| To: zamboz who wrote (278) | 6/7/2009 6:55:15 PM | | From: LTK007 | | | | It's tragic the copyright thugs have been storming through UTube ripping everything out, even if it is as great a movie of Invasion of The Body Snatchers, all the way back to 1956 version--easily the greatest version..
This movie had many sources on Utube, one source had "The scary kiss" scene--the scene where Kevin McCarthy kisses Dana Wynter and her lips are frozen, cold/ no reaction,and Kevin Screams "they got you!" and she says yes Kevin, come join us--then the mad run into the nearest big city --the trailer is BS promo, the way they promoted this movie--including a huge lie "see as this panic moves from city to city sweeping the nation" RUBBISH--the movie ENDS BEFORE that actually happens--one the great aspects of this movie
It has been remade twice, the second one starring Donald Sutherland starts where the first one ends, Kevin McCarthy is in traffic banging on car windows "Screaming Your Next"--in one of those cars is Donald Sutherland.
So the second version starts where the first version ENDED.
This is a movie i believe is a one that can not ba a NOT see--an absolute MUST SEE, imo.
They do have its original trailer, so you actually get a glimpse of the close-- you get the idea of "Your Next!" scene that Kevin resprises at the open of the 1986 version--very CLEVER, and much appreciate by fans of the original.
i would buy this as a DVD in a twink if i didn't have every pulse of this already movie embedded in my mind---
i do have "my age" shock when i realize this major event in motion pictures is lost in the shadows of history for the young.
The campy and misleading trailer, but worth looking at.
youtube.com
<<Though I am more optimistic about Obama than yourself,>>
i am patient, you will feel the kick in the teeth eventually----you simply don't GRASP "it is all BS, now--you are living in'
But i am SURPRISED this remains your STAND as you have been exposed to so much and you STILL think GOOD OPTIMISTIC THOUGHTS of OBAMA----that in truth is just re-inforcing how POWERFUL the grip is on people REFUSING to think we are HNOT in a one party BS plutocracy.
Rick someday you will realize the seriousness of all this, your learning experience ahead will be painful.Sorry about that but that is how this will play out.
But i learn from you just how just severely people have fallen asleep, when someone as seemingly awake as you, is just missing the point.
You prove to me, this will end BADLY.Max
Rick, hen wil you be next? As Dr. Miles Bennett screams, and you shuffle your feet and say "Ah fiddle-dee-sticks" and like i STILL feel really good about Obama being OUR LEADER your still into the GOODNESS of This Hack POLITICIAN/this vacuous SMOOTHIE. And yes this is a democracy.
You still BELIEVE.
Yes you have got The Faith.
YOU WILL NOT ENJOY THIS BOARD, RICK,not AT ALL.
As i do NOT have your FAITH. Max |
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| To: LTK007 who wrote (280) | 6/7/2009 8:28:27 PM | | From: zamboz | | | | There could be worse, Max. Like more nutzo Republicans who totally dis science and whose only answer to economic problems is cutting taxes, free trade, deregulation and espousing that government can do nothing good at all. More anti-intellectuals would be living hell. Palin's pastor detected a witch in his home village in Africa. She believes all that crap. McCain is bad enough, but Palin could have been prez. We have to consider things that could have happened. At least there is more of a game in Washington. It is not a nice game. And understand that I have been disappointed. Like I said, progressives are wising up that Obama is not friendly to everything they want. They are going to have to fight for what they want. Libs expected to be hand fed.
Whatever the case, I am interested in the truth. I do not come to these boards to find agreement.
Just added "Body Snatchers" to my Netflix queue. It has been too long since I have seen it. And my daughter and son-in-law will enjoy it. "Ran", Kurosawa's interpretation of King Lear, will have to wait. I am a Hamlet guy anyway. When I finally get to the final act, all will be tragedy. <g> |
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| To: Crimson Ghost who wrote (279) | 6/7/2009 8:50:13 PM | | From: LTK007 | | | | CG, here is an end of a long essay about TheShoah/Holocaust by Tony Judt, he dedicated this essay to Hannah Arendt for her relentless commitment to write "To Disturb The PEACE, to BREAK with Conventional Wisdom, and write things that caused outrage" Such as her essay on the Banality of Evil.
Here Judt dares to write it is time for the Jewish Powers to cease and desist screaming Holocaust CONSTANTLY when ever they think they are under attack, Judt even suggests that The Holocaust be withdrawn as a MANDATORY subject of of study.
He is dedicating this to Hannah Arendt as he is writing this in the NYRB and knows it will cause outrage, you can just imagine how AIPAC reacted to this article--whew!!!
well i will just here give Judt's words without comment, this from the 2/14/2008 NYRB.
i will just add this for those that do not know Tony Judt is Jewish, and once a firmly committed zionist.
and thus give this quote that starts his essay.
