Tag Archives: Puritans

Virginia Dare was an “Anchor Baby”

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Not meaning to poke fun at young Ms Dare who disappeared along with the rest of the Roanoke Colony more than 400 years ago. More like mocking and reproving redneck bigots who make a big stink about other people having the same immigration privileges as THEIR ancestors did. Especially as it’s an election issue.

Along with the Religious Refugees. See, the first English immigrants were notably religious extremists fleeing from other religious extremists. Virginia the colony was named not for the Virgin Mary, but for Queen Elizabeth. The one who bullied Parliament into passing the Conformity doctrines. Which led to some hugely large massive horrifying monstrous big “civil” wars in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland. Then exported to America along with the ongoing British v Spain and France wars.  The plan was then as now (think Israel) put a large amount of people who are just too contentious to allow them to stay in the Motherland, give them discount passage and sell them limited supplies and weapons. And do a lot of it on credit. The French term for it was pioneers. A support system for military adventures.  Make sure they’re likely to piss off the natives, but not likely to survive without some “emergency” backup from Momma England.

Others did the same thing, the English just were the ones who got away with it. Davy Crockett was part of two such maneuvers. Born in Tennessee when the Revolution hadn’t been worked out, Tennessee having been treaty land which the Crown was refusing to allow English expansion. One of the sore spots that the sorehead revolutionaries used as an excuse for the revolution. It’s referenced in the Declaration of Independence. The British government honoring some of their treaty obligations by selling weapons to Natives. And blankets (ahem!) and other goods. The Treaties in question being the peace agreements after the 7 Years War which was fought mostly in Europe but in American History class we’re taught to call it the French and Indian War. And since he was born in 1786 which was just barely almost 20 years before the Louisiana purchase, where the kings of  France and Spain took turns financing each others wars by selling land in The New World which had never been visited by any European king. They sold land back and forth that they had never seen. Along with the people of the region. Subject of Spain one morning and France the next. The English and their bastard child The United States did the same thing.

to tie it all together….

Definitely Davy Crockett was born of illegal immigrants on Cherokee land. The Roanoke colony was located in what’s now the Carolinas, named for one of the Kings Charles of England. The Conformity Acts caused such frictions between English Christians that Protestant groups like the Pilgrim Church, Puritans, Presbyterians and of course Catholics were slaughtered and persecuted whenever their factions weren’t persecuting every other faction. And a whole bunch of Christians who just could not conform to other Christian doctrines fled to America to set up shop. And put up shot. There was for instance a running feud which often broke into gunfire between South Carolina and North Carolina about the difference between Presbyterian and Episcopalian and another cross-Potomac same thing because Virginia was mostly Protestant and Maryland was predominately Catholic.  You didn’t have to be across the Catholic Protestant line to piss off the authorities. Just being a Non Conformist protestant would do the trick. I got that from the Oxford World Almanac which interestingly enough is sponsored by the Episcopal Church.

Whatever happened to Ms Dare and the rest of the Roanoke settlers is pure speculation but there sure is a lot of that too. Some have said in my hearing that the Roanoke people assimilated into the Cherokee or other nearby tribes. No documentation of that, all the documentation is on the lines that they Never Were Found Again.   Some of the speculation seems, to me, very cult like.

And a lot of the ones who promote that kind of conspiracy theories are also heavily into the Birther and Minuteman militias. And with ties to the Klan.

But with all these centuries of Christian v Christian slaughter, it’s somehow the fault of Jewish merchants (who say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas)and Muslims. There have already been calls for the opening of internment camps for American Muslims.

Although the Hate Groups keep telling us that Muslims can’t be Americans. Or Native American Church. Or Jews. Or anybody who doesn’t attend Their Church. Ask any of those who proposing a Church State which one is to be the State Church and he’ll probably (eventually) say his own church of course.

Before any of all that comes around, maybe Christians better stop hating each other first. And your fellow Americans regardless of whether you think we’re actually Americans.

Our Constitutional Rights

By Clayton van Lydegraf
(From a statement read before the San Francisco grand jury, January 1973.)

Members of the grand jury have legal and constitutional responsibility for the decisions that they make.

People don’t have to be helpless before the experts because of the mystery and trickiness of the law, especially with fundamental and constitutional law. If you just assume that the Constitution of the United States and its Bill of Rights ought to mean what they say in plain English, you can hold your own.

