Apres nous, le Depression

Posted on February 6, 2009 by Eric Verlo

If it matters what to call this financial crisis, what is it? Is America in a recession? When does a deep recession approach a depression? When is an economic crash revealed to be a collapse? Before we can rename the Great Depression, as we did the Great War (WWI), in deference to this latest, we would do better to address the cataclysm which left this depression.

It was not a meteor, not the foot of Godzilla, nor a collapsed salt mine. The scorched earth we see about us, this rapidly degrading economy, is the destruction wrought by a Norman raid; a blitz of rape and pillage with brutal indifference.

It wouldn’t matter what you call it except that the raiders are still among us. If your valuables are still intact, it’s because they haven’t yet been sacked. If you still have your house, it’s not because the tethers aren’t attached, it’s that they haven’t started towing it off.

When you can see this robbery for what it is, you’ll know that history can tell us that the barbarians do not leave even gold fillings unmolested.

Do you doubt a viking analogy? Look at the economic news today. Over half a million jobs lost in January, over three million jobs lost already. On the same day, the stock market rallies upward.

While you are losing your livelihood, those who invested in the long ships are heartened by the projected success of this raid.

Gaza is not the Holocaust that the Jews suffered in the Warsaw Ghetto of WWII

Posted on February 5, 2009 by Tony Logan

warsaw ghetto
“Pointing out that the suffering endured by Gazans is not comparable in scope to the Holocaust or other well-known genocides, does not diminish it. However, it is crucial to provide accurate historical context to the current conflict, for two reasons. If Gaza is today’s Warsaw, then Palestinians have no hope.

“Firstly, the use of highly charged historical comparisons that do not hold up to scrutiny unnecessarily weakens the Palestinian case against the occupation. In a propaganda war in which Palestinians have always struggled to compete, handing Israel’s supporters the gift of inaccurate or exaggerated comparisons does not help this struggle, particularly not in Israel and the US, the two most important battlegrounds in this conflict.”
–excerpted from a commentary of Mark LeVine published by Al Jazeera titled Gaza is no Warsaw Ghetto

Holocaust Remembrance Day inaction

Posted on January 27, 2009 by Eric Verlo

I’d like to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, with this photograph of modern day Israelis, who came to a hilltop overlooking Gaza to watch the IDF soldiers do their work.

I’ve yet to encounter a WWII photograph of German citizens cheerleading as their soldiers rampaged through their neighbors’ homes.

Of course, this situation is different. These Israelis are hoping to settle, or resume their illegal settlements, the occupied territories, as soon as enough of the Palestinians are driven out or exterminated.

Jewish survivors of the Holocaust vow “never again,” but it only applies to them.

Actual Holocaust revisionists unmasked

Posted on December 28, 2008 by Eric Verlo

In the face of escalated Israeli atrocities and war crimes against the inhabitants of Gaza this week, is the Zionist Holocaust Remembrance juggernaut losing its nerve? A major publisher has canceled plans to distribute a WWII concentration camp memoir when it was discovered that key elements of the tale were untrue. But that never stopped Holocaust Rememberers before.

Herman Rosenblat had been peddling the fictional details for a decade, details which made his particular Holocaust experience unique. But historians questioned the very premise of his title, Angel at the Fence, and Rosenblat confessed his wife’s part was fabricated. Taking a cue from James Frey, Rosenblat is hoping the film can be distributed as fiction.

This example is not as bad as Belgian author Monique De Wael, writing under the pen name Misha Defonseca, who had to confess that her memoir of escaping the camps to live with wolves was fictional, and that she wasn’t Jewish, but “felt Jewish.”

The original key witness account by Eli Wiesel, the leading patriarch of Holocaust Remembrance, turned out to be inaccurate enough that the memoir Night had to be reclassified as a novel. Despite the inventions, Wiesel’s book remains in the canon of Holocaust literature.

Bolstered by François Mauriac who wrote that Night is “…a book to which no other could be compared.” Wrote A. Alverez, it was “almost unbearably painful, and certainly beyond criticism.”

Eli Wiesel made this pitch in 1955:

“…ten years or so ago, I have seen children, hundreds of Jewish children, who suffered more than Jesus did on his cross and we do not speak about it.”

Who has the famous al-Zaidi Bush shoes

Posted on December 23, 2008 by Eric Verlo

Everyone’s clamoring for the shoe heard around the world. The several
manufacturers who claim to have cobbled the offending black oxfords are deluged in orders. A Saudi man has offered ten million dollars for Muntadhar al-Zaidi’s original pair. But the NYT reports: “Explosives tests by investigators destroyed the offending footwear.” Whaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!

I don’t believe that shit for a minute. If airport security can verify footwear inertness in a few seconds…

Not that a pair of worn leather shoes matters a whit. But there is more than shoe fetish at foot here. And I find something about the fate of this pair of shoes that’s awfully unlike a Skull and Bones man.

Idolatry
The Saudi who offered the king’s ransom for the “Medal of Freedom” shoes, may have been enraptured by idolatry, but he knows the magical allure which those shoes will always possess. How can any of us deny the mystical energy we attribute to baseballs marked by having been hit to home runs? All Americans take, or aspire to take, a pilgrimage to the Smithsonian to see the actual, for real, objects of their common heritage.

Museums of art and natural history, glean an idolatry all their own, but historical collections like the Smithsonian and the British Imperial War Museum, peddle in pure talisman mysticism.

The crown jewels come to mind, or any ordinary person’s diamond. Stones, crystals, runes, coins, fetishes, heirlooms, antiques, personal designer accessories, safety blankets. We swim in stuff which have meaning greater than their utility. Even poor Diogenes had his lantern.

Who are we kidding that mere objects don’t have enormous power over us? I myself keep everything. I frequently feel I’m drowning in remembrances and chanced-upon objects for which I aspire sentiment. Would that I could focus on strength-building empowering articles.

I’m reminded of last year’s sale of a copy of the Magna Carta, was it, to a modern Wall Street robber baron. I was not alone to surmise that he paid 21 million for the now-transgressed compact, probably to wipe his ass with it. As the great white hunters paid their safari guides in hope of being the last to personally vanquish whatever late species was next to be rendered extinct.

The al-Zaidi Shoes
This famous pair of shoes were thrown by Muntadhar al-Zaidi at President Bush, al-Zaidi being the first man to dare show defiance to the US Nero. Although, certain intellectuals do come to mind, for having voiced their discontent with his policies. I remember too, a certain brave Indonesian witch doctor who cast a magic curse on the universally despised Bush. Ki Gendeng Pamungkas placed a jinx to shorten Bush’s stay in Indonesia, it wasn’t a fatal voodoo spell, for that would have been just as illegal as making threats is in the US. I will always believe there must have been countless more who’ve cursed Bush to his face, if prudently under their breath.

But journalist al-Zaidi did the one act above all others. He showed open, physical defiance. At the bottom line, against an imperial oligarchy which dominates the world by military force, it’s the only defiance that really matters. And George Bush knows it.

Once subdued, was it necessary to bludgeon al-Zaidi? He had disarmed himself, and was now completely out of ammo. Was the rough apprehension in any manner appropriate? Everyone in the room had already been checked by security. What was the purpose of beating al-Zaidi in the next room? Or of the torture later?

Regicide
Would-be assassins of kings, in the times of kings, were drawn and quartered, made to suffer excruciating deaths, but their body parts desecrated as well. It wasn’t to insure their mortality.

From a historical perspective, I believe al-Zaidi’s projectile footwear represent an enormously momentous act, even more by being common objects. We all have shoes. And see, shoes have provide a ready aeronautic diversion from the path most taken. A significant number of common citizens can get close enough to our leader to lambast him with their shoes.

Do we approve of him or not? Does he listen to our protestations, or does he laugh them off as our America-given freedoms to disagree?

Is it a mere disagreement we have with Bush over his regime’s genocide, high crimes and theft from the American People?

I’m convinced that al-Zaidi’s shoes had to be drawn and quartered, lest they inspire further acts of bravery from the ranks of Bush’s subjects.

