Bruce Garrett Cartoon
The Cartoon Gallery

A Coming Out Story
A Coming Out Story

My Photo Galleries
New and Improved!

Past Web Logs
The Story So Far archives

My Amazon.Com Wish List

My Myspace Profile

Bruce Garrett's Profile
Bruce Garrett's Facebook profile


Blogs I Read!
Alicublog

Wayne Besen

Beyond Ex-Gay
(A Survivor's Community)

Box Turtle Bulletin

Chrome Tuna

Daily Kos

Mike Daisy's Blog

The Disney Blog

Envisioning The American Dream

Eschaton

Ex-Gay Watch

Hullabaloo

Joe. My. God

Peterson Toscano

Progress City USA

Slacktivist

SLOG

Fear the wrath of Sparky!

Wil Wheaton



Gone But Not Forgotten

Howard Cruse Central

The Rittenhouse Review

Steve Gilliard's News Blog

Steve Gilliard's Blogspot Site



Great Cartoon Sites!

Tripping Over You
Tripping Over You

XKCD

Commando Cody Monthly

Scandinavia And The World

Dope Rider

The World Of Kirk Anderson

Ann Telnaes' Cartoon Site

Bors Blog

John K

Penny Arcade




Other News & Commentary

Lead Stories

Amtrak In The Heartland

Corridor Capital

Railway Age

Maryland Weather Blog

Foot's Forecast

All Facts & Opinions

Baltimore Crime

Cursor

HinesSight

Page One Q
(GLBT News)


Michelangelo Signorile

The Smirking Chimp

Talking Points Memo

Truth Wins Out

The Raw Story

Slashdot




International News & Views

BBC

NIS News Bulletin (Dutch)

Mexico Daily

The Local (Sweden)




News & Views from Germany

Spiegel Online

The Local

Deutsche Welle

Young Germany




Fun Stuff

It's not news. It's FARK

Plan 59

Pleasant Family Shopping

Discount Stores of the 60s

Retrospace

Photos of the Forgotten

Boom-Pop!

Comics With Problems

HMK Mystery Streams




Mercedes Love!

Mercedes-Benz USA

Mercedes-Benz TV

Mercedes-Benz Owners Club of America

MBCA - Greater Washington Section

BenzInsider

Mercedes-Benz Blog

BenzWorld Forum

April 15th, 2008

What Really Matters

This Article over at Slashdot…

"In Paraguay we are at T-9 days to national elections. The ruling party has been in power for nearly 61 years (including more than 30 years of dictatorship). Now the state-run ADSL company is hijacking the DNS nationwide of a site that denounces the corruption in the party."

…provoked this comment…

Paraguay is a country ruled by a conservative coalition.

Which only goes to show what my old bolshie Uncle Ivan used to say. "Kid," he’d say, "nobody believes in capitalism. Nobody believes in socialism. It’s socialism for me, and capitalism for you!" Ivan may have been a red, but he was a cynic first and foremost, and that keeps you honest.

In the end, there is only one thing that really matters in any system: transparency. At least if the system is supposed to be run for the benefit of the people who live under it. You can be all for the proletariat, or all for the free market, but if you’re pulling the wool of the peoples’ eyes, you aren’t any different from anybody else running a con behind high sounding priciples.

Well I believe in a free market because I don’t think that human beings can plan an economy any better then we can plan the weather.  But a free market needs a rule of law and a means of preventing the power of money from subverting that rule of law, or that free market won’t remain free for very long, it’ll degenerate into oligarchy

But that’s the republican ideal, isn’t it?   For decades now anyone with half a brain could see that republicans favored oligarchy over all other forms of government. They claim to believe in both free markets and the rule of law and I think seven years plus of George Bush has pretty well decisively proved otherwise.  Nothing disturbs the status-quo more then free market capitalism, when it isn’t turning it upside down.   Nothing.  And nothing locks the human potential in chains and thereby preserves the status-quo better then crony capitalism, which is to say, republican party economics.

The state religion of Oligarchy is God Loves The Rich.  Its economic theory is To The Victors Belong The Spoils.  Its theory of government is Might Makes Right. Vis:

A Tale of Three Lawyers

On Thursday in the National Press Club in Washington, a crowd gathered to witness the presentation of the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling to Lieutenant Commander Matthew Diaz. The story of Matthew Diaz was chronicled in this space repeatedly (also here and here). It is a story of courage, fortitude, conviction and suffering. Joe Margulies introduced the honoree with clarity:

no one can think it is fun when you sit in a courtroom as an accused, and a United States prosecutor points an accusatory finger at your chest and calls you a criminal and tells you that you have betrayed your oath and you have betrayed your country, and you have endangered the safety of the men and women that you swore to share your burdens with. And no one can think it is fun when you have to sit with your heart pounding in your chest as the jury files back into the room with a piece of paper folded in its hands, and that piece of paper holds your fate. And no one can think it is fun when that jury, your peers, pronounces you guilty. And no one can think it is fun when you have to face that same jury that will sentence you for what may be many years; many years that you will be away from your family, your life in tatters, your career ruined.

Matthew Diaz served his country as a staff judge advocate at Guantánamo. He watched a shameless assault on America’s Constitution and commitment to the rule of law carried out by the Bush Administration. He watched the introduction of a system of cruel torture and abuse. He watched the shaming of the nation’s uniformed services, with their proud traditions that formed the very basis of the standards of humanitarian law, now torn asunder through the lawless acts of the Executive. Matthew Diaz found himself in a precarious position—as a uniformed officer, he was bound to follow his command. As a licensed and qualified attorney, he was bound to uphold the law. And these things were indubitably at odds.

Diaz resolved to do something about it. He knew the Supreme Court twice ruled the Guantánamo regime, which he was under orders to uphold, was unlawful. In the Hamdan decision, the Court went a step further. In powerful and extraordinary words, Justice Kennedy reminded the Administration that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions was binding upon them, and that a violation could constitute a criminal act. One senior member of the Bush legal team, informed of the decision over lunch, was reported to have turned “white as a sheet” and to have immediately excused himself. For the following months, Bush Administration lawyers entered into a frenzied discussion of how to protect themselves from criminal prosecution.