I have no special legal training either, but right now, just like you, I have to decide to oppose or support the various ways the present authorities are using the law to oppress people.

When these things happen, ordinary people have to make extra efforts to understand what is going on. Not to become amateur lawyers, but so as to know and feel the strength of how people have resisted oppressive law for centuries. It’s interesting that one way people did that was to take a feudal document like England’s Magna Carta of the year 1215 and turned it into a weapon to struggle for their own rights. They strained and stretched its words to fit their own needs. And they made the King’s courts accept that many times.

FIRST PRINCIPLES
Legal authorities are fond of saying that a frequent return to fundamentals (first principles) is essential. If they would actually do that, we wouldn’t have so many of these troubles. In any case, the statement is made in most early state constitutions, and it is in the constitution of the State of Washington, where I lived much of the time since going to school in Oregon. The constitution of the State of California states, “The provisions of this constitution are mandatory and prohibitive.” So what is involved are first principles. I am asking that you uphold them.

The Bill of Rights of the U.S. was not handed down from above. It came from centuries of struggle against oppressive governments and church authorities. The starting point is in English and Colonial common law.

ENGLAND
The practices of the Grand Inquisition and its compulsory testimony and its compulsory Oath ex-officio were brought to England in the year 1236. 1 They were brought by Cardinal Otho, a Papal legate who was made welcome by King Henry III. Compulsory oaths and testimony were previously unknown.

Over the next 550 years, hundreds of men and women resisted. These were people charged with religious and political heresy and sedition. They refused to take the oath or testify. What these people wanted were things like being able to read the Bible in English instead of having it served to them in Latin. Or not to have the Queen as the head of their church. Or not to be thrown in jail at the will of the King without indictment of knowing the charges or having a trial by jury. 2

Hundreds, thousands, were imprisoned, tortured, be-headed, banned, burned, crushed to death during those centuries. 3

It took all that and two revolutions to put the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution.

The Cromwellian revolution of the Puritans in England resulted in the Long Parliament outlawing the Oath Ex-Officio in 1641. It also abolished the Star Chamber – the King’s own prerogative court – and the High Commission of the church courts. Both of these courts used the oath and compelled testimony and denied legal rights to defendants and witnesses. 4

UNITED STATES
The same process took place in the American Colonies of Great Britain where at first the main resistance was to the colonial oppression by the King and Parliament of England. Hence the American Revolution of 1776. Hence the struggle over the nature of the new government in the former colonies.

Having experience with oppression, people feared a strong central government and insisted on curbing the powers of both the Congress and the executive by adding onto the constitution a Bill of Rights. For example, during that time the people of New Hampshire four times voted down proposed state constitutions that did not have strong enough Bills of Rights. 5

In that situation, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were actually moderates. That is, they were for a functional federal union, but for one with powers limited by a Bill of Rights and by the common law and by powers reserved to the states. 6

Facts like this must be kept in mind to properly consider all the constitutional objections to what the government is trying to do here.

A MODERN INQUISITION
The government has called myself and other people here and it is now demanding compulsory testimony under a compulsory oath to force us to confess and to become informers. The only difference in this inquisition and that of the colonial times is that there are twenty or so people here instead of one or two bishops or a King’s Privy Council, and the courts use imprisonment instead of heaving kinds of bodily torture. Otherwise the procedures are precisely those that people fought for half a thousand years to abolish.

Some of us know that we have to resist like John Latimer, and John Lilburn and Elizabeth Crane and like the 19 witches executed in Salem, Mass. in 1692.7 We are brought here as witches of the 20th century.

This is exactly what the 5th and the 1st and the 6th and the 9th and 10th Amendments are all about. Nowhere in the entire U.S. Constitution is anyone or anybody given power to compel unwilling testimony by torture of coercion (now politely called civil contempt), by jailing people for up to 18 months. To the contrary, these things are forbidden. And nowhere is any compulsory oath authorized other than for office holders and those who want to accuse somebody.

OATH EX-OFFICIO
The Oath Ex-Officio is directly unconstitutional. It is forbidden by the opening statement of the 5th Amendment: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury… nor shall be compelled, in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law;…”

An attempt is being made here to hold me to answer, to force me to give compulsory testimony against my will, to deprive me of life, liberty, and property without due process. There is here no presentment nor indictment of a grand jury, no charges, no counsel except myself, no right of jury trial or cross-examination, or confrontation, no witnesses on my own behalf, no public trial and no writ of habeas corpus.

