::: Letter From Würzburg :::

The Power and the Glory

2005-07-04T17:47:00.000Z

It is the Fourth of July, that annual celebration of America’s birthday. The Declaration of Independence, a document largely crafted by Thomas Jefferson to formally sever ties with Great Britain, was officially adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776.

“Taxation without representation,” was the major compliant of the 13 colonies in America that were forced to pay taxes to England's King George III with no representation in Parliament. As dissatisfaction grew, British troops were dispatched to quell any signs of rebellion, and repeated attempts by the colonists to resolve the crisis without war proved fruitless.

Although Jefferson was considered the strongest and most eloquent writer of his generation, the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence included Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston.

Howard Zinn, the contemporary American historian and playwright, reminds us of our past so we might better understand the present. The following essay is adapted from a lecture he gave for MIT's Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies, and originally appeared in the on-line edition of the Boston Review.

What Zinn has to say is extremely important on the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

“The notion of American exceptionalism—that the United States alone has the right, whether by divine sanction or moral obligation, to bring civilization, or democracy, or liberty to the rest of the world, by violence if necessary—is not new. It started as early as 1630 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony when Governor John Winthrop uttered the words that centuries later would be quoted by Ronald Reagan. Winthrop called the Massachusetts Bay Colony a “city upon a hill.” Reagan embellished a little, calling it a “shining city on a hill.”

The idea of a city on a hill is heart warming. It suggests what George Bush has spoken of: that the United States is a beacon of liberty and democracy. People can look to us and learn from and emulate us.

In reality, we have never been just a city on a hill. A few years after Governor Winthrop uttered his famous words, the people in the city on a hill moved out to massacre the Pequot Indians.

Here’s a description by William Bradford, an early settler, of Captain John Mason’s attack on a Pequot village:

Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword, some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived that they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.

* * *

The kind of massacre described by Bradford occurs again and again as Americans march west to the Pacific and south to the Gulf of Mexico. (In fact our celebrated war of liberation, the American Revolution, was disastrous for the Indians. Colonists had been restrained from encroaching on the Indian territory by the British and the boundary set up in their Proclamation of 1763. American independence wiped out that boundary.)

Expanding into another territory, occupying that territory, and dealing harshly with people who resist occupation has been a persistent fact of American history from the first settlements to the present day. And this was often accompanied from very early on with a particular form of American exceptionalism: the idea that American expansion is divinely ordained.

On the eve of the war with Mexico in the middle of the 19th century, just after the United States annexed Texas, the editor and writer John O’Sullivan coined the famous phrase “manifest destiny.” He said it was “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

At the beginning of the 20th century, when the United States invaded the Philippines, President McKinley said that the decision to take the Philippines came to him one night when he got down on his knees and prayed, and God told him to take the Philippines.

Invoking God has been a habit for American presidents throughout the nation’s history, but George W. Bush has made a specialty of it. For an article in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, the reporter talked with Palestinian leaders who had met with Bush. One of them reported that Bush told him, “God told me to strike at al Qaeda. And I struck them. And then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did. And now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.”

It’s hard to know if the quote is authentic, especially because it is so literate. But it certainly is consistent with Bush’s oft-expressed claims. A more credible story comes from a Bush supporter, Richard Lamb, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, who says that during the election campaign Bush told him, “I believe God wants me to be president. But if that doesn’t happen, that’s okay.”

Divine ordination is a very dangerous idea, especially when combined with military power (the United States has 10,000 nuclear weapons, with military bases in a hundred different countries and warships on every sea). With God’s approval, you need no human standard of morality. Anyone today who claims the support of God might be embarrassed to recall that the Nazi storm troopers had inscribed on their belts, “Gott mit uns” (“God with us”).

Not every American leader claimed divine sanction, but the idea persisted that the United States was uniquely justified in using its power to expand throughout the world. In 1945, at the end of World War II, Henry Luce, the owner of a vast chain of media enterprises—Time, Life, Fortune—declared that this would be “the American Century,” that victory in the war gave the United States the right “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”

This confident prophecy was acted out all through the rest of the 20th century. Almost immediately after World War II the United States penetrated the oil regions of the Middle East by special arrangement with Saudi Arabia. It established military bases in Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and a number of Pacific islands. In the next decades it orchestrated right-wing coups in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile, and gave military aid to various dictatorships in the Caribbean. In an attempt to establish a foothold in Southeast Asia it invaded Vietnam and bombed Laos and Cambodia.

The existence of the Soviet Union, even with its acquisition of nuclear weapons, did not block this expansion. In fact, the exaggerated threat of “world communism” gave the United States a powerful justification for expanding all over the globe, and soon it had military bases in a hundred countries. Presumably, only the United States stood in the way of the Soviet conquest of the world.

Can we believe that it was the existence of the Soviet Union that brought about the aggressive militarism of the United States? If so, how do we explain all the violent expansion before 1917? A hundred years before the Bolshevik Revolution, American armies were annihilating Indian tribes, clearing the great expanse of the West in an early example of what we now call “ethnic cleansing.” And with the continent conquered, the nation began to look overseas.

On the eve of the 20th century, as American armies moved into Cuba and the Philippines, American exceptionalism did not always mean that the United States wanted to go it alone. The nation was willing—indeed, eager—to join the small group of Western imperial powers that it would one day supersede. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge wrote at the time, “The great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion, and their present defense all the waste places of the earth. . . . As one of the great nations of the world the United States must not fall out of the line of march.”

Surely, the nationalistic spirit in other countries has often led them to see their expansion as uniquely moral, but this country has carried the claim farthest.

American exceptionalism was never more clearly expressed than by Secretary of War Elihu Root, who in 1899 declared, “The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the world began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.” At the time he was saying this, American soldiers in the Philippines were starting a bloodbath which would take the lives of 600,000 Filipinos.

The idea that America is different because its military actions are for the benefit of others becomes particularly persuasive when it is put forth by leaders presumed to be liberals, or progressives. For instance, Woodrow Wilson, always high on the list of “liberal” presidents, labeled both by scholars and the popular culture as an “idealist,” was ruthless in his use of military power against weaker nations. He sent the navy to bombard and occupy the Mexican port of Vera Cruz in 1914 because the Mexicans had arrested some American sailors. He sent the marines into Haiti in 1915, and when the Haitians resisted, thousands were killed.

The following year American marines occupied the Dominican Republic. The occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic lasted many years. And Wilson, who had been elected in 1916 saying, “There is such a thing as a nation being too proud to fight,” soon sent young Americans into the slaughterhouse of the European war.

Theodore Roosevelt was considered a “progressive” and indeed ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket in 1912. But he was a lover of war and a supporter of the conquest of the Philippines—he had congratulated the general who wiped out a Filipino village of 600 people in 1906. He had promulgated the 1904 “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which justified the occupation of small countries in the Caribbean as bringing them “stability.”

During the Cold War, many American “liberals” became caught up in a kind of hysteria about the Soviet expansion, which was certainly real in Eastern Europe but was greatly exaggerated as a threat to western Europe and the United States. During the period of McCarthyism the Senate’s quintessential liberal, Hubert Humphrey, proposed detention camps for suspected subversives who in times of “national emergency” could be held without trial.

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, terrorism replaced communism as the justification for expansion. Terrorism was real, but its threat was magnified to the point of hysteria, permitting excessive military action abroad and the curtailment of civil liberties at home.

The idea of American exceptionalism persisted as the first President Bush declared, extending Henry Luce’s prediction, that the nation was about to embark on a “new American Century.” Though the Soviet Union was gone, the policy of military intervention abroad did not end. The elder Bush invaded Panama and then went to war against Iraq.

The terrible attacks of September 11 gave a new impetus to the idea that the United States was uniquely responsible for the security of the world, defending us all against terrorism as it once did against communism. President George W. Bush carried the idea of American exceptionalism to its limits by putting forth in his national-security strategy the principles of unilateral war.

This was a repudiation of the United Nations charter, which is based on the idea that security is a collective matter, and that war could only be justified in self-defense. We might note that the Bush doctrine also violates the principles laid out at Nuremberg, when Nazi leaders were convicted and hanged for aggressive war, preventive war, far from self-defense.

Bush’s national-security strategy and its bold statement that the United States is uniquely responsible for peace and democracy in the world has been shocking to many Americans.
But it is not really a dramatic departure from the historical practice of the United States, which for a long time has acted as an aggressor, bombing and invading other countries (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Panama, Iraq) and insisting on maintaining nuclear and non-nuclear supremacy. Unilateral military action, under the guise of prevention, is a familiar part of American foreign policy.

Sometimes bombings and invasions have been cloaked as international action by bringing in the United Nations, as in Korea, or NATO, as in Serbia, but basically our wars have been American enterprises. It was Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who said at one point, “If possible we will act in the world multilaterally, but if necessary, we will act unilaterally.” Henry Kissinger, hearing this, responded with his customary solemnity that this principle “should not be universalized.” Exceptionalism was never clearer.

Some liberals in this country, opposed to Bush, nevertheless are closer to his principles on foreign affairs than they want to acknowledge. It is clear that 9/11 had a powerful psychological effect on everybody in America, and for certain liberal intellectuals a kind of hysterical reaction has distorted their ability to think clearly about our nation’s role in the world.

In a recent issue of the liberal magazine The American Prospect, the editors write, “Today Islamist terrorists with global reach pose the greatest immediate threat to our lives and liberties. . . . When facing a substantial, immediate, and provable threat, the United States has both the right and the obligation to strike preemptively and, if need be, unilaterally against terrorists or states that support them.”

Preemptively and, if need be, unilaterally; and against “states that support” terrorists, not just terrorists themselves. Those are large steps in the direction of the Bush doctrine, though the editors do qualify their support for preemption by adding that the threat must be “substantial, immediate, and provable.” But when intellectuals endorse abstract principles, even with qualifications, they need to keep in mind that the principles will be applied by the people who run the U.S. government.

This is all the more important to keep in mind when the abstract principle is about the use of violence by the state—in fact, about preemptively initiating the use of violence.

There may be an acceptable case for initiating military action in the face of an immediate threat, but only if the action is limited and focused directly on the threatening party—just as we might accept the squelching of someone falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater if that really were the situation and not some guy distributing anti-war leaflets on the street. But accepting action not just against “terrorists” (can we identify them as we do the person shouting “fire”?) but against “states that support them” invites unfocused and indiscriminate violence, as in Afghanistan, where our government killed at least 3,000 civilians in a claimed pursuit of terrorists.

It seems that the idea of American exceptionalism is pervasive across the political spectrum.
The idea is not challenged because the history of American expansion in the world is not a history that is taught very much in our educational system.

A couple of years ago Bush addressed the Philippine National Assembly and said, “America is proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people. Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.”

The president apparently never learned the story of the bloody conquest of the Philippines.

And last year, when the Mexican ambassador to the UN said something undiplomatic about how the United States has been treating Mexico as its “backyard” he was immediately reprimanded by then–Secretary of State Colin Powell. Powell, denying the accusation, said, “We have too much of a history that we have gone through together.” (Had he not learned about the Mexican War or the military forays into Mexico?) The ambassador was soon removed from his post.

The major newspapers, television news shows, and radio talk shows appear not to know history, or prefer to forget it. There was an outpouring of praise for Bush’s second inaugural speech in the press, including the so-called liberal press (The Washington Post, The New York Times). The editorial writers eagerly embraced Bush’s words about spreading liberty in the world, as if they were ignorant of the history of such claims, as if the past two years’ worth of news from Iraq were meaningless.

Only a couple of days before Bush uttered those words about spreading liberty in the world, The New York Times published a photo of a crouching, bleeding Iraqi girl. She was screaming. Her parents, taking her somewhere in their car, had just been shot to death by nervous American soldiers.

One of the consequences of American exceptionalism is that the U.S. government considers itself exempt from legal and moral standards accepted by other nations in the world. There is a long list of such self-exemptions: the refusal to sign the Kyoto Treaty regulating the pollution of the environment, the refusal to strengthen the convention on biological weapons.

The United States has failed to join the hundred-plus nations that have agreed to ban land mines, in spite of the appalling statistics about amputations performed on children mutilated by those mines. It refuses to ban the use of napalm and cluster bombs. It insists that it must not be subject, as are other countries, to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

What is the answer to the insistence on American exceptionalism? Those of us in the United States and in the world who do not accept it must declare forcibly that the ethical norms concerning peace and human rights should be observed. It should be understood that the children of Iraq, of China, and of Africa, children everywhere in the world, have the same right to life as American children.

These are fundamental moral principles. If our government doesn’t uphold them, the citizenry must. At certain times in recent history, imperial powers—the British in India and East Africa, the Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria, the Dutch and French in Southeast Asia, the Portuguese in Angola—have reluctantly surrendered their possessions and swallowed their pride when they were forced to by massive resistance.

Fortunately, there are people all over the world who believe that human beings everywhere deserve the same rights to life and liberty. On February 15, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, more than ten million people in more than 60 countries around the world demonstrated against that war.

There is a growing refusal to accept U.S. domination and the idea of American exceptionalism. Recently, when the State Department issued its annual report listing countries guilty of torture and other human-rights abuses, there were indignant responses from around the world commenting on the absence of the United States from that list.

A Turkish newspaper said, “There’s not even mention of the incidents in Abu Ghraib prison, no mention of Guantánamo.” A newspaper in Sydney pointed out that the United States sends suspects—people who have not been tried or found guilty of anything—to prisons in Morocco, Egypt, Libya, and Uzbekistan, countries that the State Department itself says use torture.

Here in the United States, despite the media’s failure to report it, there is a growing resistance to the war in Iraq. Public-opinion polls show that at least half the citizenry no longer believe in the war. Perhaps most significant is that among the armed forces, and families of those in the armed forces, there is more and more opposition to it.

After the horrors of the first World War, Albert Einstein said, “Wars will stop when men refuse to fight.”

We are now seeing the refusal of soldiers to fight, the refusal of families to let their loved ones go to war, the insistence of the parents of high-school kids that recruiters stay away from their schools. These incidents, occurring more and more frequently, may finally, as happened in the case of Vietnam, make it impossible for the government to continue the war, and it will come to an end.

The true heroes of our history are those Americans who refused to accept that we have a special claim to morality and the right to exert our force on the rest of the world. I think of William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist. On the masthead of his antislavery newspaper, The Liberator, were the words, “My country is the world. My countrymen are mankind.”

Report from Barcelona

2005-06-25T09:55:00.000Z

Just returned from a pleasant four-day vacation in Barcelona. The Mediterranean city is certainly a hopping place, and attracts a generous quota of college students, eccentrics, grifters, misfits and weirdos. Most of this folly is displayed daily on La Rambla, a major promenade that extends from Placa de Catalunya to la Mirrador de Colon near the harbor.

La Rambla offers a fair share of sidewalk cafes, yet without the grimy beggars one encounters in Mexico. Five years ago, when we stayed in Veracruz, our base was the stylish Hotel Imperial, built on the Zocalo in 1796.

Sitting in the sidewalk cafe of the Hotel Imperial each evening was like being in Fellini’s La Dolca Vita. Within 20 minutes, an assortment of 40 vendors: beggars, panhandlers, cripples and people with appalling deformities, paraded by our table. The vendors were predictable, selling cigars, hammocks, T-shirts, pure vanilla. pencils, straw sombreros. Yet perhaps the most unusual spectacle was the women dressed as nurses, offering blood pressure tests for a modest price. Quite amusing. Of course the circus freak candidates also paid us a visit: the midget shoeshine boy, the blind accordionist, though the woman with the disfigured arm really took the prize. The senora was so repulsive all she had to do was appear before each cafe table, and one quickly paid her to scram. Yet the toothless woman selling gum was also quite memorable.

Between La Rambla and the edge of Ciutat Vella (Old Town) is the Arabic quarter, with row after row of narrow streets of apartments with long-shuttered doors and wrought-iron balconies used to escape the hot-house atmosphere of the tiny, crowded rooms. These scenes resemble a slightly improved version of dilapidated Cairo. All along this area are cheap internet cafes, operated by young men in Punjab suits from Pakistan. Apparently, the Pakis who did not land in the Middle East have made their way to the Iberian Peninsula.

We stayed in a modest two-star hotel on the other side of the Arabic quarter. Early every morning, I walked the streets just to absorb the multicultural flavor of the port city. On the last morning of our stay, I ventured back into the Arab quarter because it reminded me of Bahrain and the Middle East. On the outskirts of the neighborhood, I discovered a bar that had never bothered to close after a long night of patronage. It was barely 7 a.m. and at least a half-dozen men were perched on barstools, grasping some aqua vitae or other equally beneficial spirits; hardcore alcoholics, each and every one. I thought I heard an older man brag that he had “fought in a major world whore.”

Across from the bar on the side of a brick building, there was a giant sprayed painted figure of a nude male pig with a clenched fist and an erect appendage, spewing some half-Spanish, half-Catalunyan diatribe. The artist, however the work managed to be rendered across the better part of a two-story building, was obviously not a Muslim.

London-to-Bavaria

2005-06-09T03:54:00.000Z

To wake up in Central London one morning and do the plane, train and car routine to rural Bavaria by late night makes for a hectic day, especially when you throw in a series of job interviews.

The people I held discussions with where all pleasant and unassuming; nothing overtly stuffy about anyone. There were no requests or questions like 1) describe your strengths and weaknesses; 2) what is your proudest accomplishment; 3) where do you see yourself in five years. I appreciated the absence of such dreck.

Q: Why do you want this position?
A: Frankly, I’m excited about this challenge.

[Real answer: Look folks, I just want to earn some decent, FUCKING money for once in my life.]

Essentially, I was simply myself – for better or for worse. Who else can I be? My background for the position is solid enough. The rest is human chemistry and the quick appraisal of personalities. Can we make a go of it?

I really don’t expect this to go anywhere – though it is flattering to be invited to the party; especially when the host picks up the travel tab.

However, if I jumped the hoops properly, I will be called back for a second-round of interviews. This could happen again next week.

I left feeling there was very good chemistry between me and the overall director. But, who knows? My instincts have betrayed me countless times in the past. If it happens, it happens.

The commute from near Cambridge to Central London would be daunting: probably 90 minutes one way. Yet it’s common for people in Brighton – on the Channel, to make the daily commute.

Sunday evening, while I had plenty of time, I meandered a few blocks in St. John’s Wood and stopped in Cottage Chicken – a third-world restaurant you’d expect to find in the food court of a shopping mall in Riyadh, Paris or Los Angeles. This place is operated by Turks. As I sat near the opened doorway, people casually cruised along the sidewalk. I lost track of how many foreign languages I heard. London is chock full of people from every corner of the earth. It’s hard to pick out a regular English bloke, anymore.

Anyway, it was a taxi back to Paddington Station (and London taxis are wildly spacious – not to mention expensive: it cost $22), the Heathrow Express to the airport, and a 90-minute flight to Frankfurt. By 7:20 p.m., I was back in Germany. I waited about an hour, and then caught the next train to Wurzburg. My son met me at the train station, and I was home by 11 p.m. A long day, to say the least.

Early the next morning, my wife and I headed back to Frankfurt on the autobahn to meet her parents at the airport. I have not seen my in-laws in two years; that’s how long I’ve been away from the United States. I always enjoy being with them; at first my mother-in-law didn’t think I’d last a year as a husband. Now I like rubbing it in that I have set the record as the son-in-law.

My sister-in-law is a serial bride and has been married four times already. That spam-sucking, trailer trash slut is merely reality impaired. At first she loves to keep her legs up in the air, and then she throws the switch – this drives the husbands away every time. So far, we’ve missed all four weddings, but remain optimistic about more opportunities.

