All posts in category Violence

“If you see it in the Sun, it’s so.”

If you have enough money and you have access to an unrestricted market, you can find someone who will, for a price, do virtually any task you disdain to do yourself.  If the task you want to delegate to someone else is a task that a great many other people also want to avoid doing, then someone might well find a way of providing a service to many people all at once, collecting a small payment from each.

So far, so obvious.  If economics were a subject in the Kindergarten, so much might be a lesson there.  Why isn’t economics a subject in the Kindergarten?  Perhaps the text below, printed in The New York Sun on 21 September 1897 but extremely familiar to everyone who has ever spent the month of December in the USA, will elucidate:

“DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.
“Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
“Papa says, ‘If you see it in THE SUN it’s so.’
“Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

“VIRGINIA O’HANLON.
“115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET.”

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

Virginia O’Hanlon of 115 West Ninety-Fifth Street was a real person, and later in life she confirmed that she had in fact written the letter the Sun published.  Her great-granddaughter displayed the original letter, in Virginia O’Hanlon’s handwriting, in 1997.    Virginia O’Hanlon’s father, who told her that “If you see it in the Sun it’s so,” was a medical doctor named Philip O’Hanlon.

What service did Dr O’Hanlon expect to the New York Sun to perform in return for his subscription?  An article in the far-right Taki’s Magazine proclaims that the newspaper’s response is a remarkably shameless lie; that article prompts me to wonder if lying to his daughter was the very task Dr O’Hanlon hoped the newspaper would take off his hands.  Surely he knew full well that the newspaper would not dare publish a statement denying that the beloved figure of childhood fantasy really existed, and that any response they printed would have to affirm Santa Claus’ reality.  By thus delegating the lie to someone else, he could distance himself from it, not leaving his daughter with a visual memory of his face as he told her something he knew to be false, and indeed to be an insult to her intelligence.  Of course, if he knew that the newspaper would say something that he knew to be false, then statement  that “If you see it in the Sun it’s so” was also a lie on Dr O’Hanlon’s part, but one that he might more plausibly be able to defend than he could defend a claim that Santa Claus existed.  On the other hand, a moralist might say that “If you see it in the Sun it’s so” was a far worse lie than “There is a Santa Claus.”  After all, telling Virginia that there was a Santa Claus might have been telling her a single, discrete, self-contained lie, while to tell her that “If you see it in the Sun it’s so” is to instruct her to put down her guard and swallow everything that might appear in that paper, day after day.

Who was Dr O’Hanlon?  He was, among other things, a functionary of New York City’s Tammany Hall political machine.  During Tammany’s dominion over city politics, Dr O’Hanlon worked for the city as an assistant coroner and as police surgeon.  When the reform wing of the Democratic Party briefly took power, Dr O’Hanlon was arrested on charges relating to his habit of helping himself to the stock of dry goods stores without bothering to pay the merchants.  In court on these charges, he boasted of his Tammany Hall loyalties.  When Tammany returned to power, Dr O’Hanlon’s legal troubles came to an end. So it’s hardly surprising that the doctor was a fan of the pro-Tammany New York Sun.

Tammany’s restoration must have been a relief to the O’Hanlon family, since Dr O’Hanlon’s had name also appeared in connection with a much more serious criminal case.  A friend of his, Dr Andre L. Stapler, had in August 1910 performed an abortion for a woman named Louise Heinrich.  Abortion was at that time illegal in New York state, and therefore unregulated.  In the course of the procedure, Mrs Heinrich died.  Dr O’Hanlon signed a death certificate saying that her death was the result of natural causes.  The state prosecuted Dr Stapler, arguing that his carelessness killed her.  Prosecutors alleged that Dr O’Hanlon’s death certificate was a fraud meant to cover up his friend’s culpability in Mrs Heinrich’s death.   Convicted of manslaughter, Dr Stapler confessed that he was part of a group of doctors who performed illegal abortions under unsanitary conditions, and that as a coroner’s assistant Dr O’Hanlon routinely filed false reports covering up the deaths of the women in their care.  Dr O’Hanlon does not appear to have been prosecuted as a result of Dr Stapler’s statement.   The doctor appears to have continued his medical and political careers without having to answer any inconvenient questions about falsified papers and dead women.  If Dr Stapler’s confession was true, then woman-killing doctors delegated a job of lying to Dr O’Hanlon, even as Dr O’Hanlon had delegated a job of lying to the Sun.

by acilius on December 7, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Christmas, Violence
Tagged , , , , ,

Posted by acilius on December 7, 2011

https://losthunderlads.com/2011/12/07/if-you-see-it-in-the-sun-its-so/

Mr O’s “anti-nuclear imperialism”

Let me tell you about a better way, a way that protects the purity of our precious bodily fluids.