In making these attempts, the government’s paid men are violating their own voluntary oaths to uphold the constitution.

I do not, therefore, stand upon the narrow ground of any so-called “privilege against self-incrimination;” that is a prosecutor’s arbitrary limit. I stand upon the unadulterated right as stated in the Constitution, as amended in 1792. This includes its protection against being defamed and degraded and due process and all the common law protection of the 9th and the 10th and other Amendments.

THE RIGHT NOT TO BE HELD TO ANSWER
If it does have to be said in a nutshell, it is the right not to be held to answer. And that includes the right to silence, which is vital, although less broad. This brings in all the rights of the 1st Amendment. There can be no right of free speech or association, or of the press, without the right to silence, as reporters are now discovering.

The 5th fortifies and is itself fortified by the rights of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects… as provided by the 4th Amendment. Government wants to ransack my brain and my private and public life without any warrant, or cause, or limit.

This government is also in violation of Article III, sec. 2 of the main body of the Constitution and Art. VI of the Bill of Rights, trial by jury and due process, and it threatens to proceed to violate Art. VII and VIII at the very next succeeding steps via prosecution for “Civil Contempt” which is itself another unconstitutional legal trick.

The government is also in violation of Article IX, the common law rights of people and of Article X that reserves powers not delegated to the Federals, to the states or to the people. Those who created the Bill of Rights often said: whatever is against natural law or common law or against the Constitution is null and void. 8

IMMUNITY
As to so-called immunity. The immunity statutes, both of the “transactional” and of the “use” variety are unconstitutional on the face of it. Both substitute and nullify in various ways the Constitution of the U.S. and the Bill of Rights. For immunity purports to reduce the 5th to a bare privilege against “self-incrimination” and then wipes out even that narrow mis-definition.

After 150 years of at least partial enforcement of the rights of the 5th and other Amendments, the courts have now upheld immunity laws. It is appropriate to comment that while courts also sent people to burn and hang as heretics and witches from 1250 to 1692, that didn’t make it right or even lawful. Nor did it prevent either English or American Revolutions. On the contrary, such practices made up apart of the causes that motivated revolt and rebellion.

Beyond the content, immunity is in flagrant violation of Article VI, sec. 2, making the Constitution the supreme law of the land in that the Congress has drastically amended, reversed, revised, substituted and nullified the 5th Amendment and the Bill of Rights without following Article V, amendment procedures. This violates due process on a grand scale.

WAIVER
Another mutilation of the 5th Amendment is the doctrine of waiver. By this modern invention, if you momentarily yield to threats and promises to answer just one question, you have to answer all related questions. If you waver, you have “waived” your rights.

NATIONAL INTEREST
An even greater breach of constitutionality is using talk about some vague “national interest” to justify wiping out people’s rights.

Under all possible theories of the Constitution by those who swear to uphold it, the basic interest and rights of the people are, or ought to be, ruling. That is: until overthrown or amended by the people, the Constitution is the ultimate, final, and holy of holies. That is the idea.

Therefore, neither Congress nor the President nor the courts are supposed to disregard the plain meaning and intent of the Constitution, which is held to be the highest legal authority on the national interest.

But suddenly I sit in court and watch some little pip-squeak of an appointed office holder, not even elected, ruling on national interest: to remove my and your Constitutional rights. He cannot be challenged, or “checked and balanced” by anyone or anything.

That is amending and nullifying the Constitution by magic incantation. Nobody has that right – Congress cannot delegate power that it doesn’t possess itself and is forbidden to touch. Nor can the President, nor the Supreme Court. That is the very best constitutional theory. It gets violated every day – no one seems to notice. But those who do these things will have no ground for complaint when we do notice and sweep them away.

PERSONAL VIOLATIONS
There are also several violations the government has committed against my own rights in a very personal way.

There has been long standing surveillance and interference by the FBI and other departments of the government into my personal life and private affairs. I and my family have been subject to illegal wire-taps, to observation of our house and the comings and goings of friends and visitors. There were even attempts to lure my then six year old daughter into the car of government agents during my absence from home.

