When I heard that Obama’s Justice Department was going to try at least five of the alleged 9-11 suspects in New York City I couldn’t help but think of Coover’s novel. In the same way that the Rosenberg execution was a piece of political theatre designed to insure the US public that Washington had the over-hyped communist threat under control, this trial serves the purpose of convincing that same public that the terrorist threat is also being taken care of. During the trial and aftermath of the Rosenbergs, the US military was fighting a war in Korea and occupying a good portion of the world. Involvement in Vietnam on the side of the French was increasing and the ultra-right was relishing the publicity it had obtained thanks to Joe McCarthy and other anti-communist demagogues. Nowadays, the US military is fighting a war in Afghanistan, occupying Iraq and maintaining military bases around the world. The ultra-right is up to its usual publicity-seeking inanities and the economy is stumbling. It’s time for a unifying event. Since (thankfully) attacks on the US homeland don’t happen very often, the next best thing to rally the masses might very well be this trial.

Currently, there is a sideshow being whipped up by the rightwing that insists that the defendants should all be tried in military courts. Most of those not among that political minority disagree. The right has nothing to fear, however. Despite all the backslapping statements calling Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision a triumph for the American way of justice, justice is not really the issue in these upcoming trials. No, what’s at stake here for the empire reaches deeper than that. As far as the empire’s guardians are concerned, these trials are about the very nature of the American future. Convictions (and most likely executions of the condemned) are essential to the continuation of the project. Doubt must be purged. Naysayers must be silenced. The attorneys that end up defending these men will be vilified. If the defendants are, by some fluke, acquitted, the jury will live in fear of their own countrymen for a long time. The court itself will be an armed camp reminiscent of the prison in Guantanamo where the defendants were held for years without trial. The effects of any torture endured by the defendants will lurk underneath every accusation and piece of evidence presented.

Given that New York is still one of the top media capitals in the world, don’t look for a change of venue for these trials. The message here is not in the courtroom proceedings, but in the presentation of those proceedings. The Lady Justitia will be present, but the real force in this courtroom will be Nemesis, the god of vengeance. He has already made a difference, through the fact of the torture used by interrogators on the defendants. Getting the message that confuses justice with vengeance across will be the task of the media circus certain to ensue. The prosecution and their cohorts on the bench are depending on it.

From the trials in Salem to the hanging of the Haymarket Martyrs; from the deportations of the anarchists and other radicals during the Palmer Raids of the early twentieth century to the trials of antiwar and black liberation activists in the 1960s and 1970s, the history of the United States is full of these rituals of cleansing. It doesn’t matter if there are any truly guilty among the prosecuted and persecuted. It only matters that the national soul is cleansed and thereby able to begin its mission again–the mission referred to by everyone from John Winthrop in his discourses written on the passage to the new world to every president that ended his addresses with the words God Bless America. The city on the hill is still being built–now on a planetary platform. First, however, we must rid ourselves of those who don’t share our vision of that city but would tear it down. More importantly, we must get rid of the self-doubt among those citizens who think the cost is too high. Vengeance under the cover of justice is just the prescription demanded by Uncle Sam and his saints.

A buddy of mine we called R, spent a year in the Navy off the coast of Vietnam begrudgingly helping the US launch jet planes to strafe the people and countryside of Vietnam. He joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War as soon as he got his discharge papers. He and I spent many an hour talking politics, books, and women over the years. One conversation occurred when we were somewhere in California’s Central Valley on Veterans’ Day. As we sat in the shade of some trees in Salinas and sipped surreptitiously on a quart of Rainier Ale, R began talking about friends of his from his Navy days. After all, noted R bitterly, this is our day. He continued by noting how much better vets were treated after they were dead. Shit, he said, you even get a decent burial. And a freakin’ American flag to go with it. When you’re in their goddam uniform, you ain’t no better than a maltreated dog who they’re trying to kill. If you get out alive, they just want you to go away. Especially if you have an ailment that can be attributed to their war. R eventually married and helped raise two children. When he was around fifty he was diagnosed with a disease related to the war that was exacerbated by his reckless lifestyle in the years immediately following his discharge. He met an untimely death a few years ago while waiting for a transplant. He did get a decent burial. And a freakin’ flag.
There are many more men and women who were in the military with their own stories. Some have better endings than others. No one makes it through unscathed. Some just hide their scars better. That’s what a friend who did veterans counseling before he died told me. Washington’s latest wars have produced a new crop of these men and women. Although the wars may be different, the wounds are equally painful.

Often left unsaid when the media writes about returning veterans and their trouble adjusting to civilian life is how a veteran’s loved ones are affected. If one wishes to maintain the vocabulary of modern war, then the appropriate label for the lovers, partners, parents and children of the returning soldier would be collateral damage. Think of a cluster bomb. If the returning veteran is a casualty of the explosions that occur on original impact, then the veterans’ families and loved ones would be those who are the casualties that occur from the bomblets that detonate later. Of course, this scenario of injury and death is also replicated among those whom the imperial army has attacked many more times over.

Author and antiwar organizer Beverly Gologorsky wrote a book a couple years ago titled Things We Do To Make It Home. This book was recently released in paperback by Seven Stories Press. It is a beautifully wrought story of a group of Vietnam veterans, their lovers, families and friends set in the 1990s. Twenty years after their return from the jungles of Nam the world they live in is still littered with the veterans’ experience in combat. Like so many of their real-life comrades, the men in the story have left much damage in their wake. Simultaneously, there is a love that binds them all together. That same love reaches across the lines between suburb and city while it tears relationships into remnants barely held together by threads of memory. There is no blame here, despite the desire to find somewhere to place the despair and anger resulting from the demons that define the lives these men have lived. The women who have loved them despite their better sense, the hopelessness the men hide with drugs and alcohol and the children who wonder where there father really is even when he’s sitting in the same room are portrayed with an emotional and spiritual depth the reader won’t find in newspaper reports about veteran suicides and PTSD statistics. There isn’t a lot of hope in this novel, despite the optimism voiced by some of its characters. These are men who know they were screwed and can’t seem to figure out how to get past the war they were sent to fight. Nonetheless, they go on living life as best as they can while often unaware of the pain they cause–a pain directly related to the guilt they feel because of the injury they caused to those their commanders called the enemy while fighting Washington’s war.

I had another friend named Loren. Like so many others, he was drafted into the Army against his will. When he got his orders to go to Vietnam, he took a truck from the motor pool where he worked and ran it through several gates and a couple of parked cars in the Officer’s Club parking lot at the Colorado Army base he was stationed. He did six months in the stockade and was thrown out of the Army. He celebrated by going to a rock festival and ended up in Berkeley. His father didn’t speak to him for years, but it was worth it to Loren just to have avoided the war. After reading Things We Do To Make It Home, one wishes once again that more soldiers would follow Loren’s example and just refuse to fight.

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

– Ayn Rand¹

Industrial civilization has been a dirty affair. While it helped give rise to the wealth we see in the Industrialized core nations—typically associated with the United States and Europe—it has also led to an unprecedented centralization of power and left the people of the world dependent on its industrial infrastructure; and so for example, 75% of humans today live in the city, away from farms and the soil. To be sure, the city has allowed us much opportunity, not among the least of which is a tight knit framework in which to trade ideas, materials and useful stuff. All of this stuff, though, had to come from somewhere, and to meet that need importation from ghostly elsewheres has kept cities the world over running. And now, monumental problems face all of us as individuals and communities today, and the challenges and associated tasks ahead threaten the fairness strived for and achieved by concerned ancestors similar to ourselves. The gains of these people’s are encapsulated in such documents as the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, US Constitution and Bill of Rights. A history of arts, also, reminds of our sometimes vibrant past. However, plans by political, financial and industrial elites to forge new institutions unaccountable to the people represent new monopolies on force and favors which threaten the very social fabric of civilization.

In an article published by the Wall Street Journal, Janet Albrechtsen covers what she describes U.N. plans for a new government “scary.” She states:

We can only hope that world leaders will do nothing more than enjoy a pleasant bicycle ride around the charming streets of Copenhagen come December. For if they actually manage to wring out an agreement based on the current draft text of the Copenhagen climate-change treaty, the world is in for some nasty surprises. Draft text, you say? If you haven’t heard about it, that’s because none of our otherwise talkative political leaders have bothered to tell us what the drafters have already cobbled together for leaders to consider. And neither have the media.

The article cites for the most part the words of Lord Chris Monckton, the former advisor to Margaret Thatcher, who, at an address at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota in November, blew the whistle and exposed the new governmental entity. He exposed the 181 page draft text, which entails United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, planned to be signed in December.

The ultimate aim of the treaty, as Monckton and myriads others are warning, is to erect a transnational government.

There is a provision under the Convention calling for a “government” which will have the power to directly intervene in the financial, economic, tax and environmental affairs of all nations that sign the Copenhagen treaty.

And so institutions which need not answer to the public are taking it upon themselves to solve environmental problems, but what do we do when their solutions are astoundingly wrongheaded?

The treaty requires developed countries to pay what is termed an “adaptation debt” to developing countries under the guise of supporting climate change mitigation. But the premise that the nation-state is the keystone institution in our social system is a misnomer, for the corporation fills that role. The largest associations and bodies are corporations and, as we will see, it is, to use a phrase made popular in the past year, the too-big-to-fail corporation which owes the rest of a massive “adaptation debt.” Moreover, many of the developing countries are servicing crippling IMF debts. It is therefore unlikely representatives of the West, especially Britain and the US, are interested in repaying the developing nations; unless, of course, much of these credits go towards fueling speculative economies in which those who sit on enough capital can line their bulging pockets.

Politically concerning are the number of “alternatives” and “options” featured in the treaty which officially undermine the democratic and republican bases of the modern Democratic Republics and give plenipotentiaries and policy makers room to do as they please.

In an interview with Alan Jones on Sydney radio Monday, Lord Monckton said, “This is the first time I’ve ever seen any transnational treaty referring to a new body to be set up under that treaty as a ‘government.’ But it’s the powers that are going to be given to this entirely unelected government that are so frightening…. The sheer ambition of this new world government is enormous right from the start—that’s even before it starts accreting powers to itself in the way that these entities inevitably always do.”

So, the power grab initiated last year with the collapse of Lehman Brothers—what actually was an assassination by other oligopolists—continues.

In his talk at St. Paul Monckton told attendees: “in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your President will sign for freedom, your democracy, and your prosperity away forever.”²

Ron Paul echoed Lord’s sentiments, stating November 9, 2009 on the Alex Jones show:

If it works it will work for a little while and companies like Goldman Sachs and a few others will rip us off and get even more wealth. But it cannot help the economy; it has to hurt the economy. And it can’t possibly help the environment because they are totally off track on that. It might turn out to be one of the biggest hoaxes of all history this whole global warming terrorism that they’ve been using.

Paul is referring to the siren song of global warming, which is being touted by many of the well-connected as the sole reason for a revolutionary reorganization of human life on our planet. In fact, in books published by the Club of Rome, a premiere think tank, climate change is touted as a mean by which the global order based on the nation-state ought to be reconstructed; the think tank champions the politically useful reasons for this as opposed to concerning themselves with the environment—of which we the people are a part—at hand. When the threat is global warming, the Club of Rome has stated:

The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself…. The old democracies have functioned reasonably well over the last 200 years, but they appear now to be in a phase of complacent stagnation with little evidence of real leadership and innovation…. Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.³

A who’s who of popular political figures and CEO’s has echoed the sentiments of that of the Club of Rome.

I believe it is appropriate to have an ‘over-representation’ of the facts on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience.

– Al Gore, Climate Change activist

I believe that the mere mass of industrial civilization poses a threat to the biodiversity of the planet: the building blocks which are responsible for us, for our ideas and emotions, inventions and systems. But, it is increasingly lucid that the framework by which climate-change and environmental degradation is framed by social engineers through political enunciations and the corporate media leaves much to be desired. For brevity’s sake, I will only mention that there is an intimate connection between plant life and carbon dioxide. So, why have we determined carbon dioxide is the main threat? We exhale it! Should we continue playing our roles, hanging on the false realities created by the leaders?

Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world’s scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet’s climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced — a catastrophe of our own making.

– Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth

This is rather alarming rhetoric for someone who, in the same breath, claims to have the near-ubiquitous support of the scientific community in his corner. He admits himself though that he is a pathological liar? Jokes on us if we let him cash in on our apathy and ignorance. By the way, when politicians and the propagandists refer to the “scientific community” they usually mean scientists who are members of corporate or governmental funded associations. Independent thinkers need not apply.

Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?

– Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme

Ok, so bringing down industrial civilization sounds pretty damn cool: Can we keep The Clash and Kurt Vonnegut? Hmm, I guess I could get a beer with this Maurice Strong fellow. Thing is, we probably have different ideas about ways, means and outcomes. Rule of thumb: During crises, the rich have almost always outsurvived poor, in many cases benefitting. For instance, the founder of the Krupp fortune, a wealthy burgher during the time of the Black Death of 1349, bought up the properties left vacant by families eradicated by the plague for pennies on the dollar. His descendants greatly prospered. I highly suspect Strong has an idea of this.⁴

In the US a Cap-and-Trade bill has been proposed, but as of yet not passed. While arguing the bill would leave to capital flight from the US, Ron Paul stated:

The Cap and Trade Bill HR 2454 was voted on last Friday. Proponents claim this bill will help the environment, but what it really does is put another nail in the economy’s coffin. The idea is to establish a national level of carbon dioxide emissions, and sell pollution permits to industry as the Catholic Church used to sell indulgences to sinners. HR 2454 also gives federal bureaucrats new power to regulate a wide variety of household appliances, such as light bulbs and refrigerators, and further distorts the market by providing more of your tax money to auto companies.

Spain legislated such progressive energy policy by massively diverting capital from the private sector into politically favored environmental projects for nearly ten years. Their economy currently has a 20 percent unemployment rate, and for each green job created, 2.2 normal jobs are eliminated.

The legislation in the US will cement more governmental regulations, taxes, fees and bureaucracy dissuading companies from doing business in the US, as well as how many employees they can afford to hire. This added governmental red tape will cause capital flight and job losses. Jobs, therefore, are increasingly likely to go overseas.

Over the summer, approximately 30,000 scientists signed a petition disputing the claim that global warming is an anthropogenic phenomenon.⁴ What’s more, the US Department of Defense is the largest polluter in the world, producing more hazardous wastes than the five largest US chemical companies together. Hazardous wastes employed by the military include, among others, pesticides and defoliants, like Agent Orange, many solvents, petroleum, perchlorate, lead mercury and depleted uranium.⁵

Health problems associated with these toxins include miscarriages, low birth weight, birth defects, kidney disease and cancer. Most affected are those on whom such weapons are used, those in the military, and those who live near a military site. In the US one out of every ten persons lives within ten miles of a military site listed as a priority cleanup site. Many corporations are right up there with the DoD. So, then, why are their fellow conspirators the ones wording such legislation? The best argument in favor of the environment, I conclude, is also an argument against war. Therefore any true and honest environmental movement has, at its core, an argument against war!

Depleted Uranium (DU) has been a hot topic since the war began, similar to Agent Orange use in Vietnam. As a radioactive and chemically toxic heavy metal, it remains wherever it is lodged, in the body on the ground or in rivers, for decades. In the human body particles of depleted uranium are a source of alpha particles. Much research suggests that DU is linked to serious damage to the human body.

In Iraq alone hundreds of tons of Depleted Uranium have been fired and exploded in high populated areas such as Basrah, Baghdad, Nasriya, Dewania, Samawa, and other cities. Exploration programs have found Depleted Uranium related contamination over most Iraqi territories.⁶

Iraq’s Minister of Environment said in July of 2007 in Cairo that “at least 350 sites in Iraq are contaminated with Depleted Uranium.” She also said that Iraq is facing an unprecedented number of cancer cases and called on the international community to help Iraq alleviate this problem. I will spare you the photos, but encourage you to look.⁶

On domestic turf, the United States Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management sell trees from public forests—that is trees owned, I mean shared, by all of us—to big timber corporations at reduced prices; in short, we subsidizes the destruction of the biodiversity which gave rise to ourselves. In the Tongass National Forest in southeastern Alaska, four-hundred-year-old hemlock, spruce and cedar are sold to timber corporations for less money than a cheeseburger. Taxpayers funded, also, are the construction of the logging roads. The Forest Service—the public—loses hundreds of millions of dollars a year on timber-sale programs. Now we are being told we have to pay taxes in order to preserve our collective land base.