One of the crimes the Administration committed was withholding from the Red Cross a list of the detainees at Guantánamo, effectively making them into secret detainees. Before the arrival of the Bush Administration, the United States had taken the axiomatic position that holding persons in secret detention for prolonged periods outside the rule of law (a practice known as “disappearing”) was not merely unlawful, but in fact a rarified “crime against humanity.” Now the United States was engaged in the active practice of this crime.

The decision to withhold the information had been taken, in defiance of law, by senior political figures in the Bush Administration. Diaz was aware of it, and he knew it was unlawful. He printed out a copy of the names and sent them to a civil rights lawyer who had requested them in federal court proceedings.

Diaz was aware when he did this that he was violating regulations and that he could and would, if caught, be subjected to severe sanction. What he did was a violation of law, even as it was an effort to cure a more severe act of lawlessness by the Government. Diaz violated the law in precisely the same sense as Martin Luther King reminds us, in the Letter from Birmingham Jail, that his arrest was based on a violation of law. That everything the Nazis did in Germany was lawful. And that every act of the Hungarian freedom fighters was a crime. In terms of the moral law, however, Diaz was on the side of right, and the Bush Administration and the Pentagon had, by engaging in the conduct that the Supreme Court condemned, placed themselves on the side of lawlessness, corruption and dishonor.

Diaz was charged, tried and convicted for disclosing “secrets.” For the Bush Administration, any information which would be politically embarrassing or harmful to it is routinely classified “secret.” In this fashion the Administration believes it can use criminal sanctions against those who disclose information it believes will be politically damaging. The list of detainees at Guantánamo, which by law was required to be disclosed, was classified as “secret.”

Diaz spent six months in prison and left it bankrupt and without a job. In addition to his sentence, the Pentagon is working aggressively to have Diaz stripped of his law license so he will not be able to practice his profession. The Bush Administration has sought to criminalize, humiliate and destroy Diaz. Its motivation could not be clearer: Diaz struck a blow for the rule of law. And nothing could be more threatening to the Bush Administration than this.

When republicans tell you that they love free markets and hate big government, look around:

No Randites in Financial Crises

Dean Baker has a nice rant about the disappearance of reliance on "market forces" now that the Princes of Wall Street are staring disaster in the face without government help:

What Happened to "Free-Market" Conservatives (or Neo-liberals)?: With the housing bubble in full meltdown, our political leaders are busily ignoring all the things they have said about the market over the last quarter century and looking to throw all the money that they can find to sustain the bubble. This would be comical, if it weren’t so painful.

Remember all the steel workers and autoworkers who lost their jobs due to trade agreements that were supposed to advance economic efficiency over the last quarter century? How about the workers in the airline, trucking, and telecommunications industry who lost jobs due to deregulation, which was also supposed to increase economic efficiency?

Well, it’s a new day. Nothing these people (or their economists) said matters anymore. It housing bubble support time!

For years, economic policy was supposed to be guided by market principles. If our autoworkers couldn’t compete with their counterparts in Mexico or China, who got paid $1 an hour, then it would be inefficient to have trade protection that would keep them employed here. The same applied to regulations that might keep high paying jobs in key sectors of the economy. Educated people all knew that interfering with the market was harmful to the economy, and if we ever forgot this basic truth, the Washington Post regularly ran sanctimonious editorials to remind us.

Well, it’s a new day. The housing bubble is melting down and Congress and the Fed are throwing money everywhere. After all, this isn’t about auto workers and truckers, it’s about Wall Street banks, and the politicians are pulling out all the stops to come to the rescue. In addition to the money that the Fed is throwing at the banks through subsidized loans at its discount window, it is also granting free insurance to the investment banks — a gift that is potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Now Congress is jumping into the act. Remember way back in the fall when they couldn’t find $7 billion to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program? Well, now Congress can finds hundreds of billions of dollars to support a housing bubble. It’s a worthy goal. After all, the Wall Street crew might lose their shirts if the housing bubble continues to meltdown.

Congress will not be able to support the housing bubble indefinitely, but they might be able to do it long enough to allow the big boys to cash out and pass more of their bad loans onto the taxpayers and other suckers.

The political support for this bailout package may make it unstoppable, but if it does go through, we should be clear that there are new rules. In the post bailout world, anyone who makes claims about forcing workers or the poor to take pay cuts or do without benefits in the name of economic efficiency is simply a fool or liar.

Anyone who cared about economic efficiency would be yelling at the top of their lungs against this bailout. Anyone who can throw untold hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars at the rich to save their hides, has no concerns about economic efficiency, they just want to help the rich. In such a world, the rest of us have the right to demand the same sort of handouts from the government. And those who stand in the way are simply lackeys of the rich and powerful, who pretend to care about principles of economics.

by Bruce | Link | React!

April 10th, 2008

Traditional Values = Forced Abortions And Prostitution

Bob Schaffer, Republican senate candidate for Colorado, is having his little vacation jaunts with convicted briber Jack Abramoff exposed on the pages of the Denver Post today.  It’s smarmy for more reasons then the photos of him and his wife enjoying the lap of luxury on the dime of a group of Mariana Island sweat shop owners…

That’s Schaffer and his wife doing a little parasailing.  Supposedly they’re investigating the conditions in the island sweat shops pending legislation to bring them under tighter U.S. regulation.  The Mariana Island sweat shop owners were Abramoff’s biggest contributors.  They’re about as sorded a bunch of republican bankrollers as you’re likely to find.  As Joshua Marshall writes over at Talking Points Memo

The Marianas program is notorious around the world for forced abortion, slavery, child prostitution, beatings and having the overwhelmingly female foreign workers houses in shacks with no plumbing surrounded by barbed wire.