My in-laws are visiting because today is the big day for our son: high school graduation, and then his real education begins. Graduation night will start off with a test for him: his current girlfriend is also a senior and last year’s girlfriend – the student at Washington University, will also attend the ceremonies with her parents.

I’m so glad I’m not 17-years-old. Though if I could figure out what I want to be when I grow up, maybe I’d be happy.

Ask Me If I Care

2005-06-07T20:52:00.000Z

America’s fourth estate has fallen so badly since the hay day of the Watergate era that all facts about the obscenity and atrocities of our War on Terrorism are ignored in favor of the "mishandling" of the Koran at the Guantánamo Bay gulag.

The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld junta is a shameful disgrace for all Americans, and these men are war criminals; no better than Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Yet when a holy book is desecrated, ask me if I care. There are far more important issues at stake.

Do you think I care that a copy of the Koran was mistreated when an American soldier kicked it or got it wet? Well, I don't care.

I'll start caring when bin Laden turns himself in and repents for incinerating all those innocent people on 9/11.

I'll care about the Koran when the fanatics in the Middle East start caring about the Holy Bible, the mere possession of which is a crime in Saudi Arabia.

I'll care when al-Zarqawi tells the world he is sorry for hacking off Nick Berg's head while Berg screamed through his gurgling, slashed throat.

I'll care when the mindless zealots who blow themselves up in search of nirvana care about the innocent children within range of their suicide bombs.

When I hear that a prisoner is complaining that his holy book is being "mishandled," you can absolutely believe in your heart of hearts that I don't care.

Enemy of the People

2005-06-03T04:31:00.000Z

George Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldstein, the enemy of the people in 1984, now haunts the United States government and its media pimps. As the U.S. demonizes figures from the Arab world in a flavor-of-the-year routine, Goldstein’s name changes conveniently from Osma bin Laden-to- Saddam Hussein-to-Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Zarqawi, the terrorist mastermind with a $25m bounty on his head.

The use of a one-name personality has a nice Hollywood ring and helps propel Zarqawi to media stardom. For an attention deficit disordered public, like Americans, who lap up 30-second bursts of CNN and Fox News reports, this is the perfect way for the few to rule the many.

A public without critical thinking skills is easily made obedient by casting for an enemy of the people. This technique is tried and true. American history is rich with examples, starting with the Salem Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692.

Zarqawi - no one's really sure where he is, or even who he is.

Lately accounts are confused, yet Zarqawi is injured in Iraq. Then there are hospital sightings, stories of the dying terrorist being smuggled across the border and the beginnings of a fight for a successor. No one knows what is true. Zarqawi has been pronounced dead before and, like a Phoenix, always comes back alive.

In the past two months only 11 senior Zarqawi aides have been arrested but still there is no trace of Iraq’s most wanted militant. This is not important. What matters is that he haunts the American psyche.

Mahmood Al-Yousif, a much respected writer from Bahrain [www.mahmood.tv], wants the world to know that when it comes to bin Laden and Zarqawi, “remember that these pricks do NOT represent the Arabs or Muslims.”

Mahmood’s response is this:

“May the fleas of a thousand desert dogs infest your arse, and may your arms grow short so you won't be able to scratch it.*

May the syphilis of 72 infected whores wilt your shriveled genitalia.

May the bugs of a hundred leprous camels flay your skin.

May the curse of eternal damnation land on your and your supporters' doorsteps.

May the cancerous cells of a million lab-rats invade your body.

May the annals of history forget your existence.

May the terror you have inflicted on Islam be your eternal companion in Purgatory.”

For Americans - and many others, the real enemies of the people are George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. Any criticism of their policies is quickly characterized as pro-al Qaeda propaganda.

Bush - no one's really sure where he is, or even who he is.

A Sidewalk Cafe

2005-05-31T09:10:00.000Z

To experience a sidewalk café on a Saturday afternoon in a German town is to enjoy the cheerful indifference of passing strangers with their many illusions and delusions, and know that none of life’s troubles mean anything in the long run.

We marked the Memorial Day weekend with a low-profile in our small Bavarian village. For many Americans this is just another long and boozy holiday. Of course this is an observance for fallen military members – dating to 1868, though older folks also visit the cemeteries to lay wreaths at family plots.

In some ways, this is like the Mexican tradition of Día de los muertos, which follows the day after Halloween – better known as All Soul’s Day in the Roman Catholic world.

On Saturday, my wife and I wandered about eight miles away to Tauberbishopsheim – a
modest city on the Tauber River. The place is quaint and tranquil and charming.

The Germans – and perhaps many Western European cultures – have the pleasant custom of sidewalk cafes. Like the Middle East, there is no rush in a restaurant. Pick a table, and it’s yours until you decide to leave – for hours on end. In America, a waiter hovers around like a 10-minute vulture – trying to get you to scram for the next customer and the next tip.

A sidewalk cafe allows one to consider recent circumstances without distraction.

My career, such as it is – really hit the wall when I arrived in Wurzburg less than a year ago. A few months back, I did have one interview for a public affairs spot. This entailed laying out pages of a newspaper – which is not my forte. When asked my opinion of the current layout design, I said it was mediocre at best. Hell, all these generic publications reinforce conformity. I guess I was supposed to affirm its cutting edge superiority.

So, my answer was dead wrong and ultimately I was shown the door with no invitation to return.

I just don’t feel like eating a mile of shit, anymore.

My recourse virtually all year has been to be a substitute teacher, which means baby-sitting and nothing more. Students have no respect for the replacement; teachers are really no better.

Since this is the end of the year and students are fed-up with the usual classroom twaddle, I feel like a misplaced animal trainer in the pit with a raised chair and a whip, snarling at insolent miscreants and appalling boors who find it necessary to talk at the top of their voices like deranged simians.

Perhaps I should take my cue from one tenured married teacher, well-liked by students and peers, who does nothing to seriously earn a $50,000-plus pay check and writes unbefitting letters to a former – yet still underage female student.

From the student:
"hey mr X.!!!

well i finally got into my house and everything here is so different .... i just want to be back in germany so bad!!! it's insane here. and it's even harder trying to catch up with everything... my XX class is CRAP!!!! i mean my teacher has us do the easiest assignments and it makes me worried i'm gonna lose my deep thinking when it comes to XX .... but i miss your class so much.... you are like my most favorite teacher in the whole world!!! i'm so serious. well, as long as we stay in touch it's all fine with me!!!

miss and love ya, mr. X!!! – H."

From the teacher:
"Hey, sweetie,

Man, do I miss you too. I knew it would not be as good there as it is here, although this place is not perfect either. So why does nobody notice someone as gorgeous as you? Tell me that! People there must be blind and stupid, but my guess is in time everyone will notice you, and not just for your beauty but for your heart and soul and character. If not, then you need to come back here and stay at my house until you graduate. I will adopt you. You should send me your address and phone number so we can talk. You can write to me every day; in fact, I think you should. So write, write, write to me and we'll figure out a way to communicate this summer, promise ....

love ya .... Mr. X."

This third-rate Humbert Humbert - adept in self-deception - has it made: job security, a very generous salary and multiple planning periods. This allows plenty of time for e-mails to a young, female high school student, now stateside. This mediocre, clumsy, aging hippie is a furnace of bullshit.

Maybe I should become a man of elastic scruples, like a Rousseau of the gutter. Maybe I should consider epistles to a Lolita candidate. Maybe teaching is not really my forte, either.

Based on a recent application and curriculum vitae to the American School in London (ASL), I was contacted late last week about an interview for a public relations position. After 20 years in journalism, a stint as public affairs officer, a master’s degree in education, and four years teaching experience …. well, who better to fill the slot?

I specifically mentioned that I will relocate to Cambridgeshire by early August. A 45-minute commute one-way every day into London, and then hopping the tube to St. John’s Wood on the west-side of the city would be a little daunting. Although I’m aware that folks in Brighton commute regularly to London every day.

My ASL contact suggested the school would pick up the interview expenses and fly me to London from Frankfurt. Yet there was the notion that a daily commute from Cambridgeshire was my obligation entirely.

I didn’t feel like wasting time trekking to London and second-guessing whether my answers should be straightforward or politically correct, so I asked about the general salary range and the possibility of a modest housing allowance. My contact said only another colleague could provide these answers. He was in a meeting and would call me back before the end of the day.

No call late Thursday. No call or e-mail contact Friday.

Well, so much for the blown opportunity. No free trip to London. This will teach me to keep eating a mile of shit and not to ask impertinent questions.

So, back to the sidewalk café; a great way to spend the afternoon; a great way to let all miserable memories slide away: momentarily forget the senseless loss of life in war; the degenerate, dog-eyed teacher undermined and inflamed by Lolita fever; the undeniable career frustrations and austere, ugly madhouses to follow.

Of course none of this matters.

Howard Zinn's Commencement Address

2005-05-28T03:57:00.000Z

In 1963, historian Howard Zinn was fired from Spelman College, where he was chair of the History Department, because of his civil rights activities. This year, he was invited back to give the commencement address. Here is the text of that speech, given on May 15, 2005.

I am deeply honored to be invited back to Spelman after forty-two years. I would like to thank the faculty and trustees who voted to invite me, and especially your president, Dr. Beverly Tatum. And it is a special privilege to be here with Diahann Carroll and Virginia Davis Floyd.

But this is your day - the students graduating today. It's a happy day for you and your families. I know you have your own hopes for the future, so it may be a little presumptuous for me to tell you what hopes I have for you, but they are exactly the same ones that I have for my grandchildren.

My first hope is that you will not be too discouraged by the way the world looks at this moment. It is easy to be discouraged, because our nation is at war - still another war, war after war - and our government seems determined to expand its empire even if it costs the lives of tens of thousands of human beings. There is poverty in this country, and homelessness, and people without health care, and crowded classrooms, but our government, which has trillions of dollars to spend, is spending its wealth on war. There are a billion people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East who need clean water and medicine to deal with malaria and tuberculosis and AIDS, but our government, which has thousands of nuclear weapons, is experimenting with even more deadly nuclear weapons. Yes, it is easy to be discouraged by all that.

But let me tell you why, in spite of what I have just described, you must not be discouraged.

I want to remind you that, fifty years ago, racial segregation here in the South was entrenched as tightly as was apartheid in South Africa. The national government, even with liberal presidents like Kennedy and Johnson in office, was looking the other way while black people were beaten and killed and denied the opportunity to vote. So black people in the South decided they had to do something by themselves. They boycotted and sat in and picketed and demonstrated, and were beaten and jailed, and some were killed, but their cries for freedom were soon heard all over the nation and around the world, and the President and Congress finally did what they had previously failed to do - enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Many people had said: The South will never change. But it did change. It changed because ordinary people organized and took risks and challenged the system and would not give up. That's when democracy came alive.

I want to remind you also that when the war in Vietnam was going on, and young Americans were dying and coming home paralyzed, and our government was bombing the villages of Vietnam - bombing schools and hospitals and killing ordinary people in huge numbers - it looked hopeless to try to stop the war. But just as in the Southern movement, people began to protest and soon it caught on. It was a national movement. Soldiers were coming back and denouncing the war, and young people were refusing to join the military, and the war had to end.

The lesson of that history is that you must not despair, that if you are right, and you persist, things will change. The government may try to deceive the people, and the newspapers and television may do the same, but the truth has a way of coming out. The truth has a power greater than a hundred lies. I know you have practical things to do - to get jobs and get married and have children. You may become prosperous and be considered a success in the way our society defines success, by wealth and standing and prestige. But that is not enough for a good life.

Remember Tolstoy's story, The Death of Ivan Illych. A man on his deathbed reflects on his life, how he has done everything right, obeyed the rules, become a judge, married, had children, and is looked upon as a success. Yet, in his last hours, he wonders why he feels a failure. After becoming a famous novelist, Tolstoy himself had decided that this was not enough, that he must speak out against the treatment of the Russian peasants, that he must write against war and militarism.

My hope is that whatever you do to make a good life for yourself - whether you become a teacher, or social worker, or business person, or lawyer, or poet, or scientist - you will devote part of your life to making this a better world for your children, for all children. My hope is that your generation will demand an end to war, that your generation will do something that has not yet been done in history and wipe out the national boundaries that separate us from other human beings on this earth.

Recently I saw a photo on the front page of the New York Times which I cannot get out of my mind. It showed ordinary Americans sitting on chairs on the southern border of Arizona, facing Mexico. They were holding guns and they were looking for Mexicans who might be trying to cross the border into the United States. This was horrifying to me - the realization that, in this twenty-first century of what we call "civilization," we have carved up what we claim is one world into two hundred artificially created entities we call "nations" and are ready to kill anyone who crosses a boundary.

Is not nationalism - that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary, so fierce it leads to murder - one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking, cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on, have been useful to those in power, deadly for those out of power.

Here in the United States, we are brought up to believe that our nation is different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral; that we expand into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy. But if you know some history you know that's not true. If you know some history, you know we massacred Indians on this continent, invaded Mexico, sent armies into Cuba, and the Philippines. We killed huge numbers of people, and we did not bring them democracy or liberty. We did not go into Vietnam to bring democracy; we did not invade Panama to stop the drug trade; we did not invade Afghanistan and Iraq to stop terrorism. Our aims were the aims of all the other empires of world history - more profit for corporations, more power for politicians.

The poets and artists among us seem to have a clearer understanding of the disease of nationalism. Perhaps the black poets especially are less enthralled with the virtues of American "liberty" and "democracy," their people having enjoyed so little of it. The great African-American poet Langston Hughes addressed his country as follows:

You really haven't been a virgin for so long.
It's ludicrous to keep up the pretext...
You've slept with all the big powers
In military uniforms,
And you've taken the sweet life
Of all the little brown fellows...
Being one of the world's big vampires,
Why don't you come on out and say so
Like Japan, and England, and France,
And all the other nymphomaniacs of power.

I am a veteran of the Second World War. That was considered a "good war," but I have come to the conclusion that war solves no fundamental problems and only leads to more wars. War poisons the minds of soldiers, leads them to kill and torture, and poisons the soul of the nation.

My hope is that your generation will demand that your children be brought up in a world without war. It we want a world in which the people of all countries are brothers and sisters, if the children all over the world are considered as our children, then war - in which children are always the greatest casualties - cannot be accepted as a way of solving problems.

I was on the faculty of Spelman College for seven years, from 1956 to 1963. It was a heartwarming time, because the friends we made in those years have remained our friends all these years. My wife Roslyn and I and our two children lived on campus. Sometimes when we went into town, white people would ask: How is it to be living in the black community? It was hard to explain. But we knew this - that in downtown Atlanta, we felt as if we were in alien territory, and when we came back to the Spelman campus, we felt that we were at home.

Those years at Spelman were the most exciting of my life, the most educational certainly. I learned more from my students than they learned from me. Those were the years of the great movement in the South against racial segregation, and I became involved in that in Atlanta, in Albany, Georgia, in Selma, Alabama, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Greenwood and Itta Bena and Jackson. I learned something about democracy: that it does not come from the government, from on high, it comes from people getting together and struggling for justice. I learned about race. I learned something that any intelligent person realizes at a certain point - that race is a manufactured thing, an artificial thing, and while race does matter (as Cornel West has written), it only matters because certain people want it to matter, just as nationalism is something artificial. I learned that what really matters is that all of us - of whatever so-called race and so-called nationality - are human beings and should cherish one another.

I was lucky to be at Spelman at a time when I could watch a marvelous transformation in my students, who were so polite, so quiet, and then suddenly they were leaving the campus and going into town, and sitting in, and being arrested, and then coming out of jail full of fire and rebellion. You can read all about that in Harry Lefever's book Undaunted by the Fight. One day Marian Wright (now Marian Wright Edelman), who was my student at Spelman, and was one of the first arrested in the Atlanta sit-ins, came to our house on campus to show us a petition she was about to put on the bulletin board of her dormitory. The heading on the petition epitomized the transformation taking place at Spelman College. Marian had written on top of the petition: "Young Ladies Who Can Picket, Please Sign Below."

My hope is that you will not be content just to be successful in the way that our society measures success; that you will not obey the rules, when the rules are unjust; that you will act out the courage that I know is in you. There are wonderful people, black and white, who are models. I don't mean African- Americans like Condoleezza Rice, or Colin Powell, or Clarence Thomas, who have become servants of the rich and powerful. I mean W.E.B. DuBois and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Marian Wright Edelman, and James Baldwin and Josephine Baker and good white folk, too, who defied the Establishment to work for peace and justice.

Another of my students at Spelman, Alice Walker, who, like Marian, has remained our friend all these years, came from a tenant farmer's family in Eatonton, Georgia, and became a famous writer. In one of her first published poems, she wrote:

It is true --
I've always loved
the daring
ones
Like the black young
man
Who tried
to crash
All barriers
at once,
wanted to
swim
At a white
beach (in Alabama)
Nude.

I am not suggesting you go that far, but you can help to break down barriers, of race certainly, but also of nationalism; that you do what you can - you don't have to do something heroic, just something, to join with millions of others who will just do something, because all of those somethings, at certain points in history, come together, and make the world better.

That marvelous African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston, who wouldn't do what white people wanted her to do, who wouldn't do what black people wanted her to do, who insisted on being herself, said that her mother advised her: Leap for the sun - you may not reach it, but at least you will get off the ground.

By being here today, you are already standing on your toes, ready to leap. My hope for you is a good life.

Confessions of An Internet Junkie

2005-05-24T11:15:00.000Z

My name is M, and I am an internet junkie. I don’t struggle with junk sickness, like William Burroughs did. No track marks in my arms; no scores on the edge of a seedy, city park.

I’m habitually drawn to the internet because of the need to escape my meaningless, 9-to-5 existence. All jobs are boring, but I sold out years ago. It’s too late to recapture any innocent ideals. When I’m not performing my routine do-dah shuffle for a paltry paycheck, I am an unrepentant soul gone south into the depths of internet Hell. God help me, but where would I be without a quick-fix of escape?

Kate, allegedly a 37-year-old former attorney, who blogs as Electric Venom, has some pretty up-front views that I like – even if she is a well-fed Republican, living the high life.

1. On the whining that pictures of Saddam in his underwear violate his “human rights” – sorry, but when you kill thousands of people because they don’t like you and litter your country with heaps of their dead bodies and gas thousands of others because of their ethnicity, you pretty much surrender any claim to possessing humanity.

2. On Michael Jackson: with the surgeries, long hair, whispery voice and makeup designed to make him look like a freak-show female, why hasn’t he taken the plunge and had himself castrated? Think of all the money he would’ve saved in lawyer fees.

3. On the Paula Abdul scandal: as vapid as she may be, a has-been who’s always one season away from returning to anonymity wouldn’t risk her resurrected career on a skanky-looking guy. Duh. (Even so, I second the idea of replacing Paula with Cher).

4. Here is a fun drinking game to play next season: do a shot every time Randy says “dawg.” Even a hard-core drunk will pass out after the sixth one.

The American Friend Who Boils People Alive

2005-05-17T04:04:00.000Z

The price of gas in America is expected to reach an all-time high of $3 a gallon by summer. The U.S. military cannot recruit enough soldiers for the Orwellian War on Terror, despite a huge signing bonus and lucrative money for deferred college plans.

Newsweek magazine has just joined the growing column of disgraced American mainstream media with its erroneous supermarket tabloid-style reporting that incited riots in the Muslim world, resulting in at least 17 deaths.

Meanwhile, the carnage in Iraq continues.

