Tag Archives: Mythology

What Does Democracy Look Like? Not likely the Old Testament Thank You

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I attended Occupy Denver’s forum “What Does Democracy Look Like?” this weekend to hear activist scholars of considerable repute throw in their two cents. The first day was a splendid gathering, except where a curated discussion of intentional community lapsed into theology. Yes, a distillation of mostly white reform literature (Fanon was dismissed as wayward) yielded three steps for The Way Forward: Egypt, Exodus and the Promised Land. Yep.

By which he meant: 1) Recognize your enslavement, 2) have the courage to leave all for an uncertain fate in the desert, and 3) seek/develop/discover your own promised land.

Even as metaphor it’s embarassing. Enlightened salvation from Old Testament mythology? No thank you, and for that matter, up yours! Unfortunately the language I used was less restrained, but his religious offensiveness had been compounding. He’d begun his presentation admonishing listeners that transformation begins with the self and so he’d already unmasked himself as spiritual. Worse, a monotheist.

Egypt: I’ll come back to “systems of oppression” in a moment.

The Exodus: a myth, it didn’t happen, even Hebrew scholars now agree with the historical and archeological records.

As to the Promised Land: that was a real estate scheme to backdate a deed, offered as divinely conceived proof of landlordship. The same title is being waived around to dispossess Palestinians today.

But really, isn’t the exodus-to-promised-land malarkey at the very foundation of Western Civilization’s expansion problem?! Are we really all entitled to virgin land? As if earth hasn’t been continuously and fully inhabited since before agrarian civilization, before monotheism was conceived to impose inequity, and justify slave-wages, interest and rent. The craddle of exploitation, that was Egypt.

But can we run from Egypt? The remedy staring us in the face, from which common men are deliberatly destracted, conspiring to emancipate Egypt, is to rid ourselves of the oppressor sociopaths. In practical terms understood more clearly by the better educated before us, we must strangle Egypt’s kings with the entrails of its priests.

I don’t care how academic your garb, when you tell your flock to reapply themselves to the sacred, and your “sacred” is biblical, supposing to transcend nature, you’re a priest.

Thank you WDDLL organizers but I do not go to church and I resent when devious means are employed to bring it to me. Actually those priests are the worst, they’re missionaries! If we’ve learned one thing as we discuss mankind’s break from his mille millenia of sustainable existance, resist the colonizer. Conquored peoples ourselves, we can only wish that indigenous peoples could have given Western missionaries the reception they deserved, and it’s no less true today: fire.

Alas as a result I heard a number of attendees today praise their faith. To each his own, but unhelpful. If you have to evangelize you’re a liability because nonsense is infectuous, especially as education levels recede. Can others entrust you with the battleplan while you commune with the adversary?

There’s a wonderful scene in AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD, Werner Herzog’s dramatic depiction of conquistadors wreaking havoc in the Amazon. Following a coup among the greedy Spaniards, the wife of the abruptly deposed leader appeals to the mission’s priest, as her last resort to restore order. The priest, her ally only moments before, turns on her thus: “Her ladyship must know that the church always stands on the side of the strong.”

Rogue vigilante Chris Dorner burned at the stake by angry hooded white men

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Tuning in to developments with fugitive cop-killer Chris Dorner in Big Bear on Tuesday, I half expected a televised denouement like Fahrenheit 451, where impatient viewers were given a contrived final scene, fitting the short arc of the average attention span for corporate media fodder. As I recall, that renegade fireman watched his pursuers stage his capture/demise, because authorities favored truncating a felon-on-the-lam narrative lest it generate a deviant hopeful following; it didn’t matter if the criminal really escaped. Could Ray Bradbury have envisioned the expectations which reality TV has created to satiate real blood lust?

No doubt Bradbury foresaw the ferocity with which a vengeful police state would immolate their one-man insurgent, with a compliant media averting their cameras so American viewers didn’t witness another Waco.