The late September issue of Counterpunch (available to subscribers here; the newsletter’s website is here) includes a fine article by Darwin Bond-Graham titled “The Obama Administration’s Nuclear Weapons Surge.”  While Mr O has made many remarks declaring that nuclear weapons are bad and the world would be better off without them, he has in fact “worked vigorously to commit the nation to a multi-hundred-billion-dollar reinvestment in nuclear weapons, mapped out over the next three decades.”  Bond-Graham analyzes the New START agreement between the USA and Russia.  Though the publicity surrounding New START presented it as an arms-reduction treaty, Bond-Graham contends that it is nothing of the kind.  “On balance, the nominal reductions in nuclear weapons required by New START are insignificant when compared to the multibillion-dollar nuclear (and strategic non-nuclear) weapons programs committed to in the treaty’s text.”  Indeed, Bond-Graham classifies New START as an “arms-affirmation treaty.”  Mr O and his allies in the upper echelons of the congressional Democratic leadership were able to market New START as a disarmament agreement and to enlist the support of Americans who usually oppose nuclear weapons, even though “the treaty does not actually require the destruction of a single nuclear warhead.”  Bond-Graham also goes into depth on various other programs through which Mr O has managed to increase spending on nuclear weapons, to reorient the USA’s nuclear weapons programs towards potential use in conflict, and to strip away inhibitions against nuclear first strikes by the USA.

For Bond-Graham, Mr O’s anti-nuclear public statements not only represent a rhetorical device to “neutralize”  the “anti-nuclear and antiwar groups that so effectively exposed [George W.] Bush’s plans” to pursue policies similar to those of the current administration, but also constitute the foundation of a strategic orientation that Bond-Graham dubs “anti-nuclear imperialism.”  This orientation, ostensibly based on abhorrence of nuclear weapons, in fact promotes the development, maintenance, and deployment of such weapons.  Remember the claims that the Bush-Cheney administration made about Saddam Hussein’s alleged “Weapons of Mass Destruction” programs in 2002-2003, and the meaning of the phrase “anti-nuclear imperialism” becomes all too clear.

by acilius on September 29, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Barack Obama, Counterpunch, Wars and Rumors of Wars
Tagged ,

Posted by acilius on September 29, 2011

https://losthunderlads.com/2011/09/29/mr-os-anti-nuclear-imperialism/

Of what narrative is the US Civil War a chapter?

A couple of days ago, I found a mass mailing from the libertarian Independent Institute in my inbox.  It included these paragraphs:

The 150th Anniversary of the Outbreak of the U.S. Civil War

April 12 marked the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the American Civil War, when Confederates fired on U.S. troops holding Fort Sumter, in the Charleston, South Carolina, harbor. Although people routinely succumb to the temptation to reduce the cause of the war to a single factor (e.g., to the slavery issue or to “states’ rights”), the cause was more complex. Independent Institute Research Fellow Joseph R. Stromberg discusses one causal factor that often gets short shrift in public discourse (although he cites many historians who support his analysis): interest groups with material, rather than ideological, stakes in promoting the war.

Antislavery, Stromberg writes, “was one of many themes generally serving as the stalking horse for more practical causes.” The Republican Party Platform of 1860, for example, focused less on antislavery grievances than on proposals designed to benefit northeastern financial and manufacturing interests and Midwestern and western farmers–policies that would have become harder to implement if southern states were allowed to secede. Lest he overgeneralize, Stromberg hastens to add that northern trading and manufacturing interests that bought from the suppliers of southern cotton–“the petroleum of the mid-nineteenth century,” as he puts it–were aware that they would face severe disruptions if war broke out.

