June 16th, 2008 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
You might remember my reports on the monk’s, nun’s and Burmese people’s protests in September of last year, how my contacts in Yangon (Rangoon) dried up within days as cpu’s were confiscated, cell phones smashed, communications wires cut, and various deeply good souls arrested, many children, men, women beaten, many murdered by Than Shwe’s evil orders. It was agony and remains so, not to know the fates of those specific contacts/blogger/photographers who were bravely and desperately funneling information and photos out of Burma to literally anyone who would receive them.
I pray for highly endangered bloggers and journalists and radio and broadcast press people everyday. But after such brutal crackdowns as the smug dictator Shwe’s in Burma, for instance, I dont know the storytellers’ whereabouts, if I should pray for them on earth, or perhaps they have been killed and are in heaven. So I pray for them wherever they might be, that they be given all mercy possible, that they be made invisible at just the right moments, that they somehow know we know; that they can be assured that their courage work did not fall on stones.
I would like a monument to The Unknown Bloggers of the World. I would. I am deadly serious. Those who risked their lives to tell the story. Those who gave their lives to tell the story before they were cut down.
Here is more on the hugely disturbing free-form arresting and harming of bloggers, a practice that despite public knowlege, continues without effective intervention… In this report from University of Washington, a reported 64 bloggers arrested for publishing their views in 2003, to a 192 bloggers reported arrested in 2007, the numbers only increase. It is poignant to note that ‘reported’ numbers does not include those who are maimed, disappeared, murdered. Nor does it include, as the article states, those arrested in place just like Burma where the government gives the evil eye to anyone who asks after the welfare of any citizen.
From BBC
…A University of Washington annual report….
More than half of all the arrests since 2003 have been made in China, Egypt and Iran, said the report.
Citizens have faced arrest and jail for blogging about many different topics, said the World Information Access (WIA) report.
Arrested bloggers exposed corruption in government, abuse of human rights or suppression of protests. They criticised public policies and took political figures to task. Read the rest of this entry »
One night in 1968, my father was in a Manhattan ballroom for the first time in his life, watching Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. hand me an award. The expression on his face was the essence of “nachas,” the word immigrants used for the joy and pride their children give them to redeem a lifetime of suffering.
I had been six or so at a Fourth of July parade when the colors came by and my father’s hat went flying from his head, knocked off by the beefy hand of a red-faced man behind us pointing at the flag. Shame and rage rose in me, but my father only smiled sweetly, nodded and bent to pick up the hat.
Years later, I read that, as a child, Sigmund Freud was told by his father that a man had grabbed his new fur cap and flung it into the mud, shouting, “Jew, get off the street.” Freud recalled angrily asking, “What did you do?” His father answered calmly, “I stepped into the gutter and picked up my cap.” In dreams, Freud would later note, a hat may stand for male genitals.
My father never talked about the past. I knew him only as a man who went to work early, came home late, ate his dinner, kissed me goodnight and went to bed. We did not play ball or go to games or listen to them on the radio. He told no stories and passed on no fatherly wisdom. He expected nothing, envied no one. He just slaved sixty hours a week to put food in my mouth, and he loved me without words. What I learned about his life came later and not from him.
An undercurrent of many foreign press articles about the U.S. election is the unfairness of the fact that while American policies dramatically affect people outside of the United States, those very people are unable to directly influence those we elect.
A note I received this morning from a friend reminded me, again, that yesterday, June 6, was the 64th anniversary of D-Day. I say again, because yesterday I read Patrick Edaburn’s very appropriate and timely post reminding all of us to ”thank our WW2 Vets.”
But, I got wrapped up in the political news of the day and other “important things,” so I glossed over Patrick’s concluding comments: “If you have a grandparent, uncle, cousin or friend who is or who knows a World War Two veteran please take the time today to go thank them for their services. Spend a little time with them, listen to their stories, take them to lunch or just hold their hand for a while.”
Well, so happens I do have a friend who not only is a World War II veteran, but who was also part of that great historic day and that magnificent effort that, as Peter says, “marked the beginning of the end of World War Two.”