"The first work by Hannah Arendt that I read, at the age of sixteen, was Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.[1] It remains, for me, the emblematic Arendt text. It is not her most philosophical book. It is not always right; and it is decidedly not her most popular piece of writing. I did not even like the book myself when I first read it—I was an ardent young Socialist-Zionist and Arendt's conclusions profoundly disturbed me. But in the years since then I have come to understand that Eichmann in Jerusalem represents Hannah Arendt at her best: attacking head-on a painful topic; dissenting from official wisdom; provoking argument not just among her critics but also and especially among her friends; and above all, disturbing the easy peace of received opinion. It is in memory of Arendt the "disturber of the peace" that I want to offer a few thoughts on a subject which, more than any other, preoccupied her political writings." Tony Judt
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From his eassay The Problem of Evil in Post-Europe
<<But in recent years the relationship between Israel and the Holocaust has changed. Today, when Israel is exposed to international criticism for its mistreatment of Palestinians and its occupation of territory conquered in 1967, its defenders prefer to emphasize the memory of the Holocaust. If you criticize Israel too forcefully, they warn, you will awaken the demons of anti-Semitism; indeed, they suggest, robust criticism of Israel doesn't just arouse anti-Semitism. It is anti-Semitism. And with anti-Semitism the route forward—or back—is open: to 1938, to Kristallnacht, and from there to Treblinka and Auschwitz. If you want to know where it leads, they say, you have only to visit Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Holocaust Museum in Washington, or any number of memorials and museums across Europe.
I understand the emotions behind such claims. But the claims themselves are extraordinarily dangerous. When people chide me and others for criticizing Israel too forcefully, lest we rouse the ghosts of prejudice, I tell them that they have the problem exactly the wrong way around. It is just such a taboo that may itself stimulate anti-Semitism. For some years now I have visited colleges and high schools in the US and elsewhere, lecturing on postwar European history and the memory of the Shoah. I also teach these topics in my university. And I can report on my findings.
Students today do not need to be reminded of the genocide of the Jews, the historical consequences of anti-Semitism, or the problem of evil. They know all about these—in ways their parents never did. And that is as it should be. But I have been struck lately by the frequency with which new questions are surfacing: "Why do we focus so on the Holocaust?" "Why is it illegal [in certain countries] to deny the Holocaust but not other genocides?" "Is the threat of anti-Semitism not exaggerated?" And, increasingly, "Doesn't Israel use the Holocaust as an excuse?" I do not recall hearing those questions in the past.
My fear is that two things have happened. By emphasizing the historical uniqueness of the Holocaust while at the same time invoking it constantly with reference to contemporary affairs, we have confused young people. And by shouting "anti-Semitism" every time someone attacks Israel or defends the Palestinians, we are breeding cynics. For the truth is that Israel today is not in existential danger. And Jews today here in the West face no threats or prejudices remotely comparable to those of the past—or comparable to contemporary prejudices against other minorities.
Imagine the following exercise: Would you feel safe, accepted, welcome today as a Muslim or an "illegal immigrant" in the US? As a "Paki" in parts of England? A Moroccan in Holland? A beur in France? A black in Switzerland? An "alien" in Denmark? A Romanian in Italy? A Gypsy anywhere in Europe? Or would you not feel safer, more integrated, more accepted as a Jew? I think we all know the answer. In many of these countries—Holland, France, the US, not to mention Germany—the local Jewish minority is prominently represented in business, the media, and the arts. In none of them are Jews stigmatized, threatened, or excluded.
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If there is a threat that should concern Jews—and everyone else—it comes from a different direction. We have attached the memory of the Holocaust so firmly to the defense of a single country—Israel—that we are in danger of provincializing its moral significance. Yes, the problem of evil in the last century, to invoke Arendt once again, took the form of a German attempt to exterminate Jews. But it is not just about Germans and it is not just about Jews. It is not even just about Europe, though it happened there. The problem of evil—of totalitarian evil, or genocidal evil—is a universal problem. But if it is manipulated to local advantage, what will then happen (what is, I believe, already happening) is that those who stand at some distance from the memory of the European crime—because they are not Europeans, or because they are too young to remember why it matters—will not understand how that memory relates to them and they will stop listening when we try to explain.
In short, the Holocaust may lose its universal resonance. We must hope that this will not be the case and we need to find a way to preserve the core lesson that the Shoah really can teach: the ease with which people—a whole people—can be defamed, dehumanized, and destroyed. But we shall get nowhere unless we recognize that this lesson could indeed be questioned, or forgotten: the trouble with lessons, as the Gryphon observed, is that they really do lessen from day to day. If you do not believe me, go beyond the developed West and ask what lessons Auschwitz teaches. The responses are not very reassuring.
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There is no easy answer to this problem. What seems obvious to West Europeans today is still opaque to many East Europeans, just as it was to West Europeans themselves forty years ago. Moral admonitions from Auschwitz that loom huge on the memory screen of Europeans are quite invisible to Asians or Africans. And, perhaps above all, what seems self-evident to people of my generation is going to make diminishing sense to our children and grandchildren. Can we preserve a European past that is now fading from memory into history? Are we not doomed to lose it, if only in part?