In a post on The Beacon, Independent Institute Research Editor Anthony Gregory argues that April 12, 1861, also marks the date of the federal government’s repudiation of the Founders’ vision of the American republic and the birth of Big Government. “The war ushered in federal conscription, income taxes, new departments and agencies, and the final victory of the Hamiltonians over the Jeffersonians…. Slavery could have been ended peacefully, to be sure, but ending slavery was not Lincoln’s motivation in waging the war–throughout which this purely evil institution was protected by the federal government in the Union states that practiced it, and during which slaves liberated from captivity by U.S. generals were sent back to their Southern ‘masters.'”

“Civil War and the American Political Economy,” by Joseph R. Stromberg (The Freeman, April 2011)

“The Regime’s 150th Birthday,” by Anthony Gregory (The Beacon, 4/12/11)

“The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate,” an Independent Policy Forum featuring Harry V. Jaffa and Thomas J. DiLorenzo (5/7/02)

“The Civil War: Liberty and American Leviathan,” an Independent Policy Forum featuring Henry E. Mayer and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel (11/14/99)

“The Bloody Hinge of American History,” by Robert Higgs (Liberty, May 1997)

It’s true enough that “people routinely succumb to the temptation to reduce the cause of the war to a single factor… the cause was more complex.”  Though I would not disagree with this statement, I would go on to say something subtly different as well.  Much public discussion of the US Civil War turns on a rather odd question.  This question is, “Of what narrative is the US Civil War a chapter?”

As the press release above suggests, libertarians tend to say that the war was a chapter in a narrative titled “The Growing Power of the Nation-State in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.”  Anthony Gregory’s description of the powers which the federal government first exercised during the war, and never renounced, gives an idea of the structure of this narrative.  Right-wing libertarians like Gregory focus on the conflict between the growing power of the nation-state and the unregulated operations of the free market, while left-wing libertarians like Joseph Stromberg point out that no unregulated free market has ever existed and focus instead on the role of the nation-state in forming the economic elites that actually have wielded power throughout history.

Most other Americans tend to say that the US Civil War was a chapter in a narrative titled “The Rise and Fall of Human Slavery.”  In this narrative, the United States figures as the champion of Emancipation and the Confederate States figure as the champions of Enslavement.  This story elides the facts that Gregory and others point out, that six slave states remained in the Union, that federal forces enforced slavery in the South throughout 1862, and that President Lincoln took office vowing to leave slavery alone.  However, it is undoubtedly true that all the Confederate states were slave states and that its leaders bound themselves time and again to defend and promote slavery, while the United States did eventually move to abolish the institution.

It should be obvious that the question, “Of what narrative is the US Civil War a chapter?,” is a meaningless one.  Of course the Civil War is a chapter of “The Growing Power of the Nation-State in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” of course it is a chapter of “The Rise and Fall of Human Slavery,” of course it is a chapter of any number of other narratives.  Why, then, is this nonsensical question agitated so intensely?

I blame the schools.  More precisely, I blame the tradition of presenting history to students as a grand narrative.  It’s natural for people who have spent a decade or so of their early life hearing history presented as a single grand narrative to go on assuming that every story is part of one, and only one, larger story.  Perhaps schools must present history this way; if so, I would say that it is a point in favor of a proposal left-libertarian thinker Albert Jay Nock made early in the last century.  Nock recommended that schools should teach mathematics “up to the quadratic equation,” Greek and Latin, and a course in formal logic.  Equipped with this training, students would be able to educate themselves in everything else, with some here and there finding it possible to benefit from association with some advanced scholar.

Be that as it may, in US schools, the grand narrative of history is usually packaged under some label like “The Story of Freedom.”  The word “freedom” in these labels raises the question “freedom from what”?  For libertarians, the freedom most urgently needed today is freedom from state bureaucracy.  In the story of that freedom, the US Civil War cannot but figure as a vast reverse.  For others, the freedom most urgently needed today is freedom from white supremacy.  In the story of that freedom, the war may appear as an advance, albeit a rather problematic one.  For still others, the freedom most urgently needed today is the individual’s freedom from domination by irresponsible private interests, whether employers, families, or other groups in civil society.  In the story of that freedom, the war stands as a moment of triumph, perhaps the supreme moment in American history.