But what is even more significant is that I didn’t know that my friend had been part of that historic event–that is, until I received his note this morning. Significant, because although I have known this gentleman–and he is a gentleman in every sense of the word–for many years, he has never spoken to me about his participation in one of the largest and most heroic single-day invasions of all time, an operation that came to be known as “Operation Overlord.”
So today I will do what is really important and gladly and proudly follow Patrick’s advice and thank a good friend, Luther B. Bullock (“Burn”), for having been part of that amazing Day, and the preparations for it.
To be perfectly correct, Burn was not one of those young men who “hit the beaches named Sword, Juno, Utah, Gold and Omaha.” But Burn, as a young American GI in Great Britain, did significantly contribute to the success of the Operation by loading engineering equipment on the ships that sailed off to France’s Normandy beaches on D-Day.
Burn writes, “D-Day. Each June 6, I remember. It was 64 years ago today the invasion of France’s Normandy beaches. I was very fortunate that I only had to load ships at Cardiff, Wales, with engineering equipment that moved to the beaches of France.”
“The cemetery above the cliff at Normandy beach has over 10,000 soldiers who died that day and the next few days. It was a very sad time for those of us who were not in the “eyeball to eyeball” fighting, but it was necessary to keep the fighting from the UK and USA.”
Burn goes on to offer his prayers and appreciation to the brave soldiers who are now serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. I join Burn in his prayers and wishes and, once again, I thank him for having been part of one of the greatest military success stories ever and for being part of “the Greatest Generation.“
“Despite the possible coming of Obama, the superpower remains. Pacified Europe is fundamentally suspicious of power; those who use it (and every U.S. president since 1945 has done so in abundance), are indeed devilish. And Obama is no savior.”
“Obama has two further strikes against him. His party plays with the fire of protectionism against products as well as people; that is why Asia and Latin America are so skeptical about the Democrats. Then there is Obama’s idealism, which provides Europeans with ample reason for concern. And include with that a lofty human rights policy, conceived not by George W. but by Democrat Jimmy Carter. …” Read the rest of this entry »
What are German-speaking people saying about whether Barack Obama is a Neville Chamberlain-like ‘appeaser’ for suggesting talks with Iran - or as President Bush put it ‘radicals and terrorists?’
“If Democratic candidate Barack Obama is denigrated simply because he wants to talk to the Iranian leadership, it is primarily election campaign rhetoric … Those who negotiate with Iran must not be accused of seeking to create a new version of the Munich Agreement . The accusation of appeasement is unfounded. Churchill once said that: ‘An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile - hoping it will eat him last.’ But if need be, the U.S. and Israel have a club in hand with which to hit the Iranian crocodile over the head.”
After the failure of the 1980 U.S.-sponsored Olympic boycott, hadn’t the world learned its lesson about the ineffectiveness of such actions? According to this editorial from the Nederlands Dagblad, things have changed since then - not the least of which is the fact that unlike South Korea, which rapidly democratized in the run-up to the 1988 Games, Beijing has taken a different tack.
The Dutch newspaper opines, “Such wishful thinking has now given way to the harsh reality. Over the past decade, Chinese leaders have decided that capitalism and dictatorship make an excellent pair … The IOC’s pseudo religious rhetoric about the brotherhood of nations doesn’t work anymore, because that now equates with siding with the Beijing regime.”
Has the spectacle of the Olympic Torch relay, first introduced by Nazi Germany in 1936, hijacked the Olympic tradition? After the mass protesting in Paris, London and now San Francisco, and due to the ‘dubious’ Nazi origins of the Olympic torch relay, this editorial from the NRC Handelsblad of The Netherlands opines, “Four years ago, the torch, which had to go from Olympia to Athens, traveled 48,466 miles. And this year is no different. … This is megalomania. … IOC Vice President Gosper has called for the trip to be restricted to the direct route between Olympia and the organizing city. This won’t deter future demonstrators, but there is a lot to be said for a relay of more modest dimensions.” Read the rest of this entry »
February 18th, 2008 by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
Having been eligible for the draft and an all-expenses-paid trip to Vietnam since I was 18, 1968 was the year that I turned 21 and finally was old enough to drink and vote, which I did in that order and with great enthusiasm.