And here’s Schaffer on his whirlwind tour of the sweatshops…

Schaffer later reported that the workers there all seemed happy.  How…unsurprising.  The Denver Post reports…

At the time, those alleged abuses and a push by the Clinton administration led to a flurry of congressional action. Several bills passed the Senate that would have brought the islands’ factories under stricter American laws, but the legislation failed in the House.

Hired by factory owners and the government of the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, Abramoff and his firm were paid more than $11 million over nine years to fend off those efforts, according to reports.

In a 2001 memo to the Marianas governor meant to justify millions in fees, Abramoff singles out the relationships built with members of the House Resources Committee, which has jurisdiction over U.S. protectorates. He points to the lavish trips for dozens of lawmakers and family members to build goodwill. And he says his connections ultimately scuttled dangerous legislation like the bill proposed by then-Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, which would have toughened the islands’ labor and immigration laws.

"We then stopped it cold in the House," the memo boasts.

"In the end, this all-out public relations and lobbying blitz brought the (Mariana Islands) back from the brink of legislative disaster," the lobbyist wrote.

Never mind for a moment, that these congressional representatives of The Party Of Moral Values had to know where the money was coming from.  Never mind that they cheerfully turned a blind eye to forced abortions and prostitution in exchange for a good time on the dime of highly successful businessmen whose business model only happened to include forcing their employees to have abortions and go into prostitution.  They’re congressmen after all.  And…republicans.  Is there a lower form of life then that?  Actually…yes there is.  Does the human gutter go any deeper?  Actually, yes it does.  And does it wear it’s righteousness on its sleeve?  Tsk, tsk…Need you ask…  Why…of course!

Abramoff for obvious reasons, had to conceal his payoffs to Schaffer.  It would never do to have it look like the very sweatshops he was investigating paid for his trip…and parasailing lessons.  So a third party payment was arranged.  Guess who served as Abramoff’s willing frontmen?

Yes…those morally righteous bible believing god fearing Jesus loving save marriage from the homosexuals folks over at the Traditional Values Coalition…

In some cases, Abramoff — who is now in prison for fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials, none of it related to the Mariana Islands — took efforts to obscure the scope of that effort and his firm’s involvement.

Values Coalition paid for trip

Schaffer’s $13,000 trip was paid for by the Orange County, Calif.-based Traditional Values Coalition, which Schaffer described as a religious group "concerned with human rights."

"Whatever involvement (Abramoff) had with Traditional Values Coalition wasn’t known at the time," Wadhams said.

Later investigations have shown that in many instances, TVC — which claims to represent 43,000 churches — acted virtually as a political arm of Abramoff’s lobbying operation.

In one 2000 case investigated by The Washington Post, TVC lobbied heavily against a bill restricting online gambling that would have hurt one of Abramoff’s clients, eLottery Inc. In return, the report said, TVC received a check from the client for $25,000. Abramoff and TVC head Louis Sheldon had cooperated successfully so often that the now-jailed lobbyist began referring to him as "Lucky Louie," the newspaper reported. A TVC official didn’t return a phone call requesting comment.

Values?  Did I hear anybody say…Traditional Values…?

What Are Traditional Values? While other pro-family groups may have their own specific definitions of what "traditional values" means, here’s what we consider to be traditional values:

A moral code and behavior based upon the Old and New Testaments. We believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that the Lord has given us a rule book to live by: The Bible. We are committed to living, as far as it is possible, by the moral precepts taught by Jesus Christ and by the whole counsel of God as revealed in the Bible.

Moral precepts…did you say…?   Oh…lookie here…

Right To Life: We believe that every human deserves the right to life—from conception to death—and that we do not have the right to kill unborn children nor to murder the elderly through active euthanasia.

You don’t say… 

Homosexuality, Bi-Sexuality, Transgenderism, And Other Deviant Sexual Behaviors: The Bible clearly condemns all sexual behaviors outside of marriage between one man and one woman. Homosexual behavior is explicitly condemned in both the Old and New Testaments as an abomination and a violation of God’s standards for sexuality. We oppose the normalization of sodomy as well as cross-dressing and other deviant sexual behaviors in our culture.

You don’t say…

A U.S. Interior Department investigation found that pregnant workers were forced to get illegal abortions or lose their jobs. Some were recruited for factories but forced into the sex trade instead.

And you helped a bunch of Marianas sweat shop owners to pay off enough U.S. congressmen that their sweat shops could escape being regulated and thereby keep operating business as usual, which meant forcing their workers to get abortions and become prostitutes, and god knows what else.  My, my…what traditional values you have there…

The Homosexual Movement And Pedophilia
The homosexual activist movement and organized pedophiles
are linked together by a common goal:
To gain access to children for seduction into homosexuality.

 
How many of the women you’ve helped sweatshop owners force into prostitution were underage I wonder? 

 

by Bruce | Link | React!

April 2nd, 2008

How Abstinence Only Sex Educations Works

Via Atrios…

Survey: Fla. Teens Believe Drinking Bleach Will Prevent HIV
Some Teens Also Believe Mountain Dew Will Stop Pregnancy

ORLANDO, Fla. — A recent survey that found some Florida teens believe drinking a cap of bleach will prevent HIV and a shot of Mountain Dew will stop pregnancy has prompted lawmakers to push for an overhaul of sex education in the state.

Fat chance. 

The survey showed that Florida teens also believe that smoking marijuana will prevent a person from getting pregnant.

If you think this sort of thing isn’t what the people who are pushing Abstinence Only sex education intended you aren’t paying attention.  This is exactly what they want.  Remember, these are the same people who don’t want young girls vaccinated against the virus that can cause cervical cancer because…well…because people who have sex without their permission deserve to die horribly.  They Want kids to get HIV.  They Want kids to get pregnant.  They Want their bodies to shrivel with disease that could have been easily prevented.  And not because it’ll serve as a warning to others about the dangers of sex.  No…no…no…  Not because it’ll serve as a warning to others about the dangers of sex.  Because they hate them.  Because they hate the joy of life they see in them.  Because they hate humanity.  If people can’t be taught to hate their bodies, if they can’t be taught to feel shame for being human, if they won’t beg god to forgive them simply for existing, then they have to die.  It really is that simple.  If you think that bottomless hatred of humanity only exists in radical Islam you are not paying attention.

by Bruce | Link | React!