Few would say that the freedom most urgently needed by the United States today is freedom from foreign domination, but I would point out that if the war had ended differently this need might very well be felt very keenly indeed.  When the war broke out, Southern leaders claimed that their cause was the defense of slavery, while Lincoln disavowed any plan to interfere with slavery.  By the end of the war, Southern leaders were discoursing earnestly about the theory of state sovereignty, while Lincoln declared that “if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another, drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said: ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'”  What remained constant through all this flip-flopping was the Northern intention to protect the domestic US market with a high tariff, while the South wanted to trade on equal terms with the industrial centers of the North and those of Britain.  The world economy being what it was in the mid-nineteenth century, a nominally independent Confederate States of America would likely have been drawn into Britain’s economic sphere, and thus into the orbit of the British Empire.  We should therefore add “US Resistance to the British Empire” to the list of narratives in which the US Civil War figures as a chapter.

by acilius on April 21, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Education policy, Wars and Rumors of Wars
Tagged , , , , , ,

Posted by acilius on April 21, 2011

https://losthunderlads.com/2011/04/21/of-which-narrative-is-the-us-civil-war-a-chapter/

The inheritors

In the 1980s, I was a teenager living down the street from a used bookstore.   My view of the world was shaped by the paperbacks available there for 85¢ and less.  Many of those were political books from 15 or 20 years before. Among them was Peter Mansfield‘s book Nasser’s Egypt, a general survey of Egypt as Mansfield saw it the late 1960s that depicted President Nasser, his pan-Arabist ideology, and the centralized economic planning of his government with the utmost sympathy.  Other political books I found at the same store depicted Nasser less favorably, but even those that presented him very negatively could not suppress all romanticism in describing the ambitions of his program and the dashing quality of his personality.

In the days when I was reading these books, the American mass media were lionizing Anwar Sadat.  From the moment President Sadat signed the Camp David Accords with Israel, he was presented to the American public as an apostle of humanity who embodied hope for peace in the Middle East.  When the movie Gandhi was a hit, Hollywood followed up with a series of other biographical epics about history’s great peacemakers; Sadat, starring Lou Gossett, Junior, was the first.  Indeed, Sadat and Mahatma Gandhi figured in the US media as exact equivalents in those days.

Considering that he came to office in the shadow of two men who inspired so much legend, it is hardly surprising that Hosni Mubarak has been seen in America as a bland placeholder.  Indeed, the most flattering thing I’ve ever read about President Mubarak in a major US publication called him “Egypt’s Gerald Ford,” a man who was his country’s leader today for the sole reason that he happened to have been kicked upstairs to the vice presidency when President Sadat wanted to get him out of the way and appoint a new defense minister.

Therefore, Egypt’s three modern presidents figure in my imagination as dramatically different figures: Nasser the tragic hero, Sadat the secular saint, Mubarak the afterthought.  It always jolts me when I see people bracketing the three together.  I know that from the perspective of many Egyptians the current regime seems like a rancid thing that’s been stinking up their country since 1952, but when I read phrases like “Nasir-Sadat-Mubarak continuum” I always scratch my head.

Another book I found at the same store was Eric L. McKitrick‘s Slavery Defended: The Views of the Old South.  A line of McKitrick’s reproduced on the back cover convinced me to buy it:  “Nothing is more susceptible to oblivion than an argument, however ingenious, that has been discredited by events.”  None of the pro-slavery documents McKitrick found put forth an argument that I would call especially ingenious, though several of them did manage to raise awkward questions about the economic system of the states in which laborers were nominally free.  Still, I think McKitrick makes a vital point.  If some Southern apologist had constructed a truly brilliant argument in defense of slavery, the fact that no serious person is today looking for any such argument would likely mean that the apologist’s work would be forgotten.