I had a front-row seat for this year of great change — including antiwar protests, the King and Kennedy assassinations, and the coming of age of the civil rights and women’s movements — but nowhere were those changes manifested so powerfully than in the presidential race that year.
This presidential election year also is shaping up to be one of potentially great change, which begs the question:
Were the changes of 1968 more important than the changes of 2008 could be?
That is a difficult question because America and the world have changed (there’s that word again) in myriad ways over the last four decades, so for the purpose of trying to tease out an answer, I’ll reframe the question thusly:
Were Americans individually and the nation generally better off in 1968 than in 2008?
Thus framed, the answer to that question is a big fat “yes,” and so the answer to my initial question is that the changes of 2008 — at the very least the much anticipated end of the Age of Bush — may indeed be more important.
Since we’re looking at year versus year through the prism of presidential politics, it should be noted that there is an obvious similarity and two obvious differences.
The similarity is the looming presence of costly and unpopular wars in both 1968 and 2008.
The first difference is that unlike 1968, the U.S. today is the sole superpower, has an unprecedented global reach and is the subject of profound loathing abroad, notably among the people whose most radical elements can do the American homeland harm.
The second difference is that in 1968 most of the opposition President Johnson faced was from within his own party over his stewardship of the Vietnam War, which prompted him to opt out of running for reelection, while in 2008 President Bush has gotten a free pass from most of his prospective heirs apparent, who dutifully worship at his altar although he is extraordinarily unpopular and is the chief reason the Republican hegemony in Washington is coming to such an unceremonious end.
February 15th, 2008 by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
PRESIDENT NIXON GREETS RETURNING POW McCAIN
No one in their right mind would believe that the last year of the Reign of Bush would be any less tendentious than previous years. There are, for example, the latest flurry of presidential signing statements and the lame duck’s insistence that telecoms be granted retroactive immunity for embracing his initiatives to spy on their customers.
But you would have to go far to top the shame team of Michael Mukasey, Charles Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Antonin Scalia and John McCain with their embrace of torture as an official instrument of Bush administration policy.
Long story short: Human dignity is trumped by political expedience.
Mukasey is the attorney general who was going to put things to rights after the disastrous tenure of his predecessor, but now embraces the extralegal excesses of the Dear Departed Gonzo and his thugs at arms, including Steven Bradbury, who acknowledged this week that torture may be illegal but because the Justice Department hasn’t ruled as such then it isn’t.
Senators Schumer and Feinstein, symptomatic of the lack of Democratic due diligence in Congress, are responsible for greasing the skids for the approval of Mukasey’s nomination after they let him off the hook by not having to explain what he really thought about torture.
Supreme Court Justice Scalia, a judicial pop-off without peer, defended the use of torture this week. Employing the pretzel logic that has made him such a right-wing darling, he asserted that the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment didn’t cover cruel and unusual interrogations. Clever, eh?
McCain, the victim of torture himself as a Navy pilot who was shot down and imprisoned in a North Vietnamese POW camp for six years, has now flip-flopped back into the pro-torture camp as he cements his frontrunner status in the Republican presidential race.
My feelings for McCain have been mixed for years: A war hero and a man of principle who nevertheless held some political views that I could not abide. Until Wednesday, I believed that depending upon how things shook out I could conceivably vote for him in November.
But that was before McCain joined 44 other senators to vote against a bill prohibiting the CIA from using waterboarding and other Nazi-like torture techniques banned by the Army’s Field Manual. Some 51 senators — including Schumer and Feinstein, many days late and many veto-proof votes short — voted for the bill.
“Underscoring the complexity of the political currents . . . McCain led earlier efforts in the Senate to ban cruel treatment of prisoners, and has denounced waterboarding in presidential debates. But preserving the CIA’s ability to employ so-called enhanced interrogation methods has broad support in the party’s conservative base.”
