to protect those who are the targets of repressive tactics, whether or not we agree with the ideas or expressive metaphors relied upon by a particular individual.
Signed by:
Derrick Bell, Visiting Professor of Law, New York Univ. School of Law
Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Juan Cole, University of Michigan
Drucilla Cornell, Rutgers University
Richard Delgado, University Distinguished Professor of Law, and Derrick Bell Fellow, University of Pittsburgh
Richard Falk, Milbank Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University; Visiting Distinguished Professor (since 2002), Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
Irene Gendzier, Boston University
Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies; Director – Middle East Institute, Columbia University
Mahmood Mamdani, Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and Anthropology, Columbia University
Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar, Department of Sociology, Yale University
Howard Zinn, professor emeritus, Boston University
When I was making a cage for my pet Guinea Pig, I used crates from an Army dump in Ft Bliss Texas. Had the Red Cross prominently displayed, and the logo:
See, when I was in Boy Scouts, JROTC, Basic Training and Tech School, they kept telling me that the ChinkyGooks (That would be “Asians” to those of us in the More Normal World) had a “paranoid crazy Conspiracy Theory” that American Military would ship Munitions disguised as Medical supplies, and told us that U.S. Army Medics would take the Red Cross off their various uniform parts in order to not be hit by them thar Gawdless Damn Gook Snipers…
Well, apparently, there is a source for this legend.
That lettering says in Mandarin Chinese,
“Red Cross Brand Military Grade Extra Dynamite- 1949”
Apparently, the Chinese were intimately acquainted with the “tricks of the trade” and that dynamite would only have been good during the Korean Conflict which we wound up losing.
I had a friend who speaks Chinese do the translation for me.
Any of y’all who don’t happen to speak or READ Chinese would have thought the package said “Medical Supplies” or something similar, just because of the Red Cross proudly displayed.
And upon finding out that it wasn’t, you would be righteously pissed and never trust anything labelled with a Red Cross again…
But my friend who does the Chinese, ummm… he translated it INTO Chinese for the purposes of this demonstration.
I did mention that I got the crates in question from a UNITED STATES ARMY DUMP, right?
Why is it that people who want to re-investigate the official 9/11 account are thought to be dragging their heels in the past, but publishing industry flag-wavers can trot out the orthodox 9/11 dogma every election cycle to repave America’s jack-boot stay-the-course resolve?
This week it’s Firefight, a book about the firefighting aspect of the still-veiled 9/11 attack on the Pentagon which destroyed Department of Defense offices which contained, of all darned things, their budget data. NPR’s Fresh Air featured an interview of the Firestorm co-authors, one of them a volunteer firefighter and Iraq veteran, with nary a question about the peculiarities of the Pentagon disaster, but plenty of evocative details. Jet fuel, plenty of it, spreading all over the roof, etc, etc. with nothing of bodies, aircraft parts, or unbroken glass, un-scorched lawns, no etcetera.
If I was a too-devious-for-my-own-good Neocon stink-tank thinkee at Presidio Press, I’d concentrate on a detail to make this story recall the audience’s own false-memory of the event. Being so clever I’d know that the most powerful memory trigger is smell. But how to reference a smell if everyone’s experience was primarily through television visuals -not even that, actually? Perhaps the suggestive power of radio could evoke the illusion of smell if enough radio land characters were to belabor its significance…
For the Pentagon story in Firefight, that detail would be “horse hair” in the ceiling insulation. Not only was this apparently a striking memory for the firefighters, but interviewer Terry Gross reaffirmed that America’s 2001 media audience had fixated on the curious detail as well. Had you?
Oddly today the subject didn’t lead to explanations about the use of horse hair insulation, or the impediment it might have created for firefighting. Nope, just the smell. On top, added the co-author, of the smell of all that jet-fuel don’t you know. Of course.
They’re hoping for our sense of smell-memory to kick in, because of course our sight-memory wasn’t there either. We have only print-news accounts to go by, the still photos themselves dispute the official story.
But there was video we didn’t see, and haven’t yet seen.
The book begins with a reference to the adjacent Citgo gas station, but not its cameras. Why did federal agents immediately confiscate all security camera video that had captured the incident and subsequently release only a couple seconds of footage that actually shows nothing? If an American readership is sought for this new book, by guys who’ve taken this long to do the research, would there be no interest in answering the predominant curiosity out there? Was it a jet that pierced the Pentagon?
The Firefight book is re-writing the emerging 9/11 narrative, re-branding, re-imprinting the 9/11 mythology for the election year John McCain Neocon reelection.
The reason for the timing of this coincidental to election year publication was that one of the authors was waylaid by a couple deployments to Iraq. Wonderful! An alibi AND a not-unsubtle tying of 9/11 to Iraq. Host Terry Gross preempted listener skepticism by asking what the soldier author thought of what’s been shown to be a debunked linking of Saddam Hussein to 9/11. His answer of course, a soldier’s duty to his nation’s call, regardless the leadership’s methods.