In the continental United States just five percent of native forest still stands. 440,000 miles of logging roads run through National Forests, despite that the Forest Service maintains there are 383,000 miles. The National Forest Service, exactly like the major financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup and Well Fargo, cook the books and routinely lie.⁷

The logic behind the new global authority is flawed. It targets nations funded by taxpayer’s—us. But damage caused by human households is nowhere near as criminal as the damage done by corporations. Municipalities and individuals consume ten percent of the nation’s water. The other 90 percent is guzzled by agriculture and industry. Individual consumptions of energy, furthermore, accounts for about one-fourth of all energy consumption. The other 75 percent is consumed corporations. Municipal waste represents three percent of total waste production in the US.⁸

So we now see that we the people are unjustly carrying the burden of climate-change. Further, there are strong indicators that a current push for power accumulation employs climate-change and environmental degradation as its smoke and mirrors.

Many analysts are insisting the only in which to rebalance and harmonize the global human community is by revolution, and many of them contend violent revolution is inevitable. I don’t necessarily think “violent” need be so; but, it has to be global. We have to aim for the fences and raise consciousness all over the globe.

The push for global government and the New World Order must be slowed by us and our environmental communities—our land base, families and friends—protected.

1. Quote featured in the 7 November edition of Bob Chapman’s The International Forecaster.
2. Janet Albrechtsen. “Has Anyone Read the Copenhagen Agreement?” Wall Street Journal, 10-28-2009.
3. The Green Agenda and the First Global Revolution
4. Howard Bloom. 2000. Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang To The 21st Century. John Wiley and Sons: New York.
5. Ron Paul. “Cap and Trade Another Nail in the Economy’s Coffin,” June 29, 2009.
6. Lucinda Marshall. “Military Pollution: The Quintessential Universal Soldier.” Dissident Voice, March 29 2005.
7. Dr. Souad N. Al-Azzawi. “The Responsibility of the US in Contaminating Iraq with Depleted Uranium.” Global Research, Nov. 9, 2009.
8. Derrick Jensen and George Draffan. Excerpt from Strangely Like War.

Talk about nuts!

Thankfully, Garry South, “a top strategist for [former] Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom,” is on to Brown’s seditious psychosis:

“California Democrats need to ponder very seriously the prospect of putting up a candidate for governor who comes with reams of radio-show rantings like Brown,” he states, sagely adding that “Republicans will put tens of millions of dollars behind making him look like a conspiracy-spouting fringe lunatic to the average voter.”

Good on them! And thank goodness they have tons of money at their disposal, too, which, if scary Jerry had had his way, would have been a vital tool long removed from the political process, thereby denying freedom-loving corporations their constitutional right to buy as many congressmembers, er, as much access as possible. For here’s Brown from his radical radio days waxing wacky about campaign reform: “The way politics is organized… money buys power, even though as a principle, that is condemned.”

“Money buys power”? Well, duh! It also buys patchouli oil, lava lamps and Internet porn (uh, so I’ve heard), and isn’t it interesting how he doesn’t rail against those.

As a dissident DJ, Brown also bashed another beloved American institution: institutions (as in, correctional), knocking locking up druggies and throwing away the key:

“Here’s the real scam. The drug war is one of the games to get more convictions and prisoners. There’s a lot of chemicals out there and when certain ones are made illegal, they become a huge profit opportunity and bring violence, crime and more people to imprison.”

So, let me get this straight: Instead of spending bazillions on eons-long prison sentences for adults partaking of intoxicants in the privacy of their homes, activity that causes irrevocable damage to our society, you know, um, somehow, what would Brown have wildly suggested? Legalize drugs, tax them and then blow the dough on school construction and highway maintenance? Earth to Jerry: if we’d wanted to live like namby-pamby socialists, we’d never have revolted against France. Get a clue!

Further cementing his criminal-coddling credentials, here’s Baby-‘Em Brown’s death penalty lowdown: “The great danger of humane punishment is that people will come to accept state murder as something sanitary. I don’t think bureaucracy should ever be entrusted with that kind of power.”

Now, I’m sure liberals would insist we ask the 138 people exonerated from death row in the U.S. since 1973 what they think about capital punishment, even though their bias would be obvious. Fine, whatever; but it still doesn’t change this unalterable fact: nobody kills anybody when they’re dead. (Yes, tree huggers, ‘tis true there have been at least eight people executed in recent years even though it was determined a little too late — oops! — they were almost assuredly innocent but, hey, what are you, perfect?)

But the thing that galls me most about Jerry Brown is the Marxist nature of his on-the-record anti-corporatism, for who else but a closet commie would blame Big Business for our great nation’s woes? Everyone knows that banks, insurance companies, the pharmaceuticals industry, weapons manufacturers and other corporate mega-entities have never had anything but our country’s best interests at heart, and anyone who reads ulterior motives into their God-given right to fully service us, check it, provide us full services, is truly an America-hater of the first order.

Personally, I’m couldn’t be happier to donate my tax dollars to help save critically-needed financial institutions in exchange for the privilege of using credit cards with perfectly reasonable 29.99% interest rates. I’m proud as a patriotic peacock to continue supporting the ever-burgeoning defense industry and its half-dozen or however many wars it is they’ve got going now, ‘cause one never knows when the next Iraqi or Afghani — or even the first — will attack us from hating the freedoms we used to have. I’m all for making taxpayer-subsidized health insurance mandatory for every American, and for do-gooders who complain it’s nothing but a backdoor windfall for soulless HMOs and marvel at the chutzpah of fining or even jailing fellow citizens too poor to comply, I’ve only one question: where’s your famous bleeding heart compassion when it comes to shareholders and CEOs, huh? They’re human, too, you know. (Probably.)

Fortunately, time wounds all heels or at least tempers their views, and moderation is apparently what’s happened to Jerry Brown’s extremist ideas from his far-out radio daze. The Bee makes it clear that Brown, in his undeclared desire to regain the governorship, has ratcheted his rebellious rhetoric way down.

That’s fine by me, ‘cause one thing’s for sure: if old Governor Moonbeam’s retro ravings ever came to pass, we’d no doubt have an America that looked radically different from how it looks today.

And who would want that?

The butcher writes: “After 14 years as a vegetarian, a few of those as a quite ‘militant’ vegan, I became a butcher. The factors that went into me taking the position are many, but the result was maybe quite predictable. Within a month I was a full-fledged meat eater. What has not changed is my passion for the welfare of animals. Through my work as a butcher and chef, I now see a more direct way to influence and work for change in the meat industry and to improve the quality of life for all of the animals we rely on for food.”

Such backlash in the face of compassionate evolution is not uncommon. For example, just as more and more women begin to challenge gender roles, the patriarchal culture countered with Howard Stern, Maxim, and Spike TV. But I digress…

Becoming a butcher in the name of animal welfare is like joining the Marines to promote peace. What’s next, the Ethical Executioner with his “passion” for the “welfare” of prisoners? Surely, he’d just be choosing a “more direct way to influence and work for change,” following the lead of his butcher comrade.

In a society less and less capable of critical, independent thought, this pro-meat character will probably be widely praised as the antidote to “militant” vegans. You know, the food Nazis. By current standards, you could pack a calf into a veal crate or pump food down a goose’s gullet or grind up live male chicks to fertilize your fields and run no risk of being called militant. For that matter, you can clear cut forests, blow off mountain tops in search of coal, and drop white phosphorous on villages filled with brown children and garner virtually no attention at all…let alone be labeled a militant.

Choose a lifestyle of compassion and logic, speak out against vivisection, or protest the use of fur? You, my friends, are a worthy of a Hitler mustache.

With the global economy collapsing like a house of cards, 80% of the world’s forests cut down, 90% of the large fish in the ocean gone, more military conflicts than anyone can count, and our eco-systems rapidly approaching the point of no return, there’s never been a more urgent time to be a truly militant vegan.

At some point, we each have to decide: Do we respect all life or not? If we choose life instead of death, then we must view the culture holistically. To divide issues of animal suffering, eco-destruction, and human rights, is to fall into the trap of the dinosaur Left. For example, ZNet founder Michael Albert, who writes:

I see no comparison in importance between seeking to eliminate the roots and branches of sexism, and seeking to eliminate the roots and branches of violence against animals. I see no comparison in importance between how chickens are treated and how women or any humans are treated. In fact, for me the animal rights agenda resonates barely at all, and the anti-sexism agenda is part of my life.

Let’s be clear: Attempting to separate sexism from violence against animals (and all nature) is like trying to separate the human circulatory system from the respiratory system. If such obvious connections are not being made by the entrenched Left, I have to wonder: Why is anyone wasting even 5 minutes of their time on such myopia?

Since Michael Albert can’t seem to stop quoting Dylan, this song excerpt is for him, the Ethical Butcher, and all those who seek to fragment and obscure the big picture:

Don’t criticize what you can’t understand … your old road is rapidly agin’

For the times they are a-changin’

Just what, then, might be the lesson of Major Hasan’s far more deadly wake-up call at Fort Hood six and a half years later? Like Sergeant Akbar, Major Hasan is a devout Moslem who chose to engage in an essentially suicidal act of violence in order to remove himself from a military campaign that he opposed against an Islamic nation. Despite his best efforts, his deployment to Afghanistan was imminent, and the massacre was his “final solution” to avoid its consequences. Like Akbar, he seems to have joined the army a couple years earlier without realizing that his mission would take him to the Near East to go to war against Islamic societies. And like Akbar, he seems to have resorted to a lethal act of disobedience both to escape such combat and to declare his moral opposition to its happening. The question remains after more than a half dozen years of warfare in both Iraq and Afghanistan, whether Hasan’s massacre will have any impact on President Obama’s impending decision whether to escalate combat in Afghanistan–a choice that might turn out to be at least as important to our nation’s future as President Johnson’s choice in 1965.

What I am suggesting here is that, like Akbar, Hasan himself intended his suicidal behavior to be a “wake up call,” if without fully taking into account its effect on the present choice whether to escalate warfare in Afghanistan. What, then, were some of these issues that Hasan himself might have overlooked? The list here of four relevant aspects is short but important: (1) as a symptom of demoralization; (2) as a gesture of outrage against our nation’s military goals; (3) as an illustration of unanticipated consequences; and (4) as insistence that a cultural war is in progress tantamount to a modern crusade against Islamic societies.

As explained by Bob Herbert in his Saturday, Nov. 7 New York Times column, “Stress Beyond Belief,” Major Hasan’s outburst was a wake-up call in the sense that it exemplified the severe demoralization in the U.S. military resulting from the longest stretch of warfare in U.S. history (slightly longer than the Vietnam War, which lasted almost exactly eight years from 1965 to 1973). Our nation has too few soldiers to conduct two wars at the same time, too many of whom have been recycled to Iraq and Afghanistan on multiple tours of duty that inevitably impact the entire army–not just the soldiers directly involved. Everybody is affected, including families, friends, and neighbors. Even the military psychiatrists who treat post-traumatic stress disorder (P.T.S.D.) among veterans returning from war suffer negative effects sometimes described as “compassion fatigue.” This in fact might have been the primary cause of Hasan’s massacre. If so, it was the therapist who totally broke down rather than his patients in response to their memory of their traumatic experiences. In any case too many of our troops have suffered pathological effects they must endure for the rest of their lives. This collective burden has necessarily contributed to the decline of our nation’s social fabric–the wasted lives, high crime and divorce rates and general social malaise. The impact of incessant military combat abroad over the past sixty years might not be the single most important factor in the moral decline of our nation, but it cannot be ignored.

A second wake-up call would be suggested by the individuals targeted by Major Hasan. His primary choice seems to have been the fellow psychiatrists and medical technicians who might have been among the personnel he claimed harassed him because of his Muslim faith. As indicated by press reports, he increasingly played up his commitment to his faith, and in turn those who ridiculed him probably became more hostile in response to his intensified religious piety. It is also significant that Hasan focused much of his rage on American soldiers, most of who were about to embark to military assignments abroad, probably either Iraq or Afghanistan. In any case, there seems to have been no doubt about his choice whom to shoot. As much as possible he selected those in uniform as opposed to those in civvies with whom they were talking. As a trained psychiatrist his primary task on a daily basis was to interview troops about to be deployed to Afghanistan, but to the extent that he also provided professional assistance to soldiers suffering from P.T.S.D., he might be expected to have felt profound empathy with their crises. However, this turns out not to have been the case. If anything, Major Hasan’s rampage enacted excessive hostility against U.S. soldiers, almost as if he wanted to kill them before they had a chance to kill their supposed Islamic enemies.

It therefore seems likely that Major Hasan’s homicidal rage was provoked to a certain extent by the stories his patients and colleagues shared with him that featured Muslim victimization at least as much as that of the American troops. Until Hasan recovers from his wounds well enough to explain himself, any retroactive assessment of his motives is of course entirely speculative, but manifold accounts from Iraq of innocent people shot down in the streets, of the grotesque dead bodies of children, of the families packed in houses mistakenly destroyed by rocket attacks, of the cars full of incinerated bodies killed by bazooka fire because they didn’t slow down enough, and in general the disdain expressed regarding the countless “sand-niggers” (or “ragheads,” or “camel jockeys”) who had to be pushed around at checkpoints–all of these topics and epithets as recounted by combat veterans in therapy sessions could only have outraged Hasan more than his non-Muslim colleagues.

One can also assume that Hasan’s seemingly disproportionate response despite his professional training for dealing exactly with this kind of provocation helps to explain the comparable outrage of Iraqi and Afghans against the U.S. troops occupying their country. American military spokesmen repeatedly emphasize the benevolent effort of U.S. troops to befriend their captive host populations, but their actual day-to-day impact unpublicized by the American press would seem to involve quite the opposite treatment as suggested by Hasan’s deadly outburst. He actually heard the stories of Muslim mistreatment first hand, as most Americans have not. He actually experienced this disdain first-hand in his own personal experience, as most Americans have not.

A third wake-up call would be suggested by the total surprise of Major Hasan’s attack. Nobody at Fort Hood had the slightest idea that such a massacre was possible. Yet it happened, and it took a female civilian police officer to terminate the event. Being taken by surprise has been an unfortunate byproduct of military conflict for American troops since Korea, when China suddenly invaded from the north. Vietnam’s 1968 Tet Offensive was comparable, as were the various bomb attacks in Iraq when they first came into play. Time and again the U.S. military command from top to bottom has been confident of what seemed a stable operation only to discover that the situation was totally different. When a General Shinseki or anybody in a lesser position has had the temerity of express doubts, he has been eliminated from the hierarchy and replaced by somebody with a more “positive” outlook. Everybody in the chain of command–certainly officers such as Hasan who have been limited to psychiatric tasks relatively low on the totem pole–has learned the necessity of reflexive optimism whatever decisions come down from above. This has been essential for peddling themselves with their superiors as “part of the team” and ultimately for the Pentagon to peddle itself with Congress and the White House because of its essential role in the “defense of freedom.”

The very possibility of inadvertent results has been so completely suppressed in the military except by strategists at the very top of its leadership–and even there to too great an extent–that our nation’s defense establishment has been far less effective than it ought to be, given its enormous share of the federal budget. As illustrated by General McChrystal’s recent “take it or leave it” diagnosis of future prospects in Afghanistan, military strategists have been able to examine all the contingencies preceding a military campaign in great detail and with marvelous tactical sophistication, but they have been far less successful in bringing it to what they themselves might have considered an acceptable outcome. In fact every one of our nation’s major wars over the past sixty years–in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and now most probably Afghanistan–has fallen short of what might be described as victory. How many more misbegotten optimistic tactical assessments need to be played out before beltway politicians realize what is going on–that poker players are trying to play bridge, that checkers players are trying to play chess? For too many surprises occur to upset the most intricate calculations. In a bloodthirsty epiphany that lasted a mere seven minutes during which more than 100 rounds were fired, Hasan’s explosive outburst epitomized everything to be expected–and not to be expected–once the Afghan-Pakistani conflict becomes a full-scale war.