Dick Polman captured perfectly the corner that McCain has painted himself into:
“The problem is that, by flip-flopping so blatantly, he undercuts his image as a man of conviction (to the delight of Democrats who fear his appeal) - without even mollifying his conservative critics, some of whom seem to believe that today’s pandering can never erase yesterday’s heresies. He could be saddled with this dilemma well into autumn.”
Yes, presidential candidates have to be mindful of their political base. Yes, they sometimes have to pander. But we’re talking torture here, not pork, and for me McCain’s betrayal is now complete.
A man whom I have hugely admired, now 35 years from the Hanoi Hilton and comfily ensconced in the chambers of the Greatest Deliberative Body in the World, betrays himself as someone who will grovel at the feet of his new captors — the people he needs to be elected.
Rep. Tom Lantos, 80, a California Democrat whose experience during the Holocaust shaped his concern for human rights and his staunch view in favor of U.S. military intervention abroad, died early this morning, a spokeswoman told the Associated Press. He had esophageal cancer and died at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda.
Lantos, born in Budapest to Hungarian Jews, served 14 terms in the House of Representatives. He is the only Holocaust survivor elected to Congress. His district included southwest San Francisco and much of San Mateo County, where he was known for supporting the socially liberal agenda of his constituents. Last year, he announced he would not seek reelection because of his cancer treatment.
Lantos was a powerful figure on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, where he had been the senior Democratic member since 2001 and its chairman since 2007.
For years, he sided with Republican neoconservatives who believe the United States should assert democracy abroad and use the military to intervene when a moral imperative or national interest is at stake.
In 2002, he supported the congressional resolution that authorized President Bush to invade Iraq and played a decisive role to gain Democratic support for the measure.
On the House floor at the time, he noted his own past as a Nazi-resistance fighter. “Had the United States and its allies confronted Hitler earlier, had we acted sooner to stymie his evil designs, the 51 million lives needlessly lost during that war could have been saved,” he said. “Just as leaders and diplomats who appeased Hitler at Munich in 1938 stand humiliated before history, so will we if we appease Saddam Hussein today.”
But after the Democrats gained control of Congress in 2006, Lantos became increasingly critical about the direction of the war and called for large withdrawals of American troops. He also held more than a dozen hearings on the situation.
Capitol Hill veterans describe Lantos - courtly, loquacious but tough - as a throwback to an earlier generation of lawmakers who were able to work across party and ideological lines.
The reaction from Jewish groups to the news was swift.
“For years people have looked to Congressman Tom Lantos as the conscience of the United States Congress,” said Rabbi Steve Gutow, executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA). “Chairman Lantos was a leader on so many issues of concern to the Jewish community such as anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and Israel.”
William Daroff, vice president for public policy of the United Jewish Communities (UJC), said Lantos “was a great friend of the Jewish community and the Jewish Federation system. As Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Lantos steered a steady ship during a particularly tumultuous time in American foreign policy.”
“We mourn the loss of Congressman Lantos,” said Nathan Diament, Washington director for the Orthodox Union. “He was a proud supporter of Israel and a proud Jew. His presence will be sorely missed.”
In announcing his expected retirement last month, Lantos said “It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust and a fighter in the anti-Nazi underground could have received an education, raised a family, and had the privilege of serving the last three decades of his life as a Member of Congress. I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country.”
It is now beyond obvious that Michael Mukasey blew beaucoup smoke up the collective asses of the senators who grilled him regarding the Bush administration’s embrace of torture during his confirmation hearings to replace Alberto Gonzales as attorney general.
Beyond being wishy-washy on the use of waterboarding, Mukasey promised that he would review the legality of the administration’s reprehensible approval of Nazi-like torture techniques, which Senator Charles Schumer and his posse of Craven Cavers bought into lock, stock and barrel.
The fig leaf that The Chuckster and his ilk used is in retrospect laughable: They would vote to approve Mukasey’s nomination because Gonzo had left the Justice Department a mess and it needs strong leadership.
