Monday, February 08, 2010
During the Bush administration, millions of anti-war protestors voiced their passionate dissent over the massive cost, in blood and treasure, of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Largely composed of disaffected Democrats, the anti-war movement vigorously challenged the Bush-Cheney war policies through hundreds of well-orchestrated rallies across the nation. But suddenly, the movement has gone strangely silent despite President Obama's intensification of the war effort.
While President Obama campaigned as the more diplomatic, pro-peace candidate, a significant number of his policies have undermined his credibility in this arena. Here's an abridged list:
He just signed a record
$708 billion military budget, bigger than President Bush's largest defense budget.
He allocated over $100 billion in supplemental funding for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The CIA has carried out a record number of
Predator Drone attacks on targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other nations, attacks which led to the deaths of
over 700 Pakistani civilians last year.
He instituted two new troop surges in Afghanistan, which added an additional 50,000 troops.
His two troop surges led to 2009 being the
bloodiest year for American & NATO soldiers in Afghanistan.
A record number of
private war contractors, approximately over 200,000, now operate in Afghanistan and Iraq under Obama's command.
U.S. soldiers, mainly special forces, are now operating in
Pakistan and
Yemen.
Over 100,000 soldiers are still on the ground in Iraq, despite campaign pledges to commence a fairly rapid drawdown. In addition, a
significant spike in sectarian violence has occured in Iraq over the last six months, arousing new worries of yet another delay.
Guantanamo Bay is
still open, despite Obama's pledge to close it in a year's time.
In his proposal for a three-year federal spending freeze, the military budget was completely
exempted.
Under Obama, annual war spending now
surpasses healthcare, education, welfare, and safety spending by all fifty state governments combined.
So, despite the flowery rhetoric and promises of "change", in many ways, President Obama has instituted a more hawkish and more expensive war policy than President Bush. Yet, notwithstanding a strong rebuke by Michael Moore and a few rallies by Cindy Sheehan & Co., the anti-war movement has offered very little resistance to the Obama administration and the Democratic-led Congress. Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and other liberal network personalities do not seem to be putting up much of a fight, either, compared to their complaints during the Bush-Cheney years.
Is this just a clear-cut case of partisan hypocrisy, then?
As it stands now, the most consistent anti-war opposition continues to originate from the likes of Cindy Sheehan, Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Independent Progressive
Ralph Nader, Republican Congressman Ron Paul, Democratic congressional candidate Marcy Winogard, and
Antiwar.com.
Much like Republicans lost a tremendous amount of credibility on fiscal issues by exploding the national debt, Democrats are rapidly in danger of losing their credibility on war policy. Record war spending, multiple troop surges, an explosive rise in Drone attacks, higher casualties, and the status quo on Guantanamo Bay are some of the stains on a Democratic party that was supposed to overturn many of the previous administration's "warmongering" policies.
If the anti-war movement wants to regain its credibility, it will need to start holding President Obama accountable, just as it did President Bush.
The Seth Series: In the coming weeks I will be posting a series on Jane Roberts, the channel of Seth, including Jane’s birth chart and my analysis, along with some less common perspectives on Jane, her life, and the Seth Material…
Mass Death and Other Group Events
In my previous post, I talked of “Mass Death” that I have foreseen in coming times, and of death as a release and open door for individual human beings. Each of us benefits from time spent contemplating death from various points of view. With practice, one gradually learns how to do that, and to prepare, without fear.
But what about when death comes to dozens, hundreds, thousands, even millions, in a single time-place event? Indeed, what about other mass disasters or group transformations such as migration, war, famine, the collapse of a civilization? Mass death comes in many forms and, according to Seth, these events are no more random or accidental, much less meaningless, than is the death of a single individual.
Here is Seth, discussing the origin and purpose of mass events such as death:
“We will call the world, as you physically experience it, Framework 1. In Framework 1, you watch television programs, for example. You have your choice of many channels….You follow certain scenes or actors….You watch all of these dramas, hardly understanding how it is that they appear on your screen to begin with ….Even the actors themselves, taking part in such sagas, have but the remotest idea of the events that are involved in order that their own images will appear on your television screen….Now somewhere there is a program director, who must take care of the entire programming…Let us imagine that physical events occur in the same fashion — that you choose those which flash upon the screen of your experience…..As you do not know what happens in the television studio before you observe a program…so you do not know what happens in the creative framework of reality before you experience physical events. We will call that vast unconscious mental and universal studio Framework 2…
“Actors visit casting agencies so that they know what plays need their services. In your dreams you visit casting agencies. You are aware of the various plays being considered for physical production. In the dream state, then, often you familiarize yourself with dramas that are of a probable nature. If enough interest is shown, if enough actors apply, if enough resources are accumulated, the play will go on. When you are in other than your normally conscious state, you visit that creative inner agency in which all physical productions must have their beginning. You meet with others, who for their own reasons are interested in the same kind of drama. Following our analogy, the technicians, the actors, the writers all assemble — only in this case the result will be a live event rather than a televised one. There are disaster films being planned, educational programs, religious dramas. All of these will be encountered in full-blown physical reality. Such events occur as a result of individual beliefs, desires, and intents.
There is no such thing as a chance encounter. No death occurs by chance, nor any birth.
“In the creative atmosphere of Framework 2, intents are known. In a manner of speaking, no act is private. Your communication systems bring to your living room notices of events that occur throughout the world. Yet that larger inner system of communications is far more powerful in scope, and each mental act is imprinted in the multidimensional screen of Framework 2. That screen is available to All, and in other levels of consciousness, particularly sleep and dreaming stages, the events of that inner reality are ever-present and easily accessible as physical events when you are awake.
“It is as if Framework 2 contains an infinite information service, that instantly puts you in contact with whatever knowledge you require, that sets up circuits between you and others, that computes probabilities with blinding speed. Not with the impersonality of a computer, however, but with a loving intent that has your best purposes in mind—yours and also those of each other individual. You cannot gain what you want at someone else’s detriment, then. You cannot use Framework 2 to force an event upon another person. Certain prerequisites must be met, you see, before a desired end can become physically experienced….
“…Framework 2 represents the inner sphere of reality, the inner dimensions of existence, that gives your world its own characteristics. The energy and power that keeps you alive, that fuels your thoughts — and also the energy that lights your cities — all have their origins in Framework 2. The same energy that leaps into practical use when you turn on your television sets also allows you to tune into the daily experienced events of your lives….
“The origin of your universe is nonphysical, and each event, however grand or minute, has its birth in the Framework 2 environment. Your physical universe arose from that inner framework, then, and continues to do so. The power that fuels your thoughts has the same source. In a manner of speaking the universe as you understand it, with All the events that it includes, functions “automatically” in its important processes, as your body does. Your individual desires and intents direct that activity of your body’s spontaneous processes….Your intents have a great effect upon your body’s health. In the same fashion, jointly, all the people alive at any given time “direct” the events of the universe to behave in a certain fashion, even though the processes must happen by themselves, or automatically. Other species have a hand in this also, however, and in one way or another all of you direct the activity of the physical body of the world in much the same way that you (each) direct your own bodily behavior.
“You were born with the impetus toward growth built in — automatically provided with the inner blueprints that would lead to a developed adult form. Not only the cells, but the atoms and the molecules that compose them contained a positive intent to cooperate in a bodily formation, to fulfill themselves, and they were then predisposed not only toward survival, but with an idealization leading toward the best possible development and maturity. All of these characteristics have their sources in Framework 2, for the psychological medium in Framework 2 is automatically conducive to creativity. It is not simply a neutral dimension, therefore, but contains within itself an automatic predisposition toward the fulfillment of all patterns inherent in it….It is automatically predisposed, again, toward the creation of “good” events. I put the word “good” in quotes for now, because of your misconceptions about the nature of good and evil….”
From Jane Roberts/Seth, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events
Seth, as channelled by Jane Roberts,
Sunday, February 07, 2010
February 7th, 2010
A lighter piece for Super Bowl Sunday. Yes, this clip isn’t exactly heady. And, yes, it botches some facts (archers apparently shoot from 70 meters, not 20 yards). But, nonetheless, it gives you the basic physics of Drew Brees’ passing game. Brees will be playing
QB for the New Orleans Saints tonight, and, as you’ll see, his accuracy is remarkable. Hat tip to Mike.
Saturday, February 06, 2010
Our real enemies are not those living in a distant land whose names or policies we don't understand; The real enemy is a system that wages war when it's profitable, the CEOs who lay us off our jobs when it's profitable, the Insurance Companies who deny us Health care when it's profitable, the Banks who take away our homes when it's profitable. Our enemies are not several hundred thousands away. They are right here in front of us
- Mike Prysner
Please share with your friends, family and acquaintances. Every little effort counts in the long run.
Please Support the Veterans at:
http://www.ivaw.org/
Also visit
www.antiwar.com
Friday, February 05, 2010
Thursday, February 04, 2010
Where, like a pillow on a bed
A pregnant bank swell'd up to rest
The violet's reclining head,
Sat we two, one another's best.
Our hands were firmly cemented
With a fast balm, which thence did spring;
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string;
So to'intergraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one,
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.
As 'twixt two equal armies fate
Suspends uncertain victory,
Our souls (which to advance their state
Were gone out) hung 'twixt her and me.
And whilst our souls negotiate there,
We like sepulchral statues lay;
All day, the same our postures were,
And we said nothing, all the day.
If any, so by love refin'd
That he soul's language understood,
And by good love were grown all mind,
Within convenient distance stood,
He (though he knew not which soul spake,
Because both meant, both spake the same)
Might thence a new concoction take
And part far purer than he came.
This ecstasy doth unperplex,
We said, and tell us what we love;
We see by this it was not sex,
We see we saw not what did move;
But as all several souls contain
Mixture of things, they know not what,
Love these mix'd souls doth mix again
And makes both one, each this and that.
A single violet transplant,
The strength, the colour, and the size,
(All which before was poor and scant)
Redoubles still, and multiplies.
When love with one another so
Interinanimates two souls,
That abler soul, which thence doth flow,
Defects of loneliness controls.
We then, who are this new soul, know
Of what we are compos'd and made,
For th' atomies of which we grow
Are souls. whom no change can invade.
But oh alas, so long, so far,
Our bodies why do we forbear?
They'are ours, though they'are not we; we are
The intelligences, they the spheres.
We owe them thanks, because they thus
Did us, to us, at first convey,
Yielded their senses' force to us,
Nor are dross to us, but allay.
On man heaven's influence works not so,
But that it first imprints the air;
So soul into the soul may flow,
Though it to body first repair.
As our blood labors to beget
Spirits, as like souls as it can,
Because such fingers need to knit
That subtle knot which makes us man,
So must pure lovers' souls descend
T' affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great prince in prison lies.