And a fourth and final wake-up call would be suggested by the fact that Major Hasan, like Sergeant Akbar, is a devout Muslim–sufficiently devout to have maintained contact with the radical imam Anwar al-Awlaki, who actually responded to his massacre last week by praising him as a hero, “a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people.” Official U.S. spokesmen repeatedly insist that the various Near East conflicts involving our nation have nothing to do with religious or cultural issues that might identify our policies as any kind of a modern Crusade against the Islamic world. However, this purpose is exactly what too many Near Easterners take for granted additional to the importance of oil profits and Israel’s nationalist agenda. In any case, it is more than coincidental that Hasan gave a PowerPoint presentation about a year ago, “Why the War on Terror is a War on Islam.” And exactly so! This is what Asia’s Muslim population has come to believe, whatever our spokesmen try to say to the contrary. Hasan himself was raised and educated in the United States, but with his massacre he has betrayed his oath of loyalty to the army and declared his personal rejection of our government. His shift in loyalty to the Islamic faith was a personal choice, but it also reflected his sympathy with his brother who now lives in Ramallah on the West Bank as well as his deceased parents, both of whom were born as Palestinians near Jerusalem before migrating to the United States–also his friendship with al-Awlaki, whose emphasis on arms training might have encouraged his purchase of his own pistol.

Israel has been engaged in this cultural battle since 1948, and we have let ourselves be dragged into its nightmare over the last couple of decades on a much more expansionistic scale–from Gaza and Lebanon all the way to Pakistan and beyond. Whatever the cause, whatever the explanation, our nation’s war on communism for fifty years transmogrified into a war against a particular religion. When the supposed Bolshevik menace finally collapsed, we as a nation, without quite realizing what we were doing, shifted our sights to the Islamic world, for the most part a borderless society that is largely both tribal and feudal except for urban enclaves. As opposed to the communists in earlier wars, the Muslim “enemies” we killed in limited situations generated further enemies–their cousins and cousins of cousins–to be killed on a bigger scale, and bigger yet, until the retaliation for 9-11 pits us against what will soon enough be the entire global region from the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea to the western edge of India.

The question remains whether our nation can afford this particular war. Until the Berlin Wall fell, the United States enjoyed economic superiority as well as a tactical advantage over the U.S.S.R. that was highly lucrative in the sense that our defense industries helped to keep our economy afloat. However, our conflict with the U.S.S.R. has long since terminated, and a new and strictly economic global standoff is now emerging that puts us on the losing end of the stick, especially because of our economy’s excessive debt to China, Japan, and many other nations with sovereign reserve funds invested in U.S. Treasury notes. Resulting from the steady fall of the dollar, these nations are looking for more profitable investments, and their political alignment can be expected to shift along with their financial withdrawal. So we are no longer in a position to waste our economic resources on a publicity-driven “war of choice” that is no longer in fact a “war of necessity” if the Taliban has expressed its willingness to negotiate a settlement and fewer than 100 Al Qaeda fighters are reported to be left in Afghanistan. If true, the military escalation now under consideration by the White House turns out to depend on an excuse just as fraudulent as the Tonkin incident in 1965 and Iraq’s “secret” nuclear weapons in 2003. At this point, however, we cannot ignore the significant difference that our almost guaranteed military quagmire in Afghanistan can only accelerate the international realignment that has begun to manifest itself with the effort of creditor nations to coordinate their impending rejection of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, for example as sponsored by BRIC (ominously inclusive of Brazil, Russia, India, and China).

Victory in Afghanistan might seem a quick antidote to such an economic threat, and it might even benefit our economy in Keynesian terms through the increased subsidization of our defense industries. However, any military occupation of Afghanistan would necessarily be prolonged–perhaps a decade or longer, especially if we resort to the construction of permanent military bases. Moreover, the conflict would unavoidably spread to include a large portion of Pakistan, whose volatile population is over half that of the United States. As Hasan’s massacre suggests, further surprises can be expected both on and off the battlefield, much as happened to the U.S.S.R. when its effort to subdue Afghanistan provided the coup de grace to its own economy. And of course the latest of our modern wars would further enlarge our national debt, ultimately reducing our nation’s standard of living into the foreseeable future. The rest of the post-industrial world need only stand aside and watch us destroy ourselves.

There is a lesson to be drawn from Hasan’s massacre if we have the sense–and courage–to recognize it: namely that we should wind down the conflict in Afghanistan as we claim to be doing in Iraq and pursue equitable diplomatic solutions throughout the entire Near East. Unfortunately, it seems, as current reports indicate (for example the CBS news Monday evening), President Obama can be anticipated in the near future to declare with his predictable rhetorical effectiveness that all those killed and wounded at Fort Hood further justify the Afghan escalation so their deaths will not have been in vain. In the words of Shakespeare (used fully eight times in his plays)–alas, alas.

The factual information used here has been primarily obtained from the New York Times coverage since the event occurred last Thursday, Nov. 5. Especially useful have been the two Nov. 6 articles by Robert McFadden and James Dao; the four Nov. 7 articles by James McKinley, Liz Robbins, Clifford Krauss & James Dao, and Campbell Robertson & Ray Rivera; the single Nov. 8 article by Benedict Carey & Damien Cave; the two Nov. 9 articles by James McKinley & James Dao, and Andrea Elliott; and the three Nov. 10 articles by Tamar Lewin, David Johnston & Scott Shane, and Michael Moss & Ray Rivera.

Laird begins each section with an anecdotal tale about some aspect of capitalism’s globalization process and those it affects. From the big box shoppers in North America and Europe to the manufacturing centers of China and from the massive ports of Los Angeles to the homeless individual displaced by the corporate race to the bottom, the narrative describes the nature of these phenomena. The reader is introduced to the health problems suffered by those near the factories producing cheap goods and the increase in the incidence of asthma in the ports cities of Los Angeles county. All of this is backed up with statistics and reportage that proves over and over again that the situation Laird describes is not isolated, but the norm. The economic fallout is presented as well. Laird is spot on in his description of the collusion between capitalist and government to lower wages, purchase materials on the cheap, create an economy based on debt and the transfer of debt and ignore the consequences. He describes how that collusion puts people out of work, moving the responsibility for their welfare onto the taxpayer while the government simultaneously undoes whatever safety nets designed precisely for the purpose of helping capitalism’s castoffs. Although he never comes out and says it directly, Laird’s book provides the reader with clear and familiar examples of the shortcomings of monopoly capitalism. He describes a paradox where most national economies depend on low-cost consumerism at the exact moment that such consumerism is stumbling. Why? Because it is dependent on unsustainable factors like cheap labor, cheap transport, trade imbalances, consumer debt and cheap oil.

In addition, he describes how the very construction of the discount marketplace virtually ensures its own destruction. After all, he writes, prices can only go so low before there is no longer any profit in their selling. More importantly, as regards the current economic situation is the fact of energy resources and their consumption. In a chapter titled “All is Plastic” Laird breaks down the essential link between the price and availability of fossil fuels and the price and availability of bargain goods. From the plastic most of the goods are made from to the cheap fuel used to transport them around the globe, cheap and available hydrocarbons are essential. This means that eventually the consumer will have to accept higher prices to compensate for fuel costs or the corporation will have to decrease its rate of profit even further–something difficult to accomplish since lower rates of profits require more sales to compensate. Laird suggests that this explains why Wal-Mart and other major discounters are looking for new customers in Asia and looking to move some of their manufacturing operations closer to the source of fuel. When one considers this latter fact, the claims that the wars and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are about oil and natural gas don’t seem far fetched at all. After all, if those military exercises succeed in the way Washington wants them to, then the way will be open for anything Wall Street wants in that region.

Laird’s book is a fine piece of reportage on a world where the economy’s collateral damage includes oil spills and the poisoning of China’s (and other developing nations) working poor; the low wages and illegal labor practices of Wal-Mart leading to the ultimate collapse of a system based on minimizing costs, high volume sales and low profit margins; and a world where debt is the cornerstone of the economy. It is, to paraphrase Laird, a system that represents capitalism in its ultimate creative and destructive capacity. Most likely, it is also our future.

Whitman has always been viewed as a poet of the people, in contrast to the pretentious dandies from academia who have controlled official American culture for much of our history. He wrote of workmen, farmers, sailors, soldiers, lovers, criminals, and prostitutes.

In the text of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, he wrote of himself as, “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest.” He had discovered a great secret, one that is known to everyone who is young at heart: that the free individual, always potentially a “kosmos,” stands at a much higher level in the scale of creation than any man-made collective.

Thus was Whitman a hero to the Beatniks of the 1950s who tried to rediscover an authentic American voice in the streets and on the roads and highways of this great land. The spirit of Whitman was surely present through the rebellion of the 1960s, when America’s young men and women rose up and fought the Establishment to stop the Vietnam War and bring civil rights to racial minorities.

The Establishment fought back with a vengeance and, through the most egregious betrayal in history, reduced the world’s greatest industrial democracy to the pathetic shadow of its former self we are today.

The first thing the Establishment did was destroy the industrial job base by shipping millions of good jobs to China and other Third World nations, where slave laborers could be forced to churn out consumer products at a fraction of the cost of similar work done by American workers.

Acting through the CIA and organized crime, the Establishment flooded the cities and college campuses with illegal drugs in order to rot the minds and souls of our youth.

They dumbed down education to the point where young people who graduate today know little and can do less of a practical nature. Vocational training is dead. A high school graduate is worth virtually nothing in the job market, and most college graduates are semi-literate and self-absorbed, without any real backbone, skills, or initiative. Many high school and college graduates are drug addicts or alcoholics.

They turned the economy over to thieves from Wall Street and created a military machine that turns youth into murderers and assassins whose job it is to conquer the world for the fat cats of global capital.

They ruined the arts, literature, and music through crass commercialization, making it almost impossible for any real original creativity to be produced or communicated. The one bright light in this darkness is the internet, which is being threatened by commercial suppression of freedom of expression by the ambitions of big communications companies. Thank goodness too for the rare creative genius like Michael Moore who has the courage to hold up a mirror to this deeply diseased society.

Then they wrecked people’s health with processed food and constant inducements to a sedentary lifestyle while pumping us full of dangerous vaccines and prescription drugs. They drummed it into everyone’s head that we are basically weak, ill, helpless creatures who can only survive by taking pills and making constant trips to doctors, hospitals, and clinics.

They induced us to fight over our possessions and freedoms in law courts with the aid of greedy lawyers in front of rapacious judges who have built up the largest prison population in the world.

They pulled money and credit out of the inner cities and rural areas leaving those segments of the nation and their populations to rot.

The list could go on and on and on.

Today we are in the midst of not just a recession but a terminal depression. Getting the banks to lend again so people can buy homes at what are still over-inflated prices or so they might compete with immigrants to get construction jobs through building of more useless office buildings or military bases is not a recovery. The “greening of America” is a myth. There is no resurgence of alternative energy investment or new public infrastructure apart from a few highway projects.

American family farming is practically dead and is under a new assault from speculators who are undercutting prices and forcing foreclosures. The local manufacturing sector never came back after the calamitous decline produced by the Paul Volcker recession of 1979-1983, when interest rates were deliberately raised to over 20 percent to kill off family-owned businesses so that global corporations could step in and take over. Since then we had the “Reagan Revolution” when the banks took over the economy, the Clinton dot.com bubble of the 1990s which crashed in 2000, and the George W. Bush/Alan Greenspan housing bubble which blew up in 2008. Now Main Street lies shattered and shuttered as a result of the crimes and treacheries of the last 30 years.

True, there is a rebellion brewing, including a monetary reform movement that has attacked the power of the Federal Reserve, as well as a few progressive voices that call for a much larger economic “stimulus” than the Obama administration has seen fit to implement.

But is there any practical plan on the part of either political party or organized movement to restore America to what it once was–a place where ordinary people could live, work, learn, and flourish? The answer is a resounding “No.” Not a chance. And “Change You Can Believe In” hasn’t changed a thing. All it has done has been to produce another financial bubble, this time using huge amounts of public debt through the sale of U.S. Treasury bonds. Business is not growing and jobs are not coming back. The only thing that has gone up has been the meeting of military recruitment quotas.
This latest bubble will fail too, because money created through lending to float the prices of assets is not wealth. Rather wealth consists of goods and services produced by labor applied to natural resources. Those who provide the labor must be recompensed fairly.

So what is to be done? The answer is that nothing can or will be done, if by that you mean whether a political savior is going to come along to rescue our nation and its people from destruction.

In fact, what they are planning is to continue to throttle and enslave us with a predatory financial establishment and a military policy that is preparing the groundwork for World War III. The war will be fought with American troops against Russia and China, after which China will take over as the world’s policeman while this country disappears from the face of the earth. It’s the ultimate plan of the New World Order, the ones American politicians, financiers, military leaders, and academics bow down to.

It is time for each and every individual who values his or her own life along with the creative potential of the human spirit to begin to work with others to create a new nation and world. The government isn’t going to do it for us. Please believe me. This is not a system that can be reformed. It is a system that must be replaced. And it must be replaced by the ordinary working men and women who have been crushed, used, and abused during the past ugly half-century.

Americans, get to work. Call your friends and family together today and begin to figure out what to do. Start with 15 minutes of prayer and meditation. You will be shown the way from within yourselves. My own view is that setting up local currency systems, as many communities are now doing, is a good place to start.

That is thanks to the cash handouts generously given out to them by the Goldman Sachs run administration in Washington. The Wall Street regime continues to make monetary policy over the heads of the electorate, devaluing the dollar purposely (in the name of ‘carry trade’ transactions) while bringing the erstwhile American economic powerhouse to its knees. An ailing economy, whose financial system has imploded like the twin towers, is now headed for an Argentinean style default and/or Weimar like hyper inflation. Casino not entrepreneurial capitalism still rules over us but the ideology is morally bankrupt. So gentlemen place your bets “rien n’est va plus” as the croupiers would say on Wall Street.

1989-2009: From the dislocation of Soviet Empire to today’s American decline

What brought down the Soviet Union was economic morass and industrial paralysis. Along with colonial adventurism in places like Angola and Afghanistan which drained the national treasury. A bloated bureaucracy and an inefficient gargantuan military industrial complex which also bled the federation’s resources. America today is in a symmetrical situation to the Soviet Union’s predicament in the late 1980s. Hence, 2009 maybe to the U.S what 1989 was to the late and somewhat great U.S.S.R. The U.S is entangled in two endless war of occupation one in the Middle East the other in central Asia.

These costly conflicts at a time of great economic distress which recalls the deprivations of the great depression era, have led to historic budget deficits. During the Bush neo con years ( the neocons being a ruthless clique driving foreign policy in the White House equivalent to the KGB apparatchiks who were influencing the Kremlin’s actions abroad) the federal government’s spent like there was no tomorrow and big government grew to monstrous proportions. Huge increases in the military spending added to this horrid fiscal nightmare. Barack Obama, the man of the moment or the “Gorbi” of our times, like the last Soviet leader, has inherited a huge mess which requires Herculean, if not superhuman capacity to clean up. And like the last leader of the Soviet empire, Obama enjoys huge popularity aboard, while being practically loathed, ridiculed and derided at home (especially on the radio airwaves). And now after the recent electoral gains of the Republicans in some key states, he’s wounded (perhaps fatally) politically.

Obama: The post modern “sun king” and absolutism American style

Obama’s pseudo or simulated “Glasnost” or the apparent policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions has led ironically to many Americans placing an absolute blind trust in the man who embodies “change”. There is an abdication of reason in the name of “yes we can”. A kind of collective hypnosis hangs over the nation. Meanwhile, there are some “hard core” pockets of dissent, made up of tea party patriots, who are denouncing his “socialist style” health care project. For its part, the zombie like mass media appears to be either asleep at the wheel to all this, or is willingly (in an insidious and complicit manner) allowing a Soviet style personality cult to take shape-mold the minds of millions and enthrall the masses.