Americans should be attuned to these out of sight infernos, all our wars for example. Except that we know Dorner was set aflame with an paramilitary incendiary device dubbed “the burner”, this is what our extrajudicial executions look like via drones. Only last week news junkies were treated to the legal argument which the USG made to justify killing untried suspects, even US citizens. A if international law differentiated among infidels. One man’s infidel may be another’s exemplar, but he’s every government’s infidel.

So Chris Dorner had snapped. His manifesto, rambling only as much as those were his parting words, Dorner a Falling Down avenger who knew there would be no Hollywood ending. But Dorner had bought into the Rambo Army-of-One mythology. No disrespect intended toward Dorner’s feat, but elite military training proved more of a dud than a fighting machine, did it? What a laugh that American forces deign to train Afghan recruits. Any one mujahideen is likely the equivalent of a high-capacity magazine clip of US special forces in their underwear. But it’s likely authorities will never reveal Dorner’s actual superhuman achievement. He knew what he was up against, and now so do we. The crooked police machine has proven to be worse than Dorner’s complaints. Perhaps that was meant to be the audience takeaway. We didn’t get to see Chris Dorner burn at the stake, but we sure as hell felt the heat.

Oops. McDonalds shill Ryan Lochte says he ate sponsor’s food in Beijing, won fewer medals.

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Literally, Ryan Lochte scored his piece of silver at the 2012 London Games for endorsing McDonalds’ unolympian crap-food. But in London Lochte waited until after his competitive events to “go to McDonalds”. His fellow shill Michael Phelps added a vicarious, thus safer, third person endorsement, as one might exclaim “He’s going to Disneyland”. At the 2008 games in Beijing, Lochte purports to have eaten the official sponsor’s crap “for breakfast, lunch and dinner over 10 days” but came away with one less medal. Lochte didn’t see SUPERSIZE ME to know his fast food mythology has already been debunked.

Did Kyle Lawrence represent Occupy CS, as its attention-hangers-on assert?

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Kyle LawrenceCOLO. SPRINGS– Poor Kyle. Not only is the newly suspected-arsonist in a hospital burn unit with third degree burns, but his until-recent colleagues are now laughing at his clumsiness and are belittling his motives. “What did his vandalism accomplish?” –his advice-givers ask, as if sensing a teaching-moment for their Youtube viewers. Well, if Kyle Lawrence INTENDED to burn down a civic justice building, as his cohort alleges, he accomplished THAT. You can’t take that away from him, you polemically-challenged pedants!

But my ire has more to do with why you attention-divas rushed out with public musings at all, drawing the media’s attention to Kyle’s participation with the early Occupy gathering in Acacia Park. Kyle Lawrence, age 22, passed through what became Occupy Colorado Springs like many a disaffected outcast. He carried no responsibility as founder, organizer or strategist, and as it turned out, bore most resemblance to the many itinerants with criminal records that abound in homeless populations. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but of course the local media are going to revel in associating lawbreakers with OCS. Why be the direct conduit?

Would the local media have made the Kyle Lawrence connection on its own? Maybe. But certainly not, I’ll allege, with the bells and whistles provided by people pretending to have the inside dirt on Occupy. You’ve insinuated that other occupiers harbor felonious intentions, pretending that you left OCS as a result. What self-aggrandizing poppycock! Can you be both insiders and outsiders? Begone then, you cretinous sound-backbiters!

Presuming you thought your were stepping up to some moral obligation, I’ll ask this: Do spokespeople for OCS need to make a public statement repudiating Kyle Lawrence’s arson? That’s certainly a local strain of the nonviolence pedagogical virus. In my opinion, absolutely not. The act Kyle committed was a crime — what’s that got to do with Occupy? OCS doesn’t condone crime. To address it implies that crime bears some relation to OCS actions. It doesn’t. Who is held to be in favor of rape, robbery or murder just because they don’t publicly repudiate it? That’s nonsense.

Repudiating anti-societal behavior is a trap, actually, to extract the menace from protest movements. Get a disgruntled populace to repudiate all forms of self defense and they’ll police themselves. To ineffectualness, ideally. Mass demonstrations aren’t met by riot police in order to prevent riots, the deployment of police is meant as a deterrent to the people’s will to assemble. Our freedom of assembly is guaranteed by right because our landlords will constantly scheme to ensure we not practice it. Demonstrations large enough, and giving off an air of sufficient stamina, are what it takes to effect government policy. Toothless crowds, not at all.