Maybe all our museums and memorials and obligatory school trips today are not a sign that we are ready to remember but an indication that we feel we have done our penance and can now begin to let go and forget, leaving the stones to remember for us. I don't know: the last time I visited Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, bored schoolchildren on an obligatory outing were playing hide-and-seek among the stones. What I do know is that if history is to do its proper job, preserving forever the evidence of past crimes and everything else, it is best left alone. When we ransack the past for political profit—selecting the bits that can serve our purposes and recruiting history to teach opportunistic moral lessons—we get bad morality and bad history.
Meanwhile, we should all of us perhaps take care when we speak of the problem of evil. For there is more than one sort of banality. There is the notorious banality of which Arendt spoke—the unsettling, normal, neighborly, everyday evil in humans. But there is another banality: the banality of overuse—the flattening, desensitizing effect of seeing or saying or thinking the same thing too many times until we have numbed our audience and rendered them immune to the evil we are describing. And that is the banality—or "banalization"—that we face today.
After 1945 our parents' generation set aside the problem of evil because—for them—it contained too much meaning. The generation that will follow us is in danger of setting the problem aside because it now contains too little meaning. How can we prevent this? How, in other words, can we ensure that the problem of evil remains the fundamental question for intellectual life, and not just in Europe? I don't know the answer but I am pretty sure that it is the right question. It is the question Hannah Arendt asked sixty years ago and I believe she would still ask it today. That ends the Tony Judt esay.
Notes
[1] This article is adapted from a lecture delivered in Bremen, Germany, on November 30, 2007, on the occasion of the award to Tony Judt of the 2007 Hannah Arendt Prize.
[2] "Nightmare and Flight," Partisan Review, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1945), reprinted in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, edited by Jerome Kohn (Harcourt Brace, 1994), pp. 133–135.
[3] For a harrowing instance, see Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton University Press, 2001).
[4] For a fuller discussion of this shift in mood, see the epilogue ("From the House of the Dead") in my Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Penguin, 2005).
[5] To be sure, Catholic thinkers have not shared this reluctance to engage with the dilemma of evil: see, for example, Leszek Kolakowski's essays "The Devil in History" and "Leibniz and Job: The Metaphysics of Evil and the Experience of Evil," both recently republished with other essays by Kolakowski in My Correct Views on Everything (St. Augustine's, 2005; discussed in The New York Review, September 21, 2006). But in the metaphysical confrontation memorably portrayed by Thomas Mann, we moderns have typically opted for Settembrini over Naphta.
[6] Essays in Understanding, pp. 271–272.
[7] See Idith Zertal, Israel's Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, translated by Chaya Galai (Cambridge University Press, 2005), especially Chapter 1, "The Sacrificed and the Sanctified.">> |
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| To: zamboz who wrote (281) | 6/7/2009 9:15:26 PM | | From: LTK007 | | | | If you understand me AT ALL you would already know i consider these words as a dangerous COP OUT << There could be worse, Max>>
i have argued with strength, and with some , what is obvious to me mathmatical logic, that Lesser of two Evils as a point of making a choice is AS DANGEROUS A CONVENTIONAL WISDOM amongst the human race.
You are are one those people, and i DISDAIN that "Logic"---it is not logic, it manifest wimpitude of mind to believe such SH-T.
i now quote what i just put in my last post to CG.
The words of Tony Judt.
"But in the years since then I have come to understand that Eichmann in Jerusalem represents Hannah Arendt at her best: attacking head-on a painful topic; dissenting from official wisdom; provoking argument not just among her critics but also and especially among her friends; and above all, disturbing the easy peace of received opinion. It is in memory of Arendt the "disturber of the peace" that I want to offer a few thoughts on a subject which, more than any other, preoccupied her political writings."
i will NOT ever allow myself, because i like person, EVER lessen my words
Such as it "it manifest wimpitude of mind to believe such SH-T."
i will NOT lower myself again to give the mathmatic logic to why i am, as the last time i did i realized had had written that incredibly was not grasped by certain others as i was MOCKED.
It was the mocking of me by people that WANT to remain STUPID.
A dedicated LAZINESS of mind.
It should be OBVIOUS the choosing of the lesser of two evils leads directly, just more slowly to The Greater Evil.
i myself, of myself, actually can NOT comprehend minds that don't get this, but it is obvious the VAST VAST majority can't grasp this--so welcome friend, you have plenty of company in your "it could be worse', you are ONE WITH THE VAST MAJORITY.
Now go back to the President Obama thread, and be a weenie wimp wimp "Love me i am a Liberal" and leave this RAD alone.
Max
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| To: zamboz who wrote (281) | 6/8/2009 1:52:24 AM | | From: LTK007 | | | | Rick i should state that i got an e-mail that supports your view.
i will not identify this poster.
i end up saying i am placing you and this person on ignore, and say why.