The Obama Factor

The president’s inverted version of “perestroika” (that is the restructuring or retooling of the economy) has been fine tuned to meet the need of the oligarchs and corporate barons who support him and prompt him behind the curtains. Obama and his czar –commissars (and his adoring minions of PR spin operatives) have deftly in a brilliant slight of hand in one swift jest, effectively expropriating the entire financial and industrial sectors in America by means of massive taxpayer funded “bail outs”. These ploys have turned the essence of capitalism upside down, by rewarding cronyism and criminal behavior to the point where “crime pays” very handsomely indeed, and enables billionaires, fraudsters and financiers to obtain great gain almost without almost any pain or punishment. These perverse policies are likely to fail. In the end, Gorbachev’s policies although ostensibly well meaning, actually hastened the demise of the Soviet state. This later led to its fragmentation and disintegration of the communist superpower and its Eastern Empire. America’s current plight may lead to a similar outcome.

THE TRANSFER AGREEMENT

Black’s father was a pre-WW II member of the Betar Zionist-Revisionist youth movement in Poland, when Menachem Begin was its Warsaw leader, and in 1983 Black was himself a member of the American branch of Herut, then the party of Prime Ministers Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, now subsumed in Bibi Netanyahu’s Revisionist Likud. Nevertheless, his 1983 edition Zionist critics were either extremely wary of the book, or intensely hostile.

When he first heard of the Ha’avara pact with the archenemy of his people, it was a nightmare: “The possibility of a Zionist-Nazi arrangement for the sake of Israel was inconceivable.”

He was correct to be shocked. In 1933, any German, Jew or gentile, who wanted to take money out of the country lost about 25% as it went out the door. But under the Ha’avara, a Jew turned over his money to a German bank and Germany shipped goods, steel pipes, etc. to Palestine, where they were sold by the World Zionost Organization. Later the WZO extended sales of these Nazi goods to the rest of the Middle East. The Nazis still deducted money from the transation, and the WZO did likewise, but the cuts were less than the percentage a Jew had to pay to send money elsewhere.

Even after he collected his wits, and decided to write about it, Black understood that he was walking straight into a political minefield:

My greatest worry is that the revelations of the book might be used by enemies of the Jewish people. For those who seek to besmirch the Zionist movement as racist and Nazi-like, this agreement might seem to be perfect ammunition.

Black’s Zionist reviewers were almost all hostile to him because he brazenly cheered the fact that the WZO didn’t fight Hitler. Arnost Lustig, writing in the 5/84 issue of the B’nai B’rith organ, The Jewish Monthly, said that “sometimes he gets into dangerous, carefree formulations that the critics will return to him like a boomerang.” A. J. Sherman reviewed Black’s book for the NY Times. He was out of sorts with Black for asking, rhetorically,

whether the Jewish architects of the agreement were men of madness or of genius. They were of course neither… they left to others the self-indulgence of ringing denunciations and posturings for the press, delivered in… the heady atmosphere of a crowded Madison Square Garden.

Henry Feingold told us in the 9/84 issue of the American Jewish Congress journal, Congress Monthly, that “both Nazis and Zionists had something in common. Neither believed that Jewish life in the Diaspora was desirable. They were both dissimilationists. It was that shared belief which made the Transfer Agreement possible…. For a propagandist who seeks to strike at the very core of Jewish sensibility, awareness of the Transfer Agreement is like a dream come true.” Black’s book “plays into the hands of those who seek to destroy the state of Israel.”

Eric Breindel took on Black in the 2/18/85 New Republic: “Black cannot evade responsibility for the uses to which his book is now being put by simply asserting, in his text, that suggestions of Zionist complicity in the Holocaust are ‘absurd.’”

Black responded to Breindel in the 4/29/85 New Republic:

Breindel links me with the anti-Zionist efforts of Arab propagandists, Soviet anti-Semites, and the anti-Zionist work of Lenni Brenner. That is so far from the truth, it is laughable. Indeed, Jewish leaders have felt that my book provided the precise document-by-document rebuttal to Brenner’s distortions, and encouraged the distribution of my book overseas.

I sent the NR a response to Black but, knowing they wouldn’t run it, I also sent it to him via his publisher, with a challenge:

“If you… believe that my books… are in need of refutation, the best way to try to do that is in debate.” By now it should come as no surprise that he didn’t accept my offer.

One can imagine Black’s dismay when he read a 6/84 speech by Louis Farrakhan:

The Zionists believed that they should get a homeland for the Jews and maintain that homeland, but they wanted to fulfill the vision without fulfilling the preconditions. So Zionists made a deal with Adolf Hitler. These are the same people that condemn me for saying Hitler was a great man, but a wicked man…. So for me to say that Hitler was great, I’ve made no mistake at all. He was great, but wickedly great, and the Zionists made a deal with Adolf Hitler according to a book called The Transfer Agreement by Edwin Black, one of their own kind….

This transfer agreement let 60,000 German Jews into Palestine and $100 million of their money into Palestine, where they began to take land away from the Palestinian people and little by little they gained strength and power and with the backing of the nations, they claimed that land to be theirs and they called it Israel. I say to the Jewish people and to the Government of the United States: the present state called Israel is an outlaw act…. and she will never have any peace, because there can be no peace structured on injustice, thievery, lying and deceit and using the name of God to shield your gutter religion under his holy name.

Black, his Zionist critics and Farrakhan were correct on one level or another. It is instinctual for post-civil rights movement Americans to suspect any group of oppressed who try to make a deal with their oppressor. Nevertheless, Black, well aware of what they did, tried to vindicate the Ha’avara:

It was one thing for the Zionists to subvert the anti-Nazi boycott… but soon Zionist leaders understood that the success of the future Jewish Palestinian economy would be inextricably bound up with the survivial of the Nazi economy…. If the Hitler economy fell both sides would be ruined.

However, he is so fanatically committed to Israel that he was driven to deceive himself with a totally false after-the-fact explanation for the traitorous pact:

As many Jews as possible had to be brought over from Germany as fast as possible – not to save their culture, not to save their wealth, but to save their lives…. The only way to continue the transfer and rescue was to bring over large groups of so-called capitalist emigrants.

In a subsequent article in the 5/84 Jewish Monthly, Black tried his own rescue operation – on the Ha’avara. Everyone knows that modern liberation movements are not supposed to be concerned only with saving capitalists, so he told us that the wealth of these German Jews “opened the gates to hundreds of thousands of working class Polish and Eastern European immigrants.”

Black claims he hired 50 people to help him research the period. He is completely familiar with the standard Holocaust literature. Yet he knowingly omitted anything from other scholars which would contradict his rescue fable. In 1983 this writer discovered that Black was working on his book, and inasmuch as my own Zionism In The Age Of The Dictators was about to be published, I wrote his editor, who put me in contact with Black. He presented me with his rescue theory. I asked if he was familiar with Abraham Margaliot’s article “The Problems Of The Rescue Of German Jewry During The Years 1933-1939: The Reasons For The Delay In Their Emigration From The Third Reich,” found in Rescue Attempts During The Holocaust, a tome issued by the Yad Vashem Institute, Israel’s Holocaust study center. Of course he had read it, but he was quick to tell me that he was “the person who knows more about the transfer than any person alive.”

Margaliot had described a 1935 speech by Chaim Weizmann, later Israel’s first President:

He declared that the Zionist movement would have to choose between the immediate rescue of Jews and the establishment of a national project which would ensure lasting redemption for the Jewish people. Under the
circumstances, the movement, according to Weizmann, must choose the later course.

Margaliot quoted Labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson’s 1933 statement that “we know that we are not able to transfer all of German Jewry and will have to choose on the basis of the cruel criterion of Zionism.” Two-thirds of the German Jews who applied to the World Zionist Organization for immigration certificates in 1933-35 were rejected while no less than 6,307 Zionist cadre were brought to Palestine from Britain, South Africa, Turkey and the Western Hemisphere.

Rescue was never the WZO’s priority. Black knew of a 12/7/38 speech by David Ben-Gurion, quoted by Yoav Gelber in Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XII. In the wake of the dreadful Kristalnacht pogrom, the British, hoping to ease pressure on them to admit more immigrants to Palestine, offered to take in thousands of Jewish children directly into Britain. But Ben-Gurion, later Israel’s first Prime Minister, solemnly declared that

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the people of Israel.

Black wouldn’t debate me in the 1980s, but I’m going to challenge him again, via his publisher, Dialog Press: If Black thinks that the WZO did the right thing re Hitler in the 1930s and that I falsely accused them of collaborating with Nazism, lets debate it now, in 2009, over the internet and let the world public decide!

KILLING KASZTNER: THE JEW WHO DEALT WITH THE NAZIS

Gaylen Ross’s film is three documentaries rolled into one. Labor Zionist Rezso Kasztner negotiated with Adolf Eichmann in Hungary in 1944. In 1953, Israel prosecuted pamphleteer Malchiel Gruenwald for libeling Kasztner as a collaborator.

On 4/25/44, Eichmann summoned Laborite Joel Brand, and sent him to negotiate with the WZO and the Allies. The SS would allow a million Jews to leave for Spain in exchange for 10,000 trucks, soap, coffee and other supplies. The trucks were to be used exclusively on the eastern front. As a token of good faith, Eichmann authorized Kasztner to organize a preliminary convoy of 600 Jews to Palestine. Brand never thought that the Western Allies would accept the proposition. He believed that worried SS officers wanted to invest in their futures. Live Jews were negotiable currency. Brand hoped to decoy the Nazis into thinking a deal could be made. Possibly extermination would slow down or stop while an accord was worked out. But Britain notified Stalin and publicly denounced the offer as a trick to divide the Allies.

While historians complain about how the WZO and Britain handled the Brand affair, the central issue is Kasztner’s role in Hungary. Eichmann allowed him to organise the convoy, ultimately a train to Switzerland, and place family and friends on it. Gruenwald denounced Kasztner for silence re German lies that Hungary’s Jews were only being resettled at Kenyermezo, then part of Hungary, now in Rumania.

The Labor Party got more than it bargained for. Shmuel Tamir, a brilliant cross-examiner, appeared for Gruenwald. On 6/21/55, Judge Benyamin Halevi found there had been no libel, apart from the fact that Kasztner hadn’t been motivated by monetary gain. His collaboration crucially aided the Nazis in murdering 450,000 Jews and, after the war, he compounded his offence by going to the defence of SS murderer Kurt Becher.

On 3/3/57 Kasztner was assassinated. Zeev Eckstein confessed to killing him, claiming that he was a government agent who had infiltrated a right-wing Zionist terrorist group. However, on 1/17/58 the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the Kasztner-Gruenwald case. It ruled, 5 to 0, that Kasztner perjured himself on behalf of Becher. It then concluded, 3 to 2, that what he did during the war couldn’t be legally considered collaboration. Judge Shlomo Chesin argued that

He didn’t warn Hungarian Jewry of the danger facing it because he didn’t think it would be useful, and because he thought that any deeds resulting from information given them would damage more than help …. The question is not whether a man is allowed to kill many in order to save a few, or vice-versa. The question is altogether in another sphere and should be defined as follows: a man is aware that a whole community is awaiting its doom. He is allowed to make efforts to save a few, although part of his efforts involve concealment of truth from the many; or should he disclose the truth to many though it is his best opinion that this way everybody will perish. I think the answer is clear. What good will the blood of the few bring if everyone is to perish?

Ross filmed Eckstein apologizing to Kasztner’s daughter, Zsuzsi, who defends her father’s deeds. Killing Kasztner is at its worst dealing with the collaborator, but the parts about the assassin and the daughter are new and automatically interesting, regardless of what they think.

Many Israelis refused to accept the verdict. Had Kasztner lived, Labor would have been in difficulty. Between the trial and the Supreme Court decision, Tamir uncovered evidence that Kasztner also intervened for SS Colonel Hermann Krumey. He sent the court at Nuremberg an affidavit: “Krumey performed his duties in a laudable spirit of good will, at a time when the life and death of many depended on him.”

During Eichmann’s 1961 trial, Brand’s cousin, André Biss, who worked with Kasztner and supported his policy, offered to testify. He had more contact with Eichmann than any other witness. An appearance was set, but Prosecutor Gideon Hausner discovered that Biss would defend Kasztner’s activities. He knew that there would be immense outcry. He also knew that Eichmann, in Argentina, followed the libel trial and described his relationship with Kasztner in interviews taped by a Dutch Nazi in 1955. Parts were later published in the 11/28 and 12/5/60 issues of Life magazine after his capture in 1960. The tapes showed how Eichmann might implicate Kasztner. And Halevi was one of the trial judges.

Israel gained prestige from Eichmann’s capture. The Labor government didn’t want the focus of the trial to shift away from him to a re-examination of Labor’s Holocaust record. According to Biss’s book, A Million Jews to Save, Hausner asked him “to omit from my evidence any mention of our action in Budapest, and especially to pass over in silence what was then in Israel called the ‘Kasztner affair’.” Biss refused and was dropped as a witness.

Eichmann had described “Kastner” [Life’s anglicised Kasztner] as

young man about my age, an ice-cold lawyer and a fanatical Zionist. He agreed to help keep the Jews from resisting deportation – and even keep order in the collection camps – if I would close my eyes and let a few hundred or a few thousand young Jews emigrate illegally to Palestine. It was a good bargain. For keeping order in the camps, the price of 15,000 or 20,000 Jews – in the end there may have been more – was not too high for me. Except perhaps for the first few sessions, Kastner never came to me fearful of the Gestapo strong man. We negotiated entirely as equals. People forget that. We were political opponents trying to arrive at a settlement, and we trusted each other perfectly. When he was with me, Kastner smoked cigarettes as though he were in a coffeehouse. While we talked he would smoke one aromatic cigarette after another, taking them from a silver case and lighting them with a little silver lighter. With his great polish and reserve he would have made an ideal Gestapo officer himself.

Dr Kastner’s main concern was to make it possible for a select group of Hungarian Jews to emigrate to Israel…. As a matter of fact, there was a very strong similarity between our attitudes in the SS and the viewpoint of these immensely idealistic Zionist leaders who were fighting what might be their last battle. As I told Kastner: ‘We, too, are idealists and we, too, had to sacrifice our own blood before we came to power.’

I believe that Kastner would have sacrificed a thousand or a hundred thousand of his blood to achieve his political goal. He was not interested in old Jews or those who had become assimilated into Hungarian society. But he was incredibly persistent in trying to save biologically valuable Jewish blood – that is, human material that was capable of reproduction and hard work. ‘You can have the others’ he would say, ‘but let me have this group here.’ And because Kastner rendered us a great service by helping keep the deportation camps peaceful, I would let his groups escape. After all, I was not concerned with small groups of a thousand or so Jews.

In 1961, Ben Hecht, a celebrity American Zionist journalist, wrote Perfidy, an expose of the Kasztner scandal, presenting pages of Tamir’s demolition of Kasztner’s defense.

Tamir: How do you account for the fact that more people were selected from Kluj [Kasztner’s home town] to be rescued than from any other Hungarian town?
Kastner: That had nothing to do with me.
Tamir: I put it to you that you specifically requested favoritism for your people in Kluj from Eichmann.
Kastner: Yes, I asked for it specifically.

Kasztner made things up on the witness stand:

Kastner: All the local Rescue Committees were under my jurisdiction.
Tamir: Committees! You speak in the plural.
Kastner: Yes – wherever they existed.
Tamir: Where else except in Kluj was there such a committee?
Kastner: Well, I think the committee in Kluj was the only one in Hungary.