This differential is quite obviously seen in the abundant effort to keep occupiers from using tents. Daily protests don’t gather steam. Occupations threaten to give them momentum.

Oh, famously –I think mythically– toothless determination can combat segregation, but it’s never produced regime change or any reform having to do with money, especially at the top. What was desegregation but a privilege which one lower class was forced to relinquish to another? Unfortunately the MLK mythology has been used very successfully to inoculate modern activism. Popular protest has been getting nowhere ever since MLK. Coincidence?

So no repudiation of Kyle Lawrence, on principle. OCS is law abiding and like anyone, presumed innocent until proven guilty. OCS has never advocated violence or lawbreaking, end of story. From an effective activism standpoint, it’s important to remember the St Paul Principles, which advise activists not to criticize the tactics chosen by others. It’s obvious to see why nonviolence zealots condemn the St Paul Principles.

Should Kyle’s actions be addressed? Not as yet, they’re alleged, first of all, and second, it’s hearsay. But if we are to believe Kyle’s accomplice, and before accounting for drunkenness, apparently the act of burning the Green Mountain Falls city building was a deliberate act of protest, misguided whatever, yada yada, but it wasn’t teenage vandalism, burglary or insurance fraud.

If Kyle and his accomplice are found guilty, as the crime so far is understood, it was a politically motivated crime and they will be political prisoners. A menace to society, yes, candidates for incarceration and rehabilitation, lamentably yes, but moral degenerates? Hardly. Make fun of them if you want, but their crime was idealism.

We live among gods and demigods

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I know a someone who’s studying Greek mythology. He isn’t very impressed and told me so, probably baiting me. He fixed me in the eye and said “Put it this way, I’m not going to care about it in college.” It was all I could muster to reply “Maybe.” I feigned not being sure myself, which was puzzling, telling him that he would find that Greek Gods had an odd habit of popping up in almost every academic discipline, especially Western literature, as if that would have mattered to him. Then I made a bet that the names of gods had come up in his favorite reads, Calvin and Hobbes and the Far Side. Nope he said. He wouldn’t have noticed, his mother chimed in, if he didn’t know them.

If he wasn’t going to do it, I thought I’d write his paper.

I thought about how content I felt having coaxed he and his siblings through attending a staged Odyssey, aided by a large and embarrassingly aromatic bag of m&ms. Surely Odysseus in the flesh was a head start I didn’t have. And I thought about how to have explained the gods further. They were more than themed superheroes, they were Gods. Do you capitalize gods in the plural? We spell it He, but not Them. Do we have their like in the Virgin of Guadalupe or St. Francis of Assisi? The Saints I guess, were not long ago role models: St. Bernadette, St. Joan, St. Barts (just kidding), St. Nick.

Of what import gods? As goes God, so too The Gods?

How do you explain the meaning of the classic gods, their relevance to Greek and Roman lives, in this age of monotheism? We’re not even that, we believe in a plurality of single gods. The best of us tolerate all, but believe that in their multitude of identities we’re only talking about one. A singular omniscient deity would have been strange to the Greeks, just as a committee of squabbling immortals would seem horribly inutilitarian to us.

My quandary extended some because in actuality monotheism was a framework I was imposing. In a single boomer generation, most of us now inhabit a secular universe, where religion is mostly lipservice to tradition. We may or may not talk to our consciences, God resides in us yada yada, but for the practical purpose of talking about God or gods, it’s academic.

So what’s the difference, one god or three, I’m thinking of the holy trinity, or a last supper full, or a whole class of 300 BC, many of whom are no longer on speaking terms? Then it occurred to me that today’s secular ungodly society probably resembles that of the Romans or Greeks more than I thought. We’re an empire, as they, decaying into unholy fetishes. We’re post-sacrilegious decadence. And we’ve gone this way before: I’m thinking of the gladiators and slavery, indifference to inhumanity and carnality, form over function and spectacle.