Ignore does not mean BANNED.
<<You obviously agree wirh Rick.
i have thought about this DEEPLY, years, i need not reconsider.
i will go to my grave refusing to agree with the choosing the lesser of two evils argument as rational.i call it Sophie's Choice. Sophie was always comprising , did not have fixed values, in the end she got the choice of choosing which of her children dies.
One MUST NOT vote if both candidates are counter to one's deepest values.
By voting the lesser of two evils is to support the continuual degeneration of the human race.
i retract NOTHING
If this country had a committed group to refuse to vate when there is no real choice could lead to a revolution.
But Bing/Farrell in that Terminator/Twitter post presents the reality, such that this revolution to greater values will NEVER happen.
"10. You'll forget ... you can fight back, but the will is gone
Bing ends gently: "We just forgot all this stuff. Stuff? What stuff?" ... fade to black."
Your post was a superflously polite way of saying i am "full of shit" Believe me i don't need coffee and to reconsider my post to Rick
So, O.K., we have an understanding.
You like living by LOWER STANDARDS than i.That's your choice.
Like Rick, you will learn in time, what your support of "This Democracy" and thus your support of this plutocracy will end.
We are heading for a bad end.
i must demonstrate the depth of my conviction by placing both and Rick on ignore.
Peace, Max
p.s. the putting on Ignore is the ONLY way i can get the message out, i have deep conviction that the good hearted OPTIMIST can't can't handle, as they still have The Faith in Political Man.
Why communicate??? There is no reason, there is an ABYSS between us, why waste words in debate?????
i will later dig up a brilliant article from Harper's describing how utterly fallacious the idea we have democracy in the U.S. and depicts this country is but a process of a diseased political system.>>
John Foster Wallace view that in the end the POTUS becomes a Madison Avenue product is at hand.>>
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| To: zamboz who wrote (285) | 6/8/2009 9:15:43 AM | | From: zamboz | | | | That said about lesser of evil arguments, it is important to recognize what has not happened. Taleb says as much. What has not happened: a new Dark Age where government gets populated by those who believe the earth is only 6,000 years old. We were close to that. The Justice Department was being staffed by those people who graduated from Pat Robertson's "law school."
Another thing that did not happen. Wall Street did NOT get Social Security like they wanted. You can bet it all would have been plowed into those AAA CDOs. Maybe the party would still be going. I mention this because some argue that the Wall Street oligarchy has complete control. They do not. |
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| From: LTK007 | 6/8/2009 10:12:53 AM | | | | | | This is my 2nd to last post on this thread.
<<From: GONE1001 12/1/2008 2:20:25 PM
3 Recommendations of 286
As of today i am satisfied Arthur Silber's Iron Law as been upheld:
<<Silber's Iron Law:
Any individual who rises to the national political level is, of necessity and by definition, committed to the authoritarian-corporatist state. The current system will not allow anyone to be elected from either of the two major parties who is determined to dismantle even one part of that system.>>
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To: Poet who wrote (6031) 11/6/2008 1:25:53 PM
From: GONE1001 of 6074
The Triumph of the White, Male Ruling Class (PartI): One Fucking Great Country by Arthur Silber
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(editorial comment preface:
Arthur SILBER is one the few bloggers on the web that actually has a deep soul and hyper-sensitivity to what is truth and idiocy and i thank him for writing something i can endorse personally. This a declaration to those that think they are participants in a democratic process , those i rank on the level of the duly conditioned and have been sufficiently dimmed to having awareness of realities.
Even if one vote for McCain or Obama i state you are voting in each case for underlyingly the same , and are paricipating in an inherently RACIST view as "The myth of American exceptionalism is an inherently, necessarily racist vision."(quote from SILBER)
i, Max, charge that the Bourgeois Class are the #1 enablers of the Ruling Class.
Those thinking voting for Obama or McCain means CHANGE are in darkness, you are unaware you are just bots in a fraudulent game.------------------max)
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The Link
href='http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2008/06/triumph-of-white-male-ruling-class-i.html' target='_blank'>http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2008/06/triumph-of-white-male-ruling-class-i.html
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The Triumph of the White, Male Ruling Class (PartI): One Fucking Great Country
by Arthur Silber
To return to my opening point: let us draw a distinction between the candidates' biological identities and what we might term their functional identities. McCain is a white man; no issue arises there. I am well aware that Hillary Clinton is biologically a woman, as I know that Barack Obama is biracial in hereditary terms. By "functional identity," I refer to the role all these candidates have chosen to play, in cultural and political terms. (Please note that what follows is not intended to mean that Clinton has not been the target of misogyny or that Obama has not been the target of racism. They have both been the targets of viciously irrational beliefs, for it is not a question of either-or on this point. I'll discuss this in detail in future parts of this essay.) Because all three of these politicians have chosen to engage in national politics at the highest level, they have no choice about enthusiastically adopting all the indicia of the ruling class, for indeed they are the ruling class. That is, they have no choice if they want to win. And all three of them assuredly want to win (even if one of them seems to be out of the running for the moment, but much can happen between now and November, and even between now and August).