Is it time to throw our shoes? In this divide and conquer feudal age, by design an anti-social world which celebrates the individual lest a community spirit trounce the narcissism imperative to thwart organizing into collectives, a next shoe-thrower would be mocked for being a copy-cat. I can hope that we recognize the humility of extremely diminutive stature. We want to be voracious proponents of social justice, but have tragically impoverished resources, . The struggle against capitalist imperialism will require many foot soldiers. We can’t all be Che and al-Zaidi. We didn’t think to throw our shoes, we won’t be improvisers of the next gesture. For the better part of us, the most effective we can be is follow their lead.

Let’s imagine, for the populist courage they might ignite, that the al-Zaidi shoes were effaced from man’s heritage. Bush has done worse, he’s razed Iraq, cradle of civilization, the untold undiscovered archeological sites, the historic library, I can’t even go on, the losses were unthinkable.

Occult Talisman
Except, this is a man who like his father, and strangely like an odd many in his cabal, came out of the secret “Skull and Bones” club at Yale. The exclusive order was originated by a forefather, who amassed the Bush fortune with help from Hitler by the way, named for the club’s alleged possession of the remains of Sitting Bull. What, was Sitting Bull a famous Yalie? A forefather of modern empire building? Was he a banking/usury supremacist?

Sitting Bull was but one of the fiercest American indian leader to have defied the white man’s global conquest. Of course, it’s not uncommon for warring cannibals to feel that they gather strength from their opponents, even as they’ve defeated them.

The Bushes and their cadre of global elites are also members of Bohemian Grove. As occultist as blue-blood better-than-thous can get. I’ll not assert they celebrate witchcraft, but it’s more pagan than average churchgoers could comfortably countenance. Traditional religions hold it as false idolatry, academia dismisses it as mysticism.

Which brings me to the Lance of Longinus, allegedly the weapon which pierced Jesus’s side to deal the Coup de Grace. Though scholars have traced its existence to only 900 AD, the “Spear of Destiny” retains a tremendous occult allure, in particular the Nazi Third Reich. Other such talisman weapons have been sought by warrior leaders throughout history, as bestowing upon whoever possessed them, divine powers over challengers to their throne.

Let’s face it, since the success of the American industrial and banking driven democracy, in rising to dominate over all its WWII adversaries and allies, our elected leader has become absolute ruler of the known world. It wasn’t our intent, but it’s human nature.

Absolute Power Corrupts
We live again in a world of kings. Of moats, of food tasters, of royal jesters, of showing not just deference but fealty. We live in a world of a leisured class, where right to wealth and privilege is considered hereditary. A birthright to nobility is reinforced even by what we understand of genetics. Men are not created equal. Man at his highest is preordained. It’s no great leap to expect these men will search the firmament for signs to affirm that their supremacy is granted by divinity.

I expect earthly objects which defy a monarch’s impregnability have irresistible personal allure to kings for whom nothing remains but to divine their life’s purpose.

It’s not uncharted territory, there have been global empires before, except the world known to earlier supreme leaders had horizons closer in. Alexander ruled his whole known world. The Roman Emperors did, with the unconquered bits being just so much backwoods. Such leaders had no rivals in trade, power, or wealth. Charlemagne, Ghengis Khan, Shaka Zulu, ruled their entire known realms. While these leaders were empire builders, the related personages less lauded, were their progeny who succumbed to proving Lord Acton’s Dictum that “absolute power corrupts–” Each it seems resolved to challenge the last part “–absolutely.”

Now John Dalberg-Acton’s Essays on Freedom and Power is a scrap of paper I’d be surprised to find enshrined in a megalomaniac’s personal collection of power-emitting talisman keepsake chatchkes.

Papieren Bitte? Just your shoes please

Posted on December 22, 2008 by Eric Verlo

Most people can easily conjure the cinematic image of Gestapo officers blocking train passengers, demanding “Your papers please.” That such a scene could ever develop in America, haunts citizens opposed to national identity cards or embedded microchips. But with modern surveillance methods as pervasive as cellphones, perhaps today’s state security services have less need to verify who we are. I’ll assert the US Department of Homeland Security is charged more with making Americans feel the heavy boot print of authoritarianism.

I think that in the wake of 9/11, this nation has indeed mobilized a “papers please” law enforcement policy.

The proof is there in black and white in the Patriot Act; you can see it in the Civil Liberties-free zone which immigration officers have been empowered to enforce to 100 miles inland from our borders; and you can see it at our airports. Last night’s 60-Minutes questioned the punitive aspects of the TSA measures to which today’s airline passengers are subjected. Less surprisingly, CBS also suggested their probable ineffectiveness.

Having just paid a holiday visit to DIA, I was inclined to see more. Yes, this is another holiday post.

Credit where credit is due? It’s no coincidence this is about shoes.

Papieren Bitte
First, I’d like to deconstruct the film mythology, which originated in wartime, from Hollywood Home Front propaganda meant to demonize the Hun. Certainly the trench-coated SS officer, or leather-jacketed Gestapo detective, asking for your documents, cut a villainous figure. But they were, in reality, as out of the ordinary as today’s FBI or CIA agents. Have you ever happened upon a one of those?

More often by far, during WWII, the job of asking for a traveler’s “Legitimacion” was assigned to the gendarmes of the occupied countries, or to the collaborators who’d been deputized. These were ordinary constables and men who otherwise were unfit to serve in combat. Old frumps, maligned and bitter. If you can picture the run-of-the-mill TSA troll, you see where I’m going.

Public Transportation
Where travelers a half-century ago were taking trains, today the public city-to-city lattice is airborne. Today we queue for planes, not trains. And instead of producing our “papers” –I should say, IN ADDITION to producing our papers– we are required to remove our shoes, all sorts of articles, submit to searches, and refrain from carrying certain items, in order to thread the needle that allows us access to public travel. I’m not sure if today’s security screening isn’t the equivalent of the depiction of the 40s silver-screen.

Before you argue that I’m being alarmist, please consider that most Germans during the war, indeed the overwhelming majority of citizens of occupied Europe, had little to fear by being asked for their documents. You or I are not insurgents on the lam, nor aspiring bomb-throwers. We do not fear being sent to Guantanamo.

Indeed, you might remember, the movie heroes who sweated the Nazi checkpoints were always resistance fighters, saboteurs, or escaped Allied prisoners. Today, ask yourself how an enemy of the USA would fare trying to use an airport. If you have become aware now that our US Homeland does not show reticence to torture, or disappear, persons of interest, would modern airport security be any less a terrifying prospect for people who may not be in lockstep with the ever rogue-ideology of the current global administrators?

And so, what was the main purpose of policemen monitoring the trains of occupied Europe? To prevent illegal travel, or to deter the thought of sedition? Both. But those were the days of imperfect intelligence.

Today, we know that even the 9/11 hijackers were tracked well in advance of their boarding at Boston Airport. Since then, we know that intelligence agency Fusion Centers also parse the surveillance data of persons of mere tangential interest. We know that the NSA records all phone calls. We know the telecoms are doing something for which they are very insistent about receiving preemptory immunity.

Potential terrorists/hijackers have everybody on their tail.

The TSA fat bastards are for the rest of us.

Airport Fear-mongering
Do you remember the days when you could linger as you dropped off your loved ones at the airport? You could wait with them, or you could meet them as they walked off the plane. Now you are greeted by concrete barriers at the curb, you can’t help anyone with their bags. America’s airports have become high security zones, unwelcoming to all.

Permit me to interject the observation that there has not been a single domestic airport attack to justify the draconian measures which have impacted American tranquility. We abide being yelled at, for absolutely no reason except the scare-phrase “Remember 9/11.” Remember the Maine? Remember Pearl Harbor? Japanese Internment Camps anyone?

If you are the traveler, you have to strip yourself of dignity before a thick-necked tin-pot. Now airports are even replacing the metal detectors with X-ray gateways. You are required to raise your arms for a virtual strip search, where digital images of your nakedness are reviewed by the airport security. Official TSA statements explain that these digital records go no further than their desks.

You can choose to believe that, or believe that all our faces are being blurred, or that our corresponding identities are not matched with the images.

(A digression on the subject of intelligence files:
Meanwhile, consider that the NSA is recording ALL satellite borne phone calls. International and domestic. They get around the “wire-tapping” restrictions by addressing it as “packet collecting.” To their devices, it’s an altogether new technology, thereby unencumbered by civil right legislation protection.