March 24th, 2008

Mission Accomplished

4000 dead U.S. Soldiers since Bush’s Splendid Little War began…

Flashback…Washington D.C…March 18, 2003

Tuesday afternoon. I am attending a conference on open source software in government being held at George Washington University. I am here because my project manager is investigating the possibility of moving the system I’ve been working on for the past several years to open source software. Work on the Hubble Space Telescope will go into maintenance mode shortly, and the thinking is that the Institute doesn’t want to spend a lot of money it won’t have on software upgrades, simply because a certain vendor has a business cycle that requires you to do that. At least with open source we would have the option of making any small fixes we absolutely needed to have before the end of the mission ourselves, without breaking our systems that depend on it. The alternative is to stick to the vendor’s upgrade cycle, and pray the new versions don’t break anything in our software, or introduce new bugs and security holes.

Between conference sessions, I wander around the Foggy Bottom area, and back and forth to my hotel, which I paid for out of my own pocket, rather then hassle with Washington traffic, which is a nightmare. The hotel has a nice little kitchenette, which allows me to eat reasonably well without further damaging my budget for the month. Around noon I begin the walk back to my hotel for lunch, stopping to examine a decrepit building right next to the conference hall, that I assume is one of the student dorms. It is, and I see by the bronze plaque by the door that this one is named Lafayette Hall. I read the inscription, which briefly describes the history of Marquis de Lafayette, who fought beside George Washington, taking a bullet in the process, for the freedom of a nation that was not his own, and who later attended the first commencement ceremonies of the university that bore his friend’s name, shaking the hand of each of those first graduates. While I am reading, a snarky voice in the back of my mind is saying Freedom Fries…Freedom Toast… An old friend of mine I’d had breakfast with that morning, told me a joke he’d heard about a man who, while visiting France recently, asked a random Frenchman, "Sir, can you speak German?" When the Frenchman replied that he couldn’t, the American said, "You’re welcome." I told my friend the Frenchman could just as easily have asked the American, "Sir, do you have a king?"

My hotel is somewhat oldish. My room is on the sixth floor and the elevators are small and slow. I press the button and when one finally appears, I see that there are already two businessmen inside. It’s a tight fit for three. As we go up I feel the hair on the back of my neck rise. There are some who you would never know from the look of them, to be of the right wing thuggish persuasion, and there are others who hit you with it in waves, in the cut of the clothes, the bullying posture that is as second nature as breathing, and the coldness of the face, particularly when smiling at nothing in particular. I tune them both out, pulling out from a space within me I’d almost forgotten about, a "Yes I’m a longhair, yes I know you hate my guts, and no mister establishment person sir, I really don’t give a flying fuck" attitude, close my eyes, and listen to the elevator floor counter click off the floors to mine. I toy briefly about writing a book, "Everything I know about living under Bush II, I learned from Nixon". The old elevator rises slowly. I hear one of my companions say, "I hope they don’t cancel our flight out Thursday." The other chuckles and says, "The war will be over by then."

Atrios has a point…all we ever see in the round table discussions about the war in the News Media are people who supported it.  The only other side to the discussions we’re even getting now are from the ones now admitting they were wrong about the war, and terribly, profoundly wrong about president Nice Job Brownie.  What we still don’t hear, the people who are still not part of the News Media conversation about the war, are the ones who had it right from the beginning.  Doesn’t it make sense to start inviting the people who were right all along into this conversation now?

No.  It doesn’t.  Because the next step after that, is the News Media facing up to their responsibility for cheering this war on, and hyping up a drunken, spoiled, self-absorbed, bullying, petulant rich man’s brat into the image of a towering world leader.  The man who failed at everything he ever put his hand to in his life, but always managed to avoid responsibility for it.  The man who treated the presidency of the United States as if it was all just one big happy frat house game with him in charge.  This guy:

 

Our news media dragged this country to war with that guy in the white house.  And now they’d rather drink poison then own up to it.  That’s why you will never see any war critics on network news.  That’s why the only liberals you’ll ever see are the ones who, like them, were all gung ho about having a splendid little war in Iraq.  It was supposed to be all over the following Thursday.  This country will be generations coping with the consequences.   And that’s not so much Bush’s fault, as our news media’s.  They failed America.  Profoundly.  Unforgivably.  They took liberties and freedoms that journalists in other nations have sacrificed their lives for and played petty schoolyard games with them and now there are four-thousand dead U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and our moral capital is gone, gone, pissed away in the whirlwind of images of dead, bloody victims of U.S. torture, the Geneva War Conventions are in tatters, we are less secure, our military forces are weaker, We Have Lost A City and the economy is teetering on the brink of the worst disaster since the Great Depression.  Nice work if you can get it.  Mission Accomplished people.

Now go home.  Please.  But before you do, I want you to get up out of your chairs and go to the window, open it up and shout as loud as you can: I FUCKED UP AND I’M SORRY.  Then…jump.

 

 

by Bruce | Link | React!

March 11th, 2008

Loving The Sinner…(continued)

What a lot of bullied gay kids discover as they get older, is that bullies never really grow out of it…

Gay singer tells of ‘nightmare’

Singer Ian ‘H’ Watkins’ has told of the "complete nightmare" of growing up gay in the south Wales valleys.

The former Steps singer, who is from the Rhondda, filmed a personal account for BBC Wales’ Week In Week Out.

In the programme, he also looked at schools’ treatment of gay issues and admitted he was bullied "relentlessly".

Making the documentary, he said he was shocked to be told by one Christian campaigner that being gay made him no better than a serial killer.

Christian Voice director, Stephen Green, told Watkins his lifestyle was "sinful", and made him no better than US mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer.