The same applies to other arguments.  Whatever its drawbacks, Nasser’s pan-Arabism had  far more to recommend it than did the practice of slavery in the United States.  Yet it too is a spent force, one which has left many monuments but which no longer attracts followers.  President Mubarak’s career is one of those monuments; his administration’s evident lack of public support shows that he has long since exhausted whatever political inheritance may have been left from Nasser when he took office decades ago. Of course, the events that discredited pan-Arabism took place long before Mubarak came to power.  By 1981, Syria had been out of the United Arab Republic for twenty years, and North Yemen had been out of the United Arab States for as long.  The June 1967 war with Israel would bury pan-Arabism, but the collapse of these federations may have marked its real death.  The case for pan-Arabism, no matter its abstract appeal, could not survive these events.

If nothing is more susceptible to oblivion than an argument discredited by events, surely the converse is true as well.  Nothing is less susceptible to oblivion than an ideology, however asinine, that has inspired a winning cause and given many people opportunities to become rich.  I suspect that many of the ideas which still have currency and power in world affairs are at least as weak as pan-Arabism.  Indeed, if we were to examine them in the abstract we would find that many forms of nationalism and internationalism have the same logical structure as pan-Arabism.

(more…)

by acilius on February 8, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Israel & Palestine, Politics, Realms of Araby
Tagged , , , , , , ,

Posted by acilius on February 8, 2011

https://losthunderlads.com/2011/02/08/the-inheritors/

Martin Luther King on the disturbing power of love

In the aftermath of the Tucson massacre, many Americans (including the president) have quoted Martin Luther King’s remark, made in the aftermath of the assassination of Malcolm X, that we must learn “to disagree without being disagreeable.”

Today the USA observes a national holiday honoring Dr King.  It strikes me that the great man had more to say about Malcolm X than that one phrase.   In this video clip, Martin Luther King answers critics such as Malcolm X who claimed that his nonviolent resistance to white supremacy brought comfort to the oppressors:

by acilius on January 17, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Special Days, Violence
Tagged , ,

Posted by acilius on January 17, 2011

https://losthunderlads.com/2011/01/17/martin-luther-king-on-the-disturbing-power-of-love/

The Higher Cannibalism

On 16 December 2010, Swiss Senator Dick Marty presented to the Council of Europe a report that he had been commissioned to make.  Senator Marty demonstrated that the government of Kosovo, led by Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, operates a network of “clinics” in which ethnic Serbs and other political prisoners are routinely killed.  Their organs are removed and sold on an international black market.

The Marty Report has barely been noticed in US media.  News outlets that in 1999 were flooded with tales of atrocities that Serbs were supposed to be committing against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo have been entirely silent.  If it weren’t for notices of the Marty Report in Alexander Cockburn’s column in The Nation, in Cockburn’s newsletter Counterpunch, and on Antiwar.com, even so devoted a reader of news as your humble correspondent would have missed the story completely.

by acilius on January 15, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Balkans, Counterpunch, The Nation
Tagged ,

Posted by acilius on January 15, 2011

https://losthunderlads.com/2011/01/15/the-higher-cannibalism/

The Tucson Massacre

Saturday, some guy shot 20 people in Tucson, Arizona.  The first person he targeted was U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

In the days since, the American media has been flooded with speculation as to the shooter’s motives.  Many people, such as this cartoonist, have focused on the fact that Giffords is a member of the Democratic Party, and a great deal of very heated rhetoric has been directed against that party.  Quite a few have focused on a map former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin posted on Facebook with a symbol of crosshairs on Giffords’ district.  Others have brought up the fact that Giffords is the first Jewish person elected to Congress from Arizona and speculated that the shooter might have been anti-semitic.  Still others have brought up the debate about immigration currently raging in Arizona and have suggested that it somehow made Giffords a target.

I suggest we look at the victims and ask at which of them the shooter aimed his gun.  His first shot was discharged point-blank into the congresswoman’s head.  He also targeted Mavanell Stoddard, hitting her with 3 rounds before her husband, Dorwan, made his way in front of her and gave his life to save hers.   Dorthy Morris was apparently also a target; her husband, George, also threw himself on his wife during the shooting, though he was too late to save her life.  Did the shooter think Mrs Stoddard and Mrs Morris were likelier to be Democrats their husbands?  Or that they were likelier to be Jewish?  Or that they were likelier to share Giffords complex and nuanced views on immigration?  Maybe!  Perhaps they were wearing T-shirts decorated with a donkey, a Star of David, and the slogan “Honk if you love to spend hours discussing immigration policy.”  Or maybe they had something else in common.