Our imaginations cannot fathom how spooks can listen to all the world’s satellite calls, but their imaginations know that someday the software will be developed to accomplish that task. Won’t they be kicking themselves later if they hadn’t stored as much as they could of our conversations BEFORE anyone suspected all telephones were eavesdropped upon?

-By the way, did you miss the memo that every cellphone is capable of being an eavesdropping device, even when it’s not engaged in a phone call? Would it be beyond the pale to imagine that if a near infinite number of calls are recorded, another near infinite amount of off-line talk is being aggregated in addition? If you can store more on your iPod than you can read in 100 lifetimes, supercomputer storage can probably lap your imagination by 100 to the 100th, I’m just thinking.)

Respect Authority
Well look at me, I’m only underlining where the DHS is happy to have us all place emphasis. FEAR. The security at today’s airports won’t keep box cutters off of airplanes, but it will keep a citizenry from daydreams of dissent.

So much ado,
And not enough DO? You already know what to do. Respect authority? Disrespect false authority! Take a lead from Comrade al-Zairi, you too can make it about the shoes.

We’ve all of us, you know it, mouthed to ourselves the defiant retort, rehearsed for if and when that imaginary Nazi hits us up for our papers: “Papers? I don’t need to show you no stinkin’ papers!”

From LA, I remember a variant which Hispanics directed at La Migra. They wished.

Anyone WITH papers can defy authority with the full confidence that comes from “I am an American” impunity. But can undocumented immigrants say it? Can Middle-Eastern-looking gentlemen say it? Not hardly.

YOU CAN.

My brave little fantasy insurgent, why not offer that rebel yell to the TSA? Tell them you don’t need to remove your stinkin’ shoes! (Double- entendre unintended.) They won’t let you on the plane, but that’s where beloved Capitalism provides your audience.

Put your courage where your mouth is
Let the airlines hear your rebel yell. “We don’t need your stinkin’ airplane!” If they don’t remove the Beirut decor concrete barriers, if they don’t send the TSA mini tyrants packing, if they don’t let you travel with toiletries of your damn choosing, you’re not going to take their stinkin’ flights.

If they’re not going to let you park up close to the terminal, where you used to be able to park but now those spaces are let out to valet parking outfits, you’re not going to visit their airport. Period.

Is there anywhere that you need to go in a hurry, besides out of the country for a long, long spell?

Drive, it’s still free
If you’re going to stick around, boycott the airlines. Use your car.

As has been demonstrated at Arizona checkpoints –as seen on YouTube– a car and a video camera can get you anywhere unmolested. If you are stopped at an DHS “immigration” checkpoint, you hold the upper hand. You can persist in being let to pass without answering a single question. If they detain you, you have a lawsuit. In your car, you can say with impunity still “I don’t need to show you no stinkin’ papers!”

“That small nations might be free”… and other Imperial Lies…

Posted on November 22, 2008 by Brother Jonah

This is about, of course, the massive disconnect from reality shown by the “Nationalists” in the Bush Regime.
The title comes from a song called “Foggy foggy dew” about the Easter Rebellion” and is a short representation of the British STATED reason for their rightful (or wrongful) share in starting World War One. “That the right of Small Nations to Self Determination is as valid as that of the Great Powers.”

While at the time they were engaged in one of their more Murderous Cycles of oppression in Ireland.

And continued it even AFTER the Great War.”Great” refers to the SIZE of the war, and the Powers.

After the War the Imperial Powers Who Claimed Not To Be Imperialists (Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the U.S. …) went on a frenzy of operations to quell rebellions in “their” Vassal States.

Ethiopia and Somalia were carved out as separate states with Eritrea split between them, nations with compound words like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were created with a wave of the (Non) Imperial Scepter… Iran and Iraq, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the Emirates, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia… The Shah was propped up as a puppet dictator just like King Faisal of Iraq, just like the Emirates…

Mostly because the British Crown was more comfortable dealing with people who had Titles of Royalty.

And Nationalist Sentiment in the Smallest Nations was tossed aside with the same Contempt and Disdain exhibited (to use another British phrase) by the Turk and Hun, meaning the Ottoman and German and Austro-Hungarian Empires.

Kaiser Wilhelm and Archduke Ferdinand and indeed all of the European Kingdoms involved (Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Suddenly Late Tsar Nicolas….) could call themselves Cousin and mean it.

Many of them were still part of the Original Triple Lie “Holy” “Roman” and “Empire”

It doesn’t take an exaggerated sense of history to see which Royal Cousins got to keep their rank and titles and which were deemed “unworthy” by the “Democracies”.

And now, the reactions to claims of National Sovereignty by the Iraqis, the Palestinians, the Somalis… a huge long list actually, are being dismissed and pooh-poohed just as arrogantly as the British dismissal of the Irish claims, the Kenyan claims, the French dismissal of the claims of the Vietnamese, the Sudan, the Algerians,… the British “mandate” in Palestine dismissing the claims of both the Jews and the Arabs.

The U.S. dismissing the claims of the Filipino and Hawaiian and Mexican and Central American claims to sovereignty over their own lands.

And it hasn’t stopped.

The gilded age and the police nightstick

Posted on November 10, 2008 by Eric Verlo

A legacy institution of the Gilded Age is the Waldorf=Astoria Hotel. Most of us only know it from the nutty salad, the mysterious Red Velvet Cake recipe, Thousand Island Dressing and Veal Oscar named for the famous maitre d’ hotel. I encountered the book of recipes collected by “Oscar of the Waldorf” and its cover illustration caught my eye. The coachman and carriage don’t look so opulent to us today, but do you recognize a timeless trapping of affluence? There’s nothing else in the picture but the policeman and his nightstick.

We almost dismiss the incongruity of the attendant police officer. That’s because he’s Officer Friendly to us, circa the 1950s egalitarian economic boom, earned post New Deal and post WWII, when law enforcement began to serve and protect the middle class share of the pie. Before those times, whose order did the police enforce?

Could the Waldorf diorama have featured some other occupation at the curb? A newsboy, a shoeshine, or a traffic director? If the cabbie is picking up late night revelers, why not depict a doorman or lamplighter?

If this scene did not include the policeman, he’d be missing.

The Gilded Age of the soaring wealth of bankers and industrialists, of the steel, coal, and rail robber barons, came at the expense of poverty wages for all the rest. The homeless of America’s eastern cities died in the streets, if they crossed the paths of the leisure class at all. As in London, where the bobbies were celebrated for carrying no guns, cops on the beat didn’t need more than a nightstick to beat back beggars and riffraff.

Just as in the Waldorf illustration, the policeman’s nightstick isn’t holstered, it is fingered idly like a baton. We’ve seen it in countless Chaplin, Keaton, and Keystone reels. The policeman’s baton might be carried idly, and animated mindlessly as a clerk might twirl a pencil, but the gyrations telegraphed a swinging function meant to be understood.

Today, a modern financial crisis has finally hit the post industrial era, and unemployment is taking a precipitous plunge. The repercussions for the American middle class are yet unclear to most, their comforts still too tangible to fathom gone. But our modern times have already seen the resurgence of the Rich And Famous, (to even beyond the lunge of our Super-Lotto winners, who always chose the sub-six-figure annuity). Exclusive cars, toy submarines and tickets into space cost multi-millions, but the rich have that money to burn. Common Americans have also watched the armoring of their police, using weapons which offend us, but which protect the security of institutional wealth. Para-military police forces are the natural escalation of the right-to-bear-arms arms-race, the equivalent of nightsticks to quell our social disquiet.

Already aren’t we seeing the police block the public’s way, lest we soil the red carpet of the well-heeled? Aren’t police blocking free speech in public spaces, when the monied media has decided it wants the backdrop to serve their message? Wait until we are gazing covetously upon the gilded extravagances, from the alley side of the gilded wrought iron gate.

Wiki notes:
Thousand Island Dressing came to the Waldorf from the so-named Lake Ontario waterway where New York’s super rich had their summer homes. The $100 recipe for Red Velvet Cake was the urban myth which resurfaced as the $250 Neiman Marcus chocolate chip cookie.