So, does anyone really care what happens in Uzbekistan?

Martin Samuel, a columnist with The Times of London thinks we should care, and with good reasons:

“Islam Karimov, President of Uzbekistan, boils people alive. Why? For the same reason Saddam Hussein put his enemies in a shredder: because, at the time, he could.

When the West is your pal you are able, quite literally, to get away with murder. And what murder!

It is a surprise Karimov has time for governing at all, once he has spent the morning formulating new ways to poach, grill, tenderise, smoke and flambé his citizens to death.
Boiling water, electrocution, chlorine-filled gas masks, drowning, rape, shooting, savage beatings, Karimov’s Uzbekistan is the absolute market leader in torture right now.

The CIA would not shop anywhere else, which is why a mysterious Gulfstream 5 executive jet routinely delivers terrorist subjects from Afghanistan there for interrogation and, perhaps, percolation.

Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador, drew attention to this last year, and the noted socialist Tony Blair acted immediately. He sacked him.

Mr Murray’s warnings echo louder than ever now, on the back of hundreds of corpses in the streets of Andijan. Uzbek troops opened fire on an unarmed crowd of protesters on Friday in an act of such brutality that the world finally woke up to the wickedness of the war on terror’s new best friend.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, called it a “clear abuse of human rights” — no kidding, Sherlock — but struggled to make his voice heard among our American allies. Little surprise. If they had wanted his opinion, they would surely have given it to him.

Live and don’t learn would appear to be the moral to this story. Karimov may be a vicious, murdering, malevolent despot, but he is our vicious, murdering, malevolent despot so, like Saddam, he can boil, shred and gas away until we tire of uses for him.

Saddam was in the right place, sharing our hostility towards Iran at the right time, and so we armed him to the teeth in the name of a cause. Karimov, a nasty member of the regional Soviet hierarchy even before independence in 1991, stands beneath another flag of convenience. He is frightened of Islam, rich in gas and oil, and within striking distance of Afghanistan.

An American airbase, which Karimov allowed to be built at Khanabad, now protects the American-owned pipeline carrying Central Asia’s black treasure through Afghanistan to the sea. Is it not strange that all our pals have the same thing in common? Just as celebrities end up latching on to other celebrities, so the West always finds itself hanging out with guys who are knee-deep in four-star.

The reason only the West could set the Iraqi people free was because our military and financial support for Saddam Hussein’s corrupt Government had made it impossible for his citizens to rise up alone. So it is in Uzbekistan. When Kabuljon Parpiyev, one of the leaders of the doomed Andijan protestors, spoke to Zakir Almatov, the Uzbek Interior Minister, at the weekend, he claims that he was told: “We don’t care if 200, 300 or 400 people die — we have the force.”

It is the backing of the coalition that makes Karimov cocksure and invincible. There are countries around the world that would choose true freedom overnight: if only the coalition’s freedom-junkies would let them.

In 2002, the United States gave Uzbekistan $500 million in aid (as opposed to $36 million four years earlier) of which $120 million went to the army and $79 million to the notorious SNB, Karimov’s secret police. It was the SNB who boiled Muzafar Avazov, an Islamist activist, to death, having already beaten him severely and ripped his fingernails out. The fate of his fellow prisoner Husnidin Alimov does not bear thinking about, considering the Government restricted viewing of his lifeless body.

It was also the SNB who came to collect Avazov’s 63-year-old mother, Fatima Mukhadirova, sentenced to six years’ hard labour for the crime of telling the world about the murder of her son. (She was released the day before Donald Rumsfeld was due to visit, during which he praised “the wonderful co-operation we have received from the Government of Uzbekistan” over the War on Terror.)

So the freedom our precious coalition claims to be exporting around the world is not true freedom at all. Rather, it is freedom we are giving back, having conspired with sadists to take away.

What the Iraqi people enjoyed at the polling booths in January was freedom on our terms, not theirs. Considering the dreadful human toll, one would think we would then acknowledge that mistake by not repeating it, but no: there were no opposition parties in Uzbekistan’s last election and there are no arms restrictions imposed by our Government, either.

Questioned on this in Parliament in December 2003, Bill Rammell, the junior Foreign and Commonwealth Office minister, said: “Uzbekistan is a key player in a region of strategic importance to the UK, so defence co-operation is important. It is important to note that Uzbek armed forces are not implicated in human rights violations.”

In other words: go boil your head. Oh, sorry, you already have done.

We mould these little monsters such as Saddam, Karimov and General Manuel Noriega and they do our dirty work until such a time when it is no longer expedient, at which point we extract revenge and dress it up as a moral crusade; or enduring freedom.

There are those who believe that, whatever its motives, the war in Iraq can be justified by free elections and the removal of Saddam. Yes, but only if that policy is consistent. If the coalition agenda is to spread democracy worldwide, then it cannot be in bed with a tyrant like Karimov. And if it is, then any good in Iraq is overpowered by the stench of death and hypocrisy wafting across from central Asia.

As it stands, the War on Terror finds an exalted place in its ranks for a man whose idea of government is a dissident casserole. Hey, Tony Blair and George Bush, what’s that smell? I think your freedom’s done.”

Let Us Now Praise Retired Army Col. David Hackworth

2005-05-11T12:00:00.000Z

When time allows, I begin each morning by perusing web sites of credible media. I’m a terminal news-junkie and I need a regular fix. Besides, we are all creatures of routine and this provides a good entree for my day.

Since I’m an expatriate, my requirement for coverage is focused on the region of current residency. While I do not overlook events in the United States, and still keep pace with life in Bahrain, there are virtually no English-language on-line newspapers in Germany. So, my main interest is the London media – specifically highly regarded newspapers like the Guardian, the Independent and the Times.

My tastes vary, though I’m constantly drawn to book reviews and, oddly enough, obituaries of high profile people. The attraction of any choice is really the well-crafted sentence or dazzling clause, and respectable British journalists still have a knack for refreshing discourse.

Of course, I do not shy away from the sordid side of life – like English Police Constable Ivor Jones, 40, who recently used a knife to inflict 97 stab wounds on his wife, Maria, 36, who was having an affair with a 21-year-old man. Allegedly, Mrs. Jones began a relationship with the young man and taunted her husband about his relative lack of sexual prowess. I guess the Constable showed her – though 97 stab wounds are a little excessive. Maybe the policeman’s anger management skills will discourage admirers among the butt-hole buddies he will soon meet in prison.

Perhaps a dose of bad news fits with Nicholas Chamfort’s dictum that a man must swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead. The 18th century French journalist and playwright possessed an interesting view, though I do not deliberately follow his advice.

What really captured my attention today was the obituary of 74-year-old Retired Army Col. David Hackworth, the maverick American soldier of the Vietnam era. The equivalent of a four-page write-up appeared in the Wednesday morning edition of the Independent. Although the American media has covered this, it’s still noteworthy when a London newspaper highlights a U.S. soldier like Hackworth.

Of course Hackworth was no ordinary soldier. He was a living legend, a highly decorated infantry officer who denounced U.S. policy in Vietnam during the war and later became an outspoken journalist who offered trenchant analyses of the military.

During his career, Hackworth received 78 combat awards- including a Distinguished Service Cross, a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and eight Purple Hearts - during his 25-year military career.

I don’t pay much regard to contemporary American military commanders; no particular reason – I just don’t. Although I recall hearing about Hackworth a few years ago, and after his fall from grace in Vietnam and subsequent self-imposed exile in Australia, he reminded me of Kurtz, the rogue general in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

Hackworth was one of the more outrageous figures to emerge from the Vietnam War. A persistent thorn in the side of the Pentagon, Col. Hackworth in 2002 called Afghanistan a Vietnam-like disaster in the making, and last year he told Salon.com that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "misunderstood the whole war" in Iraq and predicted that American troops could be stuck there for "at least" another 30 years.

Hackworth’s outspoken nature and unvarnished view of himself as a trained killer for the military reminds me of George Patton. There’s a lot of noise in the media about the 60th anniversary of Germany’s‎ defeat in May, 1945.

Just this Saturday, nearly 5,000 members of the National Party – a neo-Nazi group, tried to march in Berlin toward the Brandenburg Gate, the new Holocaust memorial and Hitler’s bunker. The group denounced Gerhard Schröder, the Chancellor, as a traitor.

This is a tough subject for Germans, especially those consigned to the Soviet sphere of East Germany after World War Two. Many historians think Roosevelt gave Eastern Europe away to Stalin, just swapping one form of totalitarian tyranny for another.

George Patton was headed for trouble before his tragic car accident in Heidelberg, right after Thanksgiving of 1945. Patton had difficulty with the de-Nazification program expected by Eisenhower and Marshall. Since so many Germans worked for the Nazi government, loyalties or no loyalties, it was difficult to find competent people with a clean bill. Patton actually respected the German culture, and the ethos of the German soldiers he helped defeat. On the other hand, Patton had nothing but contempt for the Russians – who first sided with Germany, and then switched alliances. He wanted to use the Third Army to drive the Russians out of Eastern Europe. He knew that totalitarianism, fascist or communist, was social slavery. Based on subsequent history, Patton was on the money.

Heidelberg is about 80 miles southwest of Wurzburg, and I’ve been there three times since moving to Germany – just to visit friends; another Bahrain-exile couple. It feels odd to drive along the streets and know that despite Patton’s astonishing sense of history and his genius on the battlefield, his life was squandered in a fatal car accident.

I mean to read Hackworth’s books. His battlefield tips, included in the Independent obit, have application to most experiences.

* Never use trails.
* Always take it for granted that the enemy's watching.
* Always have a go-to-hell plan.
* Never assume anything.
* Always expect the unexpected.
* Talk to the Grunts, they always have the best feel for what's going down.
* Keep operations sledgehammer simple and remember: if it can be fucked up, it will be.
* Train your force like a good football coach. Teamwork is the key and this is done by relentlessly repeating squad drills over and over until they are executed automatically and flawlessly. Then do them again!
* And remember, squads who live by the basics of their trade make great armies; armies don't make great squads. And these squads must be perfectly trained in the basic fundamentals of the killing trade.
* And most importantly, NEVER, NEVER be in a hurry.

For an exposure to his journalism, Hackworth wrote a weekly column over many years - published in various American media. An archive of his journalism may be found at: http://www.hackworth.com

Hackworth was one of a kind.

The Prodigious But Squandered Talent of Tony Blair

2005-05-05T10:08:00.000Z

The talented American journalist Greg Palast has keen insights into events beyond the United States.

The on-going parliamentary elections in the United Kingdom should be of interest to Americans - though it is doubtful any will care about the results.

That’s unfortunate because the return of Tony Blair as Prime Minister only serves to validate the misguided George Bush who impersonates as President of the United States.

Compared to Bush, Blair does have a prodigious but squandered talent. How else does one explain the Prime Minister’s penchant for being the lap dog to a man with an intelligence that should be consigned to a Chernobyl-like desert?

Will voters in the United Kingdom really be as dumb as those who recently offered Bush a four-year blank check to mismanage the American Empire?

According to Greg palest:

“Mark my words: Tony Blair won't be re-elected on Thursday. However, he will
remain in office.

That's because Brits don't vote for their Prime Minister. They've got a "parliamentary" system there in the Mother Country. And the difference between democracy and parliamentary rule makes all the difference. It is the only reason why Blair will keep his job - at least for a few months.

Let me explain. The British vote only for their local Member of Parliament. The MPs, in turn, pick the PM. If a carpenter in Nottingham doesn't like Prime Minister Blair (not all dislike him, some detest him), the only darn thing they can do about it is vote against their local MP, in this case, the lovely Alan Simpson, a Labour Party stalwart who himself would rather kiss a toad than cuddle with Tony.

Therefore, the majority of the Queen's subjects - deathly afraid of the return of Margaret Thatcher's vampirical Tory spawn - holds their noses, vote for their local Labour MP and pray that an act of God will save their happy isle. A recent poll showed the British evenly divided: forty percent want Blair to encounter a speeding double-decker bus and forty percent want him stretched, scalded and quartered in the Tower of London (within a sampling margin of four percent).

Why? Well, to begin with, Blair lies. A secret memo from inside Blair's coven discovered this week made clear that Britain's Prime Minister knew damn well, eight months before we invaded Iraq, that George Bush was cooking the intelligence info on "WDM," but Blair agreed to tag along with his master.

The Prime Minister's coterie sold his nation on the re-conquest of their old colony, Iraq, by making up this cockamamie story about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction that could take out London in 45 minutes. But Brits knew that was 'bollocks' (no translation available) long before this week's shock-horror memo story.

A greater blight on the Prime Minister's reputation: Blair likes American presidents. While his habit of keeping his nose snug against Bill Clinton's derriere was a bit off-putting, his application to George Bush's behind makes Blair's countrymen retch.

I watched the machinery called Tony Blair up close as a Yankee in King Blair's court (first as an advisor on the inside, then as a journalist also on the inside, but with a hidden tape recorder).

And it was eerie. Because what I saw was a man who, while Britain's erstwhile leader, scorns his own country. That is, he scorns the union workers that wanted to keep filthy coal mines open; he scorns the nostalgic blue-haired ladies who wanted to keep the Queen's snout on their nation's currency; he scorns his nation of maddeningly inefficient little shops on the high street, of subjects snoozy with welfare state comforts and fearful of the wonders of cheap labor available in far-off locales.

Blair looks longingly at America, land of the hard-charging capitalist cowboy, of entrepreneurs with big-box retail discount stores, Silicon Valley start-ups and Asian out-sourcing.

Blair doesn't want to be Prime Minister. He wants to be governor in London of America's 51st state.

Britons know this. They feel deeply that their main man doesn't like the Britain he has. And that is why the average punter in the pub longs to be led by that most English of British politicians -- who is not English at all – Gordon Brown, the Scotland-born Chancellor of the Exchequer.

And so they vote for their local Labour MP on that party's quietly whispered promise that, shortly after the election, Gordon Brown, defender of the old welfare state, union rights, and a gentleman unlikely to invade forgotten remnants of the empire, will, on a vote of his parliamentary confreres, take the reins of government in his benign and prudent hands.

As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman says, Tony Blair is a man of principle. So was the Ayatolla Khomeini. Both were willing to have others pay any price for their beliefs.

Luckily for Britain, Chancellor Brown won't let Blair put his fanatic hands on the kingdom's cash or coinage. And herein is another difference betwixt the US and UK. In America, the Treasury Secretary is little more than the President's factotum. In Britain, the Chancellor holds the nation's purse. Brown brilliantly controls Britain's spending, taxing and currency. For example, despite Tony's pleas, Brown presciently nixed England dumping the pound coin for the euro.

And thus Brown, not Blair, has earned his nation's gratitude for the island's steady recovery from Thatcherite punishments while, across The Pond, real wages in Bush's America are falling.

Blair will hold onto office - for now - due only to a sly campaign that relies on the public's accepting on faith that, sooner rather than later after the vote on Thursday, Blair will do the honorable thing and end his own political life, leaving the British-to-the-bone Brown to inherit the parliamentary throne.

Tony's political corpse can then be mailed to Texas - wrapped in an American flag.”

The College of Cardinals Just Gave You The Finger

2005-04-20T07:01:00.000Z

The waiting is over and for progressive Roman Catholics – especially in the United States, the College of Cardinals just gave you the finger.

Before his election as the 265th pontiff, German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedictus XVI, was widely known as "Cardinal No" because of his drives to crack down on the liberation theology movement, religious pluralism, challenges to traditional teachings on issues such as homosexuality, and calls to ordain women as priests.

The Roman Catholic Church continues its descent into irrelevancy; more homophobia, more head-in-the-sand about contraception and AIDS prevention. No marriage for priests, no increased role for women in the church.

Now it’s Habemus - the status quo, 19th century style.

But Americans, regardless of views on matters related to the scared or the profane, cannot afford to overlook the somnambulist in the White House. This is far more serious than the new pontiff.

From Pulp Friction:
Bush is bad for the economy. He's never run a successful business, and it shows.

-Crude oil prices recently hit $58 a barrel
-Home mortgage and credit card interest rates are on the rise
-Sweetheart deals like Bush's pet bankruptcy law benefit credit card companies, not consumers
-Job growth has been the weakest it's been since last summer
-America's trade gap is widening- imports cost more, exports earn less
-Bush is borrowing from Red China and Japan to finance his outrageous deficit spending.

Forgive me if I don't get all excited about budding democracy in the Middle East. Our nation is falling apart and Bush has squandered billions of dollars and thousands of American souls trying to force his version of democracy on his enemies.

Bush is spread too thin. He can't multi-task. He surrounds himself with sycophants. He's withholding and secretive, as dry drunks tend to be.

I'm sick of our country being led by a dullard theologian with untreated alcoholism.

I Would Rather Jack Off With Sand Paper Than Listen to Rush Limbaugh

2005-04-16T21:34:00.000Z

James Wolcott is a liberal with a regular column for Vanity Fair. He also maintains a blog at:
http://jameswolcott.com/

Both Wolcott’s writing style and insights appeal to me.

If a country allows Karl Rove to swindle two presidential elections for failed businessman George Bush, I should not be surprised that former pill-head and terminal buffoon Rush Limbaugh still takes to the airwaves and mews the most awful twaddle about American family values.

I would rather jack off with sand paper than listen to Limbaugh.

On Some Sad Laps, No Heads Bob
Posted by James Wolcott

This morning on Air America, Jerry Springer ran the tape of Rush Limbaugh's bizarre outburst against Al Gore's upcoming cable news venture for "yoof" (as they say in British papers), mocking its mission to represent the viewpoints of young people by claiming that the only thing kids cared about today was blowjobs, which were rampant in the nation's high schools today thanks to Al's good friend Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Maybe it should be called "The BJ Network," Rush railed, since blowjobs were now the only thing occupying the empty minds of MTV audiences - all those teenage Monicas out there hooking up with teenage Bubbas.

Limbaugh seemed to be implying at the top of his voice that blowjobs are an integral part of the liberal agenda, an argument which he may want to rethink. The popularity of blowjobs is difficult to metric but undeniable; they cause little harm and zero unwanted pregnancies. If the plentitude of blowjobs is part of the Clinton legacy, millions owe the former president a debt of gratitude and an annual pilgrimage to the Clinton Memorial Library in Arkansas.

Yet, like so many products and pleasures, blowjobs aren't evenly distributed in society. It's a renewable natural resource not everyone gets to enjoy, and I was struck by the vehement tone of Limbaugh's tirade. He sounded bitter. I've seen this rancor inflict so many middle-aged men. Reading about all the oral sex young people are presumably having, they feel envious and resentful. No classmates were treating them to afterschool blowjobs in high school! Nor were hot teachers like that one in Florida seducing them in parked cars. It doesn't seem fair. It doesn't seem just. We're living in the Golden Age of BJs, and men in Rush's recumbent position feel barred from Eden, forced to imagine the action from their recliners as they stare sullenly at their plasma screens. It's probably how many adults felt during the free-love Sixties as the lid came off the nation's libido.

Clearly no small part of the undying enmity conservatives like Rush (and many liberal men too) have for Bill Clinton was that he was their age (maybe even older) and yet was able to participate in the exciting blowjob youth movement courtesy of Monica Lewinsky's bright red mouth. How this made them seethe, and the fact they still mention it at the slightest farfetched opportunity shows that they seethe still.

At the time, Hillary-haters sneered that if she had been performing her wifely duties and been less of a frozen popsicle, Bill may not have so easily strayed, red lips or no red lips. Liberal women didn't know how to satisfy a husband's needs, being so wrapped in their selfish careers.