To my knowledge, no detailed forensic reconstruction of the shooting has yet been published.  However, what has come out suggests that most of the women and girls who were shot were standing closer to the shooter and were in his line of sight, while the men were either too far away to have been deliberately targeted (for example, Judge John Roll), or gave their lives in deliberate acts of heroism like those of Mr Stoddard and Mr Morris.  The Feminist Peace Network has made the point that the shooter seems to have targeted women; I haven’t seen that point elsewhere yet.

by acilius on January 11, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Violence
Tagged , ,

Posted by acilius on January 11, 2011

https://losthunderlads.com/2011/01/11/the-tucson-massacre/

Remembering Tuli Kupferberg

This reference by Tsaurah Litzky prompted me to look up Tuli Kupferberg‘s song “Go Fuck Yourself With Your Atom Bomb.”  There was something startling about all the popup windows inviting me to download “Go Fuck Yourself With Your Atom Bomb” as a ringtone.  The youtube post below is a radio conversation with still photos.  I found a transcript of the conversation here.

It’s interesting to me that the caller tries to use the same psychologizing explanations to dismiss Tuli’s anti-militarism that Tuli uses to jeer at militarism.

by acilius on November 6, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Wars and Rumors of Wars
Tagged , ,

Posted by acilius on November 6, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/11/06/remembering-tuli-kupferberg/

A peace movement begins in Afghanistan

Truthout has a report about a movement that started among peace-minded young people in central Afghanistan and that is beginning to attract followers elsewhere.  Here’s a quote:

In the United States, we may find it hard to believe that anything good can actually come out of Afghanistan, or we may have fallen into a trap of thinking that Afghans cannot accomplish anything useful without foreign aid and assistance. I confess that I struggle to live outside the shadow of this narrow-mindedness and ethno-centrism. Certainly, if the scope of our imaginations is limited by CNN and Fox News, we would not be likely to imagine an indigenous peace group forming in Bamiyan Province. But this is exactly what has happened.

More information is available here and here and here.

 

 

by acilius on October 22, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Afghanistan
Tagged

Posted by acilius on October 22, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/10/22/a-peace-movement-begins-in-afghanistan/

Philip Weiss’ latest

A powerful cri de coeur from Mondoweiss, titled “The occupation is the Stanley Milgram experiment for American Jews,” turns on this paragraph:

The general U.S. Jewish position is like the Stanley Milgram experiment, the famous Yale study in which paid research subjects were instructed by a researcher to apply higher and higher levels of shock to someone on the other side of a curtain every time he got an answer wrong on a test. And with increasing levels of shock that other subject– who wasn’t really a subject but a confederate of the researcher– howled louder and louder and passed out from pain. Still the students applied the shock. That is the American Jewish community. They hear the Palestinians screaming for 60 years but they have been told by an authority figure that the Palestinians deserve the shocks they are getting– because they are resisters, because they are terrorists, because they are animals, because they are violent, because their women cover themselves, because they live off the land, because they want their houses back, because they don’t have gay rights, because they read the Koran, because they want to return to their homes, because they elected Hamas… on and on the instructor justifies it with lies and bullshit, still the community cranks the dial and ignores the screams.

The Milgram experiment seems to have a powerful resonance for a certain kind of American intellectual.  For example, in his 1999 book The Holocaust in American Life, Peter Novick suggested that the USA might be a better place if, instead of recurring so often to the Holocaust as the ultimate index of political evil, Americans were in the habit of referring to the findings of the Milgram experiment.  I attended a talk Professor Novick gave in that year; from the podium, he made such a strong claim for the symbolic power of the Milgram experiment that half the Q & A session consisted of expressions of disbelief.  Still, I highly recommend Weiss’ essay, and for that matter Novick’s works.

 

by acilius on October 22, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Israel & Palestine
Tagged , ,

Posted by acilius on October 22, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/10/22/philip-weiss-latest/

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