After Eichmann’s execution, Zionist-Nazi relations were debated in Israel but, excepting articles by East German Klaus Polkehn and Faris Glubb’s PLO pamphlet, Zionist Relations With Nazi Germany, the issue dropped out of international concern until the 1980s, with Zionism in the Age of the Dictators and Black’s book. My text was reviewed by London Times editor Edward Mortimer, who hailed it as “short, crisp and carefully documented.” This attracted the attention of Jim Allen, a leading British TV playwright, who wrote a 1987 stage play, Perdition, titled after Hecht’s Perfidy, based on my Hungarian Holocaust chapter. Two days before its opening, the Royal Court Upstairs canceled it under Zionist pressure.

It turned into a Zionist disaster. Jim had no trouble getting nationwide prime time Diverse Reports to set up a debate. He, Marion Woolfson and I took on Zionist Martin Gilbert, the Churchill family’s appointed historian, Hungarian-born Stephen Roth, chair of the local Zionist Federation, who worked with Kasztner, and Holocaust survivor Rabbi Hugo Gryn.

Our side met with Perdition’s director, Ken Loach. He gave us our debate roles: “Marion, you defend the public’s right to see the play and make up their own minds re Kasztner. Jim, you defend the additions and subtractions you were making in the run up to opening night. Lenni, you back him up with documents.”

I returned to the US the morning after the debate. I took the Underground to Heathrow, getting into a car via an end door. In little time I realized that many folks were looking at me. As others got on and saw people looking in one direction, they did likewise. A packed car arrived at the airport, looking at me with smiles on every face. Finally, one guy said “You won.” “I think we won. But I’d like to know why you think we won?” “We had the right to see the play and make up our own minds, Jim was making last minute changes, as playwrights do, and you backed him up with solid documentation.”

Readers understand my ego-boost as a historian and debater. But Ken was the star of that show. David Lan wrote up the debate in the 4/2/87 London Review of Books. He explained why those Brits looked at me:

The High Court of Justice in London, 1967. Dr. Miklos Yaron, a Hungarian gynaecologist, is suing his former assistant Ruth Kaplan for libel. Kaplan has published a pamphlet accusing Yaron of collaboration with Nazi leaders in 1944….

Is there anyone in Britain interested in the theatre, in civil liberties or in Jews who can’t identify this as a scene in Jim Allen’s play Perdition? The successful lobbying by Jews in Britain to have its production cancelled has made it one of the most famous plays of the decade.

Zionist Holocaust historian David Cesarani, involved in the Royal Court purge, confessed, in London’s 3 July 1987 Jewish Chronicle, that the public thought the theatre “had been bullied into censoring the play.”

Fanatics don’t know when to quit. In 1943, Nathan Schwalb, Labor’s Swiss representative, had written a letter to party comrades in Slovakia:

About the cries coming from your country, we should know that all the Allied nations are spilling much of their blood, and if we do not sacrifice any blood, by what right shall we merit coming before the bargaining table when they divide nations and lands at the war’s end? Therefore it is silly, even impudent, on our part to ask these nations who are spilling their blood to permit their money into enemy countries in order to protect our blood – for only with blood shall we get the land. But in respect to you, my friends, atem taylu, and for this purpose I am sending you money illegally with this messenger.

Schwalb sued Allen, who found his letter in my book and put it in Perdition. Allen had to publish Perdition with blank space where a character quoted it. But there was a judicial day of reckoning. London’s 27/11/92 Jewish Chronicle lamented: “The collapse of a libel action has allowed… Perdition to be published in full…. The action… collapsed due to lack of evidence.”

Kasztner’s libel trial lies about his post-war efforts on Becher’s behalf, denounced even by the Supreme Court, were the bedrock of Israeli hatred of Kasztner:

Tamir: And how did it happen that Kurt Becher, a high-ranking SS leader and war criminal, was acquitted at Nuremberg as a result of your intervention and testimony?

Kasztner: That’s a lie! I never testified for him!

Zionist Holocaust scholar Walter Laqueur described the after effects in the 12/55 Commentary:

“With that, he had fallen into Tamir’s trap…. For Kastner had testified at Nuremberg, on August 4, 1947, asking that Becher’s services be accorded the ‘fullest possible consideration’…. worse was to follow… Kastner had stated that the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization had authorized him to give his testimony in Becher’s behalf.” Laqueur insisted that “this turned out not to be so,” but a 1997 article in The Journal of Israeli History by Shoshona Barri (Ishoni) documented that this was true.

She traced the evolution of Kasztner’s statements re Eichman’s crew:

In September 1945, he made two statements before the American Committee for the Investigation of War Crimes…. The first described the destruction of the Jews… mentioning Krumey as the one who had headed the implementation of Eichmann’s murderous program…. The second statement described Becher and Wisliceny as war criminals whose only reason for benevolent activity during the final months of the war (including the preservation of Kastner’s own life) had been to provide themselves with alibis; they sensed the impending defeat of the Nazis and the subsequent end of the war.

Eliahu Dobkin of the Jewish Agency, the WZO’s Palestine executive body, testified at the 1954 trial. Barri (Ishoni) tells us that

when Dobkin was called to the witness stand, he denied ever having heard Becher’s name… Kastner sent a letter to Justice Halevi in which he attempted to prove that… Dobkin had been scheduled during the war to meet Becher in Lisbon as part of the rescue attempts. He had also been party to the Jewish Agency’s rescue work and was therefore familiar with all reports issued on rescue activities, including Kastner’s own report (which had been written in 1946)…. Kastner claimed that it was impossible that this man should not be familiar with Becher’s name. This claim of Kastner’s sounds quite plausible. Dobkin was indeed about to meet Becher during the war…. Becher’s name appeared innumerable times in Kastner’s own report.

She explains that the WZO was trying to get its hands on the ‘Becher deposit,’ “money and valuables taken from the Jews of Hungary and later turned over by Becher to [Moshe] Schweiger acting on behalf of the Rescue Committee” run by Kasztner. “This treasure was then taken from Schweiger by the American forces.” Barri (Ishoni) discovered that “there was a total of seven interventions by Kastner on behalf of Nazi war criminals…. Certainly the Jewish Agency knew of some of them… archival sources suggest the probability that the Jewish Agency was aware of them all.”

She explained that

Members of the Jewish Agency… were concerned that… the Jewish people. lacking a state, was not represented in the Nuremberg court…. Kastner, as one who was acquainted with top ranking Nazis, could testify as to their activities, and could at the same time report on the trials’ proceedings. These were the reasons for his employment at Nuremberg. It is therefore difficult to accept the picture painted during the 1954 trial and thereafter, that Kastner’s sojourn in Nuremberg was entirely on his own initiative.

Ever since the 1954 trial, Israeli historians and dramatists have tried to explain Kasztner’s Becher intervention. Barri (Ishoni) said that

This article does support the view that Kastner underwent psychological processes that influenced his testimonies…. Psychologists use the term ‘cognitive dissonance’ to describe what happens to someone who has performed an act in the past that is difficult to live with.

Among Barri (Ishoni)’s major contributions to the discussion is detailing Jewish Agency use of Kasztner in their chase after the Becher deposit and adding that as a factor explaining his obviously morbid character development. Gaylen Ross certainly knows Barri (Ishoni)’s development of the JA’s role, but the documentary focused on Kasztner, not the JA’s role, which is not an artistic sin. Therefore this discussion follows her line of thought and doesn’t develop the JA’s involvement in this morbid tale. Readers interested in that should go directly to her excellent article.

New York’s 10/23 Jewish Week says that “Ross became inspired several years ago when when… she heard sociologist Egon Mayer, who who was one of the “Kasztner Jews,” say that the train represented ‘the single largest successful rescue of Jews by Jews during the Holocaust.’” The NY Times review focuses on his mother, Hedy Mayer, “several months pregnant when she boarded Mr. Kasztner’s train.” As I edited 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration With The Nazis, published in 2002, I discovered Mayer’s website devoted to defending Kasztner. It quoted his 1946 German Bericht or Report, unpublished in English, so I went to him and asked for a copy:

“I want to read it because I don’t want to be blindsided, unaware of evidence exhonorating him. If I find any such, I’ll run it.”

I meant it, but I expected to get a big no, given my condemnation of Mayer’s hero. When Egon realized that I was a serious scholar, he not only gave me the Bericht, he gave me a translation he had privately made for him. Ultimately I showed Egan the 33 pages of excerpts that I wanted to put in the book. “Was it fair to Kasztner?” “Run it.” Total cooperation with someone who opposes your politics is otherworldly saintliness. Later yet, he told me that he was “a demographer, not a historian. What I don’t understand is how Zionism evolved from a basically secular movement into one overrun with religious fanatics.” I told him that I’d contact him and we would set a time for such a serious discussion. Days later he got sick, was hospitalize and died.

An obituary cited his open cooperative character. Indeed I’ve met people of many different politics including my own. But few of their deaths upset me as much as Egon’s. In his memory, I donated a copy of the yet unpublished Report to the Jewish Room of New York’s 42nd Street Public Library. And now memory of him makes me declare that Zsuzsi Kasztner may think her father was a hero and still be a nice person. He collaborated with Eichmann, not her. Defending her father is a very human mistake. But he was the collaborator that Hecht and Allen and I say he was.

We are all living at the thin sharp point of always more, always bigger, always better, always new, improved and disposable. That much should be obvious, even though it is not. We want our homes to be worth more today than yesterday, we demand it to be so. Prices must always fall, wages must always rise, and our wealth must always increase. We must have more than our parents and we must ensure more again for our children. Standing still is failure. Going backwards is unthinkable. This is simply impossible to sustain, we all know it, but we carry on regardless. Impossibleism.

It’s a math problem, or more correctly, it is our collective ignorance of natural forces, and the tyranny of arithmetic behind them. In our civilized hubris, certainty is something malleable, something which we can and will in time conquer. A war on 2+2=4. The inevitable as the enemy. Invisible, exponential terrorists whose design it is to take away our cherished free markets, destroy our twin towers of freedom and democracy, and bust us all back to the dark ages before cars, coke, and plasma TV’s. Absolutely nobody alive today wants that.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), world output “collapsed” by 1.1% in 2009. That data point the official manifestation of what everybody already knew — that our world was in trouble and we were living with less. The value (in US dollars) of everything produced on our small blue planet in 2009 was about 60 trillion dollars — give or take a fish in Indonesia or the occasional bribe in Saudi Arabia. The American GDP is about 14 trillion dollars, where a ham sandwich is about five bucks — for purposes of scale. A contraction in production was both cause and effect of a serious economic “meltdown”, one which has squeezed our societies and cultures in fundamental and dramatic ways. It was, and is, a catastrophe. 1.1 % it turns out, is a lot.

The IMF forecast for 2010 is much rosier, as they predict a “return to growth” of about 3.1%. The consensus is that this is a good thing of course, growth being the only acceptable state of affairs, and by any measure. Absolutely nobody wants contracting production of stuff, nor do they want piddling increments of same. No, we all alive today want increasing production of stuff and nothing less, Amen. The only caution the IMF reserves is that our recovery is weak, and we must all be on our guard lest it slip back or sideways. And again, Amen to that.

In fact, it won’t be long before we just simply assume, as we had before, that growth is the natural order of things and forget completely the lessons of the great economic collapse. We will expect that growth is constant, and pay no heed to the annual IMF reports, just so much wallpaper in their dull, never changing prognosticating. A constant line of 2% growth our just reward for taming the earth and making it our own. Sustainable growth as many economists say, sustainable in the “we can keep this sucker moving” kind of way, not in the antithetic “can we keep this up?” heretical kind of way.

So we have a 60 trillion dollar world and it isn’t good enough it appears. We want a bigger world, a better world, and 2% a year should give it to us. That’s 2% compounded of course — we want our 2 % added to our current amount of stuff, and we want this to happen every 365 times the earth rotates on its axis — per annum, once a year. In 2010, we will be expecting to produce about 1.8 trillion dollars worth of “wealth” above and beyond the 60 trillion we have now (my apologies to economists who normally demand footnotes and qualifiers for this kind of thing. You get the point regardless). Maybe another 1.2 trillion or so the year after. We couldn’t be happier when our world GDP grows to 63 trillion USD’s in just two years. Good, sustainable progress we all can believe in, the effects of which we intuitively know will make us all healthier, happier, and richer. A lot of us anyway, or at least those of us who matter.

What is a 63 trillion dollar world going to look like? More jobs, more cars, more I Pods and I Phones. More people perhaps, more food we would expect, more industries and factories and technology. More of everything: poverty, stress, and Hollywood plastic. Three trillion doesn’t seem much against sixty, and it seems manageable. Certainly compared to a 120 trillion dollar world, which would be twice the amount of productivity we are churning out today. It’s much harder to imagine that. Spend a day out in the workaday world we all inhabit, and we can see what 60 trillion dollars looks like. Spend the same day trying to picture a 120 trillion dollar world… and it confounds the senses.

Of course, it is easy to forget that our current world is powered by the resources of the planet, and once reminded it makes for perfect common sense. More cars, industry, and flip flops require more coal, iron, and oil. It is reasonable to consider that a 3 trillion dollar increase in production worldwide will require additional stuff dug, scraped, or pumped out of the ground. This is concerning to many, as there is common understanding that raping the earth is morally and ethically to be avoided. We do it anyway of course, depending on our children to figure out a way to fix the imbalance for us. But a 120 trillion dollar world? Twice the oil pumped at twice the rate, twice the fish killed at twice the rate, twice the consumption with twice the debt. What about a 240 trillion dollar world? Four times the wealth, based on four times the resources our current world is built upon. Four times the rate and amount of extraction and consumption of oil than today. 85 billion barrels of oil in 2008, 340 billion barrels of oil consumed every day in a 240 trillion dollar world. And rising by design.

Impossible.

Impossibleists want unrestrained sustainable growth in the face of its inevitable impossibility. It is a mystery how they think this way, knowing as they surely do that eventually the bill will come due, and the engine will run out of gas — literally. Think about it — growth that never stops, ever. Even with limitless resources, it is simple intuition that eventually, somewhere, sometime…. But of course we don’t have infinite resources, another intuitive understanding even though it seems to us every day that we do. We know we don’t. Impossibleists will not reconcile these two basic intuitions, that all growth must eventually end, and that all resources must eventually tap out.

Impossibleism is a form of insanity, a shared delusional neurosis. It’s a party game of trick or treat all humans are invited to, a game where treats are redeemed by us in the present, and tricks are reserved for the ghosts of future people we will not know, and of whom we do not care. Not our children, nor theirs. The legacy of Impossibleism is the certain destruction of the future, the hope of the Impossibleist that he will not have to face the damned.

Pop quiz. How long will it take, at 2% annual growth compounded, to turn our 60 trillion dollar world into a 120 trillion dollar world? 35 years. If we do exactly what we plan to do, and everything goes swimmingly, and we have sustainable growth of 2% a year, our children will have a 120 trillion dollar world to deal with, and most of us alive today will live to see it. Children today of ten years of age will be alive and drowning in a 240 trillion dollar world, which by deliberate and calculated design will arrive in a single lifetime of 70 years. It’s a tyrannical feature of unflinching math called “doubling time”, a feature of exponential growth hidden in plain view.

The future ghosts are not just real, they are alive today and are our very own children. We have met — and love, and cherish, and protect — the very people we are cashing in the chits on, on whom we are knocking out the jams. Think about it, we are nurturing the very people — people who carry our names, our genes, and paradoxically our dreams — who will watch and live in and deal with a world four times larger than our own. We ourselves will breathe our last on a small blue planet that has to produce twice as much as today’s planet.

Progress, as we all define it, is impossible to sustain. Why? Leave the dogmas, politics, and bullshit aside and do the math. That’s why.

Impossibleism.

The second thought I had upon reading about the Vatican’s decision was that this was the religious version of a corporate takeover. Look, says the Vatican to those disaffected Anglicans and Episcopalians, your spiritual stock may be down because of the decisions of your church elders to accept all of god’s children into its flock as equals, but our church would never do such a thing. So, invest your soul with us. It’s a masterstroke of corporate raiding. Not only does the Vatican pick up some membership in North America, where its numbers have been declining for decades, but it also picks up the monies those former members of the Anglican churches give to their churches. In fact, when one considers the money, it is truly a masterstroke, since the Vatican’s most recent adherents come from the planet’s poorer continents, especially Africa. With the potential increase in relatively wealthy homophobic converts, the full coffers of the Catholic Church should increase even more.