Our consumer culture is the golden calf and very likely Apollo’s temple is a brick and mortar edifice –alright marble and stone– and it’s consulted for oracles. And specialist gods live side by side with us, they on the red carpet. Who are our role models, the vocational enthusiasts to whom we whisper private prayers, but our celebrities? Not gods of archery maybe, but gods of tennis and cycling, go without saying. Their mortality is inconsequential, because their trademarks are immortal. How tangible the Roman gods and demi-gods, their dalliances and bastard progeny, do seem now.

We may have jettisoned Nietzsche’s dead God, but lost none of our weak nature. We do still worship godly personages, except they rise from among us, from our perceived meritocracy. I’ve no doubt genetics is about to confirm that only a few humans are ordained to greatness, affirming our tribal yearning to celebrate blood ties and royal lineage. Soon enough we’ll designate our betters as a superior genus, ourselves only lowly servants content to bask in their spirit-enriching glow.

We do it already, we attend concerts, keep up on the tabloids, wait eagerly for their anointed tweets. We fashion our own ambitions after the super stars of our particular interests. Could that have been the extent of the Roman adulation for their mythic ancestors?

Might Roman society have grown to such decay that the living celebrities walked in the shadow of their unblemished cousins immortal? I’m thinking of the difference between Elvis and Tom Cruise, or between Marilyn and Madonna. The big gods died young. The larger-than-life who were unexpired were the living gods who saw the flame of their lifetime extinguished with entropy.

Of course, how to explain the protracted legacy of gods like that? Did there follow such a dearth of unexceptional humanity, judging through the filter of the Dark Ages and prism of the Enlightenment, that every cultural reference can only point back before the Greeks?

How would you explain today why James Dean or Salvador Dali should be remembered into perpetuity? Won’t future generations have their own Formerly-know-as-Princes and Marx Brothers Stooges for masses to hold in reverence?

The truth is no. Anomalies like Einstein and Mozart aside in the mortal hierarchies, the archetypal heroes of Western mankind’s understanding of his social self, established themselves during civilization’s formative years. Just as Jesus and Co emerged from proximate centuries, so did introspective man have a stone age during which the character range of his character was cast in stone. In theory.

Therefore, yes, the classical gods are for us to study, as we would metallurgy or farming. Lest we inhabit only the now, with Parises of Ashton Kutcher and Dianas of Sarah Jessica Parker.

Papieren Bitte? Just your shoes please

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mens shoesMost 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!”

Shlomo Sand and shattering a national mythology

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Shlomo SandShattering 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.”

The Jewish Nation

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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.
khazaria kingdom

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?

Election year 9/11 Kool-aid inoculation

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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?
Pentagon hit by something smaller than a jet plane

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.

The democracy that just isn’t

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One of the pillars of US mythology is that the US is the epitome and embodiment of evolutionary democracy. From ancient Greece to us. It is a belief that is more embedded in most Americans’ souls deeper than US believers’ Christianity is. It is the foundation of our country’s recidivistic nationalism, in fact. Such a pure and developed democracy makes us superior, goes the mythology.

All very pretty a picture, except the democracy just isn’t there. Money runs the USA show, and money is the antithesis of democracy and always has been. Few have big money, yet big money runs the national show, and it runs the show so that big money can make yet more money and make the mass of people yet more powerless to stop the big.

The little want to belong so hard. That is why they identify so often with the big, even when the big is kicking them in the teeth. That is why the average US Joe and Jane is so insistent that they are seeing democracy even when all reality shouts out that it is untrue. What little was had at the time of the American Revolution was high jacked by the slave owning class, and even after the Civil War the industrial class took over from them.

Today the corporate ruling class rules through a military-industrial combined that they rule over. Americans don’t control it, they just work for it. The politicians just work for it, too. Even the ‘winners’ at the democracy game do not direct the combined, they just get pushed around by it. They chortle and bray to get elected but do not dare rock the boat. Not that they would even if they could.