Does Tom Cruise deserve to be referred to as ‘courageous’ for portraying Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg - a high-ranking Nazi who tried to assassinate Adolph Hitler? According to this tribute by the publisher of one of Germany’s leading newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, ‘With his decision to lend Graf von Stauffenberg a face, Tom Cruise will change the image that the world has of us Germans.’
“It has always aggrieved me that it’s nearly impossible to make people in foreign countries aware of the fact that in Germany there were also people who risked their lives to oppose the Nazi order. … With his decision to lend Graf von Stauffenberg a face, Tom Cruise will change the image that the world has of us Germans.”
By Frank Schirrmacher*
Translated By Susanne Angelow
November 30, 2007
Germany - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung - Home Page (German)
A little over a year ago when he took over United Artists, that legendary studio founded by Charlie Chaplin, people wondered what title he should receive: CEO? Chairman? President? But no title was as big as the two words that for over 20 years have been so closely associated with American cinema. No title seems as big as his name, and it’s under that name alone that he leads this studio: Tom Cruise.
Every other star must learn to cope with the ups and downs of the movie industry. For him, though, there have been only ups since his breakthrough with Top Gun in 1986. If during these 20 years one of Cruise’s films wasn’t a blockbuster, it was due entirely to his own deliberate decisions. Such was the case recently, with Lions for Lambs, a film with which he intended to wake up his compatriots to the events in Iraq.
Just by chance over the past few months, I had the opportunity to experience how Tom Cruise fights, how hard he works, and how much he must almost force matters to obtain these achievements. Now Tom Cruise has taken on a subject that is very near and dear to my heart, not least because my predecessor as publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Joachim Fest, spent many years working very intensively on the subject: I speak of the German resistance to Hitler. It has always aggrieved me that it’s nearly impossible to make people in foreign countries aware of the fact that in Germany there were also people who risked their lives to oppose the Nazi order.
It took an unconventional thinker to break through this prejudice. It required a world-class superstar to get that message to audiences abroad. With his decision to lend Graf von Stauffenberg a face, Tom Cruise will change the image that the world has of us Germans. To rescue the image of his country - especially abroad - was one of the key motives Stauffenberg had for his deeds [attempting to assassinate Hitler]. Because of Cruise’s courageous decision to play this role, he has indirectly fulfilled Stauffenberg’s intentions. Based on his story, a huge audience will come to understand that one can oppose inhumanity, and that a hero’s courage and nobility are even more important than the success of his deeds.
News today that members of Congress, including Nancy Pelosi, failed to protest when they were briefed about waterboarding and other harsh techniques of interrogation five years ago recalls the disturbing Milgram experiments of the 1960s.
A Yale professor wanted to find out how much pain people would inflict on others for what they believed to be a good cause.
“Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ strongest moral imperatives against hurting others,” Prof. Stanley Milgram reported, “and, with the subjects’ ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.”
We still don’t know the answer to that question, which was originally raised in an effort to see behind the Eichmann defense for Nazi atrocities during World War War II, “I was only following orders.” But we should keep trying to find out.
Today’s revelation about waterboarding further underscores how dicey individual morality can become under social pressure. According to the Washington Post, “officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support.
“‘Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,’ said [Porter] Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. ‘And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.’”
We lived in a different America then. News that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor came from bulletins that broke into Sunday afternoon radio programs and was spread by word of mouth over the telephone, on the streets of cities and house to house in small towns.
World War II came to us in slow motion and seemed unreal until we read details in the next day’s newspaper and heard a broadcast of President Roosevelt telling Congress that that day would live in infamy as he declared a state of war with Japan.
Why, then, did that unseen war affect our lives so much more deeply than the 24/7 images and endless words about Iraq, which nevertheless is sliding out of the national consciousness now day by day?
World War II was everybody’s war. It would be fought by our fathers, sons, husbands, brothers and those of the people next door and down the block. I was 17 then, but in little more than a year, I knew I would be among them.
We were all in it together, and every night at 8:55, we turned on our radios for the only news most of us were able to get.