Mr Green also told the former Celebrity Big Brother contestant he could become straight if he wanted to.

The comparison to Dahmer who was jailed for life in 1992 after the Wisconsin trial heard evidence of his cannibalism after murdering his victims came when Watkins told Mr Green he was "completely happy" being gay and that he was in a loving relationship.

Mr Green added: "Jeremy (sic) Dahmer was happy murdering people, does that make it right?"

The comment shocked Watkins and he responded: "So, being completely happy and at one with yourself, and being in a happy, loving relationship is the same as murdering somebody?"

But Mr Green stuck to his guns during the exchange: "Sin is sin…in the eyes of God, sin is sin…"

When Watkins referred to people being born gay, Mr Green told him: "I don’t believe anybody is born homosexual. God wouldn’t allow anybody to be born homosexual."

Watkins, who came out when he was in the Big Brother house alongside Shilpa Shetty and Jade Goody, says he was "absolutely flabbergasted" by the comments.

You might ask why, since like a lot of gay people he’d been hearing them most of his life.  But staring into the face of grinning depravity always comes as a shock, no matter how often you’ve seen it before.  That wasn’t a conversation about Watkin’s homosexuality, it was about his happiness.  Green saw it…saw it was real the moment Watkins told him of it…saw it in his face, in his voice, in that peaceful aura truly happy people gently radiate.  He saw it, and his immediate reflex was to punch it out.  And he reached for the first weapon he could wrap his hands around to do it.  Ah…Jeffrey Dahmer…the cannibal…that’ll do the trick…  And he swung.  He swung at that innermost place in Watkin’s heart where that joy had taken root.

It wasn’t sin Green was striking out at.  God is just the grown up bully’s substitute for mother’s skirt…something to hide behind when the bullied start looking like they’ve had enough.  It was the happiness in Watkin’s voice Green hated, it was his joy, it was the sight of a person in love, and it was pure reflex.  And he did it, with the same brutally carnal delight a playground bully takes in busting apart that nice toy the neighbor’s kid just got for his birthday…for the pleasure of seeing the look in the kid’s eyes when he realizes his toy is gone.  The tears afterward, are like free candy.  Green is probably still savoring the look on Watkin’s face at the moment of impact.  He’ll be savoring it for weeks.

by Bruce | Link | React! (1)

February 28th, 2008

Heathens Are The People In The Church Across The Street

When fundamentalists speak of freedom of religion, they don’t mean what you think they mean…

Calif. Capitol chaplain says religious tolerance offends God

An evangelical chaplain who leads Bible studies for California lawmakers says God is disgusted with a rival fellowship group that includes people of all faiths.

"Although they are pleasant men in their personal demeanor, their group is more than disgusting to our Lord and Savior," Drollinger wrote on the Capitol Ministries’ Web site.

The comments drew immediate fire from others in the capital, including the Republican lawmaker who sponsors Drollinger’s Bible study group.

Drollinger said "progressive religious tolerance" is an offense against God and causes harm to its practitioners.

He said the other Bible study group was perpetrating a "deadly lie" by presenting Jesus as "a good moral teacher who loves everyone without distinction."

Assembly Republican leader Mike Villines, who sponsors Drollinger’s Bible study group, said the differing approach between the two groups should not be a cause of conflict between them.

Right.  Until Drollinger’s kind finally acquires the power to decide what the first amendment means. This on Drollinger’s Capital Ministries from Jews On First

Capitol Ministries aims to "reach every elected official in every nation of the world at every level of government with the uncompromised, saving message of Jesus Christ," according to its website. So far, the California-based group has, again according to its website, "singularly focused on establishing biblical ministries in State Capitols throughout our nation … in order to make disciples of Jesus Christ within the political arena, at every level."

… 

The growing roster of states is worth noting because of Capitol Ministries’ extremism.

The group’s leader, Ralph Drollinger, is so extreme that the Los Angeles Daily News reported this month without qualification that he "has a long record of bashing Catholics, gays and mothers of young children who serve in the state Legislature."

In his keynote address to the May 8th Harrisburg "Commonwealth Prayer Breakfast," Drollinger said it was important to challenge legislators to make decisions to "submit to Christ as Lord," according to Rabbi Paula Reimers of Congregation Beth Israel in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, who attended.

She also noted Drollinger’s remark that it isn’t necessary "to coerce one who has come to Christ as to how to vote."

In 2004 he [Drollinger] offended many in the California legislature when he called Catholicism "the world’s largest false religion."

According to a 2005 report in the Sacramento News & Review, the previous year Drollinger "had to move the Bible study from the governor’s suites after he labeled Catholicism, the religion of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a ‘false religion.’" Thanks to the sponsorship of three Republican legislators, Drollinger moved the study to a legislative suite, according to the paper, where its attendance was around a dozen Republican lawmakers. There is a separate study group for staffers.

In 2004 Drollinger wrote a Bible study stating that women legislators were sinning by leaving their children to go to Sacramento. "It is one thing for a mother to work out of her home while her children are in school," he wrote. "It is quite another matter to have children in the home and live away in Sacramento for four days a week. Whereas the former could be in keeping with the spirit of Proverbs 31, the latter is sinful."

Drollinger amplified with a patriarchal assertion about the roles of men and women. "Man’s is, primarily, to be a breadwinner, and women’s is to be at home nurturing their children," according to contemporaneous news reports.

Some members of the state Senate responded by wearing aprons to a legislative session.

In the interview with the Sacramento News & Review, Drollinger differentiated his operation from religious right organizations. They, he said, lobby on bills, whereas Capitol Ministries works to win souls (the same distinction he made at the Harrisburg breakfast)..

He also insisted that he supports the separation of church and state, because the two insititutions are biblically ordained to serve different purposes, according to the SNR.

The group’s own descriptions of its activities suggests quite the opposite. A 2002 "Bible study lesson series" aimed at Tennessee government workers was titled "Decision-Making and God’s Will," according to the Nashville Business Journal.