To'our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love reveal'd may look;
Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.
And if some lover, such as we,
Have heard this dialogue of one,
Let him still mark us, he shall see
Small change, when we'are to bodies gone.
*
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
The following is reprinted from The Zinn Reader (1997, Seven Stories Press, pp 574-578) and with the permission of the author.
FOR A LONG TIME I thought that there were important and useful ideas in Marxist philosophy and political economy that should be protected from the self-righteous cries on the right that “Marxism is dead”..
Not long ago, someone referred to me publicly as a “Marxist professor.” In fact, two people did. One was a spokesman for “Accuracy in Academia,” worried that there were “five thousand Marxist faculty members” in the United States (which diminished my importance, but also my loneliness). The other was a former student I encountered on a shuttle to New York, a fellow traveller. I felt a bit honoured. A “Marxist” means a tough guy (making up for the pillowy connotation of the “professor”), a person of formidable politics, someone not to be trifled with, someone who knows the difference between absolute and relative surplus value, and what is commodity fetishism, and refuses to buy it.
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I was also a bit taken aback (a position which yoga practitioners understand well, and which is good for you about once a day). Did
“Marxist” suggest that I kept a tiny stature of Lenin in my drawer and rubbed his head to discover what policy to follow to intensify the contradictions o the imperialist camp, or what songs to sing if we were sent away to such a camp?
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Also, I remembered that famous statement of Marx: “Je ne suis pas Marxiste.” I always wondered why Marx, an English-speaking German who had studied Greek for his doctoral dissertation, would make such an important statement in French. But I am confident that he did make it, and I think I know what brought it on. After Marx and his wife Jenny had moved to London, where they lost three of their six children to illness and lived in squalor for many years, they were often visited by a young German refugee named Pieper. This guy was a total “noodnik” (there are “noodniks” all along the political spectrum stationed ten feet apart, but there is a special Left Noodnik, hired by the police, to drive revolutionaries batty). Pieper (I swear, I did not make him up) hovered around Marx gasping with admiration, once offered to translate Das Kapital into English, which he could barely speak, and kept organising Karl Marx Clubs, exasperating Marx more and more by insisting that every word Marx uttered was holy. And one day Marx caused Pieper to have a severe abdominal cramp when he said to him: “Thanks for inviting me to speak at your Karl Marx Club. But I can’t. I’m not a Marxist.”
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That was a high point in Marx’s life, and also a good starting point for considering Marx’s ideas seriously without becoming a Pieper (or a
Stalin, or Kim Il Sung, or any born-again Marxist who argues that every word in Volume One, Two and Three, and especially in the Grundrisse, is unquestionably true). Because it seems to me (risking that this may lead to my inclusion in the second edition of Norman Podhoretz’s Register of Marxists, Living or Dead), Marx had some very useful thoughts.
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For instance, we find in Marx’s short but powerful Theses on Feuerbach the idea that philosophers, who always considered their job was to
interpret the world, should now set about changing it, in their writings, and in their lives. Marx set a good example himself. While history has treated him as a secondary scholar, spending all his time in the library of the British Museum, Marx was a tireless activist all his life. He was expelled from Germany, from Belgium, from France, was arrested and put on trial in Cologne.
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Exiled to London, he kept his ties with revolutionary movements all over the world. The poverty-ridden flats that he and Jenny Marx and their children occupied became busy centres of political activity, gathering places for political refugees from the continent.
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True, many of his writings were impossibly abstract (especially those on political economy; my poor head at the age of nineteen swam, or
rather drowned, with ground rent and differential rent, the falling rate of profit and the organic composition of capital). But he departed from that constantly to confront the events of 1848, the Paris Commune, rebellion in India, the Civil War in the United States.
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The manuscripts he wrote at the age of twenty-five while an exile in Paris (where he hung out in cafes with Engels, Proudhon, Bakunin, Heine, Stirner), often dismissed by hard-line fundamentalists as “immature”, contain some of the most profound ideas. His critique of capitalism in those Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts did not need any mathematical proofs of “surplus value.” It simply stated (but did not state it simply) that the capitalist system violates whatever it means to be a human. The industrial system Marx saw developing in Europe not only robbed them of the products of their work, it estranged working people from their own creative responsibilities, from one another as human beings, from the beauties of nature, from their own true selves.
The manuscripts he wrote at the age of twenty-five while an exile in Paris (where he hung out in cafes with Engels, Proudhon, Bakunin, Heine, Stirner), often dismissed by hard-line fundamentalists as “immature”, contain some of the most profound ideas. His critique of capitalism in those Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts did not need any mathematical proofs of “surplus value.” It simply stated (but did not state it simply) that the capitalist system violates whatever it means to be a human. The industrial system Marx saw developing in Europe not only robbed them of the products of their work, it estranged working people from their own creative responsibilities, from one another as human beings, from the beauties of nature, from their own true selves. They lived out their lives not according to their own inner needs, but according to the necessities of survival.
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This estrangement from self and others, this alienation from all that was human, could not be overcome by an intellectual effort, by something in the mind. What was needed was a fundamental, revolutionary change in society, to create the conditions – a short workday, a rational use of the earth’s natural wealth and people’s natural talents, a just distribution of the fruits of human labour, a new social consciousness – for the flowering of human potential, for a leap into freedom as it had never been experienced in history.
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Marx understood how difficult it was to achieve this, because, no matter how “revolutionary” we are, the weight of tradition, habit, the accumulated mis-education of generations, “weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”
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Marx understood politics. He saw that behind political conflicts were questions of class: who gets what. Behind benign bubbles of togetherness (We the people…our country…national security), the powerful and the wealthy would legislate on their own behalf. He noted (in The Eighteenth Brumaire, a biting, brilliant, analysis of the Napoleonic seizure of power after the 1848 Revolution in France) how a modern constitution could proclaim absolute rights, which were then limited by marginal notes (he might have been predicting the tortured constructions of the First Amendment in our own Constitution), reflecting the reality of domination by one class over another regardless of the written word.
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He saw religion, not just negatively as “the opium of the people,” but positively as the “sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions.” This helps us understand the mass appeal of the religious charlatans of the television screen, as well as the work of Liberation Theology in joining the soulfulness of religion to the energy of revolutionary movements in miserably poor countries.
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Marx was often wrong, often dogmatic, often a “Marxist.” He was sometimes too accepting of imperial domination as “progressive,” a way of bringing capitalism faster to the third world, and therefore hastening, he thought, the road to socialism. (But he staunchly supported the rebellions of the Irish, the Poles, the Indians, the Chinese, against colonial control.)
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He was too insistent that the industrial working class must be the agent of revolution, and that this must happen first in the advanced capitalist countries. He was unnecessarily dense in his economic analysis (too much education in German universities, maybe) when his clear, simple insight into exploitation was enough: that no matter how valuable were the things workers produced, those who controlled the economy could pay them as little as they liked, and enrich themselves with the difference.
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Personally, Marx was sometimes charming, generous, self-sacrificing; at other times arrogant, obnoxious, abusive. He loved his wife and children, and they clearly adored him, but he also may have fathered the son of their German housekeeper, Lenchen.
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The anarchist, Bakunin, his rival in the International Workingmen’s Association, said of Marx: “I very much admired him for his knowledge and for his passionate and earnest devotion to the cause of the proletariat. But…our temperaments did not harmonize. He called me a sentimental idealist, and he was right. I called him vain, treacherous, and morose, and I was right.” Marx’s daughter Eleanor, on the other hand, called her father “…the cheeriest, gayest soul that ever breathed, a man brimming over with humour”.
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He epitomised his own warning, that people, however advanced in their thinking, were weighted down by the limitations of their time. Still, Marx gave us acute insights, inspiring visions. I can’t imagine Marx being pleased with the “socialism” of the Soviet Union. He would have been a dissident in Moscow, I like to think. His idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was the Paris Commune of 1871, where endless arguments in the streets and halls of the city gave it the vitality of a grass roots democracy, where overbearing officials could be immediately booted out of office by popular vote, where the wages of government leaders could not exceed that of ordinary workers, where the guillotine was destroyed as a symbol of capital punishment. Marx once wrote in the New York Times that he did not see how capital punishment could be justified “in a society glorifying in its civilisation.”
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Perhaps the most precious heritage of Marx’s thought is his internationalism, his hostility to the nation state, his insistence that ordinary people have no nation they must obey and give their lives for in war, that we are all linked to one another across the globe as human beings. This is not only a direct challenge to modern capitalist nationalism, with its ugly evocations of hatred for “the enemy” abroad, and its false creation of a common interest for all within certain artificial borders. It is also a rejection of the narrow nationalism of contemporary “Marxist” states, whether the Soviet Union, or China, or any of the others.
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Marx had something important to say not only as a critic of capitalism, but as a warning to revolutionaries, who, he wrote in The German Ideology, had better revolutionise themselves if they intend to do that to society. He offered an antidote to the dogmatists, the hard-liners, the Piepers, the Stalins, the commissars, the “Marxists.” He said: “Nothing human is alien to me.”
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That seems a good beginning for changing the world.
—Howard Zinn
Posted on Feb 2, 2010
By Amy Goodman
Howard Zinn, legendary historian, author and activist, died last week at the age of 87. His most famous book is “A People’s History of the United States.” Zinn told me last May, “The idea of ‘A People’s History’ is to go beyond what people have learned in school ... history through the eyes of the presidents and the generals in the battles fought in the Civil War, [to] the voices of ordinary people, of rebels, of dissidents, of women, of black people, of Asian-Americans, of immigrants, of socialists and anarchists and troublemakers of all kinds.”
It is fitting to write of Zinn’s life at the start of Black History Month. Although he was white, he wrote eloquently of the civil rights struggle and was a part of that movement as well. Fifty years ago, on Feb. 1, 1960, four black students entered the F.W. Woolworth store in Greensboro, N.C., and sat down at the “whites only” lunch counter. They were refused service, and returned day after day. Each day, more and more people came with them. The lunch-counter desegregation movement spread to other Southern cities. By July, the Greensboro Woolworth lunch counter was desegregated. This week, the International Civil Rights Center and Museum opened at the site of that original lunch-counter protest.
At the time of the sit-ins, Zinn was a professor at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college in Atlanta. He told me why, after seven years there, he was fired: “The students at Spelman College rose up out of that very tranquil and controlled atmosphere at the college during the sit-ins and went into town, got arrested, they came back fired up and determined to change the conditions of their lives on campus. ... I supported them in their rebellion, and I was too much for the administration of the college.” Zinn wrote in the afterword of “A People’s History”: “It was not until I joined the faculty of Spelman College ... that I began to read the African-American historians who never appeared in my reading lists in graduate school. Nowhere in my history education had I learned about the massacres of black people that took place again and again, amid the silence of a national government pledged, by the Constitution, to protect equal rights for all.”