If we had been told then we would be called “The Greatest Generation,” we would have wondered what was unusual about doing what we had to do. It would have saddened us beyond tears if we knew that our children and grandchildren would ever have to fight and die when the nation’s survival was not so clearly at stake.
It would have broken our hearts then, and it still does.
November 12th, 2007 by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
Site of Block 17 at Sachsenhausen Death Camp
The Jewish side of my family lost a number of people in Hitler’s death camps, but for many years there were unconfirmed rumors that a distant cousin — a young boy — had gotten out of the country and was living somewhere. We just didn’t know who he was or where he lived.
Then a few years ago, Foley: The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews was published in England. In it, Daily Telegraph correspondent Michael Smith told the story of Frank Foley, an MI6 operative at the British embassy in Berlin in the late 1930s whose cover was passport control officer.
It turned out that Foley, who is touted on the book’s cover as Britain’s Schindler after the legendary Oskar Schindler, managed to arrange transit to New Zealand in 1939 for my cousin, then three years old, and his parents at a time when Jews were, for all intents and purposes, trapped and doomed.
Not coincidental to publication of Foley, my cousin and I finally connected through another family member. A thriving correspondence followed with this most erudite gentleman, a bibliophile and man of the world, lives in a suburb of Wellington, New Zealand, and writes under the pen name of Country Bumpkin.
Mr. Bumpkin has been guest-blogging at Kiko’s House on various goings on — the changing of the seasons in New Zealand, politics, culture and personal reflections. Now 72, he recently returned to Germany for the first time in 68 years. I have excerpted his account here.
It is a touching remembrance of things past and an astute commentary on things present and future.
November 9th, 2007 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
The Night of The Shattering Glass, otherwise known as Kristallnacht, took place November 9, 1938, marking to that date, the most widespread attack against Jews in peacetime Germany and Austria.
In France, two days prior, a 17 year old Jew had shot a German embassy staffer in retaliation for the egregious treatment of his father and family at the hands of Nazis in Germany.
Hitler seized on that event as opportunity to enact his long planned desire to destroy Jewish houses of worship and the Jews…. parnasah, their ability to make a living.
Thus, on that night, Hitler unleashed his most psychopathic and hate-gorged minions to loot and burn any and every Jewish community in Nazi territory. 267 synagogues were plundered of sacred Torah scrolls, the hand-built temples torched.
100 Jews were murdered whilst trying to defend family and property. 7500 Jewish shops were looted of valuables, left with every window shattered and all remaining fixtures despoiled and set afire.
The Nazi government said the Jews had brought this down upon their own heads, and ordered them to pay one billion marks for the murder of the Embassy staffer in Paris.
The Jews were also charged six million marks to pay for the Nazi’s destruction of their own shops.
Shortly afterward, 25,000 Jewish fathers, rabbis, brothers, sons, students, poets, farmers, sweethearts, and bridegrooms, were dragged from their families, farms, and off the streets.
They were forced to Nazi slave camps, never to be seen again. It was the commencement of an ancient evil, but on a new, relentless scale.
The Nazi plan: To extinguish entire cultural groups, but first to coerce them to become a wage-less workforce for the state’s purposes, until these innocents, unable to work any longer because of starvation and torture, were murdered where they lay.
Near Oswiecim Poland, the Nazis ordered more heatless barracks and factory halls built. Less than eighteen months after Kristallnacht, this death camp, called Auschwitz, was fully packed with blameless souls who were rendered into a river of blood. This flood of humanity was bled out day and night without cease for the next four years.
Kristallnacht stands as one of the central flashpoints… one so large that for those who had the eyes or heart to see it, it could be registered around the world. It was Kristallnacht that catalyzed the Nazi’s spreading stain across Europe and Russia.
The sick psychological ideas underlying the arsons of Kristallnacht leapt from dry mind to dry mind until the malicious ideas caught on that mental tinderwood in each man’s darkest mind, and there, broke into flame, fueling ever more death.
By 1938, Dachau had already been rendering human bones and blood for six years. Now were added six more houses of slaughter in Poland alone, including Auschwitz.