Reflect for just a moment about what it is they want to win so desperately. Each of these three persons wants to be the most powerful ruler in the world. Given the nature of the weapons that will be at their disposal, they want to be the most powerful ruler in all of history, with the power to fundamentally transform human history and perhaps even to end it in significant part. Even if you believed that you acted righteously, with justice and truth on your side (let us set aside for the moment how one can believe that the power to murder millions of innocent people can ever be thought to be right or just, although I do not believe such considerations should ever be set aside), would you want power of that kind? If you would, I hope never to meet you.(This fits my view and Kurt Vonnegut's view, that to seek the world thrones of power REQUIRES the seeker to be psycopathic--the willingness to lie befuddle charm and con and huckster relentlessly to get The Throne of Ruling Class and all its perks and glory and motifs of evil. You the voters are just serfs, little obedient servants in a farce.The farce this is about democracy, rather than actually being about who next sits at the Throne of The Ruling Class--max) For any person who actively seeks the power of life and death over just one other human being, let alone millions of people, is deeply, irrevocably damaged in psychological terms. If we use the term "normal" to designate those goals and motives that can generally be described as supportive of individual life and happiness, no one who wants to be president of the United States is remotely close to normal. When you consider the years of relentless, soul-destroying ambition that are required to approach the office of president, together with the indefensible compromises, the endless lies, and the constant exercise of power over others in less extreme forms, anyone who deeply desires to be president verges on a constant state of insanity.
Yet one of these terrifyingly deranged people will, in fact, be the next president. Many Americans are excited, even thrilled, about the prospect, which tells you a rather important fact about most Americans, actually many important facts. I have numerous reasons for dreaming of a stateless world. There are others, but these are among the most critical of them.
As I have discussed in detail, there are unquestionably policy differences between the two major political parties, but those differences concern only derivative issues. On the points of greatest significance, the ruling class adheres to a consistent, monolithic worldview; the goals on which they all agree are a corporatist-authoritarian state at home, and unending interventions abroad, using military force as and on the scope required. (On the characteristics and dynamics of the ruling class, see "The Elites Who Rule Us," "It's Called the Ruling Class Because It Rules," "Blinded by the Story," "Once More Into the Land of the Blind," and the other essays linked in those articles.)
In general terms, the worldview that allegedly justifies the numerous, repeated acts of invasion, bombing, murder, genocide and torture engaged in by the United States government goes like this:
The West has the answer to successful human life. Since it does, and because certain elements in the rest of the world have now chosen to attack us on our own ground (and never mind that we have invaded and ruled over vast portions of the rest of the world since time immemorial), we must enlighten those benighted portions of the globe in our defense. Our chosen method of enlightenment is brute military force, to be deployed even against countries that did not threaten us. The lack of a genuine threat is no argument against spreading our version of "civilization," for our mission is grounded not only in self-defense: it is also a moral mission. Our success and our "peace" directly correlate to our virtue. Those countries and those civilizations that do not enjoy the same success and peace are without virtue. In the most extreme (and, one could argue, most consistent) version of this tale, non-Western parts of the world are less than human -- and they are subhuman by choice. They are immoral, and sometimes even evil. Since we represent the good and they represent the evil, we are surely entitled to improve them, by invasion and bombing if necessary. If they do not threaten us today, they might at some indeterminate time in the future. And while we might kill many innocent civilians in our campaign of civilization, those who survive will be infinitely better off than they would have been otherwise.( Frank Rich, classic example of a powerful "liberal" that really thinks America The Good, we just were sdtupid to enter Iraq---the genocide aspect of it seems to evade him. Frank Rich i sense is your classic believer in Secular Americanus Sanctum--max)) Besides, how "innocent" can any of them be -- since they are members of inferior, less than fully human civilizations, and since they are so by choice?
This story may have the virtue of simplicity and the attractiveness of notions that support a faltering sense of righteousness -- but it is also grievously, terribly wrong. It ignores the long sweep of history and complex questions of philosophy, morality and politics. ... It should be noted that, besides being wrong for countless reasons, this story contains the seeds of immense destructiveness. The destruction we have seen in the last few years may only be the prelude to infinitely greater destruction still to come. ...
The fable peddled after 9/11 addressed questions dealing with the entire world. The wake of Hurricane Katrina unmasked a corollary to this tale. This time, the storyline was contained within our own borders -- but it was no less ugly for that. In fact, the domestic fable that has taken hold in large parts of our media and among many so-called "respectable" intellectuals has confirmed that ancient hatreds have never left us. Those hatreds reveal the most virulent form of racism -- and they ought to give pause to all those who champion the kind of "civilization" they contend we are morally justified in exporting by means of missiles, bombs and bullets.
That final point concerning racism is explored more fully in, "Myths of New Orleans: Poor, Bad Blacks Who Got What They Deserved."