I find such speculative intrusion undignified. I do. And yet, applying the logic of the Hillary-haters, I can't help but wonder if Rush's jealous ire over other people's blowjobs reflects poorly on his current relationship with CNN's Daryn Kagan, rumored to be on the fast track to have the honor of being his fourth wife. He sounded frustrated, disgruntled, and perhaps the anchorwoman isn't applying herself as much as she could or should to the task of keeping her big man happy.

It will require fortitude on her part, but it is no more than other women have borne. Perhaps this particular act disgusts her, or she's unsure of her technique, despite being in the television business, where everyone assumes everyone is so worldly. If the latter is the case and insecurity is the issue, there's a very helpful show-and-tell scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High where Phoebe Cates uses a banana to educate a classmate on how it's nutritiously done.

I would note that Fast Times at Ridgemont High was released in 1982, predating the Clinton administration by a decade, thus undercutting Rush's already dubious thesis.

The Stench of Hypocrisy Is Overwhelming

2005-03-26T06:13:00.000Z

Earlier this week, 16-year-old Jeff Weise killed nine members of his Red Lake tribe before taking his own life.

In perfunctory manner, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Tuesday: "Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of those who were killed."

Yet there has been no direct response from President Bush on the Red Lake massacre.
For the Chippewa, Bush's silence must be particularly bitter given his high-profile, late-night intervention on behalf of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman caught in a legal battle over whether her feeding tube should be reinserted.

"The fact that Bush pre-empted his vacation to say something about Ms. Schiavo and here you have 10 native people gunned down and he can't take time to speak is very telling," said David Wilkins, interim chairman of the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota.

According to American Indian Movement National Director Clyde Bellecourt, also a Chippewa Indian, "When people's children are murdered and others are in the hospital hanging on to life, the president should be the first one to offer his condolences. . . . If this was a white community, I don't think he'd have any problem doing that."

Actually, President Bush has no problem with taking action, as long as the action involves dismantling civil liberties at home and imposing corporate-styled colonial rule around the world.

The stench of hypocrisy is overwhelming. Yet, in the world of imperialism, hypocrisy abounds.

The corporate media cover imperialist pronouncements calling on the invited Syrian forces to end their occupation of Lebanon (a country that treacherously came into existence because of a broken promise by France and Britain to its Arab allies in World War I) while ignoring the fact that the United States is occupying both Iraq and Afghanistan among others, and Zionists are occupying Palestine (also known as Israel), Syrian territory, and Lebanese territory. Simultaneously, Iran is being berated by the nuclear-armed United States and Israel for pursuing a uranium-enrichment program.

In reality, the United States has been the main supporter of dictatorships in the Middle East for the last 50 years. It has backed the Shah of Iran, the Saudi Monarchy, Egypt's dictatorship, Saddam Hussein himself, and of course the Zionist occupation of Palestine.

A leopard does not change its spots.

The United States government cares nothing for democracy; it supports regimes that agree to its terms and overthrows those that disagree whether they are democratic or autocratic. The United States values obedience not democracy.

That the United States is a militarized imperial empire is beyond question at this point in time. The level of nationalism, xenophobia, and mindless hatred divides this nation even worse during the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960’s.

If ever a nation exemplified a “crisis in democracy” it is the United States under George W. Bush and the Bush Brigade, and it’s legions of cheerleaders throughout the nation.

Everything has been turned upside down. Up is down; in is out; wrong is right; war is peace; occupation is liberation; fact is fiction; and freedom is the freedom to agree and do what you are told.This nation under the Bush cabal has launched a brutal, senseless and bloody war. Not against a state, but against a tactic—terrorism. The result has been a self-fulfilling prophecy. Iraq is now what it never was, ground zero for fools and fanatics.

Iraq had no suicide bombers until after this country invaded, occupied and then proceeded to sell off all of Iraq’s infrastructure, assets and resources to United States multinational corporations.

It would appear that the people running this absurd and perverted “Twilight Zone” episode (Bush’s “war on terrorism”) have given no thought to “cause and effect” or “for every action there is an opposite reaction.”Every warning given to the Bush Junta that invading Iraq would result in urban, guerilla war, exactly what is being faced in Iraq now, were ignored and discounted. The cost of this has been paid by the over 100,000 Iraqi’s that have been killed and by the over 1200 U.S. personnel killed - and there is no end in sight for the death and destruction.

The Bush-Cheney regime has accomplished what Osama bin Laden needed, and that is to provide a recruiting tool for insurgents through the radicalization of so many in the Muslim world. It is only in this context that Bush is a “uniter.”

The Chippewa of Red Leaf, Minnesota continue to wait for a gesture of compassion from the former cocaine-sniffing, DUI, Texas National Guard deserter and failed businessman now occupying the White House. The Palestinians wait. The Iraqis wait. The list is lengthy, with no end in sight.

Saudi Arabia, Our Best Friend in the Middle East

2005-03-21T04:48:00.000Z

Democracy at work in Saudi Arabia, our best friend in the Middle East:

According to the London-based Al-Hayat , a Saudi academic has been sentenced to 200 lashes and time in jail for insulting a colleague, a Saudi-owned newspaper reported.

Hamza al-Muzaini - a lecturer in linguistics at King Saud University - was accused by Islamic culture lecturer Abd Allah al-Barak of defamation and insult.

Al-Barak accused Muzaini of "mocking long beards" and questioning his knowledge in an article published a few months ago, other reports said.

Al-Muzaini was sentenced to 200 lashes, four months in prison and banned from publishing, a verdict he immediately appealed, Al-Hayat said.

Al-Muzaini maintains that his case should be examined by the ministry of information as it involves alleged libel, while Barak insists it is a personal matter that should be dealt with by a normal court.

The court has now appointed a committee to "implement the publications law, which dictates that cases involving publication (offences) should not be referred to (normal Islamic) courts", said Al-Hayat.

Saudi Arabia applies strict Sharia, or Islamic law, under which beheadings, as well as mutilating hands and floggings, are accepted punishments.

High Profile Liars

2005-03-19T07:08:00.000Z

What American has time to read fiction, when the culture produces an almost daily regimen of high-profile liars, celebrity convicts and fake news reports signed off by the Bush administration?

This week’s poster boy for moral decrepitude is disgraced baseball legend Mark McGwire.

Called before a U.S. Congressional hearing on Thursday to answer formal charges that he used performance enhancing steroids during his career, McGwire dodged the questions
repeatedly.

Instead of providing honesty, McGwire drove his reputation off a cliff, and his legacy should be irreparably shattered.

Lucky for McGwire, he’s part of contemporary American culture; otherwise he would go down in flames and his record breaking 70 home runs in 1998 would be expunged from history.

Recently, it was Happy Homecoming for the convicted stock fraudster – and still under house arrest – Martha Stewart. There’s been the usual media heavy-breathing effort to hype her emergence from jail as the heartwarming comeback of a born-again humanitarian.

Will handing out hot cocoa to reporters at her Bedford, N.Y., estate turn the tide for Martha? Probably.

Let’s not overlook the completely unrepentant former Enron CEO Ken Lay, who still purports on 60 Minutes that he's an innocent victim.

And, now for the Ministry of Truth, there’s the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that the Bush Administration spent $254 million in its first four years on contracts with public relations firms to produce fake TV reports.

The GAO has declared that video news releases - or prepackaged TV segments - that fail to reveal they were produced by the government – at taxpayer expense, constitute illegal propaganda.

Not surprisingly, Bush’s Justice Department has rebuked the GAO report, telling federal agencies to ignore the findings and recommendations. Welcome to the United States of Amnesia.

Deceiving the American people about government policies and proposals goes hand-in-hand with fallen role models from the sports and entertainment world.

The results of a Harris Interactive Poll in mid-February are particularly disturbing. The topic was: "Iraq, 9/11, Al Qaeda and Weapons of Mass Destruction: What the Public Believes Now."

While the poll offered some interesting survey statistics about what Americans believe about the war in Iraq, how long we should keep troops in that country, and if Iraqis are better off now than they were when Saddam Hussein was in charge, it also contained some very disturbing numbers about other things that Americans believe:

* 64 percent believe that Saddam Hussein had strong links to Al Qaeda (up slightly from
62% in November).
* 47 percent believe that Saddam Hussein helped plan and support the hijackers who
attacked the US on September 11, 2001 (up six percentage points from November).
* 44 percent actually believe that several of the hijackers who attacked the US on
September 11 were Iraqis (up significantly from 37% in November).
* 36 percent believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the US invaded
(down slightly from 38% in November).

These statistics are staggering.

Significant numbers of people in the United States, (almost two-thirds in the case of the first item) believe things that are just not true, have been repeatedly shown to be not true, have been repudiated by the White House, the 9/11 commission, the people hired by the US to find WMD, the United Nations, Chris Rock, the United Federation of Planets, you name it. And most of the numbers are going up.

There are only two possible explanations for this stunning lack of knowledge: an impressive number of Americans have chased too many parked cars – as they say in Oklahoma, or the problem is the sources they are using to get their news - or what they mistake for news.

All the feng shui in China cannot sweeten the moral rot of America, which is now de rigueur – from top-to-bottom.

William Rivers Pitt and Satire

2005-03-05T07:22:00.000Z

Just because William Rivers Pitt, of truthout.org, writes great satire:

just because the Supreme Court set a poison precedent and appointed Bush, who brought in his crowd of neocon yahoos that no one discussed during the 2000 campaign because we 'Muricans vote for the man and not the mob of frothing dogs that come in his wake;

just because the twin bill of unreasonably massive tax cuts were combined with economic depth-charge that was the Enron/Arthur Andersen scandal that was umbilically connected to the White House;

just because the economy (not to mention our whole psyche) absorbed another blow when four commercial airplanes somehow managed to pierce the most impenetrable air defense system in the history of the universe, fooling the entire intelligence community as well if you believe what you hear on Fox ... despite a blizzard of warnings and a raft of information from the previous administration;

just because a bunch of anthrax got mailed to Democrats by the Ashcroft wing of the Republican Party in what were obvious assassination attempts and yet nothing but nothing has been done about it;

just because the 9/11 attack was immediately, and I mean the day after immediately, grasped as an excuse to invade Iraq;

just because virtually everyone in the administration lied with their bare faces hanging out about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, terrorism ties in Iraq, so break out the plastic sheeting and duct tape because we're all gonna die;

just because they did this in no small part to win the 2002 midterms by any means necessary;

just because 1,502 American soldiers have been killed looking for the 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons (which is 1,000,00 lbs.) of sarin and mustard and VX nerve agent, 30,000 munitions to deliver the stuff, mobile biological weapons labs, arial drones to spray the aforementioned stuff, and let's not forget the uranium from Niger for use in Iraq's robust nuclear program, all of which was described to the letter by Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address, all of which remains on the White House website on a page titled 'Disarm Saddam Hussein,';

just because the medical journal Lancet estimates that as many as 198,000 Iraqi citizens have been killed as well in the war to get at this stuff;

just because none of the stuff was there, and by the way none of the stuff was there, and did I mention that none of the stuff was there, just because the idea that Hussein was allied with bin Laden was laughable because Osama has wanted Saddam's head on his battle standard for decades;

just because the true source of world terrorism, which is Wahabbist extremism in Saudi Arabia, goes completely unaddressed because the Houses of Bush and Saud have been partnered for decades;

just because so much of 9/11 and this 'War on Terra' has to do with business arrangements going awry between these two Houses;

just because a deep-cover CIA agent who was working to track any person or nation or group that would give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists got her cover and her network blown by Administration officials who wanted to shut her husband and any other potential whistleblowers the hell up;

just because the front company she was working out of called Brewster Jennings and Associates was likewise blown, thus torpedoing other agents and their networks;

just because absolutely all of this went virtually unreported by the mainstream media until it was too late, if it was reported at all;

just because dangerous spies like Ahmad Chalabi used Judy Miller and the New York Times to disseminate the lie that Iraq was riddled with weapons, thus opening the floodgates for the rest of the media to repeat the lie because once the Times says it, it must be true;

just because this lack of reporting combined with an astounding level of cheerleading from the aforementioned media combined with some good old-fashioned vote fraud in places like Ohio, Florida and New Mexico gave the aforementioned group of yahoos four more years and a congressional majority in both houses of congress;

just because this means the Iraq war will continue and Iran will probably be next and draconian legislation further restricting our rights will get passed along with things like the Bankruptcy bill and media reform of any kind will be nowhere on the menu;

just because a lot of the Justices on the Supreme Court are sure to step down or die soon and Bush will be able to recraft that high court for the next 20 years;

just because the Christian Reconstructionists are becoming mainstream with their goal of having every American singing "Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me" in a droning monochromatic hypnotized voice all day every day ... doesn't mean anyone should be worried or anything.

Bush Is The No. 1 Terrorist in Germany

2005-02-24T04:27:00.000Z

MAINZ, Germany (Reuters) - About 12,000 protesters, many carrying banners reading "Bush go home," "No. 1 Terrorist" and "Warmonger," marched through the German city of Mainz on Wednesday, but were mostly kept away from the visiting U.S. president.

The official rally, which was twice as big as expected, never got within earshot of President Bush, but a small group of protestors rushed toward his car as he left to visit a U.S. base in nearby Wiesbaden. Police wrestled several demonstrators to the ground and led them away in handcuffs, a Reuters witness said.

Bush was visiting Germany for the first time since the 2003 Iraq war, which Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and most Germans opposed.

"I'm disgusted by the Iraqi war Bush started that has cost thousands of civilian lives," said Thomas Odenweller, 49, a computer technician. "Now he's trying to normalize relations with Europe. It must be stopped."

Ignoring snow and freezing temperatures, the demonstrators held banners chastising Bush in English with slogans such as: "You can bomb the world to pieces but not into peace." Many had pre-printed posters reading: "Bush, No. 1 Terrorist."

Before the march, which Mainz police said was one of the largest ever in the city of about 300,000, one speaker told the crowd: "Mr. Bush, please leave our country. You started an illegal war against Iraq."

German police confiscated one poster that read: "We had our Hitler, now you have yours."
Some protesters praised Schroeder for his anti-war stance.

"Schroeder's opposition to the Iraq war made me so proud to be German," said Helmut Bach, 50, a pilot who marched with his 20-year-old daughter. "That's why I voted for him."

Several protesters wearing fake U.S. army uniforms pulled a trailer with dummies of blood-covered Iraq prisoners impaled on iron bars under a banner: "We don't want your type of freedom."

Bloggers Are The New Barbarians at The Gates

2005-02-23T10:24:00.000Z

Blogger Steve Gilliard writes “it is understood that the death of Hunter Thompson is a tragedy, but it comes at an odd time for journalism. Thompson and his peers like Lucian Truscott, Frances Fitzgerald and others who came of age in the 1960's and early 70's were largely ignored inside the newsroom. They were outsiders and remained largely outside the journalism mainstream. Some broke through, like Sy Hersh, but they never stayed for long, or were eventually shoved aside for years.

Bloggers act as if their treatment in the press and by the press is something new and unique. It isn't.Thompson had been a newspaperman, had worked for Time and hated it. He didn't fit into the neat box that people wanted to place journalists in. Was it really any wonder that David Halberstam didn't wind up running the Times or that Sy Hersh still has to deal with people who call him a traitor. Journalism wasn't embracing the outcasts, not then, and not now.

Thompson didn't wind up in Rolling Stone because he was in high demand as a political commentator. Just like people aren't falling over themselves to read Bill Grieder finance stories today. He was a refugee from American journalism, just as many bloggers are today.

Remember, the people we scorn today were the people who fit the idea of the ideal journalist. Judy Miller is what every editor, secretly dreams about, the sexy, tempestuous man-crazy reporter. The fact that she's a tool for those in power doesn't discomfort them.

Bloggers are not some new creation, but the newest set of the barbarians at the gates. They are the people who don't trust the system and its artifacts. It is to writing, what rap is to music, the coming of democracy to a trade.

What Thompson and his peers did in the 60's and 70's, we do today. But free of the constraints of editors and publishers and the need to hustle up work. Why? Because of two different trends in writing.

One is the co-opting of journalists. The insiders beat back the challenges from the Sheehans, Halberstams and Arnetts. Those who played the game won, those who didn't became heroes and authors, and exiled from the newsroom. Arnett hung on longer than most, but most were gone from the daily papers by 1975. Or they became enamored of celebrity, like Bob Woodward.
Some like Sydney Schamberg and Ray Bonner, following in their tradition, were booted from newsrooms the minute their bosses felt uncomfortable. Or exiled to "alternative" papers.

The newsroom became the home of the tame dissident and the compliant office holder. Carl Hiaasen saves his most brutal critiques of Florida life for his crime fiction. Bob Greene wrote drivel for years, finally canned, not for a lack of talent, but an excess of hunting teenaged trim.

The best writing in the Washington Post is Tom Boswell's sports columns. If people are disheartened by this, they shouldn't be. Ernie Pyle died 60 years ago this week, because he loved soldiers and the stories of their lives. Edward R. Murrow was forced out of CBS.

Thompson was lucky in that since he was never inside the tent, they could never kick him out. But most of the great heroes of journalism were and will be forced from the newsroom, because that is not a place for uncomfortable truths. There has never been a national columnist like Jack Newfield or Mike Royko or Jimmy Breslin, and never will be. Because they will never play the game, or even recognize it.

The other is the irrelevant nature of modern fiction writing. The worst thing to ever happen to writing was the writing program. Because it allowed people to focus on the trivia in their lives.

The greatness of Heller and Mailer escapes these mindless twits nattering about their cheating dads and pill popping moms. It's not even a world of clever craftsmen like Thomas Pynchon, but of navel gazers like Dave Eggers.

Egger, a silly, irrelevant man in a serious time, draws only my contempt and scorn. I mean, his idea of struggle was living off inherentences. Not that his personal story wasn't tragic, but it's not Sophie's Choice.

The problem is that Eggers and his little group of confederates are trivial people in a not trivial time.

So you have journalists, Washington journalists, who report but do not question, getting squeamish when people do, like Helen Thomas, seeking to live off the handouts of their "sources", and get the hand-fed "scoop" which will sell papers. And fiction writers more concerned with apartments and cheating mates than the world around them. Notice the trivial nature of these books. Their self-absorption and lack of interest in the wider world. It is masturbation in print for the most part, and irrelevant.

You would hardly know that men are hunting men in the mountains of Afghanistan and dodging roadside bombs in Iraq. The world of the vital has escaped our fiction, to be replaced by the world of the trivial and self-involved. Why? Because that is what drives the writing program, those who write well about themselves, but without the real introspection needed to be honest.

The Naked and the Dead is a savage tale of men at war, Catch 22 lacking in any kind of larger heroism. These were not tales that made the authors heroic, but exposed their foibles and their fears.

What is usually missing from the description of these modern novels is the condescension the authors feel for their subjects. These books are about revenge on imperfect lives, the failures of their parents and those around them. There is no honesty in them, because the honesty is bred out of them.Their template is The Catcher in the Rye, but lacks the brutal self-analysis JD Salinger brought to it. But then, like his peers, his anger was driven by the war he had fought.

These program-raised authors are angry because their lives were imperfect. They have never missed a meal, felt fear at seeing the police, much less rode in a truck past a bomb. They are angry at the safety and comfort of their lives. So when you need a brutal, honest fiction to deal with lives in Bush's America, and it's contradictions, you get bitter drivel. Or you get the 'sploitation novels which is best-selling black fiction. They aren't exploitation, because most are barely literate.