Throw in the author’s IED head-trauma injury that has left his memory impaired. Now he’s a wounded vet, deserving of our patronage, and his personally responsibility to these 9/11 untruths will be inoculated from the eventual debunking of this treasonous 9/11 lie.
What a thoroughly wrapped package! Unfortunately for the clever stinkers a not inconsiderable portion of the American public believe the Pentagon was hit by a missile, and their smell-memory is of fish.
peter sprunger-froese writes: Comrades. . .
Without belittling the positives of our parade experience, Saturday’s potluck discussion of it suggests to me we are in danger of overlooking important negatives. Irony beckons us to see at best a “mixed bag” in our part of the parade. Otherwise our own learning stops and history becomes meaningless. Details aside, over-arching and most troubling in my mind was the presence of the “Honor the troops…” banner on each side of the bus. Not wanting to be an individualistic sourpuss on our group, i continued to walk, yet how tempting it was to exit. As soon as i saw the banner i knew our peace message would be as non-controversial and without substance as that of the billions in this world who imagine peace and national primary loyalties can stand side by side.
That says not merely that everybody is for peace, including every tyrant there is or ever was. Logically –because of the nature of any provincialistic loyalty– that is also to say it is somehow valid to have peace on our terms, even at the expense of someone else’s life. In the U.S. this patriotic mindset has reached proportions far exceeding all other countries precisely because of its empire status. It has become the equivalent of narcissistic adolescents desperately scampering for an identity by comparing each other, using the familiar”I’m better than you” game. The near-sacrosanct role that U.S. national documents often play for us is but one example of this self-righteous comparing syndrome. Whatever their relative value, these documents’ inherently non-universal character and focus continue to be a severe blinding force for even the progressive segment of the U.S. public.
Yes, i know people’s typical reaction to this: peace is a stepping stone process; we must begin where people are at so as to avoid being offensive; therefore leave national symbolism intact. My immediate question to this liberalism, as applied to Saturday is, at what point does the quest for mainstream respectability contradict our message? Look, eg, at the word “Honor” on our banner. Core to its meaning in Saturday’s context was that we endorse, support and give moral approval to the troops’ behavior! So i ask, did we forget that troops are human, that regardless of how extensive the “economic draft” is, they are choice-capable human beings? They are fully capable of and responsible for applying moral scrutiny to the question of signing up for Uncle Sam. If we believe there are options –with our assistance as the public– for our “lazy bum” friends to get jobs and contribute to society, the same perspective surely applies to those considering the military. The question then becomes, why didn’t the banner instead say something true to who i believe we are: “Support the troops who dissent;” “Ware is never the answer;” “Convert the troops to non-violence;” or –in line with the primacy of world citizenship that the peace position inherently requires– “Stop the genocide of our Iraqi sisters and brothers.” You obviously could come up with more and better messages.
Correct me if i’m wrong… I think we were so “caught off guard” in being asked by officialdom to be in the parade this year that we quite forgot to discriminate between patriotic peace and universal, or true peace. The patriotic peace on our banner represents the always fictional “peace through violence!” It’s the Constantinian, Brady Boyd type of peace at the New Life Church that relies ultimately on violent security guards to “protect” their congregation. It’s the kind of peace that gains our mayor’s and the rest of officialdom’s approval. At last year’s press conference we stood up to this mindset. We declared that neither the Justice and Peace Commission (J&P) nor the Bookman broke any parade rules –nor intended to– and that the parade in fact contained myriad other social issues besides ours. This year, once we learned social issues would be accepted, we apparently became so compliant with parade organizers and the police as to seem apologetic for last year and for our non-patriotic peace stance.
First, we apparently forgot the injustice behind the Bookman’s not being invited, but only the J&P, to participate in the parade. The Bookman was as much maligned by the public and by officialdom last year as was the J&P. The matter, i assume, could have been easily settled with an upfront meeting of the permit issuers and representatives of our two entries.
Second, somehow –whether through the courtroom of a largely conservative public opinion and/or through officialdom’s court– we got derailed from our earlier sense of injustice by the police at last year’s parade. Meetings with them seem not to have reminded them that their professional ethics contain no valid reason or circumstance whatsoever that could justify their behavior –whether in the treatment of six of our parade friends, or more generally of our many mentally ill, often obstreperous and inebriated friends.
To prevent potential misunderstanding here, let me footnote, i am not necessarily expecting an official apology (tho perhaps City Councilman Larry Small did?) i assume –with probably most of you– that officialdom’s invitation for at least the J&P to participate in the parade, was an “olive branch,” an oblique, face-saving attempt to apologize and “make peace” with us. In the same way Mayor Rivera’s informally greeting us on Saturday can possibly be understood as a closeted apology for his claim last year that the police acted appropriately. We know that apologies, especially among leaders of countries, systems, traditions and ideologies are quite in vogue today. They generally follow delay, the usual fate of inconvenient truths (whenever outright concealment or else “psychological distancing” is impossible). That is, they mostly emerge when wrongs are already publicly abhorred and impossible to avoid.