It would be false to pretend that the entire reason for the growing disenchantment of conservative Anglicans is the election of an openly gay bishop to head the Episcopal Church in the United States. However, it is safe to say that this election was the straw that broke the proverbial camels back for those members. As the Anglican churches have grown increasingly liberal in their doctrine and approach to social justice, more and more traditionally conservative parishes and individual members have become extremely uncomfortable. In other words, the social gospel of Jesus makes certain Christians uneasy. If one considers the historical relationship of the Anglican Church to the British monarchist social order, it makes particular sense that the liberal interpretation of that gospel would make many church members question their allegiance. Like the Roman Catholic hierarchy, which has its struggle between liberal and conservative elements, the Anglican churches are undergoing a crisis. At this moment in history, it looks like the more conservative elements of the Vatican have won in the arenas where it actually has influence (leaving its position opposing imperial war and decrying poverty caused by global capitalism intact but essentially irrelevant), while in the Anglican churches it appears that the liberal elements have the upper hand.

Of course, neither of these powerful churches have the political power of the Christian faithful that align themselves with the fundamentalist churches across the United States. We are all familiar with these believers role in US elections the past few decades. When the fundamentalist churches ally themselves with the Catholic hierarchy—most often around their opposition to birth control and abortion—they can turn elections. When these two forces align themselves with the Mormon Church, as they did in California’s most recent election referendum against gay marriage, they proved the even greater power of that trinity.

When you read the headlines about “pay czar crackdowns” and “clawbacks” and “reining in pay,” you should know that this whole Wall Street psychological operation is being run by the same man who sold us the Iraq war!

Here’s an example of misleading coverage from ABC News:

Bank of America Chief Executive Ken Lewis, who has announced he will leave the company by the end of the year, will receive no more pay for 2009 and will have more than $1 million of his prior pay clawed back, according to a deal Feinberg struck.

Poor Ken Lewis. The Economic Hitman, a.k.a. Mr. Bank of America, the poor guy has to work for the rest of the year for “no pay.” Oh, these strict new regulations! Well, you see, there is a missing part to this oh so popular media meme. Here’s a headline that should be written, “Ken Lewis to Pocket $70 million”… yep, poor Ken Lewis. He has to wait until the end of the year to receive $70 mill. If there were such a thing as law in this land, instead of getting $70 million at the end of the year, he would be getting a prison sentence.

This is a tragic comedy of Shakespearean proportions.

Due to these psychological operations, the average American is so thoroughly propagandized that most are yet to realize that a weapon more powerful than an atomic bomb has hit the US.

An economic deathblow has been struck, and the “republic” lay in ruins.

No one sounded the alarm loud enough to get through the propaganda system. The political process and mainstream media are so thoroughly dominated that the people remain passive as the noose is tightened around their neck, it is as if an entire population has been sentenced to a slow death.

Trillions of dollars have vanished, we know who was involved, and yet, there is no investigation. While paid-off “lawmakers” battle over every aspect of the healthcare bill — a bill that will once again screw most Americans in favor of more corporate profits and huge salaries and bonuses for the top executives of the companies who are sponsoring these puppet “politicians” — these “lawmakers” seem to have forgotten about $23 trillion. No, not $23 billion, we are talking $23 trillion taxpayer dollars!

Actually, Shakespearean proportions look rather small in comparison. $23 trillion is New God money.

The Bush Regime took down the US population. With Paulson leading, the financial crisis became the last ultimate act. The greatest theft of all time, trillions vanish. The entire power structure goes off the grid, off the balance sheet, into the dark.

It reminds me of Dostoevsky, “but enough; I don’t want to write more from the underground.”

It began when an openly gay judge asked Miss California, Carrie Prejean, what she thought about same sex marriage. Prejean, a student at San Diego Christian College, said that although she recognizes and accepts that others may believe in same-sex marriage, “I think I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman.” That created a firestorm of publicity for the Trump-owned organization. A large minority of Americans said they supported Prejean’s opinion. A large minority said she was reciting biased lessons of intolerance; Perez Hilton, the judge who had asked the question, on his blog called Prejean “a dumb bitch.” However, several prominent gay rights activists defended Prejean’s right to her opinion.

Pageant officials had ordered all of its contestants not to mention God on their applications or at any public event. Apparently, openly believing in God could be seen as detrimental to an organization which holds its beauty contest in Las Vegas, also known as Sin City, USA. Prejean’s view about gay marriage, she later said, was based upon her religious beliefs.

Prejean was second in the Miss USA contest itself; her views may have cost her the national crown.

The Miss California organization claimed that since the pageant in April, Prejean missed scheduled events and lied about pre-pageant semi-nude pictures of her. A month after Donald Trump had strongly defended Prejean and her right of free speech, he approved the pageant stripping her crown. Prejean, who said the Pageant’s action was retaliation against her views, sued for libel.

In October, the Miss California organization countersued, claiming Prejean owes it $5,200 for what it claims is a loan it made so she could get breast augmentation. In its countersuit, the organizers and officials claimed Prejean “attempts to cast herself as a virtuous young woman and the victim in a supposed conspiracy against her.” The suit also accused her of having a “new-found notoriety [and] an inflated sense of self.” This, of course, is the organization headed by a man who beneath a blonde pompadour enjoys firing reality shows contestants. This is also an organization whose backstage manipulations could make Chicago politics or New York’s Tammany Hall organization appear to be little more than grade school cliques.

The Miss USA pageant claims its contestants are “savvy, goal-oriented and aware.” In a pompous arrogance of self-deceit it even claims that contestants “display those characteristics in their everyday lives, both as individuals, who compete with hope of advancing their careers, personal and humanitarian goals, and as women who seek to improve the lives of others.” The organization, like the Miss America contest, also requires its contestants to be single, never married, never pregnant and, apparently, never nude.

What it doesn’t require is that its contestants have natural beauty or wisdom. There are coaches to train them in voice and poise. There are coaches who train them in what questions will be asked of them, and how to respond in the most circumscribed way possible to avoid showing they have any opinions. There are coaches to tell them what bikini, ball gown, or casual wear looks best on them. There are hair dressers and makeup artists. There are weight coaches and trainers—since pageant officials and their public audience undoubtedly believe that anyone over size 4 is morbidly obese. The contestants go to suntan parlors, and slather lotions and sprays to get an even tan to pretend that they’re sun-drenched gorgeous. They use double-edge sticky tape to keep skimpy clothes from falling from almost-emaciated bodies, as well as to enhance whatever it is that needs enhancing or reducing. They get cosmetic surgery on cheeks, belly buttons, and their breasts, apparently to enhance or modify whatever genetics—or, in the case of the highly religious, whatever God—has given them.

Like any good media celebrity, Carrie Prejean has written … or co-written … or had someone else write an autobiography. This one will be published in November. The Miss California organization has just assured increased sales by publicly demanding all royalties from the book, because its stable of cookie-cutter perfect beauties can’t say, write, or do anything without its permission, even after they are dumped as employees.

Unfortunately, cosmetic surgery and breast augmentation are something it does approve.

Blogs that responded to the essay contain some interesting comments. Many bloggers blame poor parenting for the shootings. Many others describe a deep sense of compassion for Susan and show a greater level of understanding of the human condition.

Life can be complicated. Dave Pelzer is author of A Child Called It. He has never demonstrated any anti-social behavior. It appears that as a child, he was the victim of extreme abuse.

On the other hand, it appears that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, had a normal, loving childhood. His brother, David, is a highly respected member of the community. They grew up in the same home. The causes of criminal/ anti-social behavior are complex and not completely understood.

There can be no greater pain than the death of a child, except maybe having a son who kills others and then himself. Susan Klebold is now a member of a very exclusive club of parents and other family members who have suffered that extreme horror. The family of the Virginia Tech Shooter, the mother and brother of the Unabomber, and many others have a loved one who has murdered. They are too often held responsible for the crimes of their loved ones. How much responsibility do these family members have for the actions of the offender? None – they are not to blame. They, too, are innocent victims. Often they had no way of predicting the criminal act. Sometimes, even if the family had recognized warning signs, they still could not have prevented the horrific act. HIPA and other limits in our health care system act as roadblocks to mental health care. The Virginia Tech shooter had a history of counseling for mental health problems. Parents often are not given access to the student’s academic records, let alone health records.

We have morphed into a culture of blame-the-other-guy. I didn’t mean to do it. It was a mistake. The dog ate my homework. My wife doesn’t understand me. My husband doesn’t pay enough attention to me. Buyer beware. My mother didn’t love me enough. My father didn’t talk to me enough. It was just a campaign promise. The media lied to me. Everybody else is doing it. The bad economy made me enlist. I was just following orders.

Wall Street Bankers hoard a large portion of the national wealth and blame it on their compensation boards. Congress has written the legislation that allows such greed. The members of Congress blame the lobbyists. The lobbyists say they are just doing their job. The voters say that they have been misled by the media. The media says that they have to put ratings first. We are witnessing the death of personal responsibility.

Capitalism is a big contributor to the problem; but, voters do not have to vote for capitalists. On my ballot there were eight candidates for president, plus a write-in option. Voting has consequences. Uninformed voting has disastrous consequences. Voters say blame someone else. They say that they do not have time to research the issues. An uninformed voter is dangerous and should stay home on election day. It is better to not vote at all, than to cast an uninformed ballot and cancel the vote of someone who has studied the issues.

The lack of personal responsibility and compassion are blocking real health care reform. We need Reform School for the compassionless. The every-man-for-himself culture was especially evident during the health care town meetings. It was common to hear comments such as, “I am insured – the hell with everybody else”. Raise-the-drawbridge syndrome — I am safe and you don’t count.

A pervasive lack of personal responsibility exists in local and national governments – also as a business model in the corporate world. Decisions are often made by committee in order to distance one from any singular responsibility. Temporary Experts are often hired for the sole purpose of relieving others from the consequences of a decision. Passing the buck has become a national pastime. It’s enough to make one wish for the end of the government system as we know it — to be replaced by a Benevolent Monarchy. No more hiding behind Experts and committee group decisions.

The culture of the Internet is not helping. Bloggers usually prefer anonymity when dropping comments. Why the failure to accept responsibility for the comment left on the blog? The civility of the blogosphere would be greatly improved if everyone gave an honest identification.

The brain is an organ – in some ways like a pancreas or a liver. It is affected by genetics, age, drugs, the environment, electrical currents, illness, and an unknown number of other influences. Where should the line between evil and madness be drawn? And who should make that determination?

Psychiatrists will continue to debate the ability of a patient to make ethical judgments. Philosophers will continue to debate Free Will versus Determinism. Lawyers will continue to argue for the guilt or innocence of the accused; but, the simple fact is that a society which is organized on any principle that does not include personal responsibility will not work.

The bottom line is that everyone must be held responsible for their own actions, and no one should ever be held responsible for the acts of another. What a revolutionary concept.

News reports are filled with senseless acts of violence. Today’s report is about a group of teens who set a 15 year old boy on fire and then laughed as they watched him burn. We must do better. We must find a way to develop empathy and compassion. The teens who set the fire must be held accountable for their act. You and I, as members of society, must be held responsible for the culture of violence that disables the youthful conscience.

Susan Klebold should be held responsible, and maybe praised, for her parenting. She should never be held responsible for the acts of Dylan.

Like an acquaintance of mine who helped organize the Moratorium in College Park, MD wrote in an email yesterday: who today wouldn’t take massive liberal anti war demos? Indeed. Reports this morning (October 15, 2009) from Washington indicate that Barack Obama is going to send 45,000 more US troops to Afghanistan. At this point it is not clear if this is the entire number or if it is just the number of combat forces. As the Washington Post revealed earlier in the week of October 11th, 2009, when Washington sent some 20,000 troops into Afghanistan earlier this year it did not announce that another 13,000 support troops were also sent over. If this ratio holds true that would mean that there would be closer to 70,000 more US troops in Afghanistan by the time this latest escalation is completed. These numbers would put the total amount of troops involved in the occupier’s forces euphemistically called the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) very close to 200,000.

200,000 heavily armed invaders on the ground. Untold numbers flying planes and dropping bombs. More sitting in bunkers in the North American desert launching drones aptly named Predator that kill fighters and civilians alike without an ounce of moral hesitation. An unknown number of mercenaries working under the title of contractor. Yet, there is barely a peep from the people of the nations whose men and women wage this pointless and immoral war. With the exception of a few protesters in DC and other big cities and a few thousand college students on twenty six college campuses around the United States, recent calls for protests against the war in Afghanistan and the continued occupation of Iraq went unheeded. The sight of young men and women in military camouflage and crewcuts wearing ISAF patches is becoming overly familiar to travelers in US airports. Yet, there is hardly a peep. The sight of parents crying on the television while their children are buried in caskets covered with the red, white and blue is not uncommon. If the news reports are true and at least 45,000 soldiers are preparing for their assignment to Afghanistan, these displays designed to inspire more such deaths will increase in frequency. All the while families tell themselves their children died for something like freedom when most of us know deep inside that no one but those who send them over there really know why the US military is even over there. When we the people are honest with ourselves we know it has to do with empire and conceit, but those reasons do o not make us feel good.

And there’s barely a peep. Liberals and rightwingers in Congress line up behind the Obama who lines up behind the Pentagon and the industry of war. With the exception of a very few, the consensus is that the death and destruction must continue. The comfort of the empire’s citizens must not be disturbed. It can not be said enough, the time to speak up is now. The orgy of death is set to increase. One can not add 50,000 more troops whose job is to kill and expect anything else.

On September 24, we wrote to the BBC’s Barbara Plett:

Dear Barbara Plett

It’s hard to believe your article, ‘Debuts and diatribes at the UN’, was written by a member of an ostensibly free press. You write of Obama:

“New US President Barack Obama set the stage with a sweeping speech announcing America’s re-engagement with the UN. Coming after the winter years of the Bush administration, this was a gale of spring air.” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8272081.stm)

By contrast, the “quixotic colonel”, Gaddafi, “embarked on a diatribe that rambled on for an hour-and-a-half.”

As for our own Dear Leader:

“After the Libyan leader finally sat down, an indignant Mr Brown changed his speech to defend the founding principles of the UN.”

Jolly good show! And the Iranian president:

“Mr Ahmadinejad himself didn’t mention Iran’s nuclear programme in front of the assembly, nor did he seem distracted by walkouts to protest his denials of the Nazi Holocaust, and what many see as his fraudulent re-election. In typical style he lambasted Israel and the West for double standards, failed ideologies and imperial interventions.”

This reads like a spoof of Big Brother-style thought control. Through an unsubtle mix of swoons and snarls we’re told who are the ‘good guys’ and who the ‘bad guys’. The BBC insists its journalism is carefully balanced with all personal opinions omitted — but this is not journalism, it is propaganda.

Sincerely

David Edwards

Plett replied on October 6:

Dear Mr Edwards

Apologies for the lateness of my response, I started to reply last week but have been distracted by demands on both work and domestic fronts.
With regards to your comments that my article amounted to unsubtle propaganda that delineated the “good guys” and the “bad guys:”

In essence, I was writing about what three world leaders had to say on the opening day of the General Assembly, how they presented themselves on the world stage, and how they were received. I was not suggesting that any of them delivered the objective truth, the piece was meant to convey what was said from the point of view of the speaker. Given your complaint, I can see it might have been helpful to signpost more clearly.

But to clarify:

Gaddafi made some points that resonated with the audience, but his presentation was rambling and often incoherent. It was received with a mixture of curiosity and irritation, tending towards the latter as his speech wound on Ahmadinejad’s objective was to criticise the west of double standards (on nuclear issues), failed ideologies (capitalism and corruption) and imperial intervention (invasion & occupation of Iraq/Afghanistan). That was the main thrust of his speech to the General Assembly

Obama’s objective was to announce that America was re-engaging with the UN. I think it is fair to say the General Assembly broadly welcomed that. That’s what I meant by a gale of spring air: there was a palpable sends of relief to have a US president prepared to work through rather than against the UN. For sure this will be in pursuit of national foreign policy objectives, but that is the same for all members.