Sploitation plays off the fictional criminal world created by studio gangsters and rim-tricked out cars. It's as self-indulgent and masturbatory as the lamest writing program fiction. Just written without a spell checker and sold in the street next to Message for the Black Man and the Autobiography of Malcolm X.

The glorification of criminal life is nothing new, but it isn't reality either. The outlets to discuss American life are now closed off because one group is afraid and the other indifferent.

This is why blogs are so popular. There is no other outlet to explain the contradictions in American life cleanly and clearly. The outcasts are more unwelcome now than ever in newsrooms battered by greedy owners and vindictive politics, fiction created to explain the anger at middle class suburbia. Honesty and truth have no place in either forum.

This is why Hunter Thompson was a hero. He was honest to a fault and mean to a fault. In a world where journalism has become about asking questions politely and fiction about settling grudges with parents and schoolmates, he was about something far more important.

Blogs follow in the tradition of outlaw journalism, but without the flourishes Thompson liked. It's not about just being outrageous, most of the bloggers are little different from their peers in newspapers, clean living young men and women. They don't get drunk and naked for fun, they pay their bills, stay faithful and maybe have a beer too many.

However, it is the spirit of what Thompson meant, to be outside the laws of journalism, not the rules, but the laws. The laws of not offending advertisers and friendly pols. The laws of family friendly copy. Those laws. Not the rules about honesty and decency. When Howard Kurtz whines about "fairness", someone needs to tell him the truth.

"Mistah Kurtz, we are not fair. We are honest."

Bush uses fairness like a Samurai uses a katana, to slice and dice and win. Fairness will no more stop Bush than a bazooka could stop a Tiger tank (couldn't come close). Honesty will stop him.

People must tell the truth. Kurtz and his fellows are people to be derided and mocked, not argued with. To accord him respect and seriousness, in the job most journalists disdain like cops hate internal affairs, is to give him power that his peers would never. The next time he whines about fairness, laugh in his face, wave a shrunken head in front of him, show him a picture of King Leopold. Do anything you want to show him the contempt you hold him in. But his words are meaningless to the people who matter, our readers.

Thompson understood the danger of objective journalism, which was a creature of the post-war period, Roosevelt would have laughed at the concept, battered by Father Coughlin and the Chicago Tribune, which is that the dishonest and the disingenuous can have their way with the honest and decent.

Thompson called for subjective journalism long ago and our temporary experiment of objective journalism is ending, because it only serves the status quo, which is not most of us.It's odd to think of the outsider Thompson having won the day about what we call journalism, but blogging allows for a world of outlaw journalists, working cheap and fast and supporting each other in ways he couldn't imagine. It's not a bad legacy.”

The Anti-Empire Report

2005-02-22T04:34:00.000Z

The Anti-Empire Report
What Do the Imperial Mafia Really Want?
by William Blum

After what was humorously designated an “election” in Iraq, there was a marked increase in calls for the United States to announce a timetable for withdrawal from that unhappy land. Senator Kennedy, The Brookings Institution, and a British government official were amongst numerous of the influential class to propose such action.

The rationale behind the timing of these requests, one would assume, is that now that Iraq has displayed a measure of what the White House calls “democracy”, the United States can and should declare, once again, “mission accomplished” and leave, without loss of face.

Such a proposal might make sense if this thing called democracy was indeed the reason the United States invaded and occupied Iraq. But the fact that Washington officials do not miss an opportunity to make it abundantly clear that they have no intention of leaving in the foreseeable future reveals how unenlightened are these calls for departure; for the reasons the US is in Iraq have very little to do with democracy, by whatever description.

On February 17, 2003, a month before the American invasion, I wrote an essay entitled: “What do the imperial mafia really want?” Briefly, the essay lists as motivations for the attack:
1. expansion of the empire
2. oil
3. globalization
4. Israel.

The election in Iraq has been labeled “successful” in many quarters primarily, it would appear, because it was held at all and there was much less of the usual violence attending it on that day.

For the record it should be noted that Iraq held peaceful elections under Saddam Hussein on a number of occasions. Individuals could run for parliament after being cleared by the Baath party. Presumably, a similar process attended the recent election, with clearance being provided by other sources, including occupation authorities.

Did any candidate try to run on a platform of early withdrawal of all American military forces and the cessation of construction of some dozen permanent American military bases? He likely wouldn't have gotten clearance, but since scarcely any of the voters were privy to the names of the candidates or their platforms anyway the question is academic.

In any event, it's questionable whether the United States cares all that much about who makes up the Iraqi government. Whoever it is will not have much power to place obstacles in the way of Washington's goals, particularly concerning oil, military bases, the care and feeding of American corporations, and catering to Israel's needs.Commie rhetoric
“The defense of proletarian internationalism is a sacred duty of each communist and workers' party and of every Marxist-Leninist.”

During the Cold War, we were all taught that it was one of the many signs of America's superiority over the Russian commies that we didn't talk that way. American cultural products and conservatives routinely satirized this commiespeak.

Now, American servicemen heading for Iraq are given “talking points” on cards and in slide shows to enable them to better relate to the media and others. Among the talking points are: “We are a values-based, people-focused team that strives to uphold the dignity and respect of all.” ... “We are not an occupying force.” ... “We are moving forward together with the Iraqi government as partners in building a future for the sons and daughters of Iraq.” ... “Coalition forces will help our Iraqi partners as they build their new and independent country and take their rightful place in the world community.”

And here is Dick Cheney speaking of Viktor Yushchenko, newly elected president of Ukraine (color him good for he's “pro-West”): “Free nations stood with him as he made his just demands that the voice of the people be heard. The free world will stand with him once again as he works to consolidate Ukraine's democratic gains.”

In his January 20 inauguration speech, which lasted 21 minutes, President Bush used the word “liberty” 15 times and the word “freedom” 27 times; that's one or the other word casually dropped exactly once every 30 seconds. He made not a single mention of Iraq or Afghanistan or any other world issue.

The president's advisers said the speech was “the rhetorical institutionalization of the Bush doctrine and reflected the president's deepest convictions about the purposes behind his foreign policies.” But, they added, “it was carefully written not to tie him to an inflexible or unrealistic application of his goal of ending tyranny.”

Only a man of Mr. Bush's self-confidence, could believe that he could get away with this.

And Commie Socialist Realism
A TV ad for Anheuser-Busch shown during the recent Super Bowl: An airport, a contingent of US soldiers in uniform is passing through, presumably on the way to or just returning from Iraq; the people in the terminal one by one look up, and slowly realize who's walking by -- It's (choke) ... Can it (gasp) be? ... Yes! HEROES!! Real honest-to-God heroes!! The faces of the onlookers are filled with deep gratitude and pride. The soldiers begin to realize what's happening as the waves of adulation sweep over them, their faces are bursting with matching gratitude and matching pride, their faces say “Thanks.” The screen says “Thanks.” Not a dry eye in the whole damn terminal.

In the USSR, they might have been a group of Stakhanovite hero workers on the way to the factory.

The guilty saved by a guilty conscience
February 13 marked the 60th anniversary of the firebombing of Dresden by the United States and Great Britain in World War II. Several thousand people marched in Dresden on that day to condemn the incendiary destruction of the beautiful old city and the taking of tens of thousands of lives for no apparent military purpose. (It's been suggested that the motivation had to do with the expectation that the city would soon be falling under Soviet control.)

The Western media has referred to the demonstrators simply as “neo-Nazis” and “fascists” as if no German citizen or anyone else could have any good reason to be upset by the bombing, which could well qualify as a war crime. The Independent of London reported that. “Churchmen in Dresden have blamed hostility to the Allies on East German Communist propaganda which for decades held that the raid was a needless act of ‘Anglo-American aggression’ inflicted on innocent civilians.” Dresden was part of East Germany.

The operative word here is “guilt”. German guilt is so heavy that, apart from the right wing, Germans generally reject attempts to lessen it by blaming the Allies for anything; and likewise reject attempts to portray Germans as also victims of World War II.

German Chancellor Gerhardt Schröder appealed to Germans to reject such interpretations of the Dresden raid. “Showing historical responsibility means not weighing crimes against suffering,” he said. “I always remember how much suffering Germany caused to others by a war that it started.”

The same guilt factor comes into play in the recent scenario involving Germany and US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Under a 2002 German law allowing prosecutors to investigate war crimes no matter where they occurred, the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York filed a request with the German prosecutor's office to investigate war crimes charges against Rumsfeld arising from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

The Germans chose to ignore their own law and declined to pursue the matter. The outcome was never in doubt. The idea of the German government prosecuting an American official for war crimes borders on science fiction.

Neo-conservative fairy tales
What do you call a man who said: “When history is written, the contras will be folk heroes?”

The man was speaking of that charming band of Nicaraguans who went around in the 1980s burning down schools and medical clinics, murdering teachers, doctors and nurses, and sabotaging any other accomplishment the Sandinista government could point to with pride (all carried out with the invaluable assistance of the CIA, fulfilling its historical role of counter-revolutionary).

You call the man Elliott Abrams and you also call him the new deputy national security adviser to President Bush; another promotion for the man who in the 1980s in the Reagan administration was a tireless campaigner for the vilest of dictatorships, death squads, and torturers in Central America and Pinochet's Chile. In 1991 he pled guilty to the much lesser crime of withholding information from Congress in the Iran-contra affair but was pardoned by George W.'s dad.

History, in recent years, has been kinder to Abrams than to his prediction. It would be difficult to find anyone outside of extreme-neo-con-land who has a charitable word for the contras, who also engaged in widespread drug trafficking and were accomplished rapists.

Malcom X and Hunter S. Thompson

2005-02-21T07:20:00.000Z

Today marks the passage of two compelling and original American figures, and the power of the word.

First, Malcolm X was shot to death 40 years ago today at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. Secondly, Hunter S. Thompson took his life within the past 24 hours.

The real power of Malcolm X was his unique ability to communicate his personal transformation to a wide audience. In his lifetime, Malcolm X was many men.

Born Malcolm Little, he later became "Detroit Red" and "New York Red" - a hustler, drug pusher, pimp, con man and the head of a Boston robbery ring. After spending time in prison, he emerged as Minister Malcolm - Malcolm X, the fiery, eloquent spokesman for the Nation of Islam. Finally, he became El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, an internationally recognized leader and advocate for oppressed peoples.

The power of this personal odyssey is most evident in his book The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

“The Autobiography,” is a work whose blazing candor and unflinching self-examination inspired Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, and remains a seminal American work. In 1999, Time magazine selected the book as one of the top 10 nonfiction works of the 20th century.

Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of fictional journalism in books like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, fatally shot himself Sunday night in Aspen, Colorado.

Thompson is credited alongside Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese with helping pioneer New Journalism — a subjective, first-person form of journalism, in which the writer made himself an essential component of the story.

The respectable, detached, objective tone demanded by mainstream American journalism was, Thompson thought, a powerful ingredient in the banality and dishonesty of American life.

Thompson’s style was aggressive, cynical and fiercely skeptical, and he stripped away layers of unquestioning respect for politicians.

President Nixon once famously said Thompson represented "that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character."

In turn, Thompson felt that Nixon spoke "for the werewolf in us."

Thompson's great legacy was his realisation, as he wrote in The Great Shark Hunt, that "the writer must be a participant in the scene ... like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character."

Both Malcolm X and Hunter S. Thompson were passionate about pursuing the truth and holding America accountable for its noble ideals.

Germany's Neo-Nazis

2005-02-14T05:15:00.000Z

In Wurzburg, when I hear the sound of an emergency siren, I’m reminded of Hollywood films of the early 1940s that depicted Nazi Storm Troopers arriving in the Jewish Ghettos of Central Europe. I think of Anne Frank and her inevitable demise at the hands of the Nazis.

Germany has the largest growing Jewish population outside Israel. Yet scratch the surface of Germany, and centuries old racism against people of the Jewish faith is still evident.

Neo-Nazis upstage Dresden memorial
5,000 people take part in a funeral march to the music of Wagner to mourn civilians killed by the allied bombing raids

Luke Harding in Dresden
Monday February 14, 2005
The Guardian

Waving black flags and banners, thousands of neo-Nazis marched through the heart of Dresden yesterday on the 60th anniversary of the city's destruction by British and American bombers.

In the largest neo-Nazi demonstration in Germany's postwar history, about 5,000 people took part in a "funeral march" to mourn the civilians killed by the allied attack.

The protest upstaged the official commemoration of the anniversary, during which the British ambassador laid a wreath at a cemetery where victims were buried. Meanwhile, thousands of local citizens gathered in the old square for a candlelight vigil.

Large numbers of riot police were drafted into Dresden as several hundred anti-fascists hurled abuse at the far-right marchers and shouted: "Nazis out!"

The neo-Nazis marched to the music of Wagner and Bach, blaring from loudspeakers. As they crossed the Elbe towards the old city, they encountered several hundred anti-fascists. The organisers merely turned up the volume and played the Ride of the Valkyries.

Several anti-fascists waved British, US and Israeli flags. Others chanted: "You lost the war" and "Stalingrad was wonderful". Confetti and pink paper aeroplanes with RAF markings were thrown.

"This is a terrible day for Dresden - I'm furious," said Ursula Hamann, 77, who lives in the city and survived the 1945 attack. "It's sad to see something like this happening in Germany again."

Edeltraud Krause said: "Look at them. You just have to look at their stupid faces. They do not represent us."

Yesterday's well-attended neo-Nazi rally is embarrassing for Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Germany's image abroad.

The political establishment appears to have been taken completely unawares by the far-right's recent renaissance and the rise of the neo-Nazi National Party of Germany (NPD), which won 9.2% of the vote in last September's elections in Saxony.

In an interview yesterday Mr Schröder hinted that he would try to ban the NPD, which, he said, portrayed Germany as a war victim by ignoring Nazi atrocities.

"We will use all means to counter these attempts to re-interpret history. We will not allow cause to be confused with effect," he told Welt am Sonntag.

He added: "This is our obligation to all the victims of the war and Nazi terror, especially, and also to the victims of Dresden." However, Mr Schröder now faces a tricky period in trying to reconcile Germany's traditional right of peaceful assembly with a neo-Nazi ascendancy.

Support for the NPD appears to be rising, especially in depressed areas of the former communist East Germany, where unemployment averages 20%.

"My husband and I are NPD voters," said Anni Lutzner, who attended yesterday's NPD-organised rally in Dresden. "We believe that the German state favours foreigners and the Jews."
She added: "There's no point in banning us - we'll simply find a new name."

The Delusional Is No Longer Marginal

2005-02-02T05:02:00.000Z

Bill Moyers was host until recently of the weekly public affairs series "NOW with Bill Moyers" on PBS. This article is adapted from AlterNet, where it first appeared. The text is taken from Moyers' remarks upon receiving the Global Environmental Citizen Award from the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.

“One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.

Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back."

Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the country. They are the people who believe the Bible is literally true - one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index.

That's right - the rapture index. Google it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the "Left Behind" series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious-right warrior Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.

Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): Once Israel has occupied the rest of its "biblical lands," legions of the antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon.

As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to Heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.

I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of man."

A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed - an essential conflagration on the road to redemption.

The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144 - just one point below the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of God will return, the righteous will enter Heaven and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.

So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist Glenn Scherer - "The Road to Environmental Apocalypse." Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed - even hastened - as a sign of the coming apocalypse.

As Grist makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress before the recent election - 231 legislators in total and more since the election - are backed by the religious right.

Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Whip Roy Blunt.

The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the Senate floor: "The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land." He seemed to be relishing the thought.

And why not? There's a constituency for it.

A 2002 Time-CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations, or in the motel turn on some of the 250 Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to worry about the environment.

Why care about the earth, when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?"

Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the Lord will provide.

One of their texts is a high school history book, "America's Providential History." You'll find there these words: "The secular or socialist has a limited-resource mentality and views the world as a pie ... that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece." However, "[t]he Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God's earth ... while many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people."

No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers." He turned out millions of the foot soldiers on Nov. 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics.

It is hard for the journalist to report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a personal level. I myself don't know how to be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I think of my friend on Wall Street whom I onceasked: "What do you think of the market?"I'm optimistic," he answered. "Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered: "Because I am not sure my optimism is justified."

I'm not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with Eric Chivian and the Center for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It's not that I don't want to believe that - it's just that I read the news and connect the dots.

I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment. This for an administration:
· That wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and their habitats, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the government to judge beforehand whether actions might damage natural resources.
· That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicle tailpipe inspections, and ease pollution standards for cars, sport-utility vehicles and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment.
· That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep certain information about environmental problems secret from the public.
· That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against polluting, coal-fired power plants and weaken consent decrees reached earlier with coal companies.
· That wants to open the Arctic [National] Wildlife Refuge to drilling and increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in America.

I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection Agency had planned to spend $9 million - $2 million of it from the administration's friends at the American Chemistry Council - to pay poor families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and the industry were going to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study.

I read all this in the news.

I read the news just last night and learned that the administration's friends at the International Policy Network, which is supported by Exxon Mobil and others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate change is "a myth, sea levels are not rising" [and] scientists who believe catastrophe is possible are "an embarrassment."

I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached toit: a clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides; language prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a waiver of environmental review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed by developers to weaken protection for crucial habitats in California.

I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer - pictures of my grandchildren. I see the future looking back at me from those photographs and I say, "Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do." And then I am stopped short by the thought: "That's not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world."

And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain indignation at injustice?

What has happened to our moral imagination?

On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: "How do you see the world?" And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly."

I see it feelingly.

The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free - not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need is what the ancient Israelites called hochma - the science of the heart ... the capacity to see, to feel and then to act as if the future depended on you.

Believe me, it does.”

The Recent Bush Coronation Was Nauseating

2005-01-23T07:09:00.000Z

The recent Bush Coronation was nauseating, and the tone of Washington, D.C. purely fascist. When the U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned the Bush-Cheney junta in 2000, I was appalled. Now my regard for America is at an all-time low.

My only connection with American television is from the Armed Forces Network (AFN). A basic decoder allows us access to this programming in Europe, the Middle East and the Asian Pacific. Overall, the arrangement is satisfactory. Perhaps the best trait is the absence of traditional commercials.

However, there is a Pentagon Channel of Orwellian news about victory in both Iraq and Afghanistan. There is always that pitiful, lie-spewing automaton, White House spokesman Scott McClellan. There is also CNN news – though more frequently, the shift is toward Fox News and the American fascist outlook filtered by Australia’s loveable Rupert Murdoch.

Weeks ago a news clip revealed that a retired, four-star American army general was on his way to Iraq to assess the “situation.” Part of the news featured brief coverage of Bush rationalizing this event. The president remains extraordinarily deficient in social skills and reminds me of Huck Finn, unable to expound his considerations before the Widow Douglas.

Typically, the sight of Bush hanging himself higher and higher with every unfinished verbless sentence is so distressing that I switch off immediately: I feel like a member of Greenpeace watching a month old seal pup beating its own brains out.

Saul Landau, a professor at Cal Poly Pomona University, where he is the director of Digital Media Programs and International Outreach, is a frequent contributor to CounterPunch, a liberal on-line journal.

His recent dispatch is worthy of consideration:

“President Bush doesn't allow negative news to interfere with his predictable rendition of clichés and slogans.”Iraq will be free, the world will be more peaceful, and America will be more secure," he regularly announces, as news of bloody chaos emanates from Iraq.

Bush claimed success for his 2002 "No Child Left Behind Act."

"We are regularly testing every child ... and making sure they have better options when schools are not performing."

Studies showed, however, that charter schools "options" left behind lots of kids.