In 2005, in a retort to the speaker of the California Assembly’s statement that all are "children of God," Capitol Ministries’ national "expansion" director, Sean Wallentine, said: "While it is nice to believe that God is everyone’s Father, it is not true." Only those who are "born again" become God’s "adopted children," Wallentine said in a written statement quoted by the California Observer blog.

The Daily News report on the prayer breakfast in Santa Clarita quoted Wallentine disparaging an alternative Interfaith event. "I would just say they’re allowed to have their meeting," he said, "but we wouldn’t be supportive of a meeting that taught that there are many ways to heaven. There are not."

Freedom of religion?  You’re very much mistaken citizen…sin has no rights that men of god are bound to respect…

by Bruce | Link | React!

February 19th, 2008

“What Did You Do To My Parents?”

Why I am going to Memphis tomorrow…

This is tough to watch, and all the more if you’ve ever met Peterson and know what a good heart he has and how much he loves his parents. Never in his life would he have ever wanted to hurt them. What happened wasn’t his fault. But all of that…what happened to Peterson and what happened to his parents…all of that is part of the horrible trail of scar tissue these ex-gay outfits leave behind. There is little enough love in this poor world. To leave the world poorer for it is crime enough. To leave people so wounded inside they have trouble for the rest of their lives finding love and intimacy, to then also drive a stake between them and their parents and family…it is a crime against humanity.

These outfits would largely whither and die almost overnight from lack of money, were they not being bankrolled by the religious right for purely political ends. The ex-gay movement gives them rhetorical ammunition for the Kulturkrieg, and it gives their politicians political cover to oppose basic civil rights for gay people. The war on gay people drives voters to the polls. And…it brings in money. That is why Peterson Toscano, and his parents, and many many others like them over the years, had to bleed. And that is why people are gathering this weekend in Memphis, to shout love into this heart of darkness. Enough is enough. No more wounded people. No more wounded families. No more bleeding hearts. Enough.

I’ll be leaving for Memphis early tomorrow. The last weather forecast I read for Memphis is calling for possible freezing rain around midnight, so I want to be in my hotel well before then. They’ll probably be no blogging tomorrow. But I’ll be posting updates on the events over the weekend as much as possible.

by Bruce | Link | React!


Corruption…

Via Andrew Sullivan’s blog…  From the National Review’s blog, ring wing crank John Derbyshire actually gets a few things right about Intelligent Design proponents…

I’ve said before here, and repeated as politely as I could in panel discussions with creationists: they’re not just wrong, they’re shifty. In my opinion, they wandered off the straight and narrow when they started pushing this "intelligent design" stuff. My advice to them — frequently offered but, for reasons that are baffling to me, never taken up — is to drop the i-d b-s and go back to good old Biblical creationism. At least that’s an honest point of view founded in Scripture. I understand why the move to i-d was made: to try to get out from under current church-state jurisprudence (not all of which I agree with). However, the constant strain of keeping a straight face while insisting that theirs is not — no way! absolutely not!! — a religious campaign, and talking about the mysterious-but-definitely-not-supernatural "Designer," has corrupted them irredeemably.

No.  What corrupted them irredeemably was idolatry.  These people worship the bible, not God.  And it’s forced them to turn away from everything God actually created, and treat Gods own handwriting in the matter that makes up the water in the sea, the sand on the shore, and the beautiful whirls and colors of sea shells as evil, whenever it contradicts what the idol says.  The first thing you give up when you turn away from the world as it really is, is your integrity.  After that, comes you honor, your self respect, and eventually everything you could have been.  Yes they’re shifty.  That’s what you become when you turn away from the world.  That’s what you have to become.

When the bird and the bird book disagree, believe the bird.  When reality slaps you upside the head, say "thank you".  Don’t tuck your tail between your legs and run away toward the comforting embrace of an idol, because you’ll never stop running until there is nothing left of you but the idol.  The empty, soulless idol.

by Bruce | Link | React!

February 18th, 2008

Teach Your Children Well…(continued)

Reverend Ken Hutcherson, founder and senior pastor of the Antioch Bible Church near Seattle Washington, and one of the three leaders of the hate group, Watchmen on the Walls, is on the warpath over the Gay-Straight Alliance in his daughter’s school…

This poster is hanging in the window of a classrom at Mt. Si High School!

It’s time we wake up and realize we are in a culture WAR!

When teachers are allowed to hang posters like this in our local school, we’ve got a big problem. It’s time to take back our schools.

Pastor Hutch

Timothy Kincaid, over at Box Turtle Bulletin, has more.  Apparently Hutcherson is upset that his daughter is being called a stressful presence while "monitoring" those GSA meetings.  I can’t imagine why, other then that those kids probably know full well that everyone who attends those meetings, and everything that is said, is being reported right back to Hutcherson, and for all anybody knows, other members of The Watchmen on the Walls.  They might as well be holding their meetings in Hutcherson’s church.

Meanwhile…back in Oxnard…

1,000 march in Oxnard in tribute to slain teen

The Goths in their black T-shirts were there. So were the punks with fluorescent hair and multiple piercings.

There were even a few adolescent boys carrying skateboards among the nearly 1,000 Oxnard youth and other supporters who turned out Saturday for a hastily organized peace march to pay tribute to Lawrence King, 15, the Oxnard student shot to death in a classroom last week.

"Larry, Larry, Larry!" the crowd chanted before marchers clasped hands in a moment of silence for the fallen student.

There were no bullhorns, no speeches and no politicians. Just a mass of mostly adolescents wearing bright clothing, carrying signs and singing John Lennon’s "Imagine" and "Give Peace a Chance."

The size of the turnout surprised police, school officials and even the two Hueneme High School sophomores who put the event together just three days ago, spreading the word with fliers, cellphone calls and MySpace bulletins.

"We were expecting maybe 100 or 200 people," said Courtney LaForest, 16, as she gazed at a broad "peace circle" formed by march participants at Plaza Park in downtown Oxnard. "This is incredible."