The original Waldorf Hotel was built by an Astor whose middle name was Waldorf, next door to an aunt with whom he was feuding. Later another Astor convinced her to move uptown and replaced her home with a taller hotel named the Astoria. The two luxurious hotels hyphened via the Peacock Alley, inspiring the popular song “Meet me at the hyphen.” In 1931 the landmark was moved to accommodate the Empire State Building, and was purchased in 1949 by Conrad Hilton who added the double-hyphen flourish, completely in the spirit of gilded ornamentation.

Colo. Springs celebrates underage vets

Posted on November 9, 2008 by Eric Verlo

COLORADO SPRINGS- The average age of a uniformed participant in this year’s Veteran’s Day Parade was underage! The high school Junior ROTCs, the Young Marines, the Devil Pups, and the scouts, pulled the age downward against the ever diminishing number of retired combat vets. I think the Hussar-clad HS marching bands brought the mean down too.

While officially the youthful paraders were there to cheer the old vets, it’s hard to imagine the cries of “thank you” were not intended for the ears of those in attendance who were still part of the military. Actually a large number of those involved in the Veteran’s Day Parade are active duty, when not on deployment.

Belonging to a pro-militant fan club such as the Colorado Springs Young Marines does not make you a soldier, nor I should hope a soldier-to-be. But their recruits are already veterans of US militarism and the warrior indoctrination process.

The Young Marines are sponsored by the Marine Corps, a rather audacious recruiting beachhead considering Colorado Springs is an Army and Air Force town. Note: the Marines have no JROTC program here, and the fewest nationwide. What does that say about the age they target?

Not to be outdone by the Young Marines, the Colorado Springs Youth Marine Club goes by the name DEVIL PUPS, although it offers its conscripts the chance to “learn code of conduct from Godly Veterans.”

Note the better fitting uniform and helmet, sized for infants. The Devil Pups are affiliated with a Camp Pendleton Devil Pups Inc. Though They claim to be neither a mini-boot-camp, nor a para-military outfit, the Devil Pups require that children “must pass a Physical Fitness Test, cannot be on any type of medication for any reason, [and] cannot have asthma (no exceptions).”

Do you doubt the Boy Scouts are a para-military organization? These scoutmasters don’t. STILL SERVING THROUGH SCOUTING read one banner. Another read RETURNING TO THE VALUES SCOUTING NEVER LEFT. Were those the values of Kit Carson to which you’re alluding?

Here are elementary school students riding on a float sponsored by the Globe Charter School. They hold posters celebrating the four branches of the military, plus the National Guard and the Coast Guard.

Rampart High School’s marching band, the “Rampart Regiment” costumed in deaths-head Hessian uniforms.

Our land-locked state also has a JROTC for students interested in the Navy. Three out of the four Colorado high schools enrolled in the Navy program are in Colorado Springs. They are Mesa Ridge, Wasson and Widefield. Oddly, none of Colorado’s 21 Army JROTC high school programs are in COS. The Air Force has five of seven participating high schools: Harrison, William Mitchell, Air Academy, Falcon and Sand Creek.

The parade of vintage cars provides a suitable reminder that all modern wars, post WWI, like these models, have been fought over the resource needed to fuel them.

Unafraid to make that point directly, the Military Vehicle Collectors Club solicits donations to KEEP ‘EM ROLLING.

This 40s staff car ferried former Waves who served the Navy in WWII. Resembling what most of us expect from a parade for honored veterans.

Denver Columbus Day Parade wants to kick indigenous ass

Posted on October 8, 2008 by Eric Verlo

DENVER- Does it look like the COLUMBUS DAY PARADE organizers are practically begging for a comeuppance? Here comes the US cavalry of the American Indian Wars to finish the job Columbus began.

On Columbus Day, the anniversary which has now become a teaching moment about revisiting the Columbus myth, about the holocaust unleashed by the European discovery, conquest and enslavement of North America, isn’t it rather odd to CALL IN THE CALVARY?

I MEAN, a celebration of Italian Americans is one thing. Is Christopher Columbus the only hero they can muster? Why not the Pope? I’m all for diverting Americans from the stereotype of the Sicilian American Sopranos legacy. But make it about pizza, not the frigging conquest of the American West. Columbus’ own diaries confess his exploitive inhumane designs in Hispaniola. White man western expansion was no less genocidal. Who should be celebrating that?

This squad looks like they’re reenacting Colonel Chivington and his raiders freshly back from the Sand Creek Massacre. Perhaps they are retracing the victory lap the soldiers rode in Denver, festooned with the body parts of their victims, women and children, they exhibited as trophies of their victorious raid on the Indian encampment at Sand Creek.

How fitting that for the modern day route, the western revelers drive Hummers. The glorification of the military is not coincidental, nor perhaps is the celebration of the uneducated.
Do YOU, for example, count Winston Churchill’s WWII England among your ancestors? Here is the invitation to the 2008 parade:

“On Saturday October 11, 2008, at 10:00AM, we will celebrate the American National Holiday which commemorates Columbus’ contribution to the formation of this great nation. It will also remind each one of us of the blood, sweat and tears our ancestors shed so that we might live and enjoy our lives in the land of the free.”

These are the Denver organizers’ own photos of the 2007 parade. In the next you can catch an unedited glimpse of a protester. And what other can that be but a reactionary scowl?

Here’s what those opposed to the Columbus commemoration are putting together.

1. RACE, RESISTANCE AND THE COLUMBIAN LEGACY
Join nationally-known activist Glenn Spagnuolo, co-founder of Re-create 68, for a night of education and dialogue about race in America and resistance to the Columbian Legacy!
When: 5pm Thursday, October 9, 2008
Where: CU Boulder Campus, Hale Hall Room 240

2. Columbus Day Resistance March and Rally
The annual protest of the Columbus Day Holiday and the racism that it embodies will begin with a march from Four Winds that ends at the Capitol Building followed by a rally for a better future.
When: March starts at 8 am, Rally at 9am, Saturday, October 11
Where: Start of March is at Four Winds at 5th and Bannock in Denver

3. People’s Council
Following the Columbus Day resistance, people will be gathering to organize a new alliance locally that can act as a national vehicle for radicals. Bring your thoughts and cooperative energy. Please come and represent R68.
When: 1pm, Saturday, October 11
Where: The Great Hall at the Iliff School of Theology just past Evans on University Blvd, Denver.

4. Student Walk-out on Racism
Whether you are a student or not, join the students of Iliff, CU Denver, CU Boulder and DU as the educate the public about Denver’s hidden racial past on the 101st Anniversary of the Columbus Holiday. There will be a student walk-out, a short rally, followed by a march to locations with a racial history that will end at Civic Center Park.
When: 12 Noon, Monday, October 13
Where: CU Denver’s Auraria Campus, The Plaza Building Lawn

The party’s over, it’s time to call it a day

Posted on September 15, 2008 by Tony Logan

…All except the really thick headed now know that the US party is over, though certainly there are a lot of thick headed Americans. So thick are they, in fact, that most Americans still believe the party is actually only over for a very short time, and that all will self-correct itself somehow!

In short, the majority of Americans still think that those who see clearly about the world economy, the blind alley militarism of the US, and the world economic crisis are simply Chicken Littles and party-poopers. The American Simpleton Majority wants nothing of any clear thinking ‘pessimism’ like that.

This will be a week of financial 9/11 and the business community of America has no al-qaeda to blame it on. Those who have followed sheep-like this out-for-lunch American business community all the way to this dead end, also have nobody much to blame other than themselves.

However… thugs and fools always will find targets to cast the blame away from themselves. For example, the German people did not blame themselves for their German caused disaster in WWI, but blamed a supposed international Jewish conspiracy and communists for the problems of their own making they found themselves deeply in. They found scapegoats and went at them.

The party is over and the US economy is dragging all down economically with themselves. Those others will not excuse the US people for what they have done, and don’ think for a second that they believe that somehow the common American is not responsible for the actions of the assholes that we allow to lead us. They blame us for not braking these thugs long ago. They blame us for our stupid cheerleading of ourselves, as if we were at some asinine athletic event! Yes, they blame us for our unsportsmanlike like attitudes…. our uncaring brutality, our all encompassing avarice and venality.

The party is over even if most of us only got some scraps thrown our way while it was going on and we really should have little reason to lament. But most of us will.