In the years prior, Hitler had ordered Germany’s doctors to euthanize tens of thousands of German children, Jews and non-Jews alike, who were in some way lame or halt, and that ‘operation’ was carried out in full, emptying sanitoriums and orphanages even as many German physicians protested vociferously.
But, death and disposal of ‘inconvenient humans’ had become not only the pattern of the collective unconscious of a nation, but an insatiable hunger. The legends of the vampire do not spring up from a soul being lost.
The oldest vampire legends spring up around those who have murdered, and thereby a ’switch has been thrown’ in them; they developed a blood lust to Read the rest of this entry »
With the drip, drip, drip subtlety and perhaps even some of the pain of waterboarding, a growing number of politicians seem to be finally realizing that the use of torture is not only thoroughly un-American, it is morally abhorrent, and are speaking out about it.
Can there be any doubt, as I wrote not long ago, that there is no darker stain on the Bush presidency — and on America at the start of the new millennium — than the top-down approval of the use of torture and this secrecy-obsessed administration’s systematic efforts to justify its use on the one hand while denying that it approved its use on the other?
Actually, yes.
With too few exceptions, the silence inside the Beltway during years of torture revelations from Abu Ghraib to the Rumsfeld Gulag to Afghanistan has been one giant silent scream and has compounded the shame that I have felt over a country that I bleed red, white and blue for.
So what has now changed?
* The drumbeat in the American town square against torture has grown louder.
Credit is due Andrew Sullivan, who has blogged about the horrifying similarities between the Gestapo’s use of Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced torture techniques that would leave no visible marks, and the CIA’s embrace of these techniques, as well as the tortured Nazi-like explanations of the White House and Justice Department in trying to justify their use.
*The administration’s Orwellian parsing has collapsed under its own weight.
The proverbial straw that broke this camel’s back was an October 4 New York Timesinvestigative report that found while the Justice Department publicly declared torture to be “abhorrent” in a 2004 legal opinion, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales then issued a secret opinion that endorsed the CIA’s use of hard-core techniques like waterboarding that the agency had cherry-picked from the cookbooks of Soviet and Saudi dungeon masters.
*Discomfort over the refusal of Gonzales’ designated replacement to say whether he believes that waterboarding constitutes torture.
What looked like a slam-dunk nomination has instead become a long overdue moment of moral clarity as a small but growing number of senators say they are troubled by Michael Mukasey’s equivocating over a technique condemned by U.S. military leaders, human rights organizations and prominent Republicans including Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham.
Mukasey’s waffling before the Senate Judiciary Committee came in response to a question from Dick Durbin, who then sent the nominee a follow-up letter with the signatures of all his fellow committee Democrats. Republican Arlen Specter then asked Mukasey to clarify his position, as did presidential candidate McCain and Graham, himself an Army lawyer.
Now four other presidential wannabes — Senators Clinton, Obama, Biden and Dodd — say they will vote against Mukasey if he doesn’t denounce waterboarding, and no amount of Rovian parsing on the part of the White House is going to bail out the nominee.
Congressional Democrats already have blocked confirmation of two other nominees to lesser posts — John Rizzo, who had endorsed torture, as general counsel of the CIA, and Steven Bradbury, author of the secret legal opinions on interrogation, as head of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel.
The White House whines that Mukasey has been put in an untenable position, and there is indeed some political grandstanding going on here. But I also would say that a long overdue day of reckoning has arrived.
October 22nd, 2007 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist
Like the Burmese presently, like other innocent groups risking their lives for true liberty just to be allowed to live in free and decent ways without governmental oppression… in 1956 the Hungarian young, middle-aged and elderly, took to the streets to rail against the Soviets, fighting for freedom for Hungary.
When the marchers were met in the streets by Russian soldiers in iron tanks, the Hungarians fought with rocks, with wine bottles filled with benzene lighter fluid and stuffed with doilies made by the old women. When the people ran out of their munitions, they fought the tanks with their hands.