In Seattle, Washington, on December 13, 1956, I was publicly charged with a “capital or otherwise infamous crime” by an officially designated (but illegally acting) representative of the United States Government. This charge was and remains totally false and in violation of all the above rights. Nevertheless, it remains on the record, never having been withdrawn or apologized for, or tried or compensated. It is a crime without a statute of limitations. Therefore, the present subpoena is tainted, unlawful and the present grand jury can have no jurisdiction over me in any way as I am being unlawfully accused and held to answer by the Congress of the United States in guise of its investigative powers. I am asserting that I cannot be held to answer, not that I am guilty of any crime. 9

All these things are being done to me and to others although we have not done injury to anyone. On the contrary, we are suspected of political heresy because we opposed the crimes and colonizing wars of an oppressive government. That is why they ordered us to appear here.

CHANGE AND REVOLUTION
Changes and revolutions have been going on for thousands of years. Many people have come to believe that it is time to create a social system that is not based on rights and privileges for some at the expense of others. That means to reject and eliminate all discrimination, oppression and exploitation of race, nationality, sex, age, and economic classes.

General motion toward that objective is the great merit of the movements of our time and of the young people, third world people, and women who want to move right on. This government hates us all. It calls us witches. What it sees is its worst nightmares are millions of Sojourner Truths and John Browns.

Considering the dignity and self-respect that should belong to a human being and the obligation due those who died and suffered so that we could have some meager share of human rights, and to my contemporaries and to women and men now growing up, I have to refuse any part in any kind of grand inquisition, no matter how slicked-up.

The government has investigated me for years. It knows all these things. It has called me here in bad faith to punish me and to try to use me to put down all that I believe in. It wants to make me inform on people, old and close friends or casual new acquaintances alike. 10

I suggest that grand jurors uphold the Bill of Rights.

I shall not take any inquisitional OATH-EX-OFFICIO.

I shall not dishonor my people by testifying about WITCHES.

Notes:
1. Rogge, O. John, The First and the Fifth, New York, 1960, p. 146.

2. Levy, Leonard W., Origins of the 5th Amendment, New York, 1968, p. 54, and Rogge, pp. 156-61, 151-54.

3. Levy, p. 69. 51 persons burned for heresy from 1534 – 1547, p. 75, about 273 from 1555 – 1558.

4. Levy, pp. 266-300.

5. Rutland, Robert, The Birth of the Bill of Rights, Chapel Hill, 1955, pp. 74-78.

6. Rutland, pp. 106-218.

7. Levy, pp. 3, 163, 266-332, 362-64. McWilliams, Carey, Witch Hunt, Boston, 1950, pp. 246-59.

8. Rutland, pp. 3-77.

9. House of Un-American Activities Committee Report, Communist Political Subversion, Part I, December 13, 1956.

10. Countryman, Verne, Un-American Activities in the State of Washington, Ithaca, 1951, pp. 28, 165, 207.

The G.I. Jihadi Doll…

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GI JoeSo my brother was telling me, about a toy that brainwashes little Palestinian and Iraqi and Afghan children into growing up to be Suicide Bombers which is intensely Bullshit on many levels.
One is the Fundamentalist Islamic aversion to Dolls, much like the Puritans and Pilgrims lynching people as “witches” for giving kids dolls to play with.

But the preacher who told him this, and of course had never had any more experience with Islam than my brother did, said that the doll had a little toy sword, a little toy rifle, and toy bombs…

Just like the very REAL toy made by a company with many Military Contracts, such as making the butt-piece for the M16 rifle, buttons for the uniforms…and their doll shown above has bombs, has a gun, has knives…

The big difference is, THIS doll actually exists.

When Right Wing Lunatics preach that the Terror Doll is being used to brainwash little kids into the Suicide Bomb Cult, their Brainless followers eat it up with a spoon… and fork… and Tabasco Sauce…

When the Society of Friends, the Quakers, point out the REAL doll and how the REAL doll is used to lure AmeriKlan kids into the Killing Machine, romanticizing War and Death,

The Right Wing Lunatics Scream that the QUAKERS must be Terrorists and accuse the QUAKERS of Hate Speech.

Our Local Right Wing Radio Propagandist “Gunny” Bob for instance.

Oh, yeah, Gunny, three words… Semper… Fi… BITCH…

Then there’s the idea that Muslim preachers tell the Suicide Bombers that God is on their side, and if they die while fighting the Infidel they’ll be taken to Heaven and adored by God and all the Saints and all the Angels… oh, wait, that’s EXACTLY what USAF and Army and Marine and Naval Chaplains tell the HOMICIDE Bombers before each mission.