One of his students at Spelman was Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker. Soon after she learned of Zinn’s death, Walker explained: “He was thrown out because he loved us, and he showed that love by just being with us. He loved his students. He didn’t see why we should be second-class citizens.” Just a few years ago, Zinn was invited back to Spelman to give the commencement address and receive an honorary degree.
World-renowned linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky, a longtime friend of Zinn’s, reflected on Zinn’s “reverence for and his detailed study of what he called ‘the countless small actions of unknown people’ that lead to those great moments that enter the historical record.” Zinn co-wrote, with Anthony Arnove, “Voices of a People’s History of the United States,” with speeches, letters and other original source material from those “unknown people” who have shaped this country. It was made into a star-studded documentary, which premiered on the History Channel just weeks before Zinn died. Matt Damon, its executive producer, gave “A People’s History” enormous popular exposure in the hit movie “Good Will Hunting” when his character Will recommended the book to his psychiatrist. Damon was Zinn’s neighbor in Newton, Mass., and knew him since he was 10 years old.
Last May, when I interviewed Zinn, he reflected on Barack Obama’s first months in office: “I wish President Obama would listen carefully to Martin Luther King. I’m sure he pays verbal homage, as everyone does, to Martin Luther King, but he ought to think before he sends missiles over Pakistan, before he agrees to this bloated military budget, before he sends troops to Afghanistan, before he opposes the single-payer system.
“He ought to ask: ‘What would Martin Luther King do? And what would Martin Luther King say?’ And if he only listened to King, he would be a very different president than he’s turning out to be so far. I think we ought to hold Obama to his promise to be different and bold and to make change. So far, he hasn’t come through on that promise.”
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.
© 2010 Amy Goodman
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
The
Center for Democracy and Technology filed two sets of comments (
1,
2) to the Federal Communications Commission regarding privacy concerns and expectations that will come along with a
national broadband policy that they are
currently stumbling towards.
The FCC says that policies "
...must promote technological neutrality, competition, investment, and innovation to ensure that broadband service providers have sufficient incentive to develop and offer such products and services."
The CDT thinks we need to go much further than that "
[F]ully protecting consumer privacy interests online requires a rigorous mix of self-regulation, enforcement of existing law, development of technical tools and standards, and enactment of new legislation."
Here is their list of six recommendations to help create and maintain a thriving Internet.
1) The National Broadband Plan should release an updated version of FIPs to guide privacy practices by the federal government and industry.
2) The National Broadband Plan should recommend enactment of a federal baseline consumer privacy law.
3) The National Broadband Plan should recommend updates to the Privacy Act of 1974.
4) The National Broadband Plan should promote the incorporation of Privacy by Design principles into both innovation and business and government practices.
5) Encourage a marketplace of privacy protective, user-centric decentralized identity providers.
6) The National Broadband Plan should encourage innovation and consumer protection in third-party applications.
Meanwhile, with 49 days until the National Broadband Plan, it's unclear what the plan has in store for
rural,
tribal and
disabled segments of the US population. Schools and libraries receiving federal Universal Service Fund money are still
on the hook to install filters and censor internet traffic. Reading
the comments on the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program is terribly poignant. My local nearly-bankrupt telco explains why
providing broadband to rural New England is so difficult.
Guestblogger Jessamyn West is a moderator at
MetaFilter and a library technologist in Central Vermont who blogs at
librarian.net
Monday, February 01, 2010
Interview with Venezuelan-American researcher and lawyer Eva Golinger
Olga Díaz Ruiz and Geisy Guía (Journalism student)
THE Havana Book Fair has accustomed us to good, interesting publications. Its 19th edition brings us Eva Golinger, the Venezuelan-American writer and lawyer, for the launch of her book, USAID, NED and the CIA: Permanent Aggression, an ambitious compilation and analysis of current situations, written by Golinger and Jean-Guy Allard, a Canadian journalist resident in Cuba.
On this occasion, the perspicacity of Golinger, who is participating in the international fair for the second time, impelled her to expose the constant onslaught of U.S. imperialism in Latin America, "which, to date, we have been unable to halt," after studying the cases of Cuba, Bolivia, Honduras and Venezuela.
"This is a visit of exposé, to achieve maximum impact and, in one way, a pretext to outline that message and to prompt reflection on the constant imperial acts of aggression and their various manifestations." Moreover, it lays out "all the marvelous things that we have achieved" in the subcontinent, she affirmed in an interview with Granma.
Golinger proposes to take up this selection of political, economic, cultural and social events that are evidence of Washington’s tactics and strategies in 2009, maintaining its interference in the region, as "a weapon in the defense of our revolutions."
At this point in the conversation, she stops to observe that the coup d’état in Honduras last June "has taught us the need to take care of our spaces, to recognize that the enemy is everywhere," adding that the book is to be published in Honduras this year.
Likewise the author of The Chávez Code (2005) and Bush vs. Chávez: Washington’s War on Venezuela, the writer believes that the strengthening of Latin American integration, fundamentally through the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) has prompted an increase in U.S. right-wing aggression, "Because we constitute a threat to its domination in the region."
Integration that has expanded its borders to the rest of the world, and that "seeks to lift up our countries without exploitation, or competition, through the principles of solidarity, integration and cooperation," she notes, commenting that Cuba and Venezuela constitute the vanguard of this South-South union.
Despite the fact that she was born and raised in the United States and "talks like a gringo" – as she reproaches herself – Golinger directs all her energy and passion into fighting for social justice, and emphasizes that cooperation among ALBA countries "is perceived outside of our bloc with much hope, because we are constructing a more just social model."
She gives the example of the Bolivarian Revolution, which has transformed all sectors of Venezuelan society, as well as making an impact at international level on account of that nation’s significance to the world, with the figure of Chávez. "We are constructing a country that was in ruins, despite its natural resources. Then this president comes along, without experience in politics, moreover, and look what he’s done!"
In this struggle against constant aggression, the writer notes the leading role of the alternative media: "Telesur has had a fundamental role in dismantling the received opinions of the international media and in promoting another class of journalism, which consists of going into and bearing witness to the facts."
At the same time, she expresses her enthusiasm at one of the first printed copies of the only Venezuelan English-language newspaper, Correo de Orinoco International. "It is the first time that there is information in English from a Venezuelan perspective, from the Venezuelan revolution," she affirms with pride.
Golinger told us that she intends to continue exposing the principal maneuvers of the powerful in Latin America and in that proposition, she says, she can count on her friend and colleague Jean-Guy Allard.
Translated by Granma International
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Always be drunk.
That's it!
The great imperative!
In order not to feel
Time's horrid fardel
bruise your shoulders,
grinding you into the earth,
Get drunk and stay that way.
On what?
On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever.
But get drunk.
And if you sometimes happen to wake up
on the porches of a palace,
in the green grass of a ditch,
in the dismal loneliness of your own room,
your drunkenness gone or disappearing,
ask the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock,
ask everything that flees,
everything that groans
or rolls
or sings,
everything that speaks,
ask what time it is;
and the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock
will answer you:
"Time to get drunk!
Don't be martyred slaves of Time,
Get drunk!
Stay drunk!
On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!"
*
Saturday, January 30, 2010
[Reality Booty] •The legendary American novelist, philosopher, essayist, editor, playwright, futurist, libertarian, and self-described agnostic mystic Robert Anton Wilson’s once lost studio sessions are now a postmortem release from The Original Falcon Press. The first of which is an audio CD titled "The Lost Studio Session"—recorded in Chicago (1994) and nearly forgotten about after it was stored away. New material from RAW also surfaces in the 2 disc CD set "TAZ: Temporary Autonomous Zone"; also featuring Hakim Bey reading from his unpublished manuscripts, Nick Herbert performing his Quantum Tantric poetry, and Rob Breszny. Finally, Robert Anton Wilson introduces his lecture as a discussion of "The Western Hermetic Tradition" in the DVD The "I" in the Triangle. The lecture covers centuries of individuals and groups from the Illuminati of Bavaria and the Freemasons to the Priory of Scion and the Bilderbergers.
You can win one of three copies of "The Lost Studio Session" by writing your most inspired homage to R.A.W. in the comments section below. (Contest ends February 8th.)
A free sample track has been posted on Creative Commons of this newly released material form the man whose goal was to “get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything.”
Friday, January 29, 2010
...
1. "Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it."
2. "To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction."
3. "The challenge remains. On the other side are formidable forces: money, political power, the major media. On our side are the people of the world and a power greater than money or weapons: the truth. Truth has a power of its own. Art has a power of its own. That age-old lesson—that everything we do matters—is the meaning of the people's struggle here in the United States and everywhere. A poem can inspire a movement. A pamphlet can spark a revolution. Civil disobedience can arouse people and provoke us to think, when we organize with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress. We live in a beautiful country. But people who have no respect for human life, freedom, or justice have taken it over. It is now up to all of us to take it back."
4. "As dogma disintegrates, hope appears. Because it seems that human beings, whatever their backgrounds, are more open than we think, that their behavior cannot be confidently predicted from their past, that we are all creatures vulnerable to new thoughts, new attitudes. And while such vulnerability creates all sorts of possibilities, both good and bad, its very existence is exciting. It means that no human being should be written off, no change in thinking deemed impossible."
5. "The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."
Thursday, January 28, 2010
AMY GOODMAN: We’re broadcasting from Park City, Utah, from the Sundance Film Festival, the home of the largest independent film festival in the country.
We spend the rest of the hour paying tribute to Howard Zinn, the late historian, writer and activist. He died suddenly Wednesday of a heart attack at the age of eighty-seven.
After serving as a bombardier in World War II, Howard Zinn went on to become a lifelong dissident and peace activist. He was active in the civil rights movement and many of the struggles for social justice over the past fifty years.
He taught at Spelman College, the historically black college for women. He was fired for insubordination for standing up for the students. While at Spelman, he served on the executive committee of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After being forced out of Spelman, Zinn became a professor at Boston University.
In 1967 he published Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. It was the first book on the war to call for immediate withdrawal, no conditions. A year later, he and Father Daniel Berrigan traveled to North Vietnam to receive the first three American prisoners of wars released by the North Vietnamese.
When Daniel Ellsberg needed a place to hide the Pentagon Papers before they were leaked to the press, he went to Howard and his late wife Roz.
In 1980, Howard Zinn published his classic work, A People’s History of the United States. The book would go on to sell over a million copies and change the way we look at history in America. The book was recently made into a television special called The People Speak.
Well, in a moment, we’ll be joined by Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein, Anthony Arnove. But first, I want to turn to a 2005 interview I did with Howard Zinn, in which he talked about his time as an Air Force bombardier in World War II.