As the above excerpt briefly outlines, the myth of American exceptionalism is an inherently, necessarily racist vision. I indicated in a recent essay that the more accurate and comprehensive phrase would be: the myth of white American exceptionalism. (I leave for another time a discussion of a very complex subject: how the concept of "whiteness" itself is an intentionally inexact, infinitely malleable one, a concept subject to continual revision and reconstruction, but always to the benefit of the ruling class. If you want to read more on this issue, I recommend Matthew Frye Jacobson's book, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race.)
In "Racist Nation," I wrote:
We are troubled by a still deeper conflict, between our preferred vision of ourselves and the facts of our history. We see ourselves as citizens of the greatest and most civilized nation in all of history. Our nation is also the most moral country in history, and we as individuals are exemplars of personal virtue. The United States represents Absolute Good, or as close to it as humanity will come. (I've discussed this mythology in a number of essays. See, for example, "The National Myth that Sustains Us -- and Its Inevitable Racism," "A 'Redeemer Nation,' with Some Explaining to Do," and "Myths of New Orleans.")
People who are Good cannot be racists. Obviously, many of us are. What to do.
This sanitized version of our history ignores or unforgivably minimizes the genocide of Native Americans, the slaughter and enslavement of African-Americans, a century following the Civil War of government-enforced segregation, discrimination against Jews, the Irish, Italians, Germans, and Hispanic immigrants today -- yet all of this is set aside so the myth can continue.
It also ignores another manifestation of the racism that inevitably proceeds from our mythologized self-assessment: the racism that has permeated our foreign policy for over a hundred years.
Vicious, murderous racism lay at the core of the war of aggression waged against Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century (see, "The American Myth Continued"), it was repeated in the disgusting and unforgivable war of aggression waged in the Philippines (see, "The Mythology of the 'Good Guy' American"), it would be revealed again in both World Wars, in the Vietnam war, and in almost every war ever waged by the United States government. With the exception of World War II, not one of those wars was genuinely defensive in nature, not in any respect whatsoever. Every one of them was instigated by the ruling class, to open up and/or strengthen markets for those American business interests with extensive connections to government, to establish and consolidate American "influence" (i.e., control), to make American hegemony unassailable, and to "civilize" The Other, who was always characterized -- and hated, despised and targeted for submission or, failing that, destruction -- because he was inferior, less than, not fully human. The United States government sanctifies each American death -- while completely disregarding and lying about the realities of slaughter in war -- and invariably employs American deaths as an additional excuse to continue the slaughter of The Other. At the same time, deaths of The Other are rarely even mentioned.
All of this is now repeated in Iraq. The United States government -- aided by a fully compliant, supportive Congress, which enabled and continues to fund this ongoing act of monstrous barbarity even now -- has unleashed genocide, torture and the destruction of an entire country. Because the American ruling class believes that "the American model of society is destined to dominate the world, by one means or another, since it is held to be the culmination of human development," it cannot possibly be the case that the United States itself is fundamentally wrong. Whatever fault and blame are involved cannot belong to the American government. Any and all important failures must unquestionably be the fault of The Other.
So says Hillary Clinton:
Our troops did the job they were asked to do. They got rid of Saddam Hussein. They conducted the search for weapons of mass destruction. They gave the Iraqi people a chance for elections and to have a government. It is the Iraqis who have failed to take advantage of that opportunity.
So said Barack Obama just last week:
It's not change when [McCain] promises to continue a policy in Iraq that asks everything of our brave men and women in uniform and nothing of Iraqi politicians..."
The condescending superiority of this perspective is unassailable and unchangeable. (In yet another loathsome example of the identical mentality, John Kerry has also said the same thing.)
Listen up, Obama, you cheap, lying fraud: the United States government launched a criminal war of aggression against a nation that never threatened us. It continues a bloody, murdering occupation which does nothing but worsen the agony of the Iraqi people. We have no right to be in Iraq at all. We never did. *****The actions of the United States government have led to a genocide of world historical proportions.*****
Genocidal murderers and those who support and enable them -- as you do, Obama, since you vote to fund this continuing crime -- do not get to "ask" one single goddamned fucking thing of their victims. Not. One. Single. Goddamned. Fucking. Thing.
Get it, you pathetic little asshole?
Ah, I must correct myself. Genocidal murderers and those who support and enable them do get to ask one thing: they can beg all the victims for their forgiveness. Otherwise, get out in a matter of months. Not just "combat troops," but every last American -- out. And, no: genocidal murderers and those who support and enable them do not get to decide how to "responsibly" leave the scene of their own crimes. What, exactly, do genocidal murderers and those who support and enable them know about behaving "responsibly"?