For the next 14 months, the propaganda system will go into high gear to convince us that you and I are the part of the democracy that works. For most they will succeed in convincing, for some few they will fail. And afterwards, things will go on exactly the same for we have the democracy that just isn’t. What are you planning to do about it? Will you continue to believe in it?

Economic Democracy, some assembly required

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There are many that would have us believe, that we the world are merrily coasting along doing better than has ever been done before. They would have us also believe, that any problems that still confront us can be easily resolved through a combination of new technology and capitalism unlimited. This, in America, is almost always combined with belief that something is special about our country, and that the core spirit of democracy and freedom reside in our nationhood, under God and what they call the free enterprise system. This has become the prevailing national mythology, and it is nowhere more so than in the US, where the talk is constantly of DEMOCRACY, capital letters, we know what it is better than any other people in the world! But actually sad to say to the contrary, there is nowhere more where democracy is less understood than in the US of A. Capitalism is actually the antitheisis of economic democracy, which is the lynchpin of all democracy. Without economic democracy, there is no decision making for the common folk. Instead, there is only dictatorship by the rich, through their corporate control over the government and all economic activity. Yet, lack of economic democracy is considered the natural state of life by the overwhelming majority of common folk in the US.

The economic dictatorship of the rich not only distributes the products of production unfairly to the rich and away from the poor, but malforms production itself. Conservatives say that the market rationalizes what capitalists produce, but the contrary is actually true. As an example, few of us in the US actually want the war industry to dominate our economic life, yet the companies that produce the missiles, bombs, planes, tanks, ships, etc. grab control over the government to insure that production is directed to them through government financing from tax monies. Our energy companies do not direct energy production to conserving scarce natural resources as most of the population would like, but rather to the misuse of it, to motivate wars to monopolize energy resources for themselves, and to create legislation that directs national planning to making overuse of energy the only possibility for the mass of people. So we have the energy monopolies combine in pushing warfare along with the war material industries own push in that direction. War becomes the main highway for production in an undemocratic economic system run by the rich, for the rich.

All economic activity is perverted so that the rich benefit under capitalism. Thus, we have a medical system that’s main purpose is not to provide health, but rather to give out as little real care for as much cost as possible. We have a food production and distribution system whose sole design is to make maximum profits. There is no concern about the public health, or the nutrional value and taste of the food that the public is forced to consume. And in like manner, we have a housing industry whose only desire is to max their own money making, damn the need to make livable neighborhoods and cities. Newly constructed instant slums dot America all over as a result. Our country’s public health is deteriorating, and our cities’ landscapes become more degraded every year.

So how can this overproduction of crap, and underproduction of real value be halted? Not to do so is to doom our planet. Not to do so is to not only have a throwaway economy, but a throwaway world. Not to halt this type of economy run undemocratically for the rich, is to halt world life itself. Capitalist economy is a cancer eating away at world ecology. Since the decision making is undemocratic in this economic system, a resort to what the majority might want will be met by repression. Is met by repression. The rich will not voluntarily give up their undemocratically held economic power. They do not respect the decisions made at the government level if those decision run against their maintaining power held in dollars. The corporations do not like democracy, are threatened by democracy, and will repress democracy.

Let’s be clear here. Nobody thinks it right that criminals hold onto money made by criminal activity. An undemocratic economy runs as a criminal consortium of sorts. It is a form of pyramid scheme. Conservatives will go ballistic at this point, and shout that nobody has the right to tell others what to do with their own property. Well, they are wrong about that. Can you imagine that argument being made by major drug traffickers? Yes, the public does have a right to control the use of assets made by forms of criminal conduct. And capitalism is essentially just that. A series of criminal monopoly enterprises that conspire to deny adequate monies necessary to life for the majority of the world’s population. Their conspiracies, in fact, conspire to endanger and destroy our public life in multiple manners. These criminal conspiracies will have to be broken up for the world’s population to obtain the economic democracy necessary to maintain this world in a liveable manner. Instead of respecting the capitalist, the world should recognize the essential criminal nature of the capitalist. Each starving child of the world has a capitalist robbing them of life. Don’t let the conservative status quo lover convince you otherwise. Capitalism is theft. And the militarism that is the lifeblood of capitalism is theft.