Courtney said the turnout reflected a community’s anguish over a senseless shooting that has destroyed the lives of two young men. It was also a public plea for tolerance on school campuses for those who are different, she said.

However, "Pastor Hutch" and his friends think it’s time people realize they’re fighting a WAR!  And The enemy…?  Right here…

 

And…here… 

And…here…

 

Children are being shot by children.  Parents are burying their children.  Their friends are being torn apart by shock and loss and grief.  And Hutcherson says we’re in a WAR!  No shit Sherlock.  Two bullets to the head killed a sixteen year old boy and took away from this poor world everything he might have given to it, every moment of friendship and joy and love, every laugh, every smile.  Gone.  All gone.  In an instant.  And Ken Hutcherson’s words, and those of his fellow KulturKriegen, were the gunpowder.

  
 

 

 

by Bruce | Link | React!

February 14th, 2008

Teach Your Children Well…

Teach your children well,
Their father’s hell did slowly go by…

Bill would keep homosexuality out of schools’ curriculum

An essay on little Johnny’s two mommies could be tossed in the trash bin before it ever gets the chance to bask in school hallway-display prominence.

Newly proposed state legislation would ban anything from being taught in schools that exposes students in prekindergarten through eighth grade to homosexuality.

"Homosexuality, bisexuality, that’s something that should be left to be taught at home and not at our schools," said Rep. Stacey Campfield, R-Knoxville, author of the legislation.

The bill, however, would allow for the teaching of heterosexuality.

"Without heterosexuality you wouldn’t be able to teach biology," Campfield explained.

He added that keeping heterosexuality on the books would protect schools from litigation. "’Jack and Jill went up the hill’ – some organizations say you can’t teach that because it pushes a heterosexual agenda," he said.

And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you’ll know by…

Oxnard student declared brain dead

An Oxnard junior high student who was shot in the head by a classmate earlier this week was declared brain dead Wednesday, and the 14-year-old male suspect now faces a first-degree murder charge, authorities said.

Lawrence King, 15, was declared brain dead by two neurosurgeons about 2 p.m. at St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard, said Craig Stevens, senior deputy Ventura County medical examiner. King’s body remains on a ventilator for possible organ donation, he said. He was shot early Tuesday in a classroom at E.O. Green Junior High School.

Authorities initially believed that King was improving. But the boy’s condition worsened early Wednesday, and he was placed on a ventilator a few hours later with his family nearby, said an official, who asked not to be named.
their privacy.

Police said the suspect, whose identity was not disclosed because of his age, shot King at least twice at the beginning of the school day and then fled the campus. The boy was apprehended by police a few blocks away and is being held in Juvenile Hall. He is scheduled to appear in court today.

Police have not determined a motive in the slaying but said it appeared to stem from a personal dispute between King and the suspect…

But several students at the south Oxnard campus said King and his alleged assailant had a falling out stemming from King’s sexual orientation.

The teenager sometimes wore feminine clothing and makeup, and proclaimed he was gay, students said.

"He would come to school in high-heeled boots, makeup, jewelry and painted nails — the whole thing," said Michael Sweeney, 13, an eighth-grader. "That was freaking the guys out."

Student Juan Sandoval, 14, said he shared a fourth-period algebra class with the suspect, whom he described as a calm, smart student who played on the basketball team. "I didn’t think he was that kind of kid," Sandoval said. "I guess you never know. He made a big mistake."

"Their lives are both destroyed now," said student Hansley Rivera, 12

Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you…

by Bruce | Link | React!

February 12th, 2008

And In Other News On The Valentine’s Day front…

…it turns out there’s some truth to the bromide that right wing nutcases are sexually frustrated dweebs who just need a good lay.  From Der Spiegel…

Lack of Women in Eastern Germany Feeds Neo-Nazis

The problem has been well known for years: Ever since the mid-1990s, young Eastern Germans have been fleeing the region due to a lack of economic opportunity, hoping to find jobs in the western part of the country. Some 1.5 million have already left the region — roughly 10 percent of the population of East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell. Even worse, most of those who leave are under 35 and many of them have above average education or training.

But according to a new study released by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, there is another problem that accompanies the migration. Since 1991, more than two-thirds of all those who have left Eastern Germany have been women. The result is that in many towns in the region, there are simply not enough to go around — some places are missing up to 25 percent of their young women. Even worse, the young men who stay behind are often poorly educated, unemployed and frustrated — perfect fodder for neo-Nazi groups looking for members.

"In general," the study finds, "right-wing radical parties receive more votes in those areas where the most young women have left."

The study comes on the heels of a report that right-wing violence rose in Germany in 2006, with many of the neo-Nazi-related incidents occurring in Eastern Germany. Additionally, the neo-Nazi party NPD has seen increasing success at the polls in Eastern German states. In state elections in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, the NPD captured fully 7.3 percent of the vote, meaning that the right wingers now hold seats in three German state parliaments, all of them in former East Germany.

The study recommends a greater focus on educating the region’s young men, but admits that solving the problem is a difficult challenge. After all, there is no one to turn to for advice: nowhere in Europe is the disappearance of women as severe as it is in Eastern Germany.

"The lack of women in former East Germany has no equal anywhere in Europe," the study says. "Even Polar regions in northern Sweden and Finland, where young women have for years been leaving in droves, don’t come close to the problem in Eastern Germany."

I don’t think education is going to do anything for those guys except make them smarter neo-Nazis, and who wants that?  You want to make this world a better place?  Universal education would help…sure.  Feeding the hungry helps.  Creating jobs and opportunities for economic improvement helps.  Working for peace and reconciliation helps.  But nothing, Nothing, will do more to make this world a better, more peaceful and secure place, then making sure that love has a chance to take root and grow, in every heart.  Yet we persist in isolating the lonely…turning away from their misery…blaming them for their own loneliness…  You just need to get out more…

You see it in every totalitarian state, in every theocratic pest hole, in every babbling right wing crank who just can’t seem to get enough of waging war on their neighbor’s private lives.  The war on sex…which is a war on human intimacy…which is a war on love…which becomes a generalized war on all humanity, on everything that a human being can be.  When love dies inside of a person, the void that’s left is all too often filled with the only thing left to fill it with.  Hate. 

by Bruce | Link | React!