Opposition to Public Education

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Why Republicans HATE Public Education.

In the Words of THEIR prophet Hitler “Universal Public Education is the most virulent toxin that Liberalism can inflict upon itself. It only makes the Lower Classes think more highly of themselves than they ought, and leads to discontent with their position in life. Truly, they only need enough education to be Efficient Coolies for our industries”
(Liberties taken with the exact English phrases, the Original was in German)

We often are accused of “ignorance” when the Anti-Semitic Supporters of Killing Palestinians, for example, or the one who calls him/herself “Friend” posts… publish their reactionary Angry Hate Speech on Not My Tribe.

In a slightly backward twist we are often accused of being “intellectual Elitists”, but Still ignorant.

Or “idiots”.

Without Public Education we would be left with home-schooling, or Parochial Education.

Those of us who weren’t born with silver spoons in our mouths would be left out in either case.

“Keep ’em Ignorant”

And for not just nearly but EXACTLY the same reason American Slaves were forbidden to learn to read and write.

I’m sure the Republican’t respondents will argue that it’s not like that, I’m just spouting Marxist Propaganda again, the Repukelickin’ Party doesn’t actually engage in class warfare or racism blah blah blah blah…

My grandfather was a cowboy.

Not like George Bush with his “ranch” and 5 cows bought and maintained by his Trust Fund, a trust fund which I’m once again going to point out came from an enterprise his family engaged in called Slave Trading.

They’ll say that, Yankee Puritans they claim to be, their family didn’t actually own slaves. Nor did their favorite “charity” the Yale Foundation.

No, they wouldn’t soil their own hands with the whips and chains necessary to “earn” their money for them…

They just owned a fleet of Slave Ships.

That and Grand-poppy Prescott Bush laundered money for the Nazis, which they don’t

a) apologize for

and

b) they’re still spending the money they got from BOTH enterprises.

No, Grandpa Brown was a REAL cowboy. So was his brother Loy and their brother-in-law Tom.

In Texas in those days that meant Impoverished.

Cowboys were just then being romanticized in the public IMAGINATION through those new-fangled movin’ picture thingies.

Uncle Tom wound up being the foreman of the Rolling Hills Ranch in Keene, Texas, until the ranch was sold to Halliburton in the late 70s to make a Game Ranch.

Like the one where Former Vice President and Current Active War Criminal Richard Cheney shot his friend in the face while they were “hunting” captive, hand raised “Wild” ducks.

They also have or had a website wherein you could with a click of your mouse or joystick “hunt” and actually kill actual formerly live animals (until you put the mouse pointer over them and clicked)

Uncle Tom described it as a place where they bought old, diseased “wild” zoo and circus animals dependent upon your actual skill level they would drug the animals or even chain them up for you so you wouldn’t miss.

That way you could go on an African Safari without ever leaving Texas.

Really swell, wonderful Republican People, they are.

But with a family background like that, working class all the way, impoverished…

Without Public Education how would I have ever risen to the position where I could contend with so many Noble Rich American (and Israeli, if you believe their story) Aristocracy like “Friend” and the Megaphone Users?

The short answer is that I wouldn’t.

Nor would most of us who oppose their monstrous schemes, we would simply have to take their word on any subject or issue, they would pat us on the head and bid us go back out into the cotton fields like good little childishly ignorant Peasants.

While they can’t do it literally, they do, in fact, precisely that by sneeringly dismissing anything we write, anything we Learn and then Share as being “ignorance”.

And sneeringly claim that we must be “idiots”.

But it’s not Racism or Class Warfare or Big Brotherism. No, it’s “all for your own good”

But in their underestimation we’re just too stupid and “ignorant” to recognize it.

Jesus vs. Santa rivalry is nothing new

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A holiday detente: As Easter sprung from fertility celebrations befitting the rebirth of spring, so Christmas originated from offerings of the season’s greetings to the winter solstice. And while Christians might have taken over the party, they’ve had to retain the yule tree and other pagan party favors to ensure converts would still RSVP to the festivities. The struggle between Jesus and Santa is nothing new.

The First War on Christmas happened in Oliver Cromwell’s England when Christmas idolatry came to be forbidden by law. Popular merriment was deemed to have strayed too far from the Protestant message of the church, the Lord’s Day etc, so Lord Protector Cromwell reined things in, for a time, until the reformer’s dominance over the parliament and the influence of the Puritans waned.