Let’s imagine our biggest company here in Colorado Springs for a second. That company is Lockheed. The capitalist owners will keep Lockheed producing weaponry to kill people on the other side of the globe. They are not about to reform production and turn Lockheed into a company that sells goodwill. Or that distributes food, or that builds schools, community centers, and neighborhood hospitals and clinics. These capitalists are going to insist that their weaponry is for the public good, and that who they kill are the bad guys. That’s how they make their money. They are not going to give their American workforce democratic input into the workings of Lockheed. Lockheed is a criminal conspiracy, is it not? Not only against the people that their weaponry goes out to kill, but to their own workforce.

We need economic democracy before the world can begin to solve its problems. American workers need to stop just going along with the killing. It is not about just one war. They must stop accepting the crumbs that the superrich throw occasionally their way. They need to take responsibility for their own labor efforts. They need to demand input into the decision making. They need to recognize that it is their own tax dollars that go into paying off the rich running Lockheed at present. And if they get thrown out of work because the war is not hot at some moment in the future, they should not cheer on their corporate brass to make up new wars so as to resume more weaponry production. They need to throw Lockheed’s owners into jail for being war criminals, and they need to direct production democratically decided by they the workforce themselves, so as to benefit society as a whole, rather than to murder off parts of it.

Economic democracy is needed, and economic totalitarianism (the capitalist making all decisions, and other people none) needs to be rejected. That means Lockheed needs to be nationalized, and the owners disenfranchised. Their criminality demands punishment.

Ahmadinejad and Hamas not denying Holocaust

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Iranian president
No one is suggesting that the Holocaust didn’t happen, or that six million Jews weren’t killed by the Nazis. The mythology surrounding the Holocaust has to do with its aftermath: how the murder of six million Jews became justification for the creation of a Jewish state on land which belonged altogether to someone else.
 
That is the mythology about the Holocaust which natives of the Middle East would like the rest of us to contemplate.

Western media seems intent on perpetuating a distortion of the Muslim position. So intent are they to avoid questioning the legitimacy of Zionism that anyone who does is painted as a “Holocaust denier.”

No one is denying the Holocaust! And no one is calling for killing any more Jews! “Wiping Israel off the map” is a truncated translation of what the Muslim voices have expressed. It does not mean “off the face of the earth” or “eradicate” or “exterminate.”

Right to exist
Hamas is often described as not believing in Israel’s right to exist. It sounds so unreasonable. Everyone has a right to exist. But Israel is not a person, it’s an entity. Try this on for size. Does Jewish occupied Palestine have a right to exist? Did French occupied Algeria have a “right to exist?”

Algeria had a right to exist, and the French there had every right to exist, as a minority. And as we’ve seen with all former colonies, the majority population has an inclination to rise against its upper class oppressors. The west has of course the inclination to try to prop up those embattled regimes.

Israel was a nation created in 1949, carved out of the land of the Palestinians to make a home for European Jews. Israel is regarded by many as a last example of colonialism. White settlers laying claim to the lands of another people.

Now the Israelis are erecting a wall to separate themselves from the darker skinned Arabs. It’s an apartheid wall, and we’ve seen apartheid before. The Boers of Dutch ancestry no longer rule South Africa because the world wouldn’t stand for it.

Israelis have as much right to exist as anyone, as the Boers for example, but they don’t have a divine right to exist on the backs of their native brothers.

Apartheir wall   Israelis call it a “fence.” To construct it required demolishing entire Palestinian neighborhoods, often separating Palestinian farmers from their fields and orchards.
  		 

Off the map
When the Iranian president says he would like to wipe Israel off the map, he’s not saying he wishes to kill anyone. He didn’t say he wants to see Israel wiped off the face of the earth, he’s saying he’d like to see Israel off the map OF THE MIDDLE EAST!