This will be a bleak Christmas Season and New Years Eve coming up, and a most scary and prolonged Halloween of our own making in the years ahead. You defended the wrong things in our national life, and now there’s a price to pay. Stupid Collective You. You knew better but acted as if you hadn’t a clue. You wanted nothing more that to get ahead yourself but you sunk the boat. Good luck! Good luck, America. You’ll need it because you still don’t want to deal with realities but prefer fantasy instead.

Your vote just doesn’t count in the two party dictatorship

Posted on August 28, 2008 by Tony Logan

Hydra …Dictatorships have gotten wise. It is easier to run a dictatorship when you present the public with two parties instead of one. Dictatorial Power no longer resides in just one single individual in today’s dictatorship, but within one power bloc instead. The public face of today’s dictatorship is a bureaucratic assemble of hacks, not just the face of one Supremo.

Take the current American dictatorship for an example (though Mexico’s current dictatorship is run exactly the same way, and if the American public was more familiar with Mexico would be just as illustrative as the American dictatorship itself is), where dictatorial power resides in a bureaucratic assemble of a bloc of bipartisan DP-RP hacks. We shall look at the present US government drive towards war with Russia as our example.

The public face of the American dictatorship comes in condensed form through the faces of about 6 individuals; Obama, Biden, Cheney, Bush, McCain, Lieberman (very possibly the VP selection by McCain). All have been appointed more than truly elected, and all are united in the need for the US to attack Russia. Russia confronts not El Supremo but rather a six headed hydra of global business domination centered in the US.

A modern day American dictatorship is the viper we can all see publicly, but it is multi-faced, and not that of just one Gran Prepotente (Big Shot). Unfortunately, the public has a hard time truly understanding that the face of America’ modern dictatorship is truly not much different from dictatorship’s of the past, where Mr. Power Hog ruled over all.

In the past, the dictator put on a show election, but that is still how it is done today with the multi-headed Dictator Bloc, too. The show currently is in the pageantry at Denver and St. Paul. In both cases, your vote really need not be bothered to be counted, since the selection was already made for you by raw economic power, which you have none of.

Dictatorship has always resided in ownership, and today’s multi-headed hydra dictatorship for all its apparent differences with the past is no different. The dictatorship owns all; press, soldiers, police, banks, oil, money supply, jobs, the water and air your life depends on. Rebel, and they’ll take off the shirt on your back and the pants you wear, and give you those of their own which they will now own.

Well what about our example of the American dictatorship confronting Russia? It is obvious to see for all that should look and think, that the 6 headed hydra of Obama, Biden, Cheney, Bush, McCain, Lieberman all have obtained ‘consensus’ to rule just like a one headed El Supremo style dictatorship would. They are all for using the Pentagon and NATO to attack Russia. Your vote doesn’t count in the 2 party dictatorship! It’s because the America you live in is a dictatorship. Vote if it makes you feel good but don’t be under any delusions about it.

HYDRA

Insurgents, prairie dogs and Laser Tag

Posted on August 19, 2008 by Eric Verlo

I remember discovering the difference between target shooting and Laser Tag. At a firing range you could look calmly down your gun sight and concentrate without distraction. Same with hunting. But Laser Tag, Paintball, or the doubtlessly misnomered Airsoft, let you experience what it’s like to be shot at. Who would believe aiming a gun is so different under fire?

In Laser Tag, you had to wear an infrared sensor to make yourself a target to your opponent’s fire. We used to wrap the sensor belt around our heads because it seemed the most fair vulnerability. Otherwise it was too easy to obscure your sensor between you and the ground or against whatever you were hiding behind. On your forehead, the sensor would become visible whenever you yourself attempted to poke up your head to take a shot.

I learned to cheat by crawling under cars to obscure my forehead in the undercarriage while my line of sight remained unimpeded. Of course I was a sitting duck when spotted. But from no matter what covered position, I found it much harder to take aim when adversaries were directing their fire at me.

If you’d succeeded in concealing your vantage point, you were free to concentrate on your aim. But now you were challenged with a further trembling sensation in your fingers. Now there was a heightened hesitation to pull the trigger, because the moment you did, your position would be revealed and you’d attract fire.

This is the predicament we discount when we think of military snipers. Though it seems quite plainly cowardly to shoot unsuspecting opponents from a concealed position, often snipers have to operate from hiding places deep in enemy territory. When they finally take their shot, snipers become prey themselves.

I think about this immediate blowback consequence when I think of Iraqis or Afghans who contemplate taking aim at the US military machine. Insurgents face technology and firepower to obliterate the very hill from which they might be shooting. It would seem that anyone who would dare to stand armed against US forces would be a suicide bomber. It’s near certain death to fire a Kalashnikov knowing that US electronics can very quickly extrapolate your location and bring ordinance against you like a fly-swatter against a fly.

In WWII against Japan, we held a sad esteem for the suicide pilots of the last desperate Japanese efforts. The Kamikazes would pilot explosive laden aircraft which had no landing gears in case they changed their minds. It seemed like lunacy, and often they were young, and barely trained.

I wondered if our soldiers accord the Iraqi or Afghan insurgents a similar awed respect. To merely raise your head from the rubble, without Kevlar armor, requires a bravery to defy the gods. What a cost to try to defend your homeland against America’s overwhelming might. I couldn’t do it. You draw almost certain overkill coming from unforeseen points, high in the sky, laser-guided by a team of technicians in climate controlled comfort on the other side of the planet, who are not themselves under fire. We’ve rendered all our adversaries into suicide bombers. How dare our behind-the-lines officers call them cowardly?

The latest Drug War news from the El Paso-Ciudad Juarez metro area

Posted on August 19, 2008 by Tony Logan

At last count, Ciudad Juarez has had 840 people murdered there this year, most of them Drug War victims. Severed head The entire US-Mexican Border area has been turned into a killing battlefield by the US campaign to militarize Latin America as well as our own country. Here is the Narco News report on the latest violence in the El Paso-Ciudad Juarez metro area Masked Gunmen Unleash AK-47s on Drug-Rehab Center; Mexican Soldiers Parked 50 Yards Away Do Nothing

For further recent US-Mexico Drug War news from a little further inside Mexico see Suspected drug hit men dump head in Mexican city

Poland, Ukraine and Georgia are three troops in US battle plan against Russia

Posted on August 16, 2008 by Tony Logan

The US is advancing its battle plans against Russia on multiple military fronts, with Georgia, Ukraine, and Poland being the most key ones. That is not to forget about US missile plans in The Czech Republic and the US manipulations in other tiny nation-lets now under at least partial US command, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. All this NATO-Pentagon joint buildup against Russia goes on under a virtual blackout of media coverage.
Shhhh…. says the corporate press. It’s not news you need to know.

Russia is vocally telling the US what it plans to do about this, and we should all be up in arms about the Pentagon game plans for conflict with Russia. Russia could strike Poland over U.S. shield: report But quite frankly, with all ‘resistance’ contained by the Democratic Party, Americans are basically a flock of passive sheep. Add to that, the antiwar movement under liberal church direction is now dead asleep.

What are you personally doing to help change all that? Oh, and does that ‘missile Defense Agency’ logo seem somewhat familiar? Head on over to Colorado Springs’ Schriever Air Force Base to see who’s goading on a possible nuclear war with Russia? You can see that logo there once again.

Dr. Bousa and the CIA

Posted on August 14, 2008 by Tony Logan

Middle Eastern Beauties
One could easily overlook certain political world happenings and believe that the Arab Lounge’s Ask Dr. Bousa is nothing more than yet another page in another innocuous single’s meat market web site. However$$$?

That would be to overlook the American Psycho Association’s …Oh I meant ‘Psychological’ Association’s work at Guantanamo for the Pentagon. Yes, nothing is as simple these days as it first appears. The US Christian government’s war on Islamic cultural beliefs is deep and repulsive, not to mention pornographic. Abu Ghraib… remember that? Now we have something called “Arab Lounge’.

So over-sexualization of Arab life is something that the Pentagon would want to push in its pornographic style. Homosexual rape, menstrual blood, and singles sites for Arabs and Muslims perhaps?

Those are some pretty seductive Arab women I am seeing in ads for ‘Arab Lounge’ Inc. Reminds me of the Israeli material military girls even. Reminds us of the American Psychological Assoication, does it not?