HOWARD ZINN: Well, we thought bombing missions were over. The war was about to come to an end. This was in April of 1945, and remember the war ended in early May 1945. This was a few weeks before the war was going to be over, and everybody knew it was going to be over, and our armies were past France into Germany, but there was a little pocket of German soldiers hanging around this little town of Royan on the Atlantic coast of France, and the Air Force decided to bomb them. Twelve hundred heavy bombers, and I was in one of them, flew over this little town of Royan and dropped napalm—first use of napalm in the European theater. And we don’t know how many people were killed or how many people were terribly burned as a result of what we did. But I did it like most soldiers do, unthinkingly, mechanically, thinking we’re on the right side, they’re on the wrong side, and therefore we can do whatever we want, and it’s OK. And only afterward, only really after the war when I was reading about Hiroshima from John Hersey and reading the stories of the survivors of Hiroshima and what they went through, only then did I begin to think about the human effects of bombing. Only then did I begin to think about what it meant to human beings on the ground when bombs were dropped on them, because as a bombardier, I was flying at 30,000 feet, six miles high, couldn’t hear screams, couldn’t see blood. And this is modern warfare. In modern warfare, soldiers fire, they drop bombs, and they have no notion, really, of what is happening to the human beings that they’re firing on. Everything is done at a distance. This enables terrible atrocities to take place. And I think, reflecting back on that bombing raid and thinking of that in Hiroshima and all the other raids on civilian cities and the killing of huge numbers of civilians in German and Japanese cities, the killing of 100,000 people in Tokyo in one night of fire-bombing, all of that made me realize war, even so-called good wars against fascism like World War II, wars don’t solve any fundamental problems, and they always poison everybody on both sides. They poison the minds and souls of everybody on both sides. We’re seeing that now in Iraq, where the minds of our soldiers are being poisoned by being an occupying army in a land where they are not wanted. And the results are terrible.
AMY GOODMAN: After returning from the war, Howard Zinn attended New York University on the GI Bill. He then received his master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Columbia University.
In the late ’50s, Howard Zinn moved to Atlanta to teach at all-black women’s school Spelman, where he became deeply involved in the civil rights movement. We’re joined now by one of his former students, the author and poet Alice Walker. She’s joining us now from her home in Mexico.
Alice, welcome to Democracy Now! So sad to talk to you on this day after we learned of the death of Howard Zinn.
ALICE WALKER: Thank you very much for inviting me to talk.
AMY GOODMAN: But talk about your former teacher.
ALICE WALKER: Well, my former teacher was one of the funniest people I have ever known, and he was likelier to say the most extraordinary things at the most amazing moments.
For instance, in Atlanta once, we get to this very staid, at that time, white college, all these very staid, upper-class white girls there and their teachers, and Howie got up—I don’t know how they managed to invite him, but anyway, there we were. And this was even before any of the changes in Atlanta. We were still battling to get into restaurants. So Howie gets up, and he goes up to the front of the room, and this large room is full of people, and he starts his talk by saying, “Well, I stand to the left of Mao Zedong.” And it was just—it was such a moment, because the people couldn’t imagine anyone in Atlanta saying something like that, when at that time the Chinese and the Chinese Revolution just meant that, you know, people were on the planet who were just going straight ahead, a folk revolution. So he was saying he was to the left of that. So, it’s just an amazing thing.
I think I felt he would live forever. And I feel such joy that I was lucky enough to know him. And he had such a wonderful impact on my life and on the lives of the students of Spelman and of millions of people. We’ve just been incredibly lucky to have him for all these years, eighty-seven. That’s such a long time. Not long enough. And I’m just so grateful.
AMY GOODMAN: Alice, Howard Zinn was thrown out of Spelman College—right?—as a professor, for insubordination, although recently they gave him an honorary degree, and he addressed the graduating class. Why was he thrown out?
ALICE WALKER: Well, he was thrown out because he loved us, and he showed that love by just being with us. He loved his students. He didn’t see why we should be second-class citizens. He didn’t see why we shouldn’t be able to eat where we wanted to and sleep where we wanted to and be with the people we wanted to be with. And so, he was with us. He didn’t stay back, you know, in his tower there at the school. And so, he was a subversive in that situation.
And, of course, the administration could expel the students for activism. And I left Spelman because I sort of lost my scholarship, but I had stayed. That was one of the ways they controlled us. And they tried to control him, but of course you couldn’t control Howie. And so, they even waited until he had left for the summer vacation to fire him, to fire him. They didn’t fire him face to face. But, yeah, he was, you know, a radical and a subversive on the campus, as far as they were concerned. And our freedom was just not that important to the administration. What they needed was for us not to rock the boat.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to Noam Chomsky, who’s still with us on the phone from Boston. Noam, I wanted to ask you about Howard Zinn’s role in the antiwar movement in the ’60s. In 1968, Howard Zinn traveled to North Vietnam with Father Daniel Berrigan to bring home three US prisoners of war. They became two of the first Americans to visit North Vietnam during the war. This is Howard Zinn speaking in 1968 after he returned to the United States.
HOWARD ZINN: Father Berrigan and I, on our way back—this may seem presumptuous on our part, but when—on our way back in from Paris, we sent a wire, I think with our last fifteen bucks, to the White House, saying something like, “We’d like to talk to you, President Johnson. You know, would you please meet with us? We’ve just come back from Hanoi. We’ve just talked with the premier, Pham Van Dong. But we just read in the newspaper that you say the North Vietnamese are not ready to negotiate. What we learned from Pham Van Dong seems to contradict that. We’d like to talk with you about this and about the prisoner release, which we think has been mishandled.” But we have not, so far, seen an answer from LBJ.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Howard Zinn. Noam Chomsky, talk about this period. Talk about the time Howard Zinn went with Father Dan Berrigan to North Vietnam and what it meant.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, that was a breakthrough at recognizing the humanity of the official enemy. Of course, the main enemy were the people of South Vietnam, who were practically destroyed. South Vietnam had been devastated by then. And that was important.
But, at least in my view, the most—the more important was his—the book you mentioned before, The Logic of Withdrawal. And there was, by then—so I think this must have been 1967—you know, a substantial antiwar movement, but it was keeping to palliatives, you know, stop doing these terrible things, do less, and so on. Howard really broke through. He was the first person to say—loudly, publicly, very persuasively—that this simply has to stop; we should get out, period, no conditions; we have no right to be there; it’s an act of aggression; pull out.
Actually, he—that was so surprising at the time—it became more commonplace later—that he couldn’t even—there wasn’t even a review of the book. In fact, he asked me if I would review it in Ramparts just so that—which, you know, left-wing journal I was running then—just so somebody—people would see it. So I did that.
But it sank in pretty quickly, and it just changed the way people looked at the war. And in fact, that was one of his fabulous achievements all along. He simply changed people’s perspectives, both by his argument and his courage and his integrity and his willingness to be on the front line all the time and his simplicity and, as Alice Walker said, his humor. This is one case, the war. His People’s History is another case. I mean, it simply changed the conscience of a whole generation.
There had been some studies, you know, of the sort of actions from below, but he raised it to an entirely new plane. In fact, the phrase of his that always rings in my mind is his reverence for and his detailed study of what he called “the countless small actions of unknown people” that lead to those great moments that enter the historical record, a record that you simply can’t begin to understand unless you look at those countless small actions.
And he not only wrote about them eloquently, but he participated in them. And he inspired others to participate in them. And the antiwar movement was one case, civil rights movement before it, Central American wars in the 1980s. In fact, just about any—you know, office worker strikes—just about anything you can—any significant action for peace and justice, Howard was there. People saw him as a leader, but he was really a participant. His remarkable character made him a leader, even if he was just sitting on the—you know, waiting for the police to pull people away like everyone else.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam, in 1971—you may remember this; in fact, you may have been there, but Howard Zinn and Daniel Ellsberg were both beaten by police in Boston at a protest against the Vietnam War. One day before the beating, Zinn spoke at a large rally on Boston Common. This is an excerpt from the documentary You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.
HOWARD ZINN: A lot of people are troubled by civil disobedience. As soon as you talk about committing civil disobedience, they get a little upset. That’s exactly the purpose of civil disobedience: to upset people, to trouble them, to disturb them. We who commit civil disobedience are disturbed, too, and we mean to disturb those who are in charge of the war. DANIEL ELLSBERG: He said at the end of his speech, I remember, he said, “Now let me address the secret police in this crowd.” HOWARD ZINN: You agents of the FBI who are circulating in the crowd, hey, don’t you see that you’re violating the spirit of democracy by what you’re doing? Don’t you see that you’re behaving like the secret police of a totalitarian state? DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, that cost him a bit, I think, the next day when we were sitting in front of the Federal Building, I have a feeling, because, again, the police chose in the end to arrest almost no one. They didn’t want arrests. They didn’t want a trial. They didn’t want the publicity that would be associated with that. They only arrested a couple of ring leaders, and one of those was Howard. HOWARD ZINN: And so, let the spirit of disobedience spread to the war factories, to the battlefield, to the halls of Congress, to every town and city, until the killing stops, until we can hold up our heads again before the world. And our children deserve a world without war, and we ought to try to give them that. DANIEL ELLSBERG: And at that point, the batons were raised, and they began clubbing us very heavily. Howard was pulled up, as I say. His shirt was ripped apart. He was taken away. And I saw blood coming down his chest as he left.
AMY GOODMAN: That was an excerpt of the documentary You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, was also the title of Howard Zinn’s autobiography.
Noam, we just have a minute left in this segment, but talk about that activism.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, that case is very similar to what Howard described about his bombing attack. I mean, the police were actually sympathetic, the individual policemen. They were coming over to demonstrators, you know, speaking supportively. And in fact, when they were given the order to move forward, they were actually telling people, Howard and others, “Look, please move, because we don’t want to do this.” But then, when the order came, they did it. I don’t know who. But it’s much like he said: when you’re in uniform, under arms, an automaton following orders, you do it.
And as Dan pointed out, they went right after Howard, probably in reaction to his comments the day before. And he was dragged away and beaten.
But he was constantly involved with civil disobedience. I was many times with him, as Dan Ellsberg was and others. And he was just—he was fearless. He was simple. He was straightforward. He said the right things, said them eloquently, and inspired others to move forward in ways they wouldn’t have done, and changed their minds. They changed their minds by their actions and by hearing him. He was a really—both in his life and in his work, he was a remarkable person, just irreplaceable.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam, you were personal friends with Howard, too. You and Carol, Howard and Roz spent summers near each other on the Cape.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, we were personal friends, close personal friends for many years, over forty years. So it’s, of course, a personal loss. But it’s beyond—even beyond his close friends and family, it’s just a tragic loss to the millions of people—who knows how many endless numbers?—whose lives he touched and changed and helped them become much better people.