A final comment on “good guys” and “bad guys:” It is a fair point that stains on the US record (ie launching what the UN regarded as an illegal war in Iraq, Abu Ghraib etc) should also be mentioned if one is to accuse Gaddafi of oppressing the opposition and Ahmadinejad of fraudulent elections. The qualification I would make is that Ahmadinejad and Gaddafi were personally implicated in abuses against their own people, whereas Obama was not present at the time of the Iraq invasion and has campaigned for a US withdrawal. Also as I mentioned earlier, the piece was about personalities, not about states or state policies.

Best regards,
Barbara Plett

We replied on October 19:

Dear Barbara

Many thanks for such a lengthy and thoughtful response; it’s much appreciated. You write:

“In essence, I was writing about what three world leaders had to say on the opening day of the General Assembly, how they presented themselves on the world stage, and how they were received.”

You claim you were writing about how the three world leaders “were received”. But you wrote that Obama’s words were “a gale of spring air”, full stop. You +then+ added that Obama had been given “a warm reception” by UN members. The first comment expressed your own opinion – it was the kind of impassioned, personal endorsement of Obama that is continually being made by mainstream journalists. Likewise, you wrote that Gaddafi “rambled on”. You did not write that UN members +felt+ that Gadaffi had rambled on. You then focused on the Iranian leader’s alleged sins and noted that he “lambasted Israel” in “typical style” – again, your personal, derogatory assessment.

You write further:

“It is a fair point that stains on the US record (ie launching what the UN regarded as an illegal war in Iraq, Abu Ghraib etc) should also be mentioned if one is to accuse Gaddafi of oppressing the opposition and Ahmadinejad of fraudulent elections. The qualification I would make is that Ahmadinejad and Gaddafi were personally implicated in abuses against their own people, whereas Obama was not present at the time of the Iraq invasion and has campaigned for a US withdrawal.”

You say that Obama has “campaigned” for a US withdrawal. But he is the president of the United States. He is the commander-in-chief of the occupying force. He doesn’t need to campaign; he has the power to order an immediate withdrawal. He is therefore directly accountable for maintaining an illegal occupation that since 2003 has resulted in the deaths of more than one million people. Worth mentioning, one would think, but such a comment is inconceivable in a BBC report.

Obama has escalated wars from south Asia to the Horn of Africa. In July, John Pilger reported in the New Statesman that since Obama had taken office US drones had killed 700 civilians in Pakistan (http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=545). A month earlier, in a report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, UN Special Investigator Philip Alston called the United States’ reliance on pilotless missile-carrying aircraft “increasingly common” and “deeply troubling.”
(http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/06/04/drone.attacks/)

In July, one of Britain’s most senior judges, Lord Bingham, said that drone attacks were so “cruel as to be beyond the pale of human tolerance”. (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/top-judge-use-of-drones-intolerable-1732756.html)

US drone attacks on Pakistan are almost certainly illegal under international law. Under Article 51 of the UN Charter, the US is entitled to self-defence only when it preserves “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations” (http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter7.shtml). Pakistan is clearly not engaged in an attack on the United States.

You could have mentioned some or all of these issues (and many others) in balancing your comments on Ahmadinejad’s “denials of the Nazi Holocaust, and what many see as his fraudulent re-election”. Instead, we were left with the standard BBC depiction of a world divided up between the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’, between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This kind of propaganda has terrible consequences in yet again preparing the public mind for bloodshed.

Best wishes

David

The Limits Of Influence: Jeremy Bowen And The Superpower

The BBC’s Middle East correspondent, Jeremy Bowen, similarly practices a version of ‘balanced’ reporting that betrays the truth of the murderously unbalanced Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We wrote to Bowen on September 24:

Dear Jeremy

You write:

“Mr Netanyahu’s refusal to do as he was asked has been an embarrassing, even humiliating reminder of the limits of America’s influence over Israel, a close ally which receives billions of dollars of US military aid and lashings of political support.” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8271715.stm)

The reality, as even your comment must lead us to conclude, is very different – the ‘failure’ was a humiliating reminder of the limits of peace activists’ influence over an American political class that bankrolls and arms the Israeli aggressor. The idea that America is a neutral peacemaker in this war of conquest, wringing its hands in frustration, is a lie. Norman Finkelstein made the point:

“But who gave the green light for Israel to commit the massacres? Who supplied the F-16s and Apache helicopters to Israel? Who vetoed the Security Council resolutions calling for international monitors to supervise the reduction of violence?…

“Consider this scenario. A and B stand accused of murder. The evidence shows that A provided B with the murder weapon, A gave B the “all-clear” signal, and A prevented onlookers from answering the victim’s screams. Would the verdict be that A was insufficiently engaged or that A was every bit as guilty as B of murder?”

Best

David

Bowen replied the same day:

Interesting argument — except that the individual most humiliated by Israel’s refusal was the man at the summit of the political class, the President hinself.

Yes, the Gaza war was greenlighted by his predecessor. You’ll remember Israel ended its main operation just as he took office. Had Mr Bush still been in office the issue of a freeze would not have arisen.

What has changed is the definition of what’s in the interests of the US.

I don’t think I suggested the US was a neutral peacemaker. It’s simply Pres Obama defines his country’s interests differently to Pres Bush, by identifying a peace settlement as a US national priority. Otherwise he wouldn’t need to bother doing what he’s doing.

Thanks for writing

Yours

Jeremy Bowen
BBC Middle East Editor

We wrote again on the same day:

Dear Jeremy

Thanks. On the Gaza attack, the US was a participant throughout — that’s been the norm since 1967. As for the “embarrassing” reminder, why on earth should Netanyahu agree to ending settlement growth (in accord with Israel’s commitment in the Road Map) after Obama has stated clearly that there won’t even be a slap on the wrist – he won’t go as far as Bush I — if Israel continues to build?

On Gaza again, you’re missing the point. Bush gave the green light. Obama agreed. That’s why he said not one word about it, claiming that there was only one President (which didn’t stop him from commenting on many other issues). As Israeli sources make clear, the Gaza operation was very carefully planned throughout. It was planned to end just as Obama came into office, as a favour to him, so that he could continue to fail to say a word about the US-backed crime. Which is what happened.

On settlement growth, Obama is just repeating what Bush II said (and what’s in the Road Map that Bush II signed) — and, importantly, he’s not even going as far as Bush I. That aside, the issue of settlement growth is hardly more than a device to obscure real issues – namely, the settlements themselves are all illegal, all constructed by the US-Israel in ways that undermine any realistic hope for Palestinian self-determination.

Best

David

“As long as I’m talking, I’m always learning about others,” she says. But, her rambling conversations are really a cover to keep others from probing too much into her life–”we’re very private people,” she says about her family. But, have a problem, especially about pets, and she’ll talk all night if she has to, and she’s not shy about talking about her English Springer Spaniels, three of whom were American Kennel Club champions.

Although she has raised AKC champions, her first English Springer Spaniel was from an SPCA shelter in New Jersey. “We had just lost Butch [a beagle],” she says, “and although we were still mourning him, we knew that you can’t have a home without a dog.” She doesn’t remember why she chose Joy, but it was the first of many English Springer Spaniels who would be her companion.

Carpenter, an award-winning freelance journalist, is executive director of Animal-Vues, a national organization which promotes “compassion for animals, and to help strengthen the bond between animal professionals and the public.” She takes no salary from Animal-Vues, and accepts only a fraction of the expenses to which she’s entitled. “The work is more important,” she says. In 1984, she and Dr. George Leighow, a Danville, Pa., veterinarian, founded Animal-Vues. The organization is an outgrowth of Animal Crackers, a popular weekly radio show they hosted for more than a decade on WCNR-AM (Bloomsburg). Animal-Vues, says Carpenter, “has given my life focus, purpose, vitality, and joy.” Animal-Vues has developed dog bite prevention programs and is now working with local agencies to help autistic children to be able to be safe with dogs.

Among Animal-Vues’ other mission is to assist in training individuals and local governments about emergency disaster evacuation. Until four years ago, most disaster organizations refused to take pets, forcing their human companions either to abandon them or not seek shelter. Hurricane Katrina changed a lot of attitudes. Television cameras showed the tragedy of abandoned animals, but it also showed another reality. “Far too many people refused to be evacuated in New Orleans unless their pets could go with them,” says Carpenter. Animal-Vues, which had pushed for pet evacuation for years, finally was able to help local and state governments figure out ways to provide shelter not just for people but their pets as well.

In addition to one-to-one counseling, Carpenter also taught non-credit classes about dogs and dog training at Bloomsburg University. Her six-session classes, with veterinarians as guest speakers, one of whom later became the president of the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), covered first aid, animals rights, and grief counseling. “It put me in touch with pet owners, and gave me more purpose in what I do,” she says.

This caring 77-year-old was always surrounded by animals, almost in opposition to her parents who, she says, “were not animal friendly.” As a child, Carpenter brought frogs’ eggs home and watched tadpoles hatch and go through metamorphosis to become an adult frog. She also had dogs and cats, turtles, rabbits, and birds–”any animal that can love you back,” says Christian, her younger daughter and co-owner of Murphy Communications, an advertising/public relations firm in State College, Pa. But she especially loves horses. As a teenager, she and Red, a horse “with a lot of personality and playfulness,” would go into the woods. “I’d ride him sometimes, but we often just walked together,” she says. They’d stop, chat, rest, and think. Like many animals, Red died violently. A man who was boarding Red became annoyed at some of the horse’s antics “and just shot him,” says Carpenter. “You never get over that.” She never owned another horse.

In one of the few contradictions in her life, although Carpenter is uncompromising in opposing cruelty to animals, she also believes that hunting is necessary, but “I couldn’t be a hunter myself.” Her father, a businessman, was a hunter and trapper. As her father became older, says Carpenter, “he became more compassionate,” although he still enjoyed duck hunting. She doesn’t talk much about her mother, except to say she was a Realtor and art gallery owner who liked to shoot birds.

Carpenter entered St. Lawrence University on a New York State Regent’s Scholarship, planning to become a physician. In her senior year, she married, and decided to go to graduate school in education not medicine “so I could devote more time to raising a family.” She earned an M.A. in one year at Alfred University, and then went to the University of Buffalo for doctoral work in psychology with additional courses at the medical school. She thought she could handle the demands of motherhood, psychology, and medicine. Six months into her first year of doctoral study, Carpenter dropped out.

“They were operating on brain centers in cats to test responses,” says Carpenter, who says she will never forget having to decapitate the animals in order to take histological samples while the animals were still alive, then hearing their death gurgles. “I didn’t like it,” she says, not defiantly, but with reluctant acceptance. She pauses, thinks a bit, as if searching for the right words, and then quietly adds that the other reason she couldn’t continue was “because I decided I’d rather be a mother full-time,” something she could do to help develop life, not take it.

“She always wanted to be at home when we came home,” recalls her older daughter, Sherilee, now an editor at Penn State. At home, Carpenter made sure her daughters developed a love of reading and writing. “She loved books about horses and dogs, but we read everything we could,” says Sherilee, recalling that the family “seldom watched TV.” Their mother “was pretty strict about that.”

She was also strict about establishing rules and “making us be good to people,” says Christian. “She taught us the spiritual side of life and what school can’t teach you.”

Carpenter says she was neither helped nor hindered by the feminist movement for equality, even when confronted by the flaming rhetoric that questioned why women would want to give up careers for motherhood. “Equality really means that each woman should be allowed to be whatever she can be,” says Carpenter, proudly stating she is “so much because I am a mother.”

Both daughters, when younger, constantly said they wanted to be mothers–”just like Mom.” They married, but neither gave birth. “For many years, their nurturing instincts,” says their mother, “have been sharpened by cats and dogs.”

In 1969, Carpenter’s husband, William, by then a corporate executive, had a stroke at the age of 39, leaving his left side paralyzed. “He had given up hope for recovery,” says Carpenter, noting, “I don’t remember how many times I saw him fall.” But he had the support of his wife and a special assistant. “Willie just looked at him and wondered what he was doing,” says Carpenter. ” Willie was an English Springer Spaniel, Ch. Holly Hills Winged Elm—”We called him Willie Lump Lump,” says Carpenter. Willie was one of the first therapy dogs, an affectionate 50 pound bundle of encouragement. Willie helped William regain his will to do the necessary exercises to regain mobility; there was never any question as to which breed Sherry Carpenter would prefer over the next four decades. Because of Willie, Carpenter’s husband improved and “never had to go on permanent disability.”

The Carpenters had received Willie from the wife of a Penn State professor. “She told us that when Willie received his championship, we could have him.” It’s not uncommon for show dog owners to give away males, says Carpenter, noting ” the female is more important in breeding.”

Willie, “who gave us a great deal of joy,” died in 1978. “He just laid down under an apple tree and died,” says Carpenter. Willie, the fourth English Springer Spaniel the Carpenters owned was 10 years old. “He was such an influence on my life that I decided to pursue writing in order to give back to him all he had given to me.” Carpenter thinks a moment, makes a couple of random thoughts, and then quietly adds, “I hope there will be service dogs like Willie for all our returning veterans suffering from physical or emotional disabilities.”

Carpenter’s husband, having regained most of his muscle use except for his left arm, eventually returned to a career in corporate personnel, including work at Johnson & Johnson in Somerville and Princeton, N.J., the Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa.; and as personnel director of Centre County, Pa., home of Penn State, where both daughters graduated with journalism degrees. “I still go to the home football games,” says Carpenter, almost as agile in climbing the steps to Beaver Stadium in 2009 as she did in the early 1970s when her daughters were journalism students at Penn State. Sherry and William Carpenter separated in the early 1990s; William died in 1998. By then, Sherry Carpenter had established herself as a journalist. Writing “was my own therapy,” she says.

She had written her first magazine article while a high school student, using the income to “buy presents for my family and friends.” During her four decade career, she was a newspaper reporter and columnist in both New Jersey and Pennsylvania, a radio news director, a public relations account executive, and a substitute teacher, all part-time jobs, always a full-time mother. For almost 20 years, she wrote a monthly column for Dog World magazine. It was the first column to focus upon the Canine Good Citizen program, which is open to all breeds, whether pure-bred or mixed. Dogs must pass the program to become therapy or rescue dogs. Carpenter proudly recalls, “In some way, I hope my column had been the reason why that program expanded.” Equally proud, she has kept many of the letters she received from readers “who said they learned something from my column.”

Carpenter also wrote a weekly column for the Danville Daily News and the Sunbury Daily Item, both of them Pennsylvania dailies, and several articles for the AKC Gazette. She is the winner of five Maxwell medals from the Dog Writers Association of America (DWAA). In addition to her column, she was honored by the DWAA for a video about the Canine Good Citizen program and a widely-used handbook for police officers to learn how to deal with dangerous dogs. She and Leighow also won a special DWAA award for their Animal Crackers radio show. Among other awards she received for her writing are two from the New Jersey Press Association and the Thomas Paine Award for Citizen Journalism. The Pennsylvania Veterinary Medical Association honored her in 2005 for her columns, one of the few times the PVMA gave any award to someone not a veterinarian.

Her insight into both psychology and medicine gives her a special perspective few writers have. She occasionally reviews scientific articles for the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, and often contributes book reviews. “As a non-veterinarian, especially, it’s a real mark of distinction,” she says, her pride evident that she has been making a difference for pets, their companions, and those who work with them.

Like many who work for others, Sherry Carpenter doesn’t have a large income, now living off of social security, a few investments, and small monthly checks from her writing. “Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you make as long as you enjoy what you’re doing,” she says. She pauses again, another of her rare pauses. She doesn’t say much more about what she intentionally hides about her life, but she reveals all anyone needs to know. “Everything I do is an extension of my motherhood,” she says. “That’s just who I am.”

As a theorist of the Elliot Wave, Prechter grounds his forecasts upon a mathematical pattern that tracks impulses of social mood. Everything else is symptomatic.