Yes, I do not think I am merely paranoid either? lol madly MADLY!!!! Cuties at Arab Lounge

Yes, the US government can actually be involving itself in seducing the young rich Arab males with porno sites! Do it and you got them by their dicks, Dick, might just be where it got started, and not just from some innocent business scheme! Hollywood might not be quite enough, and the Pentagon may actually have a hand in this ‘Arab Lounge’?!

Go figure? Nothing is as it ever simply appears these days. War is fought on so many different fronts. It’s a Brave and Creepy World out there.

Conservatism Is For Sociopaths

Posted on August 8, 2008 by Thomas Mc

Oh, those caucasians. Russia and Georgia go to war over Ossetia. Thousands are dead, capitol of Ossetia is in ruins, and Bush has declared we are on Georgia’s side…against Russia. So enjoy your weekend, it might be our last.

Pakistan is toppling dictator Musharraf. Pelosi says “What? You can’t impeach a dictator!”

Condi Rice gives Israel a “green light” to attack Iran and start WWIII.

Witness the Nazi State of Israel.

As we all suspected, Cheney has his own private torture dungeon underneath the White House.

Cheney’s flying monkey Douglas Feith forged document linking Saddam and al Qaeda.

New McCain ad calls Obama the AntiChrist.

A country this stupid can’t survive for very long.

Jury gives Salim Hamdan (bin Laden’s driver) a 66 month sentence, including time served — which means he can go home in January. Needless to say, der Führer is pissed, he was demanding a 30 year sentence.

Excerpts from Thomas McCullock’s notes Aug 8, thomasmc.com.

Military fiction, publishing as product takes us further downhill to total cultural illiteracy

Posted on August 7, 2008 by Tony Logan

When Americans step inside the big chain publishers’ bookstores, Barnes and Noble and Borders, they are almost always under the delusion that they are inside real bookstores containing real books. Nothing could be farther from the truth though. We instead have merely entered into the realm of publishing as product.

What do I mean by ‘publishing as product’? The answer simply put is that publishing historically was an act of putting an art form in front of the art appreciating public. That art form was called literature and you had to read to get it. Publishing was never a pure process without politics, but far from it as politics was essential to what often got published, and what did not. But todays publishing world is far different than that of the past. What does the American literature reading public run into today?

Today’s publishing world has as much to do with art (literature) as McDonald’s has to do with cooking (culinary arts). Content inside the big publishing firms today is handled like a product, not an art that has high impact on politics and national culture. Conservative businessmen still limit what gets published and what does not, but the censorship involves not censuring and disallowing individual radical authors, but censoring and disallowing entire product lines. To cover up this censorship, a whole new group of alternative products have been developed to better hide the fact that real literature is no longer a product to be carried on the shelves.

As an avid book reader since I was a kid, I have been going into America’s bookstores for 1/2 a century which has allowed me to see this devolution in process on a continual basis. So let me name a few of the new publishing product lines that have displaced the old book shelves that once were partially inhabited, at least some, by novels in translation from other parts of the world.

Americans have always been an ethnocentric society and that has been always encouraged by conservative publishers who published mainly American authors. But where once stood Steinbeck and Zola, now stands shelves after shelves of books under other categories of products instead of just Fiction , all now directed to a population segmented by market research science laboratories. We now have Gay Literature, Christian Literature, and the latest grouping something called Military Literature. Further, one finds literature now very much separated into gender categories (Thanks, Oprah! See what you helped do?). Of course, as a remnant of the ’60s we have tiny sections of Black Fiction, Chicano Fiction, Native American Fiction, though not Black Fiction from elsewhere than the US, Latin American fiction from elsewhere than the US, or Native American fiction from say Guatemala or Peru.

We also have oodles of shelves with product lines directed to UFO believers, New Age dabblers, fascist talk show lovers, ‘self help’ addicts, and this new grouping identified for product line identity sales, the US military grunt fan club of all that is weaponry and war. Hence comes ‘Military Fiction’.

There is nothing really modern about this since Hollywood keyed in on this crowd since way back even before John Wayne. (Kids, if you don’t know who John Wayne is, then text message some Dude who might know and ask him?) What is new is to see this product line as marked out, pushed, and delineated as it is today. We shall all be corporately sliced and diced down to our very genes, it seems…

So who are the ‘writers’ for this new product line called Military Fiction? Here they are in Barnes and Nobles, War and Military Fiction division. Notice all those B&N sub-divisions of this hither before non-existent category of Fiction. Notice how they tossed in Vonnegut and Hemingway to make the new product line look less superficial than it really is?

Can you imagine this sort of thing in French, Italian, or German bookstores? They don’t have half their countries’ populations working for the military-security-industrial complex though. Personally, I can see a future reduction int he Christian Fiction and Christian Non-Fiction product lines, and and even larger spread of product items in the War and Military Fiction and Non-Fiction departments. Maybe even an ICE Fiction product line, too? And Private Military Contractor Fiction area?

Meanwhile, culturally, the US heads toward being a total illiterate wasteland in the publishing of real literature in the English language, especially in the translation of foreign authors of note. The worst of all this, is that almost all those entering into these warehouses of bookfood products think that they are part of the educated just by being there among the shelves of what??? … shelves of trash. All the books have been replaced by artificial-alterficial-superficial bookfood, or spam of lit. This delusion of education being sold at the bookfood warehouses is the phoniest product line of them all.

Oh, and that photo that led off this commentary? That is a promotion from a category of bookfood called ‘Women’s Military Fiction’, which is a combo of Romance, pseudo Feminism, and Pentagon Pro-war propaganda? Here is Lindsay McKinna’s website promo comments about her bookfood.

‘Lindsay McKenna (A.K.A. Eileen Nauman) is the best-selling author of Valkyrie and 75 fiction books in the last 20 years. Known as the “Top Gun of Women’s Military Fiction,” she created the sub-genre of military adventure/romance and covers a mainstream women’s market having sold over 10 million books worldwide.’

Who needs international literature in American bookstores when there is this sort of crap to sell? That’s why literature by authors from other countries just really is not there anymore. It has been replaced by bookfood spam.

Howabout an unexpurgated face of war

Posted on July 29, 2008 by Eric Verlo

163

Forbidden image of a dead US soldier The US media was not permitted to depict fallen soldiers, in or out of the coffin. Next military censors forbade photos of US wounded. Most recently US soldiers have been under orders to prohibit the press from photographing them at all, to promote the illusion that our Iraqi surrogates alone are handling security. How infuriated our officials must have been to see this photograph in the international press.

Do Americans not want to see their fallen boys? In my recent experience with death, I most certainly wanted to see what happened straight up. Do the families of soldiers really not want to see how their loved one met his/her fate? What utter bullshit! If they don’t I do. Someone should care enough for the poor lost life!

Hopefully the total control our military has been asserting over media images will result in more outright mutiny on the part of international photo journalists.

Not long ago, a sequence of photos which documented the aftermath of an IED led the DoD to forbid all depictions of even wounded soldiers. The picture below shows a victim trying vainly to join his comrades who made it to cover. He didn’t die. But this image most certainly is dispiriting to Americans watching safely from their homes, who are losing their stamina for an ugly war.

Last permitted photo of a wounded US soldier

Before coverage of operations in Iraq were safely controlled by only embedded reporters, freelance photographers were able to record images reminiscent of WWII, Korea and Vietnam. These GIs fell in the assault on Fallujah. Fortunately for the Pentagon, Iraq is now too dangerous for journalist who don’t have American minders.
US casualties in Fallujah

A recent so-called breach of an embed contract yielded images of the aftermath of a suicide-bomb attack. The American photographer incurred heavy criticism for publishing the pictures which his Marine unit had ordered him to erase. But they were published in B&W, which invokes the famous WWII Pacific Theater dead, but it does lessen the realism, doesn’t it? These casualties seem more distant than our losses in Vietnam. And how do you reconcile that the simultaneous photos of the Iraqi casualties were printed adjacent in color? We can handle seeing the red of their blood, but not ours?

Dead US Marines

I’d rather vote for what I want and not get it, than vote for what I don’t want

Posted on July 25, 2008 by NMT

eugene-victor-debs-convict-9653-for-president-presidential-campaign-botton-pin.jpg “I’d rather vote for something
I want and not get it, than vote
for something I don’t want,
and get it.”
–Eugene Debs

Debs ran for the presidency from jail where he was imprisoned for sedition for opposing America’s participation in WWI.