Bush never had to worry about his financial future yet dogmatically insists that privatizing social security will afford future generations increased security. By skimming 15% off the top as brokers' fees?

Bush's clichés remind me of how my mother tried to indoctrinate me with Shakespeare's truism: "neither a borrower nor a lender be."

In fact, Shakespeare put those words in the mouth of Polonius (Hamlet's would-be father-in-law), who continued that "loan oft loses both itself and friend."

But how would Mom or Polonius have survived in 2005 without credit cards and mortgages to say nothing of auto and appliance loans? She also neglected to tell me that Shakespeare drew the Polonius character as a pedant whose lack of practical wisdom proved fatal.

This pompous bungler served as a character foil. By following his simplistic logic spying on Hamlet to learn the cause of his infirmity -- he got himself fatally stabbed.

Like Bush, Polonius possessed a one-dimensional view of the world; a stark contrast to Hamlet's complexities. Hamlet reflected on experiences, analyzed his emotions and rejected facile solutions to his moral and political problems: how to avenge his father's murder and punish the murderer, the King who had married his mother?

But Hamlet's introversion led him to ignore threats to Denmark's security. His Byzantine mental process led not only to his own and his loved ones' demise, but to the conquest of Denmark as well.

Contemporary US leaders speak with the pomposity of Polonius, but lack the elementary moral foundations education that Shakespeare gave to his foil. How would Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld interpret Polonius' most famous saw, "To thine own self be true"?

For truth to surface in the Oval Office, Congress would have to create the position of "court jester," a truth-telling clown who would counsel the president on the politics of contemporary empire.

Such a truth telling clown would announce: "Nothing succeeds like failure."

He would use Bush as an example. He failed as a student (poor grades and questionable character) and a young adult (addict and shirker).

In business ventures, from oil drilling to owning a baseball team, Bush invested millions of dollars of other people's money. He failed, but nevertheless grew richer, thanks to bailouts from wealthy Republicans. Stockholders, however, lost money.

Bush's friends encouraged him to invest $600,000 in the Texas Rangers. He made almost $15 million when the team was sold.

In 2000, he lost the popular vote for President in 2000, but slimed his way into the Presidency thanks to Florida shenanigans and a Republican Supreme Court. He launched an invasion of Iraq, which he called a "catastrophic success." Bush built up the US debt and deficit to record levels and divided the nation more than it had been since the Civil War.

While his hand steered the ship of state, a vast corporate scandal emerged that involved Bush's friend and campaign contributor, Ken "Kenny Boy" Lay, ENRON's Chief Executive officer. Bush emerged as a moral failure. But it didn't seem to matter.

Before the 2004 election, the public also knew that on the economic and social level Bush had delivered nothing for the majority. His tax policies, however, had made the filthy rich even filthier.

In foreign policy, after 9/11 Bush succeeded in converting immense world sympathy and support into unabashed hatred and contempt. He isolated the United States by withdrawing from important world processes like the Kyoto environment discussions and the International Criminal Court. He also lied about the reasons for invading Iraq: weapons of mass destruction and ties to the 9/11 terrorists.

If lying signifies failure, then Bush is overqualified. Bush also took more vacation time during a war than any other president. He eroded traditional foundations of the nation: separation between church and state. In light of this record of fiascos, he garnered some 59 million votes in 2004.

"They've seen me make decisions, they've seen me under trying times, they've seen me weep, they've seen me laugh, they've seen me hug," Bush told USA Today (Aug 27, 2004). "And they know who I am"

Yes, the voters knew. But why they chose Bush would defy even Shakespeare's infinitely complex mind. Do millions identify with Bush because he screws up?

Roman emperors had jesters to remind them that they were not God. Bush may not think he's God, but does believe God has spoken to him.

A jester would whisper in his ear: "You have power to destroy the world, but maybe it's not God who's talking to you," as he pointed downward and winked his eye satanically."

Darwin Awards

2005-01-04T21:19:00.000Z

1 WILL THE REAL DUMMY PLEASE STAND UP?
AT&T fired President John Walter after nine months, saying he lacked intellectual leadership. He received a $26 million severance package. Perhaps it's not Walter who's lacking intelligence.

2. WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM OUR FRIENDS:
Police in Oakland, California spent two hours attempting to subdue a gunman who had barricaded himself inside his home. After firing ten tear gas canisters, officers discovered that the man was standing beside them in the police line, shouting, "Please come out and give yourself up.

3. WHAT WAS PLAN B???
An Illinois man, pretending to have a gun, kidnapped a motorist and forced him to drive to two different auto-mated teller machines, where in the kidnapper proceeded to withdraw money from his own bank accounts.

4. THE GETAWAY!
A man walked into a Topeka, Kansas, Kwik Stop, and asked for all the money in the cash drawer. Apparently, the take was too small, so he tied up the store clerk and worked the counter himself for three hours until police showed up and grabbed him.

5. DID I SAY THAT???
Police in Los Angeles had good luck with a robbery suspect who just couldn't control himself during a lineup. When detectives asked each man in the lineupto repeat the words: "Give me all your money or I'll shoot," the man shouted, "That'snot what I said!"

6. ARE WE COMMUNICATING??
A man spoke frantically into the phone, "My wife is pregnant and her contractions are only two minutes apart!" "Is this her first child?" the doctor asked. "No!" the man shouted, "This is her husband!

7. NOT THE SHARPEST TOOL IN THE SHED!!
In Modesto, California, Steven Richard King was arrested for trying to hold up a Bank of America branch without a weapon. King used a thumb and a finger to simulate a gun, but fortunately, he failed to keep his hand in his pocket.

8. BOAT PROBLEMS
Last summer, down on Lake Isabella, located in the high desert, an hour east of Bakersfield, California, some folks, new to boating, were having a problem. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn't get their brand new 22 ft. boat going. It was very sluggish in almost every maneuver, no matter how much power was applied. After about an hour of trying to make it go, they putted to a nearby marina, thinking someonethere could tell them what was wrong. A thorough topside check revealedeverything in perfect working condition. The engine ran fine, the outdrive went up and down, and the prop was the correct size and pitch. So, one of the marina guys jumped in the water to check underneath. He came up choking on water, he was laughing so hard.

Under the boat, still strapped securely in place, was the trailer.

9. AND THE GRAND FINALE - ONLY IN OKLAHOMA!!!
The city of Enid, Oklahoma hired a city manager & let him have a contract stating that he would be paid and have insurance benefits through 2007 regardless of whether he quit or was fired. You guessed it, he quit so the city has to pay him to sit at home.

From Da Shizzle to Da Shiznit

2005-01-03T21:25:00.000Z

For years, I’ve tried to deny my bigotry of African-Americans. This goes against my upbringing. Yet, I have a problem with many people of this category. The problem is not skin color or hair style; it’s language – the Ebonics slang of the sub-culture.

1. You are a beautiful woman.
You be a fine ass hoe.

2. Do you know what I'm saying?
Ya dun know?

3. Hey, that's the breaks.
Yo, a so it go.

4. You only get one chance in life.
You better rip the show.

The face of Europe is changing, and people from Africa – or people of African descent, may be found everywhere, and Germany is no exception, though the United Kingdom may boast the largest numbers because of the Commonwealth.

When I encounter a person outside the United States who fits this category, I’m delightfully impressed by how articulate and intelligent he or she is in social settings. I’m engaged with someone who is dignified and reflects pride - skin color and ethnicity means nothing. There’s no taking it from da shizzle to da shiznit:

“As many as 170,000 muthas are feared dead after da largest earthquake shake da planet in nearly 40 years jolted Southeast Asia n' shit.”

What Can You Say About 2004?

2005-01-02T06:54:00.000Z

Over the past three years we have transcended the boundaries of homeland and national identity only to find ourselves perpetual outsiders. Those who live in two cultural worlds are always aware of being at home in neither.

Yet life is always concerned with straddling two separate worlds.

We’ve just experienced the German custom of New Year’s Eve. Apparently, the national tradition is to set off fire works - Fourth of July style - as midnight approaches on December 31.

Ilmspan, our small farm village just outside Wurzburg, is small and the surrounding communities may qualify as towns – but the populations do not exceed 2,000 people. In the early hours of today, short bursts of light emblazoned the skies. At first, the spectacle suggested a summer lightening storm over the nearby hills. No: just fireworks.

Ilmspan offers loads of tranquility; that’s about it. No stores, no post office, no gas station. There is St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Church and a guest house (inn) directly across the street. Actually, Ilmspan boasts two guest houses. Germans do love their beer.

New Year's Day I awoke around 5:15 am. – there’s not the excuse of being disturbed by an off-key mullah warbling the call to prayer, like in the Middle East … I just start the day early.

When I stepped out the door of the master bedroom to allow the Yorkies time for that necessary morning run, I could see in the faint late that my immediate neighbors were outside – still socializing. Not long afterward, my 17-year-old son arrived home from an all-night New Year’s Eve party – at “the butt-crack-of-dawn,” as he says.

I’m proud to report this year his Irish heritage did not take over; he arrived home safe and sober. To his credit, the sight of his contemporaries passed out in various rooms of the host’s house, many clutching small dishware in case they hurled during the night, prompted him to avoid the same sordid plight. Last year’s lesson remains with him.

In fact, last year when we lived in Bahrain, the boy was home before 11 p.m. – escorted to the front door by a cab driver from India. He was visibly plastered and moon-walked like a new-born colt on a rocky incline. The distance from main door-to-front door was less than a hundred feet, and completely flat. Of course the boy had mixed his drinks, a mistake of the novice, and consumed too much too fast.

The dicey part of parenthood is dispensing knowledge without admitting first-hand experience.

What a difference a year makes; cliché yet true.

Life has changed dramatically for us over the past 12 months; we are no longer in the Middle East, now Central Europe is home. This is certainly that point for reflection. What happened?

As CNN’s Todd Leopold asked:
“What can you say about a year that spent more time and indignation on a 38-year-old pop singer's accidentally exposed right breast than the vapidly violent dance routine, erection ads, capitalistic orgy (and football game) that surrounded it?

What can you say about a year in which the two most talked-about movies of the year -- and two of its biggest box office hits -- were a violent film about a man of peace and an effectively manipulative polemic about a president at war?

What can you say about a year that got some of its sharpest news from a fake news show?

What can you say about a year that glorified both a bright man who won 74 "Jeopardy!" games in a row, and also glorified a shallow, inexplicably famous hotel heiress/party girl who became even more inexplicably famous thanks to a Fox reality show?

What can you say about a year that made a self-aggrandizing, strangely hair-styled tycoon with an edifice complex into a TV star and put the queen of domesticity behind bars?

What can you say about a year in which the Federal Communications Commission levies a record fine for that aforementioned 38-year-old pop singer's bared breast -- but the violently graphic details of "CSI"-type shows were met with nothing but high ratings?

What can you say about a year that lost its Genius (Ray Charles), its Superman (Christopher Reeve), its Method man (Marlon Brando) and its "Friends"?

What can you say about a year in which wizards were featured in a top five-grossing movie, a major best-selling book, and the film named best picture of 2003?

What can you say about a year that featured Britney Spears getting married more times than Jennifer Lopez, and Jude Law appearing in more movies in four months -- six -- than a studio contract player in his prime?

What can you say about a year in which Howard Stern's best-known competition for sexually suggestive talk was Bill O'Reilly, and "Monday Night Football" was better known for a silly locker-room skit than a fourth-quarter comeback?

What can you say about a year in which "moral values" was revealed as some kind of bellwether, yet put "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" on the best-seller list, made a cleverly soapy show about "Desperate Housewives" its breakout hit and can't seem to get past a pop star's breast-revealing finale?”

The Wisdom of Cokehead Hermann Goering

2004-12-25T06:26:00.000Z

"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same in any country."

- Hermann Goering (1893-1946)
President of the Reichstag
Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe

"These [terrorist] attacks are not inevitable. They are, however, possible, and this very fact underscores the reason we cannot live under the threat of blackmail…The terrorist threat to America and the world will be diminished the moment that Saddam Hussein is disarmed."

- George W Bush (1946- )
President of the United States of America
Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces

A gas tanker truck wired with explosives blew up in a west Baghdad neighborhood Friday, killing one person, wounding 19 and lighting up the night sky with a fireball, just hours after Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld left the capital.

Rumsfeld's surprise one-day tour in Iraq took him to the cities of Mosul, Fallujah and Tikrit and the heavily barricaded Green Zone in Baghdad — he did not visit the Mansour area — and throughout his meetings with U.S. troops, he insisted that the insurgency that plagued the country for months would be defeated.

A few hours earlier in Tikrit, a female soldier complained that she had a hard time explaining what the American military was doing in Iraq when she returned home and asked what could be done to get past the bad press.

Rumsfeld said the message was getting through anyway.

"I think the country does understand that we lost 3,000 people on September 11th and the fact that those people were operating in this part of the world ... You've seen the evil up close and personal, you know the danger that this poses.

"What you're doing is important. I think the American people get it."

Still, violence has escalated even after the U.S. offensive in Fallujah last month that largely captured the guerrilla's main stronghold.

On Tuesday, insurgents in Mosul, a northern city that has become a center for violence, carried out the deadliest yet against Americans — a suicide attack on a mess tent at a U.S. base.

Gonorrhea Lectim

2004-12-18T21:11:00.000Z

The Center for Disease Control has issued a warning about a new virulent strain of sexually transmitted disease.

This disease is contracted through dangerous and high risk behavior.The disease is called Gonorrhea Lectim (pronounced "gonna re-elect him").

Many victims have contracted it after having been screwed for the past four years, in spite of having taken measures to protect themselves from this especially troublesome disease.

Cognitive sequellae of individuals infected with Gonorrhea Lectim include, but are not limited to: Anti-social personality disorder traits; delusions of grandeur with a distinct messianic flavor; chronic mangling of the English language; extreme cognitive dissonance; inability to incorporate new information; pronounced xenophobia; inability to accept responsibility for actions; exceptional cowardice masked by acts of misplaced bravado; uncontrolled facial smirking; ignorance of geography and history; tendencies toward creating evangelical theocracies; and a strong propensity for categorical, all-or nothing behavior.

The disease is sweeping Washington.

Naturalists and epidemiologists are amazed and baffled that this malignant disease originated only a few years ago in a Texas Bush.

Bush Offers High Honors for Profound Failures

2004-12-18T06:04:00.000Z

The world depicted by George Orwell in 1984 continues in imperial Washington. Earlier this week, Bush offered high honors for profound failures, with his bestowal of the Presidential Medal of Freedom on:

- Tommy Franks, the former CentCom commander, who allowed Osama bin Laden to escape at Tora Bora;
- George Tenet, former CIA director, who jumped on the bandwagon for the Iraq war, informing Bush that the WMD claims were "a slam dunk";
- Paul Bremer, former chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority, who disbanded the Iraqi army, among other blunders.

Failure is celebrated as success in the American Empire. As Orwell said, “Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act.”

These days, there is no chance of such a revolutionary act in America – not with such a docile public ready to accept everything served up by AOL Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., and Viacom.

The ludicrous unravelling of the nomination of former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik as secretary of Homeland Security further illustrates the Bush administration's methods.

The fact that Kerik neglected to pay taxes on a nanny who was an illegal immigrant was a convenient alibi. Beyond his extramarital affairs, secret marriage and love nests, he appears also to be married to the mob - on the take from the Gambino crime family. Yet Bush had been attracted to Kerik's Rambo-like aggression; the White House vetting process seems to be as credulous as the Mickey Mouse Club; and the impulse to cover up instant.

The fall guy is former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, Kerik's patron. Inadvertently, Giuliani's tainting eliminates him as a moderate Republican pretender to the throne. If only Kerik's foibles had passed beneath the radar, he might have been honored for any calamity.

Does this really surprise anyone?

According to Dr. Gerry Lower of Keystone, South Dakota – a contributor to Axis of Logic, “Americans are - among countries - the least Christian, the least decent, the least compassionate, the least kind government on the globe. Nowhere else can I think of does greed, power, corruption, vengeance, bigotry, and hatred more rule the day under the guise of Christianity and democracy than in the United States. Other nations with "Christian" traditions, like Germany, France, Italy, and England, at least have basic health care for their people and abhor the death penalty.

America under George Bush is dishonesty, ignorance, self-righteousness and belligerence personified. We are like the guy who has conquered dozens of women ... proud of himself in the midst of sin, thinking he is on top of manhood while residing on the very bottom. What is this, if not uneducated adolescence?

For all his unworthy pomp and power, George Bush is nothing but a puppet "anti-Christ" in the strings of right wing religious fundamentalists, who in turn maintain Constantine's JudeoRoman lie, his perverted fusion of Old Testament and Roman legalism with Christianity to produce New Testament self-righteous conquest in the name of compassion.

It is this millennial religious duping of the people that has brought us to where we are, from tribal to national to global human organization, good people doing bad things in the name of a larger good. That lie was an evolutionary inevitability with the emergence of Christian philosophy in an ancient despotic world. That lie, and the conquest-bent attitudes it has nourished, have blindly promoted the exponential economic unification of the world's people and set the stage for the emergence of a global political philosophy.

George Bush and his puppeteers and followers are religiously incorrigible, transcendent of human knowledge and logic, above rethinking anything which they already know with religious certainty. There will be no stopping the cultural imperative which they have currently put in place.

America is, among the western democracies, the least well-educated, most shallow, least intellectual, most ignorant, least thoughtful, most self-righteous, least honest, most deceitful, least spiritual and most destructive.

Americans are the least family-oriented, least community-oriented, least democracy-oriented nation in the western world. We have become, under Bush's watch, just another wretched religious nation, justifying whatever we please by employing the authority of the Christian Bible.”

Iraq's Declaration of Independence

2004-12-12T09:19:00.000Z

Columnist Anwaar Hussain of the Pak Tribune, now based in the United Arab Emirates, has a reverence for some of the heavyweights of Western Literature; Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift among the canon. He also has a keen appreciation for Enlightenment thinkers of revolutionary America, chiefly Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson.

The Bush administration is interested in regime change in many parts of the world, specifically the Middle East, so the American Empire may at least have serious leverage over oil distribution for Europe and Japan, and now the world’s fastest growing consumer society – China. However, if regime change is needed anywhere, it’s the United States – and immediately.

Most Americans make no connection with the efforts of both Thomas Paine – Common Sense and The Rights of Man, and Thomas Jefferson – The Declaration of Independence. The spirit of 1776 is now concealed under so many layers of fast-food lasagna as to be unrecognizable by the culture that pretends to evangelize these worthy virtues to the rest of the world.

An empire is not in the business of political liberation; the overriding purpose is to always secure coveted resources, no matter the cost of human life. The American Empire occupies Iraq for oil and not democracy. This wretched disgrace is too obvious to disregard.

Pakistaini writer Anwar Hussain does not ignore the plight of the Iraqi people. Instead, he invokes the same standards Americans once applied to their British masters:

“If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”
William Shakespeare

"Once a victim of Britain's subjugation herself, America has risen to become the usurper of Iraq. Just a few wordings change in the American Declaration of Independence, makes it a wishful yet equally fine Iraqi Declaration of Independence. The present American Administration stands answerable to their founding fathers who wrote that lofty document. For comparison to the American Declaration of Independence,

Iraq’s Declaration of Independence

And, therefore, here it is--The unanimous Declaration of the entire Iraqi nation.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to break the bonds of tyranny which have enchained them brutally, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to declare their independence.

We, the Iraqi nation, hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, like that of our previous master Saddam Hussain’s did, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Though prudence, indeed, dictated that Governments long established should not have been changed for false and sham causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. Our’s was, nevertheless, changed for spurious and wicked reasons and our will having been taken for granted.