Ahmadinejad even suggested that Israel relocate itself to Europe. If Europeans feel so bad about the Holocaust which they inflicted upon the Jews, why shouldn’t it fall to Europe to offer up some of its real estate for a Jewish homeland?

Ahmadinejad, like many Muslims, doesn’t see that it was Europe or America’s place to bequeath Ancient Judea to the present day Jews, a land which for the last two thousand years has belonged to non-Jews and went by the name of Palestine.

We all came from Africa. Does that give us a right to resettle it without regard to who’s already living there? Should someone resurrect Babylon, Alexander’s Greater Macedonia, or the Holy Roman Empire?

Hamas, and the PLO before it, speak of driving this foreign intruder from Palestinian land. The Muslims scattered the Israelites into Europe two thousand years ago. Now interlopers have brought them back and Hamas has pledged to drive them out again.

Imagine if America chose to return its Puritans whence they came, to England, where they weren’t terribly popular the first time. Perhaps the English would vow to expel the kill-joys once again to the New World.

As unreasonable as it was to redraw international borders to recreate a Promised Land, so too might it be unreasonable to undo the land grab of 1949. Perhaps the most pragmatic course of action would be to insist the Israelis and the Palestinians cohabit the promised land. They can govern themselves democratically and the chips will fall where they may. This age of enlightened democracy should have little patience for dogmatic racism and religious prejudice, from either side.

The world should be able to look upon these religious squabbles with impartiality. Although it seems Israelis are plenty worried that the secular west may not always grant Jewish fundamentalism more deference than its Islamic rivals. Therein lies the importance in not denying the Holocaust.

Holocaust myth
What peoples, among victims of genocide, have ever been granted their own ancient Promised Land as a redress for the genocide? None. Is this because the Holocaust was such a unique genocide? Indeed, to be labeled a Holocaust denier you merely have to be denying the uniqueness of the Holocaust.

When Iran president Ahmadinejad says that he wants to examine the myth of the Holocaust, he is threatening to challenge the prevailing Zionist interpretation.

Ward Churchill got in trouble with the Zionists because he wanted to compare the genocide of Native Americans to the Holocaust. He makes the case mainly because the policy of extermination conducted against the original inhabitants of the Americas is still denied, and as a result extensions of the policies persist.

I think the argument to prove Churchill’s point leads in an altogether different direction. This is because the Jewish extermination was not an act of imperialism against an weaker people.

The genocide against the Native Americans was like the systematic extermination of indigenous peoples everywhere: Australia’s aborigines, Indonesia’s Ache and Timorese. It is also the age-old mechanics of one people conquering another, like the genocide by the Turkish of the Armenians, and the recent actions of the Sudanese Arabs against their blacks.

The genocide against the Jews was class warfare upward. It belonged in a category like the Soviet and Chinese against their bourgeois and intellectuals, like the Khmer Rouge genocide of the urban Cambodians most of whom were ethnic Chinese, like the Hutu slaughtering of the Tutsies, like the traditional and recurring pogroms against Jews. It’s hard to say that even the Spanish Inquisition wasn’t after the usury profits of the Jews.

Thus antisemitism is less unique than its name implies, and resembles very much Marx’s class warfare where the proletariat is trying to come out from under its oppressors, or perceived oppressors.

The Holocaust is touted as religious genocide, hence the rationale for redress which honors their biggest religious wish: return to their Promised Land.

The Zionist count on the west’s continued support of that religious goal. They need an independent Israel with a homogeneous Jewish religion. They know that if they were to be integrated with the region’s present-day peoples, as a Jewish minority among Palestinians, they stand a good chance of being voted off the island.

So here are America and modern Europe, standing in support of a dogmatic religious group. It does not play well with others, and it insists in fact that it be segregated from everyone else, even as it usurps the land of others, and occupies adjacent lands under the pretext of its national security.

I have no doubt that victims of the Holocaust would themselves be shocked and shamed at the crimes that Israel is committing in their name against the peoples of Palestine.

Why America and Europe should side in religious solidarity with Jewish fundamentalists without sympathy for the Islamic fundamentalists is the consequence of believing a myth.