It continues to amaze me that matters of this kind must be explained over and over again -- and that the denial of both the American ruling class and most Americans remains impenetrable.( Don't be amazed Arthur, they are what they are, and that ain't good.--max) That is a measure of the depravity of this nation today. In terms of the conduct of our government and what most Americans are willing to accept, we are a nation without any sense of morality, without the smallest bit of decency or humanity, completely incapable of seeing and acknowledging the horrors we inflict on others. If the United States should attack Iran in the current circumstances -- an attack which no one is doing anything of significance to even try to stop, not the Democrats, not the useless progressive bloggers, no one -- our journey into hell will be complete. The United States will find its place among the most monstrous nations in all of history.
I should mention one further point about Iraq specifically. The American ruling class's patronizing, narcissistic, racist, homicidal impulses force them into denying simple truths that should be obvious to any semi-honest and semi-decent human being. Patrick Cockburn wrote the following some time ago. It remains true today in all essential ways:
One theme has been constant throughout the past three-and-a-half years - the Iraqi government has always been weak. For this, the US and Britain were largely responsible. They wanted an Iraqi government which was strong towards the insurgents but otherwise compliant to what the White House and Downing Street wanted. All Iraqi governments, unelected and elected, have been tainted and de-legitimised by being dependent on the US. This is as true of the government of the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki today as it was when sovereignty was supposedly handed back to Iraq under the prime minister Iyad Allawi in June 2004. Real authority had remained in the hands of the US. The result was a government whose ministers could not move outside the Green Zone. They showed great enthusiasm for press conferences abroad where they breathed defiance at the insurgents and agreed with everything said by Mr Bush or Tony Blair.
The government can do nothing because it only came into existence after ministries were divided up between the political parties after prolonged negotiations. Each ministry is a bastion of that party, a source of jobs and money. The government can implement no policy because of these deep divisions. The government cannot turn on the militias because they are too strong.
In brief: what Obama and the rest of the ruling class propose to "ask" of Iraqi politicians is that they do exactly as the U.S. government demands with regard to every issue that concerns the American ruling class itself. Iraqi politicians cannot form a genuinely independent, autonomous government -- because the U.S. ruling class has forbidden them to do so. That is not what the ruling class wants, and it was never what they wanted. What they want is an obedient, compliant colony, regardless of the official designation they might use.
This is only one indication, albeit a revealing one, of the numerous ways in which Obama has enthusiastically made himself into a full-fledged member of the American ruling class. It is not even the most significant way in which he has done so; I will address Obama's complete identification with the beliefs, motives, and goals of the ruling class in the next installment. (For a preview, see "Obama's Whitewash," all of the "Choosing Sides" series, and the other essays linked in those pieces.)
And remember: the beliefs, motives, and goals of the American ruling class have remained basically unchanged for well over a century. That means they are the beliefs, motives, and goals of a white ruling class. Obama may be biracial in hereditary terms, but in every significant respect, he is as white as any black man can be -- ideologically, politically, and with regard to every critical policy issue.
As they say, dear reader: only in America. It's one fucking great country. Arthur SILBER >> |
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| To: LTK007 who wrote (287) | 6/8/2009 10:41:29 AM | | From: LTK007 | | | | This is my LAST POST, the sickest joke of all, how the U.S. sells sells and sells that it is America The Good, the better than the rest, the great America.
i open with an article posted by CG, and follow with Harold Pinter's great speech given on receiving the Nobel Prize For Literature.
Harold Pinter died 12/25/2008.
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<<From: Crimson Ghost 3/7/2008 10:34:32 AM
Read Replies (1) of 3906
The Iraq War Is Wrong. Why Can't Candidates Admit It?
By Norman Solomon 06 marzo 2008
Maybe it sounded good when politicians, pundits and online fundraisers talked about American deaths as though they were the deaths that mattered most.
Maybe it sounded good to taunt the Bush administration as a bunch of screw-ups who didn't know how to run a proper occupation.
And maybe it sounded good to condemn Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush for ignoring predictions that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to effectively occupy Iraq after an invasion.
But when a war based on lies is opposed because too many Americans are dying, the implication is that it can be made right by reducing the American death toll.
When a war that flagrantly violated international law is opposed because it was badly managed, the implication is that better management could make for an acceptable war.
When the number of occupying troops is condemned as insufficient for the occupying task at hand, the White House and Pentagon may figure out how to make shrewder use of U.S. air power — in combination with private mercenaries and Iraqis who are desperate enough for jobs that they're willing to point guns at the occupiers' enemies.
And there's also the grisly and unanswerable reality that Iraqis who've been inclined to violently resist the occupation can no longer resist it after the U.S. military has killed them.
If the ultimate argument against the war is that it isn't being won, the advocates for more war will have extra incentive to show that it can be won after all.
If a steady argument against the war maintains that it was and is wrong — that it is fundamentally immoral — that's a tougher sell to the savants of Capitol Hill and an array of corporate-paid journalists.
But by taking the political path of least resistance — by condemning the Iraq war as unwinnable instead of inherently wrong — more restrained foes of the war helped to prolong the occupation that has inflicted and catalyzed so much carnage. The antiwar movement is now paying a price for political shortcuts often taken in the past several years.