Now under these new masters, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce us under absolute Despotism, it is our right, it is our duty, to throw off such masters, and to provide new guards for our future security -- Such has been the patient sufferance of us Iraqis; and such is now the necessity which constrains us to alter our present state of serfdom. -- The history of the present master is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over Iraqi nation. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

Our present master, The United States of America, has refused its Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

The United States of America has forbidden its Representatives in Iraq to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till its Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, it has utterly neglected to attend to them.

The United States of America has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large provinces of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the forthcoming sham Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

The United States of America has dissolved representative political parties and heroic Iraqi resistance, repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness its invasions on the rights of the people.

The United States of America has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing its Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

The United States of America has made some sycophant Iraqis dependent on its Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

The United States of America has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and plunder our resources.

The United States of America declared war on us without there being any provocation on our part, subjected us to a brutal occupation and has kept among us, Standing Armies without our Consent.

The United States of America has affected to render its Military independent of and superior to the Iraqi Civil Power.

The United States of America, in the past as well as now, has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our religion, culture and unacknowledged by our laws; giving its Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting their troops, by a mock Trial, from Punishment for any Murders which they have, and are, committing on the Inhabitants of Iraq:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For killing our men, women and children mercilessly and depriving us in all cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing all our laws and attempting to establish therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging it’s Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into all countries that it has designs for:

For taking away our dignity, violating our most valuable ethos, and desecrating our places of worship:

For suspending our own Legislature and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

The United States of America aims to pillage our resources and has, thus far, ravaged our lands, burnt our oil wells, destroyed our towns and devastated the lives of our people.

The United States of America is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of civilized nations.

The United States of America has constrained our fellow Citizens to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

The United States of America has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions we, the Iraqi nation, have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A master, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our World brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by the United States of America to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of our circumstances. We have appealed to their collective sense of justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our humanity to disavow these usurpations. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity.

We, therefore, the entire Iraqi nation, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of Iraq, solemnly publish and declare, that the Iraqi nation is, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent Nation; that we are absolved from all Allegiance to the United States of America, and that all political connection between us and the United States of America, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as a Free and Independent State, we have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to other brotherly nations our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

And till the time this humble declaration does fall on receptive ears we, hereby, remind our present masters that "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that"

The Signers of the Declaration and the new Iraqi state they represent.
Representatives of all Iraqi Arabs, Kurds, Turcoman and Assyrians of all religions including Islam, Christianity and others.

The Gore Vidal Interview

2004-12-10T21:34:00.000Z

Journalist Marc Cooper, an American, recently interviewed Gore Vidal – an American who divides his time equally between the United States and Italy. Vidal really needs no introduction. However, for the uninitiated, he is one of the sharpest and most original minds of the Post-World War Two landscape. A patriot in the manner of Thomas Paine, Vidal is a worthy candidate for the Noble Prize for Literature. His newest book is Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia.

MARC COOPER: What would a truly courageous American president do after being inaugurated in January 2005?

GORE VIDAL: The first thing you do is bring the troops home. And you don’t listen to anyone who says: "We can’t do that now. We knocked their countries down and now must put them back up again. We knocked them down with our tax dollars, and with our tax dollars we must rebuild them — our sort of urban renewal."

None of that! We go. They want us out of there — the longer we stay, the more they’re going to kill us, and the more they will be killed. And the more outrages they will perpetrate on us here at home. Get out. No more adventures. Forget about our friends in the Middle East who want us to attack Iran and Syria. Forget them. Tell them to get lost. Cut the Pentagon budget by 50 percent. That’ll give you enough money to properly educate the people so they will know their own history, and when a bunch of thugs come along proposing to fleece the taxpayer — they will recognize them, because they will know about them from past history.

Q: Does the subtitle of your book, Reflections on the United States of Amnesia, imply that as a people we have lost our collective historic memory?

A: I think that’s true. There are good and bad reasons for that. The good reasons are that we’ve always had kind of an urgent, hot present — which also meant a hopeful future. We were not grimly tied into imperial adventures, into crazy pre-emptive wars. So why think of the future if our present looks so good?

But our future doesn’t look so good thanks to the pre-emptive wars that have been attempted — unsuccessfully, I would say. In Afghanistan and Iraq. And now Iran is up for our possible attempt. Meanwhile our institutions don’t work so well.

Q: You’ve lived a good part of your life in Europe. Do you think, by contrast, that this collective amnesia is something particular to Americans?

A: I think it’s more deeply American. You know, we were once the country of unlimited opportunity. A lot of people didn’t share in it. But they shared in the idea. The American idea. No matter what your salary was, you were going to do four times better than your father. But we ceased to be socially mobile a long time ago.

Another reason we have no past is the fault of the educational system. And then if you have media, to put it politely, that is totally corrupt, easily bought, and if you have a president who tells lies or a whole society who tells lies about itself, then you have a basic unreality. People don’t know where to turn to. You talk to them about the electoral college, and they say, ‘What’s that?’ Oh, you didn’t learn about it in school? No. No, you didn’t? And when you ask the teacher about it, half the time he says, "Oh, it’s too complicated. Forget about it."

There is no great curiosity. There’s a certain edginess about why things go wrong. And they have to blame people. So there’s gay marriage over here. Black people over there. Or whether it is French people who eat garlic. There’s nothing but demonizing going on. We demonize entire groups of people. We demonize the entire Muslim world because it suits certain kinds of people to hate them.

There’s no reason to hate them. September 11 had nothing to do with the Muslim world except for a few people. Nor did any country have anything to do with it.

Q: Why in your new book do you compare the war on terrorism with what you call "the war on dandruff"?

A: You cannot have a war against an abstract noun — which is what terrorism is. I hate to be a grammarian here. But it’s perfect nonsense. When the Soviet Union folded and we stopped the war on communism, we pretended we had won it. We didn’t. We lost it. And the Russians lost it too. We were both broke, and we both gave up. But, we had to have a replacement for it to keep up this great military budget which started with Reagan and is now just out of control.

So we had the war on drugs, but no one wanted to win that. So we gave that up after running around setting fields afire in Mexico and wrecking Colombia. The war on drugs — another abstract noun that made no sense.

Then came the war on terrorism. You needed a trigger for it. And there are conspiracy theorists, of which I am not one, who think the Bush people had something to do with 9/11. And I have never seen any evidence that they did, though I have been accused of saying they did. And that’s nonsense — I can’t imagine them doing anything rather so effective, in its ghastly way.

But they needed a trigger. And suddenly there it was. And they were waiting for it. I mean, we have enough statements from Bush pre-9/11 about how he wanted to invade Iraq. Presumably to make up for his father, who didn’t go all the way to Baghdad to kill Saddam Hussein.

But Bush and Cheney have other fish to fry. They are oil and gas men, and they wanted those oil reserves in Iraq — the second biggest in the world. They wanted to be well-placed in that part of the world. As soon as Cheney got to Washington, he ordered a study wanting to know how much time do we have? How much oil do we have? He was told, by 2020, pretty much, it will be over with. We will run out. It will be over. And then there’s chaos.

So now it begins to make sense. The pre-emptive wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. And now Iran, which has got great oil reserves. And that is how we got into these places. And it has proved to be a great mistake. We’re caught again in a Vietnam-like situation. And the oil hasn’t been very good to us. That’s been our game.

Q: Didn’t we face a legitimate terrorist threat from Afghanistan after September 11 that justified our intervention there?

A: No. Look, when you get a hit by the likes of Osama bin Laden and a gang of religious crazies, you know what you do in a civilized world? You don’t make a war. You can only have a war on an organized country. So they invented a country that was guilty. First, it was Afghanistan and then it was Iraq. Why not Denmark or Norway? They had nothing to do with it, either.

I hate to sound like Kerry, but you go through international institutions. There’s something called INTERPOL, you know, which is very effective. You go to the police when you’ve been shot, robbed, vandalized. And you send out a warrant for Osama bin Laden and you capture him. The billions we spend on intelligence! Our intelligence wasn’t that bad in the field. There were some FBI types who knew something was up — some strange Arab guys who wanted to learn to fly airplanes but not land them. I mean, that would have even made me suspicious!

Q: But these wars are hardly the first pre-emptive ones in our history.

A: No, they’re not. We’ve assaulted our neighbors in the past. The worst case was 1846, when we picked a war with Mexico when we wanted to steal part of their property, known as California. President Polk said we must have California, so he went to war against Mexico and ripped off California, Arizona, New Mexico and a couple of other states.

A young lieutenant in that war, fresh from West Point, Ulysses S. Grant, years later after he was the savior of the Union, said, "I have always thought that nations, like individuals, must always pay for transgressions. And I have always thought that the Civil War, the bloodiest civil war in history, was retribution for our attack on a weaker neighbor, Mexico." God help us for what we have done now in the Middle East.

If we have this record of 150 years, then what is really different about the Iraqi adventure?
At first, we didn’t go beyond our boundaries of the North American continent. Until, of course, the Spanish-American War. And we ended up with Cuba, Puerto Rico and, of course, the Philippines, which made us an Asiatic power. That was a war of aggression. The Spanish empire was very weak, and we were going to help the local people, you know. We were going to give them freedom and independence. Instead, we made serfs out of the Filipinos — it’s a wonder they still speak to us for the way we killed 200,000 men, women and children.

So we’ve been down this road before. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to do it again. Especially now when we have suicide bombers, when we have nuclear enemies. There were no suicide bombers in the Philippines back then. But there are now through the entire Middle East, and they want to kill us and blow up our cities.

We are all at risk, because the worst president in American history, the most ignorant, the one with the least right to be president or hold any office at all, was by his rich friends put in the White House to grab for the likes of Halliburton, et cetera, the oil and gas reserves of the 21st century.

Many people went into the national election with many ideas in their heads, among them the notion that they were going to take back the Democratic Party as the party of the people. Were the Democrats ever that? Or is that more of our national mythology?

Yes, it’s part of our mythology. Power and money always go together. No matter what the name of the party that is in power, it got there usually by force and certainly by money. But certainly, the New Deal, which I lived through, was a time when we had a president who wanted to get the people out of the Depression. Most of his programs didn’t work. World War II did work, and he led us into that. We came out owning much of the world, hence the Global Empire. And that was done by President Roosevelt in the name of the people.

Since Roosevelt, I can’t think of a single president who represented the people or did much for them. We’re the only country that doesn’t have health care for the people, or a proper education system or day centers for working mothers. No other country like this! I have just come from a tour of Germany, Austria, Sweden . . . they are all ahead of us.

Q: This is "Old Europe," as they now call it.

A: Yes, Mr. Rumsfeld’s Old Europe is way ahead of Aging America and its aging structures in which the people pay big taxes and get nothing back from them except armaments and wars to enrich the oil companies.

How do you beat terror? Terror is everywhere. Terror is the government of the United States half the time in how it relates to its own people. Our government is no friend to us and has not been for some years. To smile with satisfaction, "Boy, we got Saddam Hussein." Oh yeah, I feel safer. Terror goes on. And Saddam Hussein does or does not. He’s irrelevant to the story.
But with constant repetition, constantly telling lies, Bush and Cheney have convinced the America people somehow they’re all mixed up together. And they hate us because we’re so good! We’re such a good people.

That is cretinism.

The Stunning Absence of Moral Accountability Under Bush

2004-12-05T07:37:00.000Z

More dire news for believers in the ideal of American democracy: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will remain at the U.S. Pentagon for the Bush regime’s second term.

It is a measure of the stunning absence of moral accountability under Bush that it is Colin
Powell who leaves the State Department, while Rumsfeld remain in office.

The acerbic-tongued 72-year-old Rumsfeld is one of the more hawkish members of the current fascist administration, and a chief architect of the upside-down morality of the Iraq colonial policy.

So far, Rumsfeld’s tenure has been marked by unanticipated postwar violence in Iraq, including the loss of an estimated 100,000 lives and more than 1,250 U.S. deaths, as well as enormous increases in spending on the military after the 9-11 attacks. Add to his character the stain of the Abu Ghraib prison scandals, not to mention other U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. Most recently there is the soldier captured on tape executing a wounded, unarmed prisoner in a mosque. Runners-up are a photograph of a two-year-old Fallujan in a hospital bed with one of his tiny legs blown off; a dead child lying in the street, clutching the headless body of an adult; and an emergency health clinic blasted to rubble.

Following the first invasion of Fallujah last spring, both al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya reported that hundreds of civilians had been killed. U.S. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld replied that this coverage was “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable ...” Words which perfectly describe U.S. policy for Iraq.

Immediately after the U.S. election of a deceitful charlatan as president, American troops once again laid siege to Falluja - but this time the attack included a new tactic: eliminating the doctors, journalists and clerics who focused public attention on civilian casualties last time around.

Among Rumsfeld’s career distinctions, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. Wonderful. Except Rumsfeld’s recent additions to his curriculum vitae would excite the approval of Hitler, Mao and Stalin.

The current Secretary of Defense should return the Presidential Medal of Freedom with his resignation immediately and be prepared to share the same fate of Henry Kissinger – the real life model for Dr. Strangelove, viewed by many worldwide as an unindicted terrorist and war criminal for his role as eager facilitator of mass murder, totalitarian repression and other atrocities during the Nixon and Ford Administrations. Kissinger doesn’t dare step foot in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh, Chile, Cyprus and East Timor.

Perhaps Rumsfeld could enlist the legal services of former Secretary of State James A. Baker – now a senior counselor and equity partner with the merchant bank and defense contractor the Carlyle Group, where he has an estimated $180 million stake.

None of this will happen because the Bush administration is a rehab center for tainted Republicans.

During Bush’s first term, Retired Admiral John Poindexter, a leading Iran-contra player, was placed in charge of a sensitive, high-tech, Pentagon intelligence-gathering operation aimed at reviewing massive amounts of individual personal data in order to uncover possible terrorists. Elliott Abrams, who pled guilty to lying to Congress in the Iran-contra scandal, was warmly embraced and handed a staff position in Bush's National Security Council. And, let’s not forget that Bush initially appointed Kissinger - a proven liar and wanted man - to chair a special 9/11 investigation.

Why are 59 million Americans satisfied to accept a Corleone-styled government?

The Sickening Atrocities of Fallujah

2004-12-01T05:55:00.000Z

It does feel horribly unsettling to be an American living in Germany, while the U.S. military enacts a similar carnage in Iraq as Hitler’s regime did when it swept through Europe in the early 1940s.

The American media takes no moral interest in the sickening atrocities of Fallujah, and the American public is only too happy to embrace ignorance and complacency toward this unjustified war.

Anwaar Hussain of the Pak Tribune, in the United Arab Emirates, places an important focus on President Bush and U.S. military operations in Fallujah.

“The crimson waters of the Euphrates are now emptying into the Persian Gulf the hopes and aspirations of innocent people whose lives were snuffed out on the orders of a man rewarded for his monumental crimes by his great nation.

Known as the "city of mosques" for its more than 200 mosques, Fallujah is also known for refusing to add Saddam’s name to the call for prayers from its ancient minarets. It is located on the banks of river Euphrates, the largest river in Southwest Asia. The 1700 m
iles long Euphrates is linked with some of the most important events in olden history.

The city of Ur, found at its mouth, was the birthplace of Abraham. On its banks stood the city of Babylon. In the past, the army of Necho was defeated on its banks by Nebuchadnezzar. Cyrus the Younger and Crassus perished after crossing it. Alexander traversed it and continued his journey eastward. Presently, George Bush’s forces are crossing and re-crossing it making its waters redder each time with the blood of Fallujah’s citizens.

Fallujah has been laid waste. It has been bombed, re-bombed, its citizens gunned down, its structures devastated by powerful weapons. It is a hell on earth of crushed bodies, shattered buildings and the reek of death.

In addition to the artillery and the warplanes dropping 500, 1000, and 2000-pound bombs, 70-ton Abrams Tanks and the murderous AC-130 Spectre gunship that can demolish a whole city block in less than a minute, the Marines had snipers crisscrossing the entire town firing at will at whatever moved outside the buildings. For those inside, the US troops were equipped with thermal sights capable of detecting body heat. Any such detection was eagerly assumed to indicate the presence of “insurgents” inviting a deadly salvo.

No one has an accurate idea of how many Iraqis—combatants and non-combatants—have been killed by the thousands of tons of explosives and bullets let loose upon the city. Mortuary teams collecting the dead rotting in the city streets are fighting the wandering dogs that are busy devouring their former masters. The hundreds buried beneath the rubble and debris will be dug out later. A US marine spokesman, Colonel Mike Regner, estimated 1,000 and 2,000 Iraqis dead. The world is awaiting the toll from more reliable sources with a wincing anticipation.

Eyewitnesses report human corpses littering the city’s streets, nibbled at by starving canines. Parents have been forced to watch their wounded children die and then bury their bodies in their gardens. An Iraqi journalist, reporting in the city for the BBC and Reuters, said: “I have seen some strange things recently, such as stray dogs snatching bites out of bodies lying on the streets. Meanwhile, people forage in their gardens looking for something to eat. Those that have survived this far are looking gaunt. The opposite is happening to the dead—left where they fell, they are now bloated and rotting...”

Some images that did manage to filter through the layers of American censorship include scenes of the devastated landscape of the city; the bloodied and fly-covered corpses of young Iraqi men lying in the streets or heaped in rows amidst the debris; a headless body; women and children escaping with the few possessions they have left; mortuary teams collecting the dead; and Fallujah infants being treated for horrific injuries in Baghdad hospitals. US general John Sattler declared: “We have liberated the city of Fallujah.”

The assault on Fallujah is a pure and simple Nazi-style collective punishment, not liberation. The city has been razed to the ground because its political, spiritual and tribal leaders, motivated by Iraqi patriotism and opposition to the presence of foreign troops in their country, organized a guerilla resistance to the US invasion.

The aim of the US assault is to make Fallujah a model to the rest of Iraq of what will happen to those thinking on similar lines. It is the leading thrust of an orgy of killing intended to crush and drive underground every voice of dissent and ensure that elections this coming January will throw up a weak-willed, pro-US toady regime. The American military is rumored to be planning similar attacks on scores of other Iraqi cities and towns.

Not a single major voice has been raised in the American media against the ongoing destruction of Fallujah. While much of the world recognizes something dreadful has occurred, the US press does not even bat an eyelash over the organized leveling of a city of 300,000 people. In none of the US media commentaries is there a single phrase of unease about the moral, or legal, questions involved in the attack on Fallujah. None have dared say it in as many words that the American military operation in the city is an unlawful act of aggression in an equally illegal, criminal, aggressive war.

The opposite is true in fact. Ralph Peters, the author of "Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace," a rabid Neocon mouthpiece and revered by the ruling Neocons, in his prominently placed November 4 New York Post article wrote: “We need to demonstrate that the US military cannot be deterred or defeated. If that means widespread destruction, we must accept the price. Most of Fallujah’s residents—those who wish to live in peace—have already fled. Those who remain have made their choice. We need to pursue the terrorists remorselessly...

“That means killing. While we strive to obey the internationally recognized laws of war (though our enemies do not), our goal should be to target the terrorists and insurgents so forcefully that few survive to raise their hands in surrender. We don’t need more complaints about our treatment of prisoners from the global forces of appeasement. We need terrorists dead in the dust. And the world needs to see their corpses...

“Even if Fallujah has to go the way of Carthage, reduced to shards, the price will be worth it. We need to demonstrate our strength of will to the world, to show that there is only one possible result when madmen take on America.”