Helen Keller: Oh blind vanity of slaves!

Posted on June 29, 2008 by NMT

“It is in your power to refuse to carry the artillery … You do not need to make a great noise about it. With the silence and dignity of creators you can end wars and the system of selfishness and exploitation that causes wars. All you need to do to bring about this stupendous revolution is to straighten up and fold your arms.”

Strike Against War

To begin with, I have a word to say to my good friends, the editors, and others who are moved to pity me. Some people are grieved because they imagine I am in the hands of unscrupulous persons who lead me astray and persuade me to espouse unpopular causes and make me the mouthpiece of their propaganda. Now, let it be understood once and for all that I do not want their pity; I would not change places with one of them. I know what I am talking about. My sources of information are as good and reliable as anybody else’s. I have papers and magazines from England, France, Germany and Austria that I can read myself. Not all the editors I have met can do that. Quite a number of them have to take their French and German second hand. No, I will not disparage the editors. They are an overworked, misunderstood class. Let them remember, though, that if I cannot see the fire at the end of their cigarettes, neither can they thread a needle in the dark. All I ask, gentlemen, is a fair field and no favor. I have entered the fight against preparedness and against the economic system under which we live. It is to be a fight to the finish, and I ask no quarter.

The future of the world rests in the hands of America. The future of America rests on the backs of 80,000,000 working men and women and their children. We are facing a grave crisis in our national life. The few who profit from the labor of the masses want to organize the workers into an army which will protect the interests of the capitalists. You are urged to add to the heavy burdens you already bear, the burden of a larger army and many additional warships. It is in your power to refuse to carry the artillery and the dread-noughts and to shake off some of the burdens, too, such as limousines, steam yachts and country estates. You do not need to make a great noise about it. With the silence and dignity of creators you can end wars and the system of selfishness and exploitation that causes wars. All you need to do to bring about this stupendous revolution is to straighten up and fold your arms.

We are not preparing to defend our country. Even if we were as helpless as Congressman Gardner says we are, we have no enemies foolhardy enough to attempt to invade the United States. The talk about attack from Germany and Japan is absurd. Germany has its hands full and will be busy with its own affairs for some generations after the European war is over.

With full control of the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, the allies failed to land enough men to defeat the Turks at Gallipoli; and then they failed again to land an army at Salonica in time to check the Bulgarian invasion of Serbia. The conquest of America by water is a nightmare confined exclusively to ignorant persons and members of the Navy League.

Yet, everywhere, we hear fear advanced as argument for armament. It reminds me of a fable I read. A certain man found a horseshoe. His neighbor began to weep and wail because, as he justly pointed out, the man who found the horseshoe might someday find a horse. Having found the shoe, he might shoe him. The neighbor’s child might some day go so near the horse’s heels as to be kicked, and die. Undoubtedly the two families would quarrel and fight, and several valuable lives would be lost through the finding of the horseshoe. You know the last war we had we quite accidentally picked up some islands in the Pacific Ocean which may some day be the cause of a quarrel between ourselves and Japan. I’d rather drop those islands right now and forget about them than go to war to keep them. Wouldn’t you?

Congress is not preparing to defend the people of the United States. It is planning to protect the capital of American speculators and investors in Mexico, South America, China, and the Philippine Islands. Incidentally this preparation will benefit the manufacturers of munitions and war machines.

Until recently there were uses in the United States for the money taken from the workers. But American labor is exploited almost to the limit now, and our national resources have all been appropriated. Still the profits keep piling up new capital. Our flourishing industry in implements of murder is filling the vaults of New York’s banks with gold. And a dollar that is not being used to make a slave of some human being is not fulfilling its purpose in the capitalistic scheme. That dollar must be invested in South America, Mexico, China, or the Philippines.

It was no accident that the Navy League came into prominence at the same time that the National City Bank of New York established a branch in Buenos Aires. It is not a mere coincidence that six business associates of J.P. Morgan are officials of defense leagues. And chance did not dictate that Mayor Mitchel should appoint to his Committee of Safety a thousand men that represent a fifth of the wealth of the United States. These men want their foreign investments protected.

Every modern war has had its root in exploitation. The Civil War was fought to decide whether the slaveholders of the South or the capitalists of the North should exploit the West. The Spanish-American War decided that the United States should exploit Cuba and the Philippines. The South African War decided that the British should exploit the diamond mines. The Russo-Japanese War decided that Japan should exploit Korea. The present war is to decide who shall exploit the Balkans, Turkey, Persia, Egypt, India, China, Africa. And we are whetting our sword to scare the victors into sharing the spoils with us. Now, the workers are not interested in the spoils; they will not get any of them anyway.

The preparedness propagandists have still another object, and a very important one. They want to give the people something to think about besides their own unhappy condition. They know the cost of living is high, wages are low, employment is uncertain and will be much more so when the European call for munitions stops. No matter how hard and incessantly the people work, they often cannot afford the comforts of life; many cannot obtain the necessities.

Every few days we are given a new war scare to lend realism to their propaganda. They have had us on the verge of war over the Lusitania, the Gulflight, the Ancona, and now they want the workingmen to become excited over the sinking of the Persia. The workingman has no interest in any of these ships. The Germans might sink every vessel on the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, and kill Americans with every one–the American workingman would still have no reason to go to war.

All the machinery of the system has been set in motion. Above the complaint and din of the protest from the workers is heard the voice of authority.

“Friends,” it says, “fellow workmen, patriots; your country is in danger! There are foes on all sides of us. There is nothing between us and our enemies except the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean. Look at what has happened to Belgium. Consider the fate of Serbia. Will you murmur about low wages when your country, your very liberties, are in jeopardy? What are the miseries you endure compared to the humiliation of having a victorious German army sail up the East River? Quit your whining, get busy and prepare to defend your firesides and your flag. Get an army, get a navy; be ready to meet the invaders like the loyal-hearted freemen you are.”

Will the workers walk into this trap? Will they be fooled again? I am afraid so. The people have always been amenable to oratory of this sort. The workers know they have no enemies except their masters. They know that their citizenship papers are no warrant for the safety of themselves or their wives and children. They know that honest sweat, persistent toil and years of struggle bring them nothing worth holding on to, worth fighting for. Yet, deep down in their foolish hearts they believe they have a country. Oh blind vanity of slaves!

The clever ones, up in the high places know how childish and silly the workers are. They know that if the government dresses them up in khaki and gives them a rifle and starts them off with a brass band and waving banners, they will go forth to fight valiantly for their own enemies. They are taught that brave men die for their country’s honor. What a price to pay for an abstraction–the lives of millions of young men; other millions crippled and blinded for life; existence made hideous for still more millions of human being; the achievement and inheritance of generations swept away in a moment–and nobody better off for all the misery! This terrible sacrifice would be comprehensible if the thing you die for and call country fed, clothed, housed and warmed you, educated and cherished your children. I thinkthe workers are the most unselfish of the children of men; they toil and live and die for other people’s country, other people’s sentiments, other people’s liberties and other people’s happiness! The workers have no liberties of their own; they are not free when they are compelled to work twelve or ten or eight hours a day. they are not free when they are ill paid for their exhausting toil. They are not free when their children must labor in mines, mills and factories or starve, and when their women may be driven by poverty to lives of shame. They are not free when they are clubbed and imprisoned because they go on strike for a raise of wages and for the elemental justice that is their right as human beings.

We are not free unless the men who frame and execute the laws represent the interests of the lives of the people and no other interest. The ballot does not make a free man out of a wage slave. there has never existed a truly free and democratic nation in the world. From time immemorial men have followed with blind loyalty the strong men who had the power of money and of armies. Even while battlefields were piled high with their own dead they have tilled the lands of the rulers and have been robbed of the fruits of their labor. They have built palaces and pyramids, temples and cathedrals that held no real shrine of liberty.

As civilization has grown more complex the workers have become more and more enslaved, until today they are little more than parts of the machines they operate. Daily they face the dangers of railroad, bridge, skyscraper, freight train, stokehold, stockyard, lumber raft and min. Panting and training at the docks, on the railroads and underground and on the seas, they move the traffic and pass from land to land the precious commodities that make it possible for us to live. And what is their reward? A scanty wage, often poverty, rents, taxes, tributes and war indemnities.