I heard this story on NPR, half of it actually. They described Christmas having been made illegal for a period, but curiously didn’t mention which period, and who in England had done it.

Puritans you say? Might these have been the same Puritans who came to America’s shore? The same. Well, they shared forefathers (Our forefathers, if our WASP history books can be believed, emphasizing as they do our “Christian Nation” while minimizing Jefferson and the other 90% of our settlers). Thus religious intolerance, on the part of the Puritans, drove the rest of England to send them packing, post paid, to take their anti-everybody else’s Christmas to New England, where it was thought there were no revelers to be bothered.

The Puritans fled religious intolerance to THEIR intolerance basically. What BS to assert that English merry folk did not accord them freedom of religion. England wanted freedom FROM the Puritan’s brand of religion. For some reason our historians seem content to leave open the suggestion that the Puritan party-pooper recount being expelled from the party because of his “wild and crazy” ways!

Just as in Old England, the American puritanical pin heads every so often revive to prominence, usually in reaction to economic or social catastrophe, to prescribe austerity across the board, from no drinking to unhappy holidays. In their current incarnation they’re Fundies aghast at what’s become of their Christmas. The “true meaning” having become too commercial, too secular, not enough infant Christ worship, etc.

We’ve got a nation of party-poopers, wanting to repo the universal Xmas holiday and its international message of brotherhood: Peace on Earth, Goodwill To All Mankind. Puritans aren’t about being good, they’re the fine folk who who accepted the turkey, then thanked the Lord, not the heathens. Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!

The new prurience in men’s magazines

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The new non nude nudie mags 
FHM, STUFF, MAXIM, RAZOR, et al.
Porn is back at the 7-11. It’s the resurgence of clean porn to counter the free-for-all no-holes-barred internet, just like Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Magazine put glossy clean brakes on the sexual revolution.

The old gloss coat nudies 
Hef put a gloss coat on the age-old girly magazine and put it unto the coffee table, Guccione dirtied it up with Penthouse and put it back under the mattress and Flynt left no fig leaf unturned with Hustler and put pornography right back in the garage. But after the ugly fin de siecle the puritans are back.

Now we have the nouveau prurient clothed seductresses. Here little flesh is revealed that is not already displayed on every popular magazine cover. Naked media stars, but covered. That’s another story, nudity in fashion magazine magazines.

Today’s men’s magazine’s entice but don’t deliver, they tease, and apparently that’s enough. In the porn heydays of the seventies, the magazines were owned by independent publishers. You could say “I read Playboy for the articles” and it’d be true. Many anti-establishment stories could only see daylight through the independent press. But the magazines today belong to the publishing empires which belong to the advertizing empires which belong to the consumer goods empire. You can’t use sex to sell anything if the boys are getting the sex. Visually at least.

The curious aspect of the today’s bathroom reading for boys is the lack of sexual depth. It’s all surface. It’s curves and titilation without a sense of anything lying beneath, inside, beyond. It’s beads of water, not sweat.

Surface and complexion is all that matters. Breast implants don’t matter because they’ll be under wrap. You’re not going to keep them, you’re not even going to undress them. Knock them against the bathroom door at the nightclub, disrobe them in the darkness at her place, you’ll be gone before it’s light. Only the visual coutour matters.

To whom? The virgin spectator.

Waterboarding not dunking

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Click here to see the actual waterboardVice-president Cheney has just explicitly admitted that US interrogators use waterboarding as a method of interrogation. The decision to use it is a “no brainer” Cheney says, it’s not torture, referring to the practice as more like dunking.

Probably we all conjure images of the wooden see-saw at the water’s edge, where the Puritans sought confessions from witches. Others I guess envision the dunking booth at the school fair.

Neither would be correct. David Corn features an updated description of waterboarding, sent him from Jonah Blank, a former senior editor of US News and World Report. Blank attached pictures from the Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, now a museum commemorating the Khymer Rouge attrocities. It’s the former site of a notorious torture facility. Of the many torture methods used by the Khymer Rouge, only two instruments are diplayed to represent the worst. Both involve water torture. One of them is the waterboard.

Water torture goes way back, and Dick Cheney of Halliburton and of the USofA are upholding its fine tradition.

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.