The one good thing is that he understood and recognized them, sure, especially in those last remarkable, vibrant years of his life, how much his incredible contributions were welcomed, admired, how much he was loved and admired, and he could look back on a very satisfying life of real unusual achievement.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Noam Chomsky, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Noam is a linguist, a world-renowned dissident and a close friend of Howard Zinn. And Alice Walker, thanks, as well, for joining us from Mexico, former student and friend of Howard Zinn.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’ll hear more of Howard in his own words, and we’ll be joined by Anthony Arnove, his co-editor and colleague. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We’ll be joined by Anthony Arnove and Naomi Klein, but on this sad day, the day after the news of Howard Zinn’s death, I want to turn to one of the last interviews we did with him. It was May 2009. He came to New York to promote his latest book.
AMY GOODMAN: You write in the introduction to A Young People’s History of the United States, “Over the years, some people have asked me: ‘Do you think that your history, which is radically different than the usual histories of the United States, is suitable for young people? Won’t it create disillusionment with our country? Is it right to be so critical of the government’s policies? Is it right to take down the traditional heroes of the nation, like Christopher Columbus, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt?’” HOWARD ZINN: Yeah, it’s true that people have asked that question again and again. You know, should we tell kids that Columbus, whom they have been told was a great hero, that Columbus mutilated Indians and kidnapped them and killed them in pursuit of gold? Should we tell people that Theodore Roosevelt, who is held up as one of our great presidents, was really a warmonger who loved military exploits and who congratulated an American general who committed a massacre in the Philippines? Should we tell young people that? And I think the answer is: we should be honest with young people; we should not deceive them. We should be honest about the history of our country. And we should be not only taking down the traditional heroes like Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt, but we should be giving young people an alternate set of heroes. Instead of Theodore Roosevelt, tell them about Mark Twain. Mark Twain—well, Mark Twain, everybody learns about as the author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but when we go to school, we don’t learn about Mark Twain as the vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League. We aren’t told that Mark Twain denounced Theodore Roosevelt for approving this massacre in the Philippines. No. We want to give young people ideal figures like Helen Keller. And I remember learning about Helen Keller. Everybody learns about Helen Keller, you know, a disabled person who overcame her handicaps and became famous. But people don’t learn in school and young people don’t learn in school what we want them to learn when we do books like A Young People’s History of the United States, that Helen Keller was a socialist. She was a labor organizer. She refused to cross a picket line that was picketing a theater showing a play about her. And so, there are these alternate heroes in American history. There’s Fannie Lou Hamer and Bob Moses. They’re the heroes of the civil rights movement. There are a lot of people who are obscure, who are not known. We have in this Young People’s History, we have a young hero who was sitting on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to leave the front of the bus. And that was before Rosa Parks. I mean, Rosa Parks is justifiably famous for refusing to leave her seat, and she got arrested, and that was the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and really the beginning of a great movement in the South. But this fifteen-year-old girl did it first. And so, we have a lot of—we are trying to bring a lot of these obscure people back into the forefront of our attention and inspire young people to say, “This is the way to live.”
AMY GOODMAN: Yes, that was Howard Zinn. We’re joined now by Anthony Arnove in New York, by Naomi Klein here at Sundance, where Howard Zinn was last year, premiering The People Speak. He was here with Anthony Arnove, who’s co-author of Voices of a People’s History of the United States with Anthony.
Anthony, we just have a few minutes, but share your reflections on the latest work of Howard Zinn. I know this is a tremendous personal loss for you, as well as for everyone.
ANTHONY ARNOVE: Well, you know, Howard never rested. He had such an energy. And over the last few years, he continued to write, continued to speak, and he brought to life this history that he spoke about in that segment that you just aired. He wanted to bring a new generation of people into contact with the voices of dissent, the voices of protest, that they don’t get in their school textbooks, that we don’t get in our establishment media, and to remind them of the power of their own voice, remind them of the power of dissent, the power of protest. And he wanted to leave a legacy of crystallizing those voices, synthesizing those voices.
And he actively worked to bring together this remarkable documentary, The People Speak, which he narrated. He worked so tirelessly to bring that about. And, you know, I just felt so privileged to have had the opportunity to work with him at all, let alone on this project, and to see that realized.
But, you know, Alice Walker talked about his humor, his sense of joy in life, and that was infectious. He really conveyed to everyone he came into contact with that there was no more meaningful action than to be involved in struggle, no more fulfilling or important way of living one’s life than in struggle fighting for justice. And so many people, myself included, but, you know, millions of people around the world, countless number of people, they changed their lives by encountering Howard Zinn—Howard changed their lives—reading A People’s History of the United States, hearing one of his lectures, meeting him, hearing him on the radio, reading an article he wrote. He really inspired people to create the kinds of movements that brought about whatever rights, whatever freedoms, whatever liberties we have in this country. And that really is the legacy that it’s incumbent upon all of us to extend and keep alive and keep vibrant.
AMY GOODMAN: Anthony, I wanted to bring Naomi Klein back into this discussion. I think it’s very touching we’re here at Sundance, where you were with Howard Zinn last year, as he premiered People Speak. But last night, after Howard died, we saw the New York Times put up the AP, the Associated Press, obit. The Times has something like 1,200 obits already prepared for people. They didn’t have one prepared for Howard Zinn. And this Associated Press obit very quickly went to a quote of Arthur Schlesinger, the historian, who once said, “I know”—he’s talking about Howard Zinn—“I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don’t take him very seriously. He’s a polemicist, not a historian.” Naomi Klein, your response?
NAOMI KLEIN: I don’t think that would have bothered Howard Zinn at all. He never was surprised when power protected itself. And he really was a people’s historian, so he didn’t look to the elites for validation.
I’m just so happy that Anthony and the incredible team from People Speak gave Howard this incredible gift at the end of his life. I was at Lincoln Center at the premiere of People Speak and was there when just the mention of Howard’s name led thousands of people to leap to their feet and give him the standing ovation that he deserved. So I don’t think he needed the New York Times. I don’t think he needed the official historians. He was everybody’s favorite teacher, the teacher that changed your life, but he was that for millions and millions of people. And so, you know, that’s what happened. We just lost our favorite teacher.
But the thing about Howard is that the history that he taught was not just about losing the official illusions about nationalism, about the heroic figures. It was about telling people to believe in themselves and their power to change the world. So, like any wonderful teacher, he left all of these lessons behind. And I think we should all just resolve to be a little bit more like Howard today.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s end with Howard Zinn in his own words, from one of his last speeches. He spoke at Boston University just two months ago in November.
HOWARD ZINN: No matter what we’re told, no matter what tyrant exists, what border has been crossed, what aggression has taken place, it’s not that we’re going to be passive in the face of tyranny or aggression, no, but we’ll find ways other than war to deal with whatever problems we have, because war is inevitably—inevitably—the indiscriminant massive killing of huge numbers of people. And children are a good part of those people. Every war is a war against children. So it’s not just getting rid of Saddam Hussein, if we think about it. Well, we got rid of Saddam Hussein. In the course of it, we killed huge numbers of people who had been victims of Saddam Hussein. When you fight a war against a tyrant, who do you kill? You kill the victims of the tyrant. Anyway, all this—all this was simply to make us think again about war and to think, you know, we’re at war now, right? In Iraq, in Afghanistan and sort of in Pakistan, since we’re sending rockets over there and killing innocent people in Pakistan. And so, we should not accept that. We should look for a peace movement to join. Really, look for some peace organization to join. It will look small at first, and pitiful and helpless, but that’s how movements start. That’s how the movement against the Vietnam War started. It started with handfuls of people who thought they were helpless, thought they were powerless. But remember, this power of the people on top depends on the obedience of the people below. When people stop obeying, they have no power. When workers go on strike, huge corporations lose their power. When consumers boycott, huge business establishments have to give in. When soldiers refuse to fight, as so many soldiers did in Vietnam, so many deserters, so many fraggings, acts of violence by enlisted men against officers in Vietnam, B-52 pilots refusing to fly bombing missions anymore, war can’t go on. When enough soldiers refuse, the government has to decide we can’t continue. So, yes, people have the power. If they begin to organize, if they protest, if they create a strong enough movement, they can change things. That’s all I want to say. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Yes, that was Howard Zinn. As we wrap up today, Naomi Klein, your final words?
NAOMI KLEIN: Well, we are in the midst of a Howard Zinn revival. I mean, this was happening anyway. And it’s so extraordinary for somebody at the end of their life to be having films made about them and played on television, and his books are back on the bestseller list. And it’s because the particular message that Howard relayed his whole life, devoted his whole life to, is so relevant for this moment. I mean, even thinking about it the day after the State of the Union address, Howard’s message was don’t believe in great men; believe in yourself; history comes from the bottom up.
And that—we have forgotten how change happens in this country. We think that you can just vote and that change will happen for us. And Howard was just relentlessly reminding us, no, you make the change that you want. And that message was so relevant for this moment. And I just feel so grateful to Anthony and, once again, the whole team that facilitated this revival, because we need Howard’s voice more than ever right now.
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, that last work, The People Speak, appeared on the History Channel, oh, just in the last weeks, really a culmination of Howard Zinn’s work.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn, one of the country’s most celebrated historians, died of a heart attack Wednesday in Santa Monica, California. He was 87.
His classic work,
A People’s History of the United States, changed the way we look at history in America. First published a quarter of a century ago, the book has sold over a million copies and continues to sell more copies each successive year.
After serving as a shipyard worker and then an Air Force bombardier in World War II, Zinn went on to become a lifelong dissident and peace activist. He went to college under the GI Bill, received his PhD from Columbia. He was active in the civil rights movement and many of the struggles for social justice over the past half-century. He taught at Spelman College, the historically black college for women in Atlanta, was fired for insubordination for standing up for the women. He is now Professor Emeritus at Boston University and was recently honored by Spelman.
Zinn has received the Thomas Merton Award, the Eugene V. Debs Award, the Upton Sinclair Award, and the Lannan Literary Award. He is the author of many books, including the
People’s History Series; a seven-volume series on the Radical ’60s; several collections of essays on art, war, politics and history; and the plays
Emma and
Marx in Soho.
In December,
The People Speak a documentary based on the live performances of
A People’s History of the United States and
Voices of a People’s History of the United States premiered on the History Channel.
Over the years, Howard Zinn has been a frequent guest on
Democracy Now! A collection of his appearances is listed below.
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Howard Zinn is an American historian, social critic, and activist. He is best known as author of the best-seller A People’s History of the United States. He spoke at Boston University on November 11, on the subject of American “Holy Wars.”