The kind of preparedness the workers want is reorganization and reconstruction of their whole life, such as has never been attempted by statesmen or governments. The Germans found out years ago that they could not raise good soldiers in the slums so they abolished the slums. They saw to it that all the people had at least a few of the essentials of civilization–decent lodging, clean streets, wholesome if scanty food, proper medical care and proper safeguards for the workers in their occupations. That is only a small part of what should be done, but what wonders that one step toward the right sort of preparedness has wrought for Germany! For eighteen months it has kept itself free from invasion while carrying on an extended war of conquest, and its armies are still pressing on with unabated vigor. It is your business to force these reforms on the Administration. Let there be no more talk about what a government can or cannot do. All these things have been done by all the belligerent nations in the hurly-burly of war. Every fundamental industry has been managed better by the governments than by private corporations.

It is your duty to insist upon still more radical measure. It is your business to see that no child is employed in an industrial establishment or mine or store, and that no worker in needlessly exposed to accident or disease. It is your business to make them give you clean cities, free from smoke, dirt and congestion. It is your business to make them pay you a living wage. It is your business to see that this kind of preparedness is carried into every department on the nation, until everyone has a chance to be well born, well nourished, rightly educated, intelligent and serviceable to the country at all times.

Strike against all ordinances and laws and institutions that continue the slaughter of peace and the butcheries of war. Srike against war, for without you no battles can be fought. Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder. Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human being. Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction. Be heroes in an army of construction.

-Helen Keller at Carnegie Hall, Strike Against War, New York City, January 5, 1916

Support the Troops executing civilians

Posted on June 12, 2008 by Eric Verlo

German regulars execute 36 Serb civilians in Pancevo, Vojvodina in retaliation for the deaths of two SS men
Early in WWII, a German Army film staff recorded this deed in color: enraged by the loss of two officers on April 21, 1941, the invading German soldiers gathered 36 random males from the town of Pancevo, Vojvodina and hung or shot them. How different was this from what US soldiers did on November 19, 2005, in Haditha, Iraq? In Haditha American Marines killed the women and children too. The Pancevo events in 1941 were kept from the German public lest their support for their troops waiver.

The Dirty Half-Dozen Dozen Dozen

Posted on April 21, 2008 by Eric Verlo

The DoD records for 2007 reveal Army, Marines allow more convicts to enlist and Army doubled felony waivers and US military ups recruitment of criminals and Double number of ex-cons join the US army. The variation in the headlines invites the question: which is it- 861 cons or ex-cons? Is the army enlisting soldiers from the prison population, or from the post-rehabilitated? I’m not sure if either is more unsavory to train to shout “Kill! Kill! Kill!” These are men guilty of burglary mainly, and aggravated assault, but also manslaughter and rape. Representing for the US.

Remember Lee Marvin and the Dirty Dozen? In a fictional WWII adventure, a squad of hardened convicts was offered a reprieve from their prison sentences in exchange for volunteering to join a suicidal commando mission. Given the arrangement would have been kept a secret, we’re left to imagine that it could have actually happened. The film came out in 1967, when redemption through patriotism, manslaughter for flag and country as atonement for vile crimes, might have had some appeal.

Can you imagine being an Afghan or Iraqi, your life, your home, your family, your future, in the hands of a criminal/ex-criminal? If there’s a common denominator with law-breakers, it isn’t just immorality, it’s bad judgment, and dare I say it, none-too-brightness. The US military is committing a war crime to put the lives of occupied peoples in such hands. The Geneva Conventions stipulate that care of civilians must be responsible and adequate. At least Marvin and fiends were only tasked with shooting everything up.

An Army spokesman minimized the recruiting development thus:

“We are a reflection of American society and the changes that affect it: today’s young men and women are more overweight, have a greater incidence of asthma and are being charged for offenses that in earlier years wouldn’t have been considered a serious offense, and might not have resulted in charges in the first place.”

For those of you concerned only for our soldiers’ welfare, there’s a big problem there too. At least the Dirty Dozen were self-contained, messing only with each other’s psychopathic urges. The 6x12x12 degenerate recruits who entered US military service in 2007, up from 457 in 2006, are integrated into the ranks of all the branches. Your sons or daughter have to serve side by side with these dubious bedfellows.

Corrupt Fed wants control

Posted on March 27, 2008 by JB

These bastards are brazen thieves and agents of disinformation. Has the entire fricking country gone stupid? We are witnessing the transfer of vast sums of our money… not theirs, ours… to them!! And a Fed who wants to get the SEC out of the way so they can do it! Paulson, Bernake, Greenspan, Volker, Rubin… all wall street thieves and crooks, liars and scum. This is the fascist business model in full head long dive to the bottom with the Fed cleaning up the mess and divvying up the bailout money to their wall street buddies. For the next 6 months.

This had to be planned. No concerned economic professional in their right mind would have let this happen. The Fed is responsible for the housing bubble, the subprime crime, the weak dollar and now for looting the U.S. citizen treasury!! JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank America… they’re all going down. They’ve all got the CDO-SIV-Hedge Fund cancer bad. Why is the Fed taking on all this worthless paper and risk? All for show. They create and destroy money all the time.

Regardless, they will bail them all out… on our tab. Bear Stearns was sacrificed to keep JP Morgan on life support. But you can bet the Bear Stearns management got out before the crash of stock price. I think the SEC would investigate that right? And how is it that the Fed can act alone on these things, and the Congress (many of whom voted to repeal the Glass-Steagal act with Clinton) [there’s a question for Hillary] in the aftermath asks their sniveling little questions of how the deal was structured? Because the Fed runs the show. It is a private banking system… not a government agency! We are witnessing the power of the central banking system that was set up in Europe by the Bauers (Rothchilds), the Greens, the Schifts, the Warburgs…all German banking Zionists. Then brought to the U.S. (The Money Masters -dvd). Talmudist Jews by the way. Sold out Germany with the British to bring U.S. into WWI. Even though Germany was offering England a return to peace with no reparations or conditions.

Now, what happened to that 2.4 trillion that went missing from the Pentagon… just before 9-11? Hmmmm Dov Zakhiem might know. Another Zionist and dual Israeli/U.S. citizen who was in charge of the Pentagons budget as comptroller. Funny how that “plane” hit the accounting area of the Pentagon, destroying all evidence and records of misplaced funds. Darn the luck. Who’d have thought?

Dead Chetnik discovered in US embassy

Posted on February 24, 2008 by Eric Verlo

Standard of the First Serbian Rebellion against the Ottoman Empire Angry Serbs stormed the American embassy in Belgrade to protest the US support of Kosovo independence. In the aftermath a charred body was found. Strange detail, don’t you think? Standard news reports would say one killed, or that there had been one casualty. Instead the stories describe “a charred body was discovered in an unoccupied area” of one of the embassy buildings. State Department spokesmen made clear it wasn’t a US national, nor an embassy employee, suggesting this was a protester. Or was it a secret detainee? Was this an interrogation water-boarding victim, left to dry, then to burn to a crisp? Was this a Janet Reno set fire?

The trouble for George’s crew was that the discovery was not in the part of the embassy breached by the rioters. Nor was it where the US diplomats have their offices. For what uses are the “unoccupied” buildings behind the embassy walls?

Otherwise it’s damned convenient to suggest the charred body could be one of the rioters. As a rebellious anti-American Serb, his/her profile would likely coincide with that of a person of interest US agents might have been holding for extraordinary rendition, or working over for intelligence.

Why is the USA a backer of Kosovo independence? Kosovo has long been a province of Serbia, but suffered in WWII when the Germans massacred most of the families who lived there in retaliation for the deeds of the Chetnik partisans. As Albanian refugees moved into the empty houses, the population of Kosovo shifted until today the separatists outnumber the historic inhabitants. Otherwise, what cause has Kosovo to split from its countryside?

America fought a civil war to keep its southern states from seceding from the union. Yet today we cheer when minority regions want to break from their national borders, when those borders are those of our enemy. The soviet member states from the former union for example, or Chechnya from Russia, or Kosovo from Serbia. When it involves our allies, we show less enthusiasm: Kurdistan, Timor, Taiwan.

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