The background theory of the Elliott Wave is different from the kind of thinking that expects a straight-line series of effects from causes. Instead, the Elliott Wave returns us to pre-modern intuitions of cycles. It must have been clear to anyone caught up in the recent Bear market rally that pure stubbornness had taken hold of buyers. On Prechter’s account, that stubbornness is about to change sides.

If the humming engine of human history rides a geometry of social mood, then downtimes cannot be caused by anything that uptimes do — although consequences of downtimes can be altered by the preparations that uptimes make. As social mood descends into the seventh circle of hell, there will be every temptation to blame the descent itself upon uptime actors. Yet all blaming will miss an important point.

What could the natural purpose of downtime be? In the bullish 1978 book, Elliott Wave Principle, Prechter and A.J. Frost argue that the up and down waves of social mood provide “the most efficient method of achieving both fluctuation and progress in a linear movement” (26). If social mood adjusts the mode of our approach to reality, then we see things differently and engage them differently when we are up. But that means there are things to learn when we are down, too.

On the fractal model of the Elliott Wave, we experience smaller fluctuations of mood within a series of larger patterns. In his bearish book of 2002, Conquer the Crash, Prechter argues that we are on the cusp of a very large degree downward drift. We will be learning hard lessons the hard way, and largely because that’s what down moods are good for. Such lessons will be meant to last more than a lifetime, and we are the generation fated to carry these lessons forward.

We will shortly see which lessons from the high times have any worth in the valley of our shadows. Old man winter is a rock hard grader. There can be no bonus points for students who do not use the warm months to prepare. Get ready for some serious grade deflation.

To begin thinking about the political future that would correspond with Prechter’s crash assumptions, we could turn our clocks back to Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency or the less-remembered panic of 1837. Unlike Roosevelt, who was able to transform depression politics into a winning streak, Democrat Martin Van Buren was not able to win even a second term against the mood of 1840. He was ousted by the “log cabin” Whig candidate William Henry Harrison, who promptly died of pneumonia.

Illness is a fateful consequence of down moods according to Prechter’s systematic theory of Socionomics. Looked into your local flu clinic lately?

Perhaps the most reliable guide to downtime politics will be found in the life—and the curiously timed death—of Huey Long, who argued that American politics had better deliver a Christmas tree after every election if politicians wanted people to prefer the ballot box as their form of political change. Depression politics killed the messenger but not the message. If the Constitution survives the coming crash, it will earn its keep through tangible benefits.

Returning to the crash of 1835 to 1842, I choose to think about Emerson, who opened 1836 with the essay “Nature.” If you want to maintain order in your mind and spirit the thing to do is take long walks in the woods. Interesting how Ken Burns turns our attention this very week to the conservation system expressed in our national parks. There is an American mecca, and it boasts a jobs program that can’t be outsourced.

Reading Emerson’s 1836 text as a downtime crammer gets more interesting when we see that Chapter 2 is about “Commodity.” How poor can we be, Emerson asks, so long as we live upon the earth? “Nature, in its ministry to man,” he writes, “is not only the material, but is also the process and the result.” We live in the arms of a “divine charity.” Commodity cuts a path to Beauty so long as we nurture the inwardness of the work we do. Emerson pulls Thoreau aside in 1837. “Do you keep a journal?” As the nation falls into panic, Thoreau began to write.

On the model of nature that was so important to Emerson and Thoreau during that great depression, I think about a big tree. Part of the tree puts out leaves, reaching up, showing off. We have been through a great leafing time together.

Another part of the tree works ever in the dark, quietly pushing downward in solitary, unforeseeable effort. Of course the deepest roots could blame the highest leaves for making all the dark work necessary. But that would be like blaming Wall Street for the collective turn we are about to make.

Then there is the ugly stuff, the kind of thing that Thoreau went to jail over. As downtime invites the spiritualist to dig deeper within, it also kicks up real dust. Never before have the tools of conflict been so lethally arrayed. Remember the Alamo? That was 1836. Over in Alabama, the Creek nation was driven off its land, again. In Florida, federal troops at Ft. Defiance drew “first blood” in the Seminole War.

If Prechter is right for the right reasons, then in about two more years it should be clear enough to everyone why the peace movement must prevail. Surely, that would be a lesson worth learning once and for all.

Ron Jacobs: Hi Marc, let me start with what seems to me to be an obvious question. Your newest book, Good Doctor Guillotin, is, among other things, a meditation on capital punishment. I’m guessing that your work opposing this form of punishment is part of what compelled you to write the novel. Yet, the story is about the invention of the guillotine. Can you talk about how these two sentiments (if that’s what they are) coincide and contradict each other?

Marc Estrin: It’s true that I think of this as “my death-penalty book”. As you know, Vermont has been under pressure from the feds to change its no-death-penalty stance to one conforming more to administration positions concerning capital punishment, and federal prosecutors continue to push for death as an option for federal capital crimes (crimes crossing state boundaries) tried in Vermont, trying to habituate Vermont juries to handing out death sentences, and the public to pressure the legislature to change Vermont statutes prohibiting them. I have written a reflection on a recent local capital trial which may be seen here.

Although the public seems to be less enthusiastic about the death penalty in the last two years, it is with us nevertheless (sometimes shockingly so as in the (upcoming) execution of the likely innocent Troy Davis), and the issue still needs work before we belatedly join the vast majority of nations in abolition.

How, then, to do that work? As with Skulk, my attempted end-run around the general censorship of 9/11 truth, The Good Doctor Guillotin is a reaching out beyond-the-choir of abolitionist regulars to a more general fiction reader who may not ever think about the issue. I had to think about the best way to involve such a person.

My hint was a strong reaction by several readers to the Sacco-Vanzetti chapter in Insect Dreams – that plus my own revulsion at a government planning and accomplishing the death of one of its citizens. It seems that detailed recounting of the prelude and countdown to an execution has strong, affective fascination, usually accompanied by a kind of identifying fear and horror often absent when we read reports of executions elsewhere. The end of A Tale of Two Cities is perhaps the supreme example.

That book certainly contributed to my choice of the French Revolution as a setting for an execution, but more than that was the stark theme of good intentions making things worse, humane science evolving into terror. Modern “improvements” in execution techniques — hanging to electric chair to gas to lethal injection – are motivated by far more technical and less revealing considerations, and so Guillotin’s situation was a very rich choice. He was in fact a good man turned into a monster by his ameliorations. So are many of us. But he knew it, too – which is what makes him so interesting a figure.

The downside of this choice is that the book may be mis-read as simply a historical novel about the French Revolution, ho-hum, that was a long time ago. I tried to block off that reception with the inclusion of contemporary essays in my own non-historical voice.

RJ: Similarly, this book also seems to be about the nature of revolution. One might frame the question this way: how do such good intentions — Liberte, equalite, fraternite — end up so horribly? Is it because the forces that are overthrown and have lost their privilege usually attack rather bloodily in an attempt to regain what they have lost or is it merely revenge on the part of the victors that were oppressed by the vanquished? Or is it something else?

ME: Having chosen the French Revolution as a setting, I spent six months reading everything I could about it, from many different authors. Because the story was to end with the first execution, and thus before the Terror, I might have limited my research to those years of preparation. But the beyond-the-novel question of how the hell the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen ended up with mass slaughter seemed so compelling, so contemporary, so relevant to our own murderous march through the world preaching “democracy”, that I spent much time trying to understand that shift.

I’m no historian or real scholar, but it did seem to me that much hinged on the moment when the Revolution went from fighting its external enemies – the royal armies of states threatened by the demise of royalty – to, having successfully defeated them, worrying about the less visible threat of internal ones – those citizens who may be secretly plotting to overthrow, or undermine, or even think about criticism of the Revolution or a return to parts of the past. Who can know what anyone is thinking? Therefore anyone may be a suspect. And any suspect will of course declare innocence. It therefore became life-preserving to speak in a certain way, to use certain words, to wear certain clothing – like wearing an American flag pin – in order to pass. Alertness for counter revolutionaries was high, and among those in power, especially Robespierre, turned into what most would agree as frank paranoia.

“The enemy within” – a most dangerous conception to be floating free in a society. We’ve seen many examples of its destructiveness. I’ve recently written a piece about two of them as a warning concerning the current mental attitude of many Israelis concerning Palestinians. You can see that here. One telltale symptom of this pathology is when a movement starts to “eat its own children.” The struggle between Robespierre and Danton was so rich in this regard, that at least two great artists have seized upon it: Büchner, in his play, Danton’s Death, and Andrej Wajda in his film, Danton. Both treatments, though poetic fiction, have enriched understanding of revolutionary struggle.

Another way good intentions go astray is via an instinct for hyper-protection when an individual, a movement, a revolution, or a nation feels itself particularly vulnerable. Though the event was created, and the fear cynically manipulated, the reaction to 9/11 is a good example. I treated that issue in my novel, Golem Song. The Golem — a central Jewish myth — was a huge clay figure built and given life by a 16th century magician/rabbi to protect the Jewish community in Prague from a likely pogrom. Unlike Frankenstein’s creature, the Golem was built not to understand better the mystery of life, but entirely for protective, potentially punitive purposes. But like the creature, the Golem got out of hand, destroying that not meant to be destroyed. “Golemism,” I call it. I see Golemism as the global marker of our times, hyperprotection leading to hyperdestruction.

RJ: My favorite character in the novel is the hapless Nicholas Pelletier — a man for whom everything he tries ends up badly. Although he is the man for whom the revolution was supposedly fought, he becomes the blade’s first victim. Is this end meant to be just a continuation of his bad luck or is there something deeper involved?

ME: Yes, he was the man for whom the revolution was supposedly fought, but 1) was he? And 2) what else was he?

Remember that except for the year of the Terror, the French Revolution was a bourgeoise one, led primarily by lawyers and rich merchants with the striking assistance of the progressive nobility. They were fighting not for Pelletier, but to wrest power away from the nobility and the clergy. In theory, the revolution declared “the rights of man”, but it was for bourgeois man those rights were proclaimed. Some idealists (Robespierre among them!) kept the Pelletiers in mind as they made their lengthy, highly educated speeches. Some, of course, like Marat, were all about the poor, but Marat and the Père Duchêne were rabble-rousers, and the philosophers of the Enlightenment were not about rousing rabble, but rousing consciousness. Liberty, as here and now, had its limits, equality was hardly reachable, except in theory, and fraternity had its mentally gated communities. The Masonic lodges came closest to a mixing of social levels, but one can scarcely imagine a Pelletier at a Masonic lodge.

No, Pelletier slipped into being a mauvais pauvre — part of pre-industrial class of society that was beneath consideration, beyond repair, and only to be controlled by an ever-expanding police apparatus. He began as a peasant, like most of his countrymen. But consecutive years of drought and freeze destroyed much of France’s agricultural economy, and there was no government help available because the national treasury had been looted to pay for foreign wars (most notably our own revolution, a proxy war against the real enemy, England.) Where have we heard this before? Just as Obama’s rescue packages robs the poor to enrich the rich, so did the realities of the Revolution leave the Pelletiers behind.

I like the little scene where an enlightened doctor offers him the opportunity to transform from a despised criminal to a hero of science by making his detached head wink on signal. I made up this incident up, but it does reflect a grand controversy about whether there was consciousness after decapitation, and whether, therefore the humane rationale for decapitation was warranted. Note the attention to this kind of detail, while the larger question (again raised by Robespierre and only a few others in the National Assembly) of capital punishment went by the boards. Like many things today, national health care, for instance, or stopping the wars, it was considered “not politically feasible.”

RJ: While reading the novel I found myself thinking about the nature of religious faith versus the nature of scientific thought–arguably one of the battles being fought at an intellectual level during the period the novel takes place. This conflict has a revived significance in today’s world what with the rise of religious fundamentalism from Afghanistan to Topeka, Kansas. Yet, underneath the apparent rationality of science there also seems to be an element of irrational belief required for one to take the next step and accept science’s logic. Your first book Insect Dreams touched on this in its portrayal of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project. Care to comment?

ME: One of the most striking things I discovered while filling in my knowledge of the French Revolution was the central role of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in creating a counter-revolutionary backlash, especially in the western rural areas of Brittany and the Vendée. Those impassioned movements affected my choice of origin for Pelletier and his wife, and infused much of the internal conflict of the curé Pierre Grenier, the only completely invented character. His role in the novel is to illustrate precisely the anguished interactions of faith, doubt, science, revolutionary fervor, and the human heart.

Having been trained as a scientist myself, I both admire its finesse, and loathe its dismissal of the larger, if cloudier, dimensions of the lived world. The chapter, “Death by a Thousand Cuts” in Insect Dreams was my indictment of that limited world view, certainly faith-based, that science is the definitive guide to reality, and arbiter of right action. The scientists of the Manhattan Project, faced with the collapse of their raison d’être, refused to stop before testing their bomb on human beings.

This conflict, this pattern, supplies one of the continuing themes of many of my novels — the Faustian bargain: desire for knowledge and “progress” without considering the cost and consequences. Guillotin’s story is an archetype of this, our ongoing, hubristic, human tragedy.

RJ: Ah yes… the Faustian bargain. I think we’ve all made a few–at least at a personal level–to get a job or maintain a relationship. However, the ones I’m more interested in are those that we make in the political/economic realm as a people. Last November’s election appears to me as a Faustian bargain of this type. Hell, every election is a Faustian bargain of a sort. Anyhow, back to the more general one we make as residents of the United States — we know what our government, its military and the corporate/financial monoliths do to maintain our standard of living… and we support it, if only tacitly. Keeping Nicholas Pelletier in mind, one could argue that it is only the criminals and others — those that Bob Dylan called “the luckless, the abandoned an’ forsaked”–that do not make this bargain. But then, they probably make their own with Mephistopheles in another form. I guess my question is–can any human in our modern society avoid the Faustian deal?

ME: Faustian bargain:

Let’s make some distinctions because not every bargain is a Faustian bargain. The key dynamic in the Faustian bargain is a quest – for knowledge, or power, or the establishment of some ideal – with every attainment receiving some unexpected blowback, usually a just punishment.

I don’t think the US elections represent a Faustian bargain: we certainly don’t learn anything from them, nor do we get any power, nor do we further any ideal. Rather the opposite in each case. So I’m not even sure what “bargain” we, or Pelletier, or any of the forsaked have entered into, much less Faustian ones.

The dynamic there (here) seems to be pure submission to power and exploitation – which is largely the case with voters (excepting the power elite) in the US.

Given that understanding, I would put your question rather differently:

1. Can any human in our modern society get any kind of bargain at all – something symbiotically quid pro quo?

2. Can any human in our modern society find a Faustian bargain on the racks?

The first is a complex question, given the resources spent to create false consciousness. “If you protect me from terrorists, I will give up my civil liberties, and engage in torture.” I suppose that’s a bargain of sorts. Etc.

The second is also complex, though I suspect less so because the group under discussion is smaller. Who are the humans in modern society who are in a position to gain knowledge, power, or their ideals? The elite, who are usually less than knowledgeable about consequences, or worse, impervious to them. “I don’t really give a shit how many Indian farmers die, as long as my net worth goes up.” Well-funded scientists
often discover things, most often of use in keeping the power imbalance intact.

The Mephistophelian dimension to the Faustian Bargain indicates that what is at issue is supernatural power brought to bear on humans who can’t handle it. Given the secularization of modern society, I suppose we have to translate that into the dynamic between the “spiritual” innerworld, and the political/economic realm. Here, I think, bargains can be made, though given the economic/social cost of say, discovering that one should drop out of society, they may often lead to Faustian hell.

RJ: What about the bargains one makes when working for an employer like General Dynamics? Or the bargain one makes by reaping the benefits of that corporation being in the tax base? Or the bargain one makes to have a nice car and pretty skin? The quests involved may be pecuniary and venal, but they are quests.

ME: I think those are “bargains” similar to “I’ll trade my civil liberties (and morality) for your protection.” Bargains in quotes, but not Faustian ones.

RJ: Until next time. Onward.