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Commemorations are being held in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Maryland today to mark the 150th anniversary of abolitionist John Brown’s raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry. We end today’s show with a reading of John Brown’s address to the court in Virginia that ordered his hanging. Actor Harris Yulin read his words as part of a larger reading of Howard Zinn’s classic work, A People’s History of the United States. Yulin was followed by James Earl Jones reading Frederick Douglass. [includes rush transcript]
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Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara has died at the age of ninety-three. McNamara was one of the key architects of the Vietnam War, which killed at least three million Vietnamese, around one million Cambodians and Laotians, and 58,000 American soldiers. We take a look at McNamara’s legacy with two preeminent historians: Howard Zinn and Marilyn Young. We also speak with Jonathan Schell, who covered Vietnam as a reporter in 1967 and met with McNamara in a secret Pentagon meeting. [includes rush transcript]
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Legendary historian Howard Zinn joins us to talk about war, torture and the teaching of history. Zinn says Obama had Obama heeded the lessons of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he wouldn’t be escalating US attacks abroad and increasing the size of the US military budget. We also play excerpts of the forthcoming documentary, The People Speak, featuring dramatic readings based on Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States. [includes rush transcript]
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Howard Zinn is one of this country’s most celebrated historians. His classic work A People’s History of the United States changed the way we look at history in America. First published a quarter of a century ago, the book has sold over a million copies and is a phenomenon in the world of publishing—selling more copies each successive year. After serving as a bombardier in World War II, Howard Zinn went on to become a lifelong dissident and peace activist. He was active in the civil rights movement and many of the struggles for social justice over the past forty years. He taught at Spelman College, the historically black college for women, and was fired for insubordination for standing up for the students. He was recently invited back to give the commencement address. Howard Zinn has written numerous books and is professor emeritus at Boston University. He recently spoke at Binghamton University a few days after the 2008 presidential election. His speech was called “War and Social Justice.” [includes rush transcript]
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On July 4th, we feature a Democracy Now special–a dramatic reading of legendary historian Howard Zinn’s classic work, “A People’s History of the United States.” First published more than a quarter of a century ago, the book has sold over a million copies and is a phenomenon in the world of publishing–selling more copies each successive year. Howard Zinn gathered with a group of actors, writers and editors for a public reading of the book at the 92nd Street Y in New York. The cast included Alice Walker, Kurt Vonnegut, Danny Glover and many others.
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The new play “Rebel Voices” is based on the book, “Voices of a People’s History of the United States,” by historian Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove." It features dramatic readings of speeches, letters, poems, songs and petitions of people like Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, as well as contemporary voices such as Iraq war resister Camilo Mejía. [includes rush transcript]
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Today we spend the hour with readings from a Voices of a People’s History of the United States edited by historian Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove. It is the companion volume to Zinn’s legendary People’s History of the United States—which has sold over a million copies.
We will hear dramatic readings of speeches, letters, poems, songs, petitions, and manifestos. These are the voices of people throughout U.S. history who struggled against slavery, racism, and war, against oppression and exploitation, and who articulated a vision for a better world.
Performances include Danny Glover as Frederick Douglass, Marisa Tomei as Cindy Sheehan, Floyd Red Crow Westerman as Tecumseh and Chief Joseph, Sandra Oh as Emma Goldman and Yuri Kochiyama, and Viggo Mortensen as Bartolomeo de Las Casas and Mark Twain.
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In Part II of our conversation with Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, we speak with the two leading dissidents about U.S. wars from Iraq to Vietnam, resistance and academia. Zinn speaks about the importance of Henry David Thoreau and his relevance today. Zinn says soldiers should “read Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience or take its advice to heart, realize that the government is not holy, but what’s holy is human life and human freedom and the right for people to resist authority.” [includes rush transcript]
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In a Democracy Now! special from Boston, two of the city’s leading dissidents, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, sit down for a rare joint interview. Noam Chomsky began teaching linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge over 50 years ago. He is the author of dozens of books on linguistics and U.S. foreign policy. Howard Zinn is one of the country’s most widely read historians. His classic work “A People’s History of the United States” has sold over 1.5 million copies and it has altered how many teach the nation’s history. Chomsky and Zinn discuss Vietnam, activism, history, Israel-Palestine, and Iraq, which Chomsky calls “one of the worst catastrophes in military and political history.” [includes rush transcript]
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Howard Zinn is one of this country’s most celebrated historians. His classic work “A People’s History of the United States” changed the way we look at history in America. First published a quarter of a century ago, the book has sold over a million copies and is a phenomenon in the world of publishing–selling more copies each successive year. [includes rush transcript]
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Howard Zinn is one of this country’s most celebrated historians. His classic work “A People’s History of the United States” changed the way we look at history in America. First published a quarter of a century ago, the book has sold over a million copies and is a phenomenon in the world of publishing–selling more copies each successive year. [includes rush transcript]
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Today we spend the hour with readings from a Voices of a People’s History of the United States edited by historian Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove. It is the companion volume to Zinn’s legendary People’s History of the United States—which has sold over a million copies.
We will hear dramatic readings of speeches, letters, poems, songs, petitions, and manifestos. These are the voices of people throughout U.S. history who struggled against slavery, racism, and war, against oppression and exploitation, and who articulated a vision for a better world.
Performances include Danny Glover as Frederick Douglass, Marisa Tomei as Cindy Sheehan, Floyd Red Crow Westerman as Tecumseh and Chief Joseph, Sandra Oh as Emma Goldman and Yuri Kochiyama, and Viggo Mortensen as Bartolomeo de Las Casas and Mark Twain.
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Today we spend the hour with readings from a Voices of a People’s History of the United States edited by historian Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove. It is the companion volume to Zinn’s legendary People’s History of the United States—which has sold over a million copies.
We will hear dramatic readings of speeches, letters, poems, songs, petitions, and manifestos. These are the voices of people throughout U.S. history who struggled against slavery, racism, and war, against oppression and exploitation, and who articulated a vision for a better world.
Speakers include Danny Glover, Marisa Tomei, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Sandra Oh, and Viggo Mortensen.
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This weekend is a national holiday commemorating July 4th when American colonies declared their independence from England in 1776. While many in the US hang flags, attend parades and watch fireworks, Independence Day is not a cause of celebration for everyone.
For Native Americans it is a bitter reminder of colonialism, which brought disease, genocide and the destruction of their culture and way of life.
For African Americans Independence Day did not extend to them. While white colonists were declaring their freedom from the crown, that liberation was not shared with millions of Africans who were captured, beaten, separated from their families and forced into slavery thousands of miles from home.
Today we’ll hear excerpts of Howard Zinn’s classic work: A People’s History of the United States. It was first published 24 years ago. The millionth copy of the book was recently sold.
To celebrate this feat, the great historian gathered with a group of actors, writers and editors for a public reading of the book at the 92nd Street Y in New York. The cast included Alice Walker, Kurt Vonnegut, Danny Glover and James Earl Jones.
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We speak with legendary historian Howard Zinn, author of one of the most popular books on American History, “A People’s History of the United States.” In his youth, Zinn was a bombardier in World War II and participated in the Napalm bombing in France. He went on to dedicate his life to opposing wars of all kind. He was an active fighter in Civil Rights Movement and served as an advisor to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. In the late 1960s, he traveled to Vietnam with Father Dan Berrigan during intensive US attacks and negotiated the release of US POWs. In fact, Howard Zinn was a part of most struggles for social justice in this country during his lifetime. He joins us in our firehouse studio. [includes rush transcript]
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We speak with Howard Zinn, renowned historian and author of “A People’s History of the United States.” Zinn says: “People all over the world are mourning the ascension of Bush to his second term as president… that’s something to feel encouraged about, even as all this pomp and circumstance of the inauguration goes on.” [includes rush transcript]
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Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, joins as George W Bush and John Kerry wrap up their third and final debate of the campaign. We speak with the legendary historian about the election, U.S. foreign policy, Ralph Nader’s candidacy, the importance of citizen involvement before and after elections, and much more. [includes rush transcript]
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This weekend is a national holiday commemorating July 4th when American colonies declared their independence from England in 1776. While many in the US hang flags, attend parades and watch fireworks, Independence Day is not a cause of celebration for everyone.
For Native Americans it is a bitter reminder of colonialism, which brought disease, genocide and the destruction of their culture and way of life.
For African Americans Independence Day did not extend to them. While white colonists were declaring their freedom from the crown, that liberation was not shared with millions of Africans who were captured, beaten, separated from their families and forced into slavery thousands of miles from home.
Today we’ll hear excerpts of Howard Zinn’s classic work: A People’s History of the United States. It was first published 24 years ago. The millionth copy of the book was recently sold.
To celebrate this feat, the great historian gathered with a group of actors, writers and editors for a public reading of the book at the 92nd Street Y in New York. The cast included Alice Walker, Kurt Vonnegut, Danny Glover and James Earl Jones.
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On this Indigenous Peoples Day, we hear from historian Howard Zinn who wrote extensively about Columbus’ so-called discovery of the Americas. Today Zinn examines the occupation of Iraq, the role of the media in the build-up to war and the historical role of dissent in the United States.
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Howard Zinn, author of the People’s History of the United States, reviews the history of the abolitionists and the Vietnam War to encourage a new generation of resistance against the Iraq occupation and the war at home.
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Today is a national holiday commemorating July 4th when American colonies declared their independence from England in 1776. While many in the US hang flags, attend parades and watch fireworks, Independence Day is not a cause of celebration for everyone.
For Native Americans it is a bitter reminder of colonialism, which brought disease, genocide and the destruction of their culture and way of life.
For African Americans Independence Day did not extend to them. While white colonists were declaring their freedom from the crown, that liberation was not shared with millions of Africans who were captured, beaten, separated from their families and forced into slavery thousands of miles from home.
Today we will go back more than 150 years to hear one of the most powerful voices of the abolition movement–Frederick Douglas.
Born a slave in Maryland in 1818, Douglas escaped from slavery in the 1830s and became a leader in the growing abolition campaign through lectures and his anti-slavery newspaper The Northstar. He would become a major civil right leader in the Unites States.
Douglas gave his Independence Day oration in 1852.
Today we’ll hear excerpts of that speech as part of a dramatic reading of Howard Zinn’s classic work: A People’s History of the United States.
The great historian gathered with actors and writers several months ago at the 92nd Street Y in New York.
The cast included Alfre Woodard, Danny Glover, Marisa Tomei, Kurt Vonnegut, James Earl Jones and others.
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“One of the reasons for the acceptance of the war by so many Americans…is that the American population has had concealed from it the human consequences of what we’ve been doing.”
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It has become a classic work of history. It is used in countless schools across the country, it has inspired a generation of historians and students and it has reshaped how many people view this country’s history.