Though the carnage carried out by Hitler’s regime was on a different scale than that now being committed by the Bush administration, there are striking parallels. For the first time since the Wehrmacht swept through Europe, the world is witnessing a major imperialist power launching an unjustifiable war, placing an entire people under military occupation and carrying out acts of collective and visible punishment against civilian populace. The US media’s wretched connivance in this deception is incredible, as incredible as the fact that this war, based on undeniable lies as it was, was sold to the American people as the gospel truth ordained by God.

To be honest, George Bush is not the first US president ordering the state’s machinery to pulverize nations and peoples abroad. Even a hurried analysis of the American’s government’s conduct in the last century makes for a most damning indictment. Out of the US’s past foreign policy woodwork, crawl out numerous invasions, bombings, overthrowing governments, suppressing movements for social change, assassinating political leaders, perverting elections, manipulating labor unions, manufacturing "news", selling blatant lies, death squads, torture, biological warfare, depleted uranium, drug trafficking, mercenaries ... you name it.

This terrorizing of nations and individuals by various US governments has been going on full bore since at least the late 1890s, when Americans obliterated a million Filipinos to keep them safe from the Spanish. 60 million Native Americans, the children of a lesser God, were exterminated by the orders of earlier administrations throughout the 19th century. The difference with past is that George Bush does it in the name of his God, a God far superior to any other and sanctioned fully by his coterie. Ironically, both George Bush and his nemesis, Osama Bin Laden, refer to God almost equal number of times in their public pronouncements.

The United States went into Afghanistan to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden. They killed 10,000 innocent Afghans but could not find their man. They went into Iraq to discover and eliminate Saddam’s WMDs. They killed tens of thousands of Iraqis but found no WMD. They laid siege to the city of Fallujah to kill or capture Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. The city and its inhabitants have been blown to smithereens but there is no Zarqawi. Is it not only too convenient? Next when they want to attack Pakistan, or Iran, they simply have to say that Bin Laden is taking refuge there. Just like the next Iraqi city awaiting the fate of Fallujah will be the latest refuge of Zarqawi; the WMDs too could next fly to Syria or may be even Saudi Arabia. Is one imagining things here? Or is it that the US imperialism is indeed now riding full time on the back of gargantuan lies?

After granting George Bush a carte blanche to do what he likes the American citizens, of course, continue their daily lives oblivious to what is being done in their name. Between their work places and the nearest fast food joints, they just do not have enough time to check back on the activities of the man who is playing the Terminator in the name of God and in their name.

Those who do get to know a little are in a constant state of denial. One thing is sure though. Just like in post-war Germany where some even denied the holocaust. "We didn't know what was happening" is bound to become a cliché that will one day be used to ridicule Americans who claim ignorance of the atrocities committed by their administration in their name. Ironically, Khomeini died trying to get people to see America as "the great Satan,” It took George W. Bush and his cohorts just four years to do exactly that, and not just in the eyes of the Muslim world.

As America sinks deeper into the heart of darkness, its thinking citizens need to jolt themselves out of their apathy. With each passing day their beloved America is scaling ever greater heights of hideous glories. The man in charge, George W. Bush, is actually living the throes of his apocalyptic dream of “I am become death-the destroyer of the worlds”. He codenamed his destruction of Fallujah as “Operation Phantom Fury”. But as the falsehood dies and gives way to truth, as all lies must one day, it will be the Iraqi dead that will form a legion of phantoms and would throng around Americans in a macabre dance to haunt them for decades. The fury of those phantoms will be hair raising.

Fallujah will enter history as the place where US imperialism carried out an offense of heinous proportions this November, a monstrous crime far beyond any possible forgiveness. The crimson waters of the Euphrates are now emptying into the Persian Gulf the hopes and aspirations of innocent people whose lives were snuffed out on the orders of a man rewarded for his monumental crimes by his great nation.

The Euphrates flows on.”

Revocation of American Indepenednce

2004-11-24T05:05:00.000Z

NOTICE OF REVOCATION OF INDEPENDENCE

Fawlty Towers, Torquay, Devon, England

To the citizens of the United States of America In the light of your failure to elect a competent President of the United States and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective today.

Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories except Utah, which she does not fancy. Your new prime minister (The Right Honourable Tony Blair, MP for the 97.85% of you who have until now been unaware that there is a world outside your borders) will appoint a Minister for America without the need for further elections. Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire will be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed.

To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:

1. You should look up "revocation" in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then look up "aluminium". Check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it. The letter 'U' will be reinstated in words such as 'favour' and 'neighbour', skipping the letter 'U' is nothing more than laziness on your part. Likewise, you will learn to spell 'doughnut' without skipping half the letters. You will end your love affair with the letter 'Z' (pronounced 'zed' not 'zee') and the suffix "ize" will be replaced by the suffix "ise". You will learn that the suffix 'burgh is pronounced 'burra' e.g. Edinburgh. You are welcome to respell Pittsburgh as 'Pittsberg' if you can't cope with correct pronunciation. Generally, you should raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels. Look up "vocabulary." Using the same twenty seven words interspersed with filler noises such as "like" and "you know" is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. Look up "interspersed." There will be no more 'bleeps' in the Jerry Springer show. If you're not old enough to cope with bad language then you shouldn't have chat shows. When you learn to develop your vocabulary then you won't have to use bad language as often.

2. There is no such thing as "US English". We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take account of the reinstated letter 'u' and the elimination of "-ize."

3. You should learn to distinguish the English and Australian accents. It really isn't that hard. English accents are not limited to cockney, upper-class twit or Mancunian (Daphne in Frasier). You will also have to learn how to understand regional accents - Scottish dramas such as "Taggart" will no longer be broadcast with subtitles. While we're talking about regions, you must learn that there is no such place as Devonshire in England. The name of the county is "Devon". If you persist in calling it Devonshire, all American States will become "shires" e.g. Texasshire, Floridashire, Louisianashire.

4. Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as the good guys. Hollywood will be required to cast English actors to play English characters. British sit-coms such as "Men Behaving Badly" or "Red Dwarf" will not be re-cast and watered down for a wishy-washy American audience who can't cope with the humour of occasional political incorrectness.

5. You should relearn your original national anthem, "God Save The Queen", but only after fully carrying out task 1. We would not want you to get confused and give up half way through.

6. You should stop playing American "football". There is only one kind of football. What you refer to as American "football" is not a very good game. The 2.15% of you who are aware that there is a world outside your borders may have noticed that no one else plays "American" football. You will no longer be allowed to play it, and should instead play proper football. Initially, it would be best if you played with the girls. It is a difficult game. Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which is similar to American "football", but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full kevlar body armour like nancies). We are hoping to get together at least a US Rugby sevens side by 2005. You should stop playing baseball. It is not reasonable to host an event called the 'World Series' for a game which is not played outside of America. Since only 2.15% of you are aware that there is a world beyond your borders, your error is understandable. Instead of baseball, you will be allowed to play a girls' game called "rounders" which is baseball without fancy team strip, oversized gloves, collector cards or hotdogs.

7. You will no longer be allowed to own or carry guns. You will no longer be allowed to own or carry anything more dangerous in public than a vegetable peeler. Because we don't believe you are sensible enough to handle potentially dangerous items, you will require a permit if you wish to carry a vegetable peeler in public.

8. July 4th is no longer a public holiday. November 2nd will be a new national holiday, but only in England. It will be called "Indecisive Day."

9. All American cars are hereby banned. They are crap and it is for your own good. When we show you German cars, you will understand what we mean. All road intersections will be replaced with roundabouts. You will start driving on the left with immediate effect. At the same time, you will go metric with immediate effect and without the benefit of conversion tables. Roundabouts and metrication will help you understand the British sense of humour.

10. You will learn to make real chips. Those things you call French fries are not real chips. Fries aren't even French, they are Belgian though 97.85% of you (including the guy who discovered fries while in Europe) are not aware of a country called Belgium. Those things you insist on calling potato chips are properly called "crisps". Real chips are thick cut and fried in animal fat. The traditional accompaniment to chips is beer which should be served warm and flat. Waitresses will be trained to be more aggressive with customers.

11. As a sign of penance 5 grams of sea salt per cup will be added to all tea made within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, this quantity to be doubled for tea made within the city of Boston itself.

12. The cold tasteless stuff you insist on calling beer is not actually beer at all, it is lager. From November 1st only proper British Bitter will be referred to as "beer", and European brews of known and accepted provenance will be referred to as "Lager". The substances formerly known as "American Beer" will henceforth be referred to as "Near-Frozen Gnat's Urine", with the exception of the product of the American Budweiser company whose product will be referred to as "Weak Near-Frozen Gnat's Urine". This will allow true Budweiser (as manufactured for the last 1000 years in Pilsen, Czech Republic) to be sold without risk of confusion.

13. From November 10th the UK will harmonise petrol (or "Gasoline" as you will be permitted to keep calling it until April 1st 2005) prices with the former USA. The UK will harmonise its prices to those of the former USA and the Former USA will, in return, adopt UK petrol prices (roughly $6/US gallon - get used to it).

14. You will learn to resolve personal issues without using guns, lawyers or therapists. The fact that you need so many lawyers and therapists shows that you're not adult enough to be independent. Guns should only be handled by adults. If you're not adult enough to sort things out without suing someone or speaking to a therapist then you're not grown up enough to handle a gun.

15. Please tell us who killed JFK. It's been driving us crazy.

Tax collectors from Her Majesty's Government will be with you shortly to ensure the orderly acquisition of all revenues due (backdated to 1776).

The Expatriate Experience

2004-11-22T12:26:00.000Z

We are Americans now among the Bahrain-exiles, forced to leave the country because of U.S. government policy enacted this past summer: the great evacuation. Presently, we reside near Wurzburg, located on the Main River in the Southwestern part of Germany.

What a difference a year makes.

It’s true; we are crazy to leave our home culture, friends and family, and live for several years in the Middle East – and now Central Europe. However, anyone attracted to wanderlust knows this can’t be helped. The dye was cast long ago.

We left Bahrain on September 3 with everything we could carry onto an airplane. This included several pieces of luggage and two small pet carriers for the hounds – Yorkshire Terriers. Everything else had to be left behind at our villa in Tubli – to be packed up later, which didn’t occur until October 10.

After we landed at the Frankfurt Airport, we had to juggle our luggage and pile into a train for Wurzburg. Welcome to Germany, and welcome to the life of expatriates.

Unlike Bahrain, finding a house is a formidable task in Germany. There is no housing boom with opulent villas geared for the wealthy and those expatriates with a bountiful housing allowance. Yet the prices are just as high as Bahrain and, as always, rents automatically increase by $300 monthly – once it’s obvious the interested party is an American. The game is the same everywhere.

We finally settled on a three-story house in the country, about 15 miles from Wurzburg. The farming village we know call home is Ilmspan, which boasts a church and two guest houses – more aptly described as inns that feature home-cooked food, beer and wine, and rooms for overnight lodging. A guest house is across the street from the church, with a sign advertising beer is served by the establishment – another major distinction from Bahrain. Germans do love their beer, and if this helps commune with God – so be it.

Little by little our household is shaping up, and it seems we are not quite refugees anymore. For instance, last week movers arrived with a 1,000 pounds of items dubbed as an “express shipment.” Forget clothes and cooking items. This delivery consisted primarily of electronics: computers, a television, a CD-DVD surround-sound system, and a microwave – plus bicycles. The computers are certainly important, yet the Armed Forces Network (AFN) decoder is highly coveted now that we are in Germany. This is our only chance at American programming. Among the reasons for selecting this house is the availability of a special AFN satellite on the roof – guaranteed to help lure Americans to this site and pay the high rent. No problem.

The “express shipment” was packed the same day as our household in Bahrain – October 10 …. however, these contents were shipped by cargo plane to Ramstein Air Force Base – which is about two hours from Wurzburg. Our main car, a 1999 Mercury Sable, is due here November 24, and the rest of our household items should be in Germany just before Christmas. Both these shipments are arriving by boat.

I’m still too new to this experience to offer any meaningful insights yet. However, this is what I’ve noticed so far:

- most Germans do not speak English. If you approach a German and ask: “sprechen sie English?” – most will respond: “nein.” However, if you simply say: “do you speak English?” – most will try and be obliging.

- Germans do seem to have a fetish about cleanliness and order. The government is very hardcore about sorting plastics, metals, glass and paper for recycling. In fact, there is a color-code for specifically bagged items. Starting in January, there will be steep fines if items are mixed. On Saturdays – in the villages, folks of the older generation may be seen vigorously sweeping the sidewalk in front of each respective residence. Yet, for all these anal qualities, Germans have no problem permitting accompanied dogs into restaurants.

All of this is in stark contrast to Bahrain, where every bathroom provided access to that strange little hose by the toilet so people may cleanse their genitals – and especially douche their asses, before entering the mosque and praying to Allah. Yet people discarded all manner of rubbish in the streets, nearby vacant property and straight into the ocean. I can’t tell you how many times I saw a Bahraini adult behind the wheel of a luxury car, the vehicle occupied by children, pull up to the edge of the Arabian Gulf in a residential area and toss bags of fast-food trash and other garbage into the water. After dark, small tanker trucks used to pull up near the shoreline of Tubli Bay – where we lived, and dumped human sewage into the ocean. The smell was absolutely putrid. However, the Bahraini attitude about tossing trash out windows of cars or even villas is that this created job security for their Muslim brothers, the lowly Pakistanis.

Not so in Germany, where everything is very tidy and proper. In Wurzburg, there are two Wal-Mart Super Centers. This is fairly nauseating, but such is the reach of American culture. Here, a familiar American product featuring a middle-aged, white bald man with an earring is not dubbed Mr. Clean. He is Mr. Proper.

- on Sundays, Germans do not work. It’s shut-down day. Stores are not open, not even Wal-Mart. It’s taboo – allegedly, to perform yard work or even wash a vehicle. Leisure activities only. In Ilmspan, people go for walks in the countryside. Near our property is a paved one-lane road that winds to the rear of the house and then up a hill and leads to who knows where. I have embarked with the hounds and attempted to pursue the path – but after a mile or so, I turn back toward home. Otherwise, it’s common to see folks on horseback trotting along even more obscure paths through distance fields.

At the foot of a slope, not far from our house, is a sizeable stone statue of Jesus nailed to the cross. Such an appealing image: a Western-looking man in a skimpy loincloth just dangling in the excruciating image of crucifixion [the ancient Romans did have a certain flair for torture]. I thought Ireland and Mexico had an abundance of Roman Catholic imagery incorporated into the landscape, but Germany has its share, also. And, I have no idea if we live in a Catholic or a Protestant region. From the north-side of our house, we can see the onion-domed steeple of a church in nearby Schonefeld [German for beautiful field]. And, stepping out into the street that leads from our house and onto the road out of this village, Ilmspan’s onion-domed steeple is clearly visible.

Most of my life I’ve tolerated Christianity, even professed major tenets. My early upbringing was a cafeteria-styled introduction to the Protestant viewpoint. After my baptism as a Roman Catholic, my mother shopped around Methodist, Presbyterian and even Christian Science Churches. The Christian Science Monitor is a fine newspaper, but Mary Baker Eddy was off-center. And, then, later in life, there was the Roman Catholic Church redux for me.

All in all, however, Christianity is just re-hashed Mediterranean mythology: Zeus/Jupiter fornicating with a female earthling. The supernatural beginning and end of Jesus of Nazareth places him squarely in the mix of other Greek legends. After Saul, better known as St. Paul, had his nervous breakdown on the road to Damascus and became one of the greatest entrepreneurs of the past 2,000 years, the mythology put on a new face. Emperor Constantine really sealed the deal with his conversion in 312, and thereafter emperors were the new popes, and senators were the new bishops.

Yet instead of providing hope and enlightenment, Christianity eventually plunged most of Europe into the Dark Ages. If there was a benefit to the Plague, perhaps it was that people began to realize God and his answer men, the Catholic hierarchy, had no salvation in mind at all. It was a supreme rip-off. What should one expect from a deity who has sex with a virgin earthling, and then sacrifices this son for the sins of mankind? Is this the kind of imaginary friend adults should embrace?

The underlying premise of Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Scientists is that God is perfect, and if man is created in God’s image then it stands to reason that man is perfect. Hence, there is no reason for physical illness and addictive traits: alcoholism, drugs, slutty behavior. In other words: it’s all good. [Step into a Wednesday evening prayer meeting of a Christian Science Church and be prepared to listen to testimonials from the believers who will offer astounding stories of faith over reason.] However, if man is really created in the image of God, then God is multicolored and multicultural. God is also heterosexual, bi-sexual, homosexual and even asexual. Likewise, God reflects all political ideologies and therefore cannot possibly be interested in legislating morality. But, of course, in an America based on the 59 million people who voted for Bush, God is interested in a constitutional amendment against gay marriage.

At least the myth of a fat man in a reindeer-powered sleigh showing up once a year with loads of presents is thoroughly more cheerful. Santa Claus, like Buddha, is that rare altruistic fellow – except Buddha really existed.

I raise this nonsense about Christianity because I received a recent letter from a long-time friend. He has finally abandoned decades of marijuana and pornography for Jesus. This was bound to happen. I am not without my own obsessive-compulsive traits – just ask my wife, but there’s nothing zealous about my fixations. My friend, on the other hand, has gone off the deep-end. Bible study classes, the whole routine. I have not really seen him since 1981, and that is a long damn time ago. Over the years, he’s re-married and has three sons – all slightly younger than my own. Two of the boys are twins. My friend admits the older of this second set of children is a pure miscreant – much like he was in adolescence.

As a 16-year-old, my friend had already been expelled from a Catholic boys’ boarding school in St. Louis, kicked out of both his well-to-do aunt’s house in Clayton and his parent’s house on Midway Island. He came to live with us in the fall of 1968, yet by early winter of 1969, he had exhausted his good will, dropped out of high school and went to live in a commune on McPherson Avenue – in the Central West End of St. Louis. For a while he worked as a male hustler around the boat house of Forest Park. These were the days when he was Holden Caulfield [The Catcher in The Rye] gone bad, really bad. Luckily, my friend was never arrested.

I can’t blame someone for solace, wherever it may be found. Nonetheless, I preferred the stoned, woe-is-me fellow, who once wrote some mighty interesting letters about his neurosis, as opposed to epistles sprinkled with “the Lord shows me the way.” I like to keep in mind that King James I – who commissioned the classic re-writing of the English Bible – built a beautiful palace for his lover, Lord Buckingham, despite being married and the father of Prince Charles [who was later beheaded as Charles I by those lovely Puritans after his defeat at the hands of Oliver Cromwell]. James I may be the only monarch in history to have both a mother [Mary, Queen of Scots] and a son beheaded. It doesn't seem like God helped the Stuarts much at all.

Perhaps the English have no cause to be squeamish over such considerations in Iraq.

Now that Bush has his Christian mandate he can steamroll through Fullajuh and show the Iraqis the real virtues of both Western democracy and Christian compassion. It’s all so sickening. And the results of the national election in America are the most sickening of all. No surprise that Colin Powell is on the way out; no matter how it plays in the media. And now for the Soviet-styled purges within the CIA – to eradicate disloyal members who leaked embarrassing and unflattering information about Bush doctrine on Iraq and the War on Terror in the fall campaign.

Still no sign of Osma bin Laden? The younger Bush still needs bin Laden at large for the benefits of the Fear Factor. The elder Bush needs to maintain profitable ties with the bin Laden family among the corrupt Carlyle Group. Don’t you know that Hollywood will now turns its back on Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 at Oscar nomination time, now that Bush is entrenched for four more years.