During a long war, condemned by some as a quagmire, that kind of dynamic has played out before. "It is time to stand back and look at where we are going," independent journalist I. F. Stone wrote in mid-February 1968, after several years of the full-throttle war on Vietnam. "And to take a good look at ourselves. A first observation is that we can easily overestimate our national conscience. A major part of the protest against the war springs simply from the fact that we are losing it. If it were not for the heavy cost, politicians like the Kennedys Robert and Edward and organizations like the ADA the liberal Americans for Democratic Action would still be as complacent about the war as they were a few years ago."
With all the recent media spin about progress in Iraq, many commentators say that the war has faded as a top-level "issue" in the presidential race. Claims of success by the U.S. military have undercut precisely the antiwar arguments that were supposed to be the most effective in political terms — harping on the American death toll and the inability of the occupying troops to make demonstrable progress at subduing Iraqi resistance and bending the country's parliament to Washington's will.
These days, Hillary Clinton speaks of withdrawing U.S. troops, but she's in no position to challenge basic rationales for war that have been in place for more than five years. At least Barack Obama can cite his opposition to the war since before it began. He talks about changing the mentality that led to the invasion in the first place. And he insists that the president should hold direct talks with foreign adversaries.
The best way to avoid becoming disillusioned is to not have illusions in the first place. There's little reason to believe that Obama is inclined to break away from the routine militarism of U.S. foreign policy. But it's plausible that grassroots pressure could pull him in a better direction on a range of issues.(Edit by Max:Grassroots Pressure? How many actually have a problem with U.S.imperialism/militarism---far FEWER than one thinks, as i have discovered on so many "so-called" progressives are indeed phonies. They will vote in a twink for someone that is an imperialist/militarist as long as he supports Global Warming Programs--that how VACUOUS can a person GET?!!!--max) He seems to be appreciably less stuck in cement than the other candidates who still have a chance to become president on January 20, 2009.>>
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my response to that post
<<To: Crimson Ghost who wrote (1600) 3/7/2008 12:32:08 PM
From: GONE1001 of 3906
response+Pinter's Great Speech:
It is now politically incorrect to suggest the Iraq War is wrong on grounds of morality, or lack of humanity or gawd forbid,it be suggested it is a criminal war.
The politicians must stick to the rules, no matter how wrong something might seem, it is NOT morally wrong, it is not crimes against humanity, we are America, the proud, the decent, the better than the rest of the world.
No matter the reality, this BS must be maintained by our politicians.
And they stick to this line of "we are not doing evil" because to do so would mean political suicide as the vast majority of americans do not wish to consider they are citizens of a country that does evil.
Reality sucks, the world itself runs on lies.
Here again is Harold Pinter's great Nobel Speech, where speaks of the incredible ability of the U.S. has had to do evil and NOT have recognized as evil.
That we have been a country committed evil for well over 50- years and getting away with it.Max
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Harold PINTER Speech, i post again, i will do so once a year.
Harold Pinter:The Nobel Prize in Literature 2005
Nobel Lecture
Art, Truth & Politics
*****************************
In 1958 I wrote the following:
'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'
I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?
Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.
I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.
Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.
The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is 'What have you done with the scissors?' The first line of Old Times is 'Dark.'
In each case I had no further information.
In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn't give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.
'Dark' I took to be a description of someone's hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.
I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.
In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), 'Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don't you buy a dog? You're a dog cook. Honest. You think you're cooking for a lot of dogs.' So since B calls A 'Dad' it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn't know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.
'Dark.' A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. 'Fat or thin?' the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.
It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.
So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.
But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.
Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.
In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation.
Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour.
Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.
But as they died, she must die too.
Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.
As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.
The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.
But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.
Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.
But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.
Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued - or beaten to death - the same thing - and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.
The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America's view of its role in the world, both then and now.
I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.
The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: 'Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.'
Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. 'Father,' he said, 'let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.' There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.
Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.
Finally somebody said: 'But in this case "innocent people" were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?'
Seitz was imperturbable. 'I don't agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,' he said.
As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.
I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.'
The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.
The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.
The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.
I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a 'totalitarian dungeon'. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.
Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.
The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. 'Democracy' had prevailed.
But this 'policy' was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.
The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'
It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.
The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.
What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally - a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.
The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.
We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.
How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they're interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.
Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks.
Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.
The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.
Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, 'I'm Explaining a Few Things':
And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.
Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.
Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.
Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.
And you will ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!*
Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda's poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.
I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as 'full spectrum dominance'. That is not my term, it is theirs. 'Full spectrum dominance' means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.
The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don't quite know how they got there but they are there all right.
The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity - the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons - is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.
Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force - yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.
I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.
'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it.'
A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection - unless you lie - in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.
I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called 'Death'.
Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?
Who was the dead body?
Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?
Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?
Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?
What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?
Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body
When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.
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* Extract from "I'm Explaining a Few Things" translated by Nathaniel Tarn, from Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems, published by Jonathan Cape, London 1970. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited.>>
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