In our case, whether or not to give local officialdom the “apologetic benefit of the doubt” at this point is discussable, in my opinion, as long as it does not amount simply to an atrophied “wishing the problem away” on our part. More critical in the long run, I believe, is that our nonviolent witness keep the human concern before the system. Partly that means, i believe, for us to promote accountability, that which comes not through coercion tactics, but through forthright truth-telling, remembering and forgiving. It is a step against the system’s domination, impersonalization, and patriotic self-righteousness. i can well imagine, with such violent persistence, that individuals –eg, police officer Paladino– can, just like anybody else in this world, come forth voluntarily to apologize, receive forgiveness from us, recognize the error of his and the system’s ways, and even begin working for either improved systemic change or else to withdraw from policing employment out of reasons of an enlarged conscience.
Meanwhile, none of this dare demure the fact that empires can’t be humble. Whether old or current, the are remarkably callous in the exercising of their power, and equally paranoid about any challenges to it. We probably all recall, almost fatuously were it not so real and sad, when a recent debate ran in the local Independent about a system possibly requiring police officers to wear patriotic yellow ribbons on their cruisers. (Whatever sliver remains of the First Amendment today actually ended that controversy in our favor.) I say this just to reinforce how deeply the imperial monster is tied also to the police office. Behind their facade of being servants to the public and “interested in working more with local groups,” the officers in fact are and must be declared our natural adversaries. Why? Their vows of commitment are to a value-system in which violence is the only trusted bottom line of effective problem solving (the myth of redemptive violence). The officers are required to be spies ad control-freaks for the empire. i’ve heard they’ve already asked what the J&P has “up its sleeve” for the Democratic Convention in Denver in August.
If we fail to identify the police officers as first representing a violent system, we will get snared by a “wold in sheep’s clothing.” In that subtle trap we’ll then get enticed to volunteer information to them and even request their permission for our planned protests. The net effect becomes a nearly unconscious Faustian pact on our part with what our “Honor the troops” banner symbolizes: a violence-driven peace commitment unable to discriminate between police and soldiers as individuals versus their role as robotic capitulators to a system we inherently oppose.
The nonviolent alternative we try to be and teach is troubling to this system. Partly that is because our analysis of it runs far beyond that offered by its administration or the myopia of partisan politics. More specifically, the system considers violence and control pivotal to its existence. Hence we are perceived as a type of loose cannon. That is because, contrary to our banner’s message, we don’t even believe in their system; the spirit of nonviolence defies any ultimate control mechanisms and seeks no security in any such systems as long as they are limited, flawed and made unreliable by their violence. Part of the consequence of this counter-position, from the system’s standpoint, as we noted, is the latter’s embarrassing difficulty projecting an apology to a group like ours. For ourselves, an obvious consequence of our position is that we must expect ostracism –not ontologically but sociologically. That means for us not withdrawal but ongoing critical engagement of the system, yet without ever expecting respectability for it. Kindred spirits from yesteryear have taught us the viability of such a road because deep convictions, when sincerely owned, have a way of preservation and growth not dependent on popular palatability.
With this in mind, it concerns me less (if I heard correctly), that some “Pied Piper” pressure probably underlay the presence of the two patriotic banners on the bus. Much more of a concern is how it happened. Not aware how the planning meetings somehow came to accept this (my apology for having been able to attend only one), i ask now: Was it a vote that decided our banners? Was it timidity on the part of some people at the meetings who i;m sure would have raised my concern too? Was it an inadvertent over-ruling of a dissenting perspective? Was it “ideological sloppiness” resulting from the weight of logistical detail in our parade preparation process? Was it insufficient overlap of meeting attenders? Was it the sway of postmodernism’s “diversity and tolerance” absolutism? Was it bits and pieces of all of the above?
If those banners were somehow the unintended conclusion of the meetings, let’s find ways to improve our collective thinking and planning. If they were intended, then i must at least cast my contrary vote now, belatedly: whether we come to our peace stance from a secular or religious grounding, i can se any and all construals of patriotic peace only as fundamentally contradictory. The non-negotiable first premise of peace –in both the educational and action components of the J&P– is surely the well-being of all human beings as equal agents of life on this beautiful, needy planet. Anything less mires us into a provincial loyalty, a tribalism. i implore us to disown this civil religion because its commitment –as our banners symbolized to the mainstream (part of who we seek to communicate with)– is an unambiguous loyalty first to nation state. Overall, the banner controversy reminds us that we are unavoidably all creatures of language. Therefore, according to my complaint here, attaching anything other than universalist-connoting words and symbolism to the peace message is not only its dilution but its negation; it’s to say the call and respect of the status quo is priority. i know we know ad can do better.