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The majority of Americans have been taught a red, white and blue history of this country.
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We’ve been hearing authors and actors and fans of Professor Howard Zinn, celebrating Zinn’s tremendous achievement: he has sold one million copies of his revolutionary book, ‘A People’s History of the United States.’
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We go now to historian Howard Zinn. Howard Zinn is a historian and professor emeritus of political science at Boston University. He is the author of fourteen books, including ‘A People’s History of the United States,’ and ‘You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.’
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It may have been the largest gathering of ex cons in the country. Over 600 people packed into the St. Peter Claver Catholic Church in Baltimore on Monday. It would have made the legendary anti-war and anti-nuclear activist Philip Berrigan proud. It was at his funeral.
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We turn now to an excerpt of a speech historian Howard Zinn gave earlier this month at Brown University. Howard Zinn is the author of
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According to CNN, over 200,000 people protested US plans to invade Iraq at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC on Saturday.
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He overturned the sacred myth of Christopher Columbus as a courageous hero. He unmasked military leaders like Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt as racists, war-lovers, imperialists, and Indian-killers. He revealed our most liberal presidents–Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, Kennedy–as more concerned with political power and national might than the rights of non-white people. And he exposed the cold war as a competition fueled by thirst for empire and domination.
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The United States ambassador for war crimes said yesterday that the Geneva Conventions are outdated and need to be rewritten to deal with the threat of international terrorism.
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1:06:47.1
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U.S. jets pounded Taliban positions this morning near front lines outside the Afghan capital and a key northern city. The attack came as Sec. of State Gen. Colin Powell, said he wanted to see the Afghan capital captured within the next few weeks before the onset of winter.
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In the midst of the rising tide of Congressional and Bush Administration calls for a harsh military response to theattacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, there is a remarkable, hawkish unity in the views being expressedin the mainstream media.
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It’s been 132 years since the Florida Legislature got this involved in presidential politics, but some things never change. The GOP majority wanted to send a Republican to the White House then, and it does now. [includes rush transcript]
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Today we are taking a look at the people, events and social movements of the century. We are joined by two activist scholars who will shed some light on this subject.
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What are the political implications of cyberspace? What role is the United States playing in Russia’s current crises? After its rise and fall, is the labor movement on the rise once again? What are the origins of corporate power? Who will control the past–and the future?
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Last week’s announcement of the proposed merger of two oil giants Exxon and Mobil would create not only the largest oil company in the world, but also the world’s single largest corporation. This merger would also reunite two of the seven companies that made up the Standard Oil monopoly of John D. Rockefeller, a monopoly that was broken up in 1911 in what was perhaps the most famous anti-trust action in U.S. history.
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No other historian has attacked the distortions and myths about the history of the United States as forcefully as Howard Zinn. His book
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Perhaps no other radical historian has reached so many hearts and minds as Howard Zinn. His book
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Howard Zinn is arguably one of the most important historians in the United States today. But that’s not because he’s followed the traditional route to influence and political power of historians before him.
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The leader of the movement to look at history from the perspective of people of color and the powerless in our society, is Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States 1492 to the Present. In honor of Indigenous People’s day, we now bring you an excerpt of a speech by Howard Zinn.
A Strictly Humanitarian Mission
By FIDEL CASTRO
Two days after the catastrophe in Haiti, which destroyed that neighboring sister nation, I wrote:
“In the area of healthcare and others the Haitian people has received the cooperation of Cuba, even though this is a small and blockaded country. Approximately 400 doctors and healthcare workers are helping the Haitian people free of charge. Our doctors are working every day at 227 of the 237 communes of that country. On the other hand, no less than 400 young Haitians have been graduated as medical doctors in our country. They will now work alongside the reinforcement that traveled there yesterday to save lives in that critical situation. Thus, up to one thousand doctors and healthcare personnel can be mobilized without any special effort; and most are already there willing to cooperate with any other State that wishes to save Haitian lives and rehabilitate the injured.”
“The head of our medical brigade has informed that ‘the situation is difficult but we are already saving lives.’”
Hour after hour, day and night, the Cuban health professionals have started to work nonstop in the few facilities that were able to stand, in tents, and out in the parks or open-air spaces, since the population feared new aftershocks.
The situation was far more serious than was originally thought. Tens of thousands of injured were clamoring for help in the streets of Port-au-Prince; innumerable persons laid, dead or alive, under the rubbled clay or adobe used in the construction of the houses where the overwhelming majority of the population lived. Buildings, even the most solid, collapsed. Besides, it was necessary to look for the Haitian doctors who had graduated at the Latin American Medicine School throughout all the destroyed neighborhoods. Many of them were affected, either directly or indirectly, by the tragedy.
Some UN officials were trapped in their dormitories and tens of lives were lost, including the lives of several chiefs of MINUSTAH, a UN contingent. The fate of hundreds of other members of its staff was unknown.
Haiti’s Presidential Palace crumbled. Many public facilities, including several hospitals, were left in ruins.
The catastrophe shocked the whole world, which was able to see what was going on through the images aired by the main international TV networks. Governments from everywhere in the planet announced they would be sending rescue experts, food, medicines, equipment and other resources.
In conformity with the position publicly announced by Cuba, medical staff from different countries--namely Spain, Mexico, and Colombia, among others--worked very hard alongside our doctors at the facilities they had improvised. Organizations such as PAHO and other friendly countries like Venezuela and other nations supplied medicines and other resources. The impeccable behavior of Cuban professionals and their leaders was absolutely void of chauvinism and remained out of the limelight.
Cuba, just as it had done under similar circumstances, when Hurricane Katrina caused huge devastation in the city of New Orleans and the lives of thousands of American citizens were in danger, offered to send a full medical brigade to cooperate with the people of the United States, a country that, as is well known, has vast resources. But at that moment what was needed were trained and well-equipped doctors to save lives. Given New Orleans geographical location, more than one thousand doctors of the “Henry Reeve” contingent mobilized and readied to leave for that city at any time of the day or the night, carrying with them the necessary medicines and equipment. It never crossed our mind that the President of that nation would reject the offer and let a number of Americans that could have been saved to die. The mistake made by that government was perhaps the inability to understand that the people of Cuba do not see in the American people an enemy; it does not blame it for the aggressions our homeland has suffered.
Nor was that government capable of understanding that our country does not need to beg for favors or forgiveness of those who, for half a century now, have been trying, to no avail, to bring us to our knees.
Our country, also in the case of Haiti, immediately responded to the US authorities requests to fly over the eastern part of Cuba as well as other facilities they needed to deliver assistance, as quickly as possible, to the American and Haitian citizens who had been affected by the earthquake.
Such have been the principles characterizing the ethical behavior of our people. Together with its equanimity and firmness, these have been the ever-present features of our foreign policy. And this is known only too well by whoever have been our adversaries in the international arena.
Cuba will firmly stand by the opinion that the tragedy that has taken place in Haiti, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, is a challenge to the richest and more powerful countries of the world.
Haiti is a net product of the colonial, capitalist and imperialist system imposed on the world. Haiti’s slavery and subsequent poverty were imposed from abroad. That terrible earthquake occurred after the Copenhagen Summit, where the most elemental rights of 192 UN member States were trampled upon.
In the aftermath of the tragedy, a competition has unleashed in Haiti to hastily and illegally adopt boys and girls. UNICEF has been forced to adopt preventive measures against the uprooting of many children, which will deprive their close relatives from their rights.
There are more than one hundred thousand deadly victims. A high number of citizens have lost their arms or legs, or have suffered fractures requiring rehabilitation that would enable them to work or manage their own.
Eighty per cent of the country needs to be rebuilt. Haiti requires an economy that is developed enough to meet its needs according to its productive capacity. The reconstruction of Europe or Japan, which was based on the productive capacity and the technical level of the population, was a relatively simple task as compared to the effort that needs to be made in Haiti. There, as well as in most of Africa and elsewhere in the Third World, it is indispensable to create the conditions for a sustainable development. In only forty years time, humanity will be made of more than nine billion inhabitants, and right now is faced with the challenge of a climate change that scientists accept as an inescapable reality.
In the midst of the Haitian tragedy, without anybody knowing how and why, thousands of US marines, 82nd Airborne Division troops and other military forces have occupied Haiti. Worse still is the fact that neither the United Nations Organization nor the US government have offered an explanation to the world’s public opinion about this relocation of troops.
Several governments have complained that their aircraft have not been allowed to land in order to deliver the human and technical resources that have been sent to Haiti.
Some countries, for their part, have announced they would be sending an additional number of troops and military equipment. In my view, such events will complicate and create chaos in international cooperation, which is already in itself complex. It is necessary to seriously discuss this issue. The UN should be entrusted with the leading role it deserves in these so delicate matters.
Our country is accomplishing a strictly humanitarian mission. To the extent of its possibilities, it will contribute the human and material resources at its disposal. The will of our people, who takes pride in its medical doctors and cooperation workers who provide vital services, is huge, and will rise to the occasion.
Any significant cooperation that is offered to our country will not be rejected, but its acceptance will fully depend on the importance and transcendence of the assistance that is requested from the human resources of our homeland.
It is only fair to state that, up until this moment, our modest aircrafts and the important human resources that Cuba has made available to the Haitian people have arrived at their destination without any difficulty whatsoever.
We send doctors, not soldiers!
by David Brown and Adam Fresco
Thousands of anti-war campaigners are preparing for Tony Blair’s appearance at the Iraq inquiry in what could be the biggest political demonstration since last year’s G20 protests.
Riot police will be on stand-by around the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, close to the Houses of Parliament, as the former Prime Minister faces more than five hours of questioning on Friday.
The day before, anti-war protesters will attempt to blockade an international conference organised by Gordon Brown on the future of Afghanistan at Lancaster House, Central London.
Political leaders from many of the 43 nations involved in the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan are expected to attend, including Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President, and Ban Ki Moon, the United Nations Secretary-General.
However the focus of the week’s demonstrations is expected to be Mr Blair’s appearance before Sir John Chilcot’s committee. The Stop the War Coalition says that protesters are preparing to travel from across the country.
More than 3,000 people applied for 40 public places in the room where the former Prime Minister will be questioned by the five-member panel. The inquiry is allowing a further 1,400 people into a public viewing room to watch either the morning and afternoon sessions on giant screens.
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Tuesday, January 26, 2010
By Chris Hedges
Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court’s decision in
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d’état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power. But it does not significantly alter the political landscape. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.
The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment.
They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.
Much of the outrage expressed about the court’s ruling is the outrage of those who prefer this choreographed charade. As long as the charade is played, they do not have to consider how to combat what the political philosopher
Sheldon Wolin calls our system of “inverted totalitarianism.”