President Bush issued a proclamation honoring the 1956 Hungarian Revolution… “The story of Hungarian democracy represents the triumph of liberty over tyranny. In the fall of 1956, the Hungarian people demanded change, and tens of thousands of students, workers, and other citizens bravely marched through the streets to call for freedom. Though Soviet tanks brutally crushed the Hungarian uprising, the thirst for freedom lived on, and in 1989 Hungary became the first communist nation in Europe to make the transition to democracy.”
THE TELEVISION WARRIOR
My foster father is Magyarok, a Hungarian born Hungarian. He came to ‘Amereeka’ with a sewing machine under his arm. And now, he is in the living room yelling at the television again. He thinks the people inside the TV can hear him.
Hollering is a form of Hungarian aerobics;
it’s kept Dad strong all these years.
He immigrated to the USA before World War II.
Afterwards, the small ancestral farm still worked by
his mother and brothers and sisters in Hungary,
was confiscated by Germans, then Soviets.
The men dragged onto freight rollers,
the women, their children held like empty rifles,
were marched to Russian labor camps,
the rest forced from Hungary to Germany.
No children survived. Dad found
his people in the camps, brought the tiny band
one by one and oh so filled with bad night dreams,
to ‘Amereeka’.
My much older cousin had fallen in love with a man
she’d met in the refugee camps.
They’d married in secret there and she was now pregnant.
Now, in ‘Amereeka’, the old people watched over her round belly
as though a ghost Bread of Life
was baking there. A child, a child, they all
sighed, and said hope makes people cry harder than hurt.
In 1956, so distraught was he seeing the first news reels of Russian tanks in the streets of Budapest, and the young and elderly Hungarians trying to fight the iron tanks with rocks and bare hands, that Dad waved his arms like windmills and threw himself down on the living room rug, daring the tanks to come run over him, “Come get me, you cowards, Come! Get! me!!â€
In the ‘60s it was missiles in Cuba and these last many years he has had a yell-fest with apartheid and ayatollahs. He warned Ortega, “Hah! Roll yourself in a tamale, let the comunistos eat you. May they all suffer indigestion.†To the lone student in Tiananmen Square, he waggled his finger, “Ya, ya, I told you so. Ve haf seen dis before. So run him over already!
Get it over with! Dere are no living heroes.†Dad’s eyes watered and watered — he said — from sitting too close to the TV screen.
Last year when Dad was 80 years old, he went hoarse from indicting the televised Ceausescu.
“He vants to bulldozing 7,000 farm villages?
You vant to tear people away from their trees??
You craze man! You want to stack them like chickens?? Read the rest of this entry »
I have broken what for me has been a cardinal rule in recent days in using Nazi analogies when writing about the Bush administration’s embrace of torture as well as a deafening lack of response from most Americans to this and other outrages not unlike the Germans who failed to speak out about the excesses of the Third Reich.
Nazi analogies usually are bad because they stifle debate and inevitably trigger side debates about whether comparing someone to Hitler or something contemporary to an aspect of the Third Reich is appropriate, let alone in good taste. And then further side debates about whether calling someone a Nazi is as bad as calling them, say, a “kike” or “nigger.”
Then there is Godwin’s Law, which states that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches inevitability.
As a longtime newspaper editor, I forbade use of Nazi analogies by my reporters because they were unnecessarily inflammatory and the comparisons invariably were exaggerated.
Many a public official has found to their dismay that the backlash against offhanded Nazi analogizing is far more damaging than their remark is effective. Then there is CNN pop-off Lou Dobbs, who earlier this year became the umpteenth media maven to feel the wrath of Jewish groups for breaking their secret rule book of inappropriate analogies after he accused advocates for illegal immigrants of using propaganda techniques employed by Nazis.
I bring some personal baggage to the issue, as well. I am proud to say that Jewish blood courses through my body, my family lost a number of relatives in Hitler’s death camps and a dear Jewish uncle survived years as an American POW because he happened to be a dentist and worked on the teeth of his captors. So I suppose that I am even more on guard for false or misplaced analogizing.
Having said all that, I have broken my rule for a couple of reasons . . .