Inverted totalitarianism represents “the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry,” Wolin writes in “Democracy Incorporated.” Inverted totalitarianism differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader, and finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, boast of replacing decaying structures with a new, revolutionary structure.
They purport to honor electoral politics, freedom and the Constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power as to make democracy impossible.
Inverted totalitarianism is not conceptualized as an ideology or objectified in public policy. It is furthered by “power-holders and citizens who often seem unaware of the deeper consequences of their actions or inactions,” Wolin writes. But it is as dangerous as classical forms of totalitarianism. In a system of inverted totalitarianism, as this court ruling illustrates, it is not necessary to rewrite the Constitution, as fascist and communist regimes do. It is enough to exploit legitimate power by means of judicial and legislative interpretation.
This exploitation ensures that huge corporate campaign contributions are protected speech under the First Amendment. It ensures that heavily financed and organized lobbying by large corporations is interpreted as an application of the people’s right to petition the government. The court again ratified the concept that corporations are persons, except in those cases where the “persons” agree to a “settlement.” Those within corporations who commit crimes can avoid going to prison by paying large sums of money to the government while, according to this twisted judicial reasoning, not “admitting any wrongdoing.” There is a word for this. It is called corruption.
Corporations have
35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit employees and shareholders for donations to fund pliable candidates.
The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on political campaigns, influence peddling and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown and the subsequent looting of the U.S. Treasury. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America spent $26 million last year and drug companies such as Pfizer, Amgen and Eli Lilly kicked in tens of millions more to buy off the two parties. These corporations have made sure our so-called health reform bill will force us to buy their predatory and defective products. The oil and gas industry, the coal industry, defense contractors and telecommunications companies have thwarted the drive for sustainable energy and orchestrated the steady erosion of civil liberties. Politicians do corporate bidding and stage hollow acts of political theater to keep the fiction of the democratic state alive.
There is no national institution left that can accurately be described as democratic. Citizens, rather than participate in power, are allowed to have virtual opinions to preordained questions, a kind of participatory fascism as meaningless as voting on “American Idol.” Mass emotions are directed toward the
raging culture wars. This allows us to take emotional stands on issues that are inconsequential to the power elite.
Our transformation into an empire, as happened in ancient Athens and Rome, has seen the tyranny we practice abroad become the tyranny we practice at home. We, like all empires, have been eviscerated by our own expansionism. We utilize weapons of horrific destructive power, subsidize their development with billions in taxpayer dollars, and are the world’s largest arms dealer. And the Constitution, as Wolin notes, is “conscripted to serve as power’s apprentice rather than its conscience.”
“Inverted totalitarianism reverses things,” Wolin writes. “It is politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash.”
Hollywood, the news industry and television, all corporate controlled, have become instruments of inverted totalitarianism. They censor or ridicule those who critique or challenge corporate structures and assumptions. They saturate the airwaves with manufactured controversy, whether it is Tiger Woods or the dispute between Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. They manipulate images to make us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge, which is how Barack Obama became president. And the draconian internal control employed by the Department of Homeland Security, the military and the police over any form of
popular dissent, coupled with the corporate media’s censorship, does for inverted totalitarianism what thugs and bonfires of books do in classical totalitarian regimes.
“It seems a replay of historical experience that the bias displayed by today’s media should be aimed consistently at the shredded remains of liberalism,” Wolin writes. “Recall that an element common to most 20th century totalitarianism, whether Fascist or Stalinist, was hostility towards the left. In the United States, the left is assumed to consist solely of liberals, occasionally of ‘the left wing of the Democratic Party,’ never of democrats.”
Liberals, socialists, trade unionists, independent journalists and intellectuals, many of whom were once important voices in our society, have been silenced or targeted for elimination within corporate-controlled academia, the media and government. Wolin, who taught at Berkeley and later at Princeton, is arguably the country’s foremost political philosopher. And yet his book was virtually ignored. This is also why Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney, along with intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, are not given a part in our national discourse.
The uniformity of opinion is reinforced by the skillfully orchestrated mass emotions of nationalism and patriotism, which paints all dissidents as “soft” or “unpatriotic.” The “patriotic” citizen, plagued by fear of job losses and possible terrorist attacks, unfailingly supports widespread surveillance and the militarized state. This means no questioning of the $1 trillion in defense-related spending. It means that the military and intelligence agencies are held above government, as if somehow they are not part of government. The most powerful instruments of state power and control are effectively removed from public discussion. We, as imperial citizens, are taught to be contemptuous of government bureaucracy, yet we stand like sheep before Homeland Security agents in airports and are mute when Congress permits our private correspondence and conversations to be
monitored and archived. We endure more state control than at any time in American history.
The civic, patriotic and political language we use to describe ourselves remains unchanged.
We pay fealty to the same national symbols and iconography. We find our collective identity in the same national myths. We continue to deify the Founding Fathers. But the America we celebrate is an illusion. It does not exist. Our government and judiciary have no real sovereignty. Our press provides diversion, not information. Our organs of security and power keep us as domesticated and as fearful as most Iraqis. Capitalism, as Karl Marx understood, when it emasculates government, becomes a revolutionary force. And this revolutionary force, best described as inverted totalitarianism, is plunging us into a state of neo-feudalism, perpetual war and severe repression. The Supreme Court decision is part of our transformation by the corporate state from citizens to prisoners.
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent, writes a column published every Monday on Truthdig. His latest book is “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.”
Original: AP / Charles Dharapak
Monday, January 25, 2010
Published: January 22, 2010
Cornel West, 56, has many roles: Princeton professor, philosopher, fiery orator, civil rights activist, classical violinist and actor (in two “Matrix” movies). On weekends, Dr. West travels the country delivering lectures, being, in his own words, “a bluesman in the life of the mind, a jazzman in the world of ideas, forever on the move.”
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
The Princeton scholar Cornel West, at Newark's airport, says he has never spent a weekend in Princeton.
HEEDING THE CALL I’ve never spent a weekend in Princeton. I would like to be at home, but my calling beckons me. I’ve got places to go, from schools to community centers to prisons to churches to mosques to universities to trade unions. There’s academic lectures, political lectures, religious lectures. It’s just my regular weekly travel. The aim is to touch minds and settle souls; so you instruct as well as delight.
EARLY RISER I usually get up in a different part of the country every Sunday, usually very early, about 6:30 a.m. It’s just the habit, you know. I’m traveling, so I’ve got to get moving. I usually hit four cities in a weekend.
THE PLACES HE GOES All over. This past weekend, I was in Seattle, Oakland, Sacramento and Chicago. Next weekend, I’m going to Dallas, Houston and back to Chicago. I stay in hotels. They provide for me. None of this is out of my pocket; I’m as broke as I can be.
FAITH-BASED Am I religious? Am I a black man born to my parents, Irene and Clifton West? I am, indeed, indeed. I am a profoundly Jesus-loving free black man who bears witness to truth and justice until the day I die.
WHICH CHURCHES? Christian and Baptist. Funky Baptist, which means you focus on the blood at the cross where you find the love and freedom to bear witness to truth and justice. And funky as in George Clinton-and-James Brown funky, as opposed to deodorized.
FAVORITE HOUSES OF WORSHIP If I can, if possible, I usually go to a black Baptist church. Concord Baptist in Brooklyn. Enon Tabernacle Baptist in Philadelphia. Abyssinian in Harlem, with my dear brother Calvin Butts. I’ve spoken at his church three times. And Mother Zion Church on West 137th Street. I just spoke there. I’m not an ordained or licensed preacher, but they ask me to preach anyway.
NO BREAKFAST I haven’t had breakfast on a Sunday since 1984.
WHAT HAPPENED IN 1984? We won’t go into that. It was a special Sunday. But I always have water. It’s decaf coffee from Monday to Thursday.
HITTING THE BOOKS Downtime is reading; I’m always reading on the plane, whatever the reading is for course work the next week. I’m also always rereading the classics, Plato, St. Augustine.
EVER READ FLUFF? I might pick up Time or Newsweek and take a peek.
PREPPING FOR CLASS I try to shoot to be home by 8 or 9 at night. I like to get home and wash my clothes. I have to read all night; I have to be real fresh for class. I like to read two or three hours every night. Right now I’m reading Robert Brandom, one of the great pragmatic American philosophers. I read until 2, 2:30 a.m. I don’t really need that much sleep.
IN THE COMPANY OF GREATS I’ve been married three times. I’m married to my calling, but I’m not married to a particular woman. I have no pets. My apartment is full of books and records, the light of Toni Morrison and John Coltrane. And Chekhov, everywhere.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
by C. T. Weber
Be aware Californians, on your June 8, 2010, direct primary ballot will be a very dangerous proposition which appears very harmless. It is called the Top Two Candidates Open Primary. I had always thought the purpose of a primary was to allow each political party to select who would run in the general election against the winners of the other parties. However, the purpose of this proposition is to put all candidates, for the same office on the same ballot in the primary election. Here’s the killer: only the two candidates with the highest vote totals for each office, regardless of party preference, would then compete for the office at the ensuing general election. This will probably result in one Democratic and one Republican candidate for each office. However, in some cases it will be two Democratic candidates and in other cases it will result in two Republican candidates. Voters will be denied the opportunity to vote in the general election for candidates from the four smaller parties. The passage of the Top Two proposition will reduce your choices in the general election to only two.
Read more...
The Morgan Library in New York is currenty exhibiting one of the
great masterworks of medieval illumination, the
Hours of Catherine of Cleves. All 157 miniatures
have also been digitized.
From the website
This digital facsimile provides reproductions of all 157 miniatures (and facing text pages) from the Hours of Catherine of Cleves. The original one-volume prayer book had been taken apart in the nineteenth century; the leaves were shuffled and then rebound into two confusing volumes. This presentation offers the miniatures in their original, fifteenth-century sequence. The Hours of Catherine of Cleves is the greatest Dutch illuminated manuscript in the world. Its 157 miniatures are by the gifted Master of Catherine of Cleves (active ca. 1435-60), who is named after this book. The Master of Catherine of Cleves is considered the finest and most original illuminator of the medieval northern Netherlands, and this manuscript is his masterpiece.
For other illuminated manuscript colelctions online, see
The Pages from the Past,
Central Asian Miniature and LUSAMUT Studio's
Armenian Minuatures. You can see a few more pages from Books of Hours
in this RIT collection to give you some idea of just how impressive this manuscript was.
Guestblogger Jessamyn West is a moderator at
MetaFilter and a library technologist in Central Vermont who blogs at
librarian.net
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Paul McMaster, a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) surgeon, describes what he and his team have seen and done since they arrived in Port-au-Prince to bring emergency medical care to earthquake survivors on January 15.
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