January 21st, 2008

Why I Get Scared Sometimes…

Via Pam’s House Blend…  This from The Opine Editorials…which bills itself as "Defending marriage on the firm ground of reason and respect for human dignity". 

Inspirational

I was reading an article on National Review Online recently and ran across an inspirational passage that made me realize the tremendous contributions of so many of our fellow defenders of the institution of marriage.

The article’s author is David French, a soldier in America’s Army Reserve fighting in Iraq, as well as a soldier in the war to protect traditional marriage!

“As a bit of background, I’m a mobilized reservist (in my civilian life, I’m a senior counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund and regularly contribute to NRO’s “Phi Beta Cons” blog) supporting 2nd (Sabre) Squadron, 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, one of the Army’s most storied units. I serve as the squadron’s judge advocate (lawyer), and I’ve been pushed forward as part of “Operation Raider Harvest.””

Alliance Defense Fund is on the forefront of the battle against same-sex “marriage”.

I found the specter of a man who spends half his time fighting America’s enemies within & the other half fighting Americas enemies abroad to be truly inspirational!

American’s enemies withinWhich was  promptly followed up in comments by

 You are degrading the TRUE freedoms of America.

"Freedom of Speech" carries the obligation to speak THE Truth, with the implication that righteous Americans also have a right to freedom from from untruths.

There are no such words in the constitution as "Freedom of Thought". Righteous Americans, however, do have the right to be free from having untruths shoved in their face and down their throats, and they do have the right to protect innocents’ freedom from exposure to these untruths.

"Making a case for change" is not the same thing as petitioning for a redress of grievances. "Grievances" connotes that there is something that is immoral that must be corrected in order to bring this country closer to the ideal of the moral straight, true and narrow. "Change" can be whatever you like even if it is immoral. There is no ‘freedom’ to make a case for allowing paedophelia, but a freedom FROM such immorality.

America is built on the metaphor of ‘Family’. Thus, that which mocks the moral wholesomeness of the family which is the bedrock of America’s moral superiority is an EMEMY of America.

Dig it.  According to this true blue American patriot, there is no such thing as freedom of thought, let alone freedom of speech.  And he was promptly followed up by this

Anyone pushing such an agenda acts against the family and the dignity of the human being, and as such is not merely an enemy of America but an enemy of humanity itself, because the acts that he/she wants society to affirm and condone are clearly “acts of grave depravity.”

Human dignity anyone?  There is no freedom of thought.  Homosexuals are the enemy within.  Homosexuals are the enemies of America.  Homosexuals are the enemies of humanity.  Some days I wonder if this was how it felt to be a Jew in Europe during the late 1920s.  Oh…don’t worry about them…they’re just a bunch of fringe lunatics.  Crazies.  Nobody takes them seriously…

[Update…]  Another commenter adds:

It appears to me that the vast majority of LGBT folks have a selfish and single-minded "what’s in it for me" attitude towards the +/- 5% of LGBT folks who are actiist and actively working to undermine the family, religion, and the institution of marriage.

So long as they are promised their "special rights", the vast majority is perfectly willing to let the nihilists run the larger agenda of evil.

…so in addition to all of the above, homosexuals are also part of a larger agenda of evil.

by Bruce | Link | React!

January 16th, 2008

Big Bill Is Watching

Microsoft takes the next logical step in its ongoing betrayal of the revolution…

Microsoft seeks patent for office ‘spy’ software

Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.

The Times has seen a patent application filed by the company for a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure. Unions said they fear that employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computer’s assessment of their physiological state.

Technology allowing constant monitoring of workers was previously limited to pilots, firefighters and Nasa astronauts. This is believed to be the first time a company has proposed developing such software for mainstream workplaces.

Microsoft submitted a patent application in the US for a “unique monitoring system” that could link workers to their computers. Wireless sensors could read “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure”, the application states.

The system could also “automatically detect frustration or stress in the user” and “offer and provide assistance accordingly”. Physical changes to an employee would be matched to an individual psychological profile based on a worker’s weight, age and health. If the system picked up an increase in heart rate or facial expressions suggestive of stress or frustration, it would tell management that he needed help.

Can’t you just see how Microsoft is going to market this?  Oh…we’re just trying to Help make your office experience more enjoyable… 

The saving grace of it is that any technology capable of producing tiny devices to monitor your every breath with is also capable of producing tiny devices to fuck with the monitoring devices.  But still…this is beyond sad.  It’s disgusting.  Next time Bill, or anyone in the Microsoft boardroom is testifying before congress about something, someone should ask them if they plan to sell this technology to totalitarian states.  Because of course, if a U.S. company doesn’t sell police state technology to police states, someone else will and that’s money out of our pockets isn’t it?

 

I sure hope nobody asks me to work on the software for crap like this.  I’ll work on it alright… 

by Bruce | Link | React!

January 15th, 2008

The Child Is Parent To The Nation

I was raised a Baptist.  And in my family’s particular strain of the faith, I was pretty much constantly taught that the human race is no damn good.  My maternal grandmother was the most sour person you could imagine growing up with.  As long as I knew her, I never once saw her smile, unless it was at someone else’s misfortune.  But make no mistake, her pleasure did not arise from the sight of someone being brought down.  To her it was always more a matter of misfortune reminding us that we were all no good in the eyes of the Lord.  The instant you find yourself enjoying life, it could only have been because you were doing something wrong, and you needed to repent.  So…obviously my memories of her aren’t exactly joyful.  But one memory sticks in my mind as a time when I actually saw myself, very reluctantly, admiring her. 

We were waiting in a train station for my mom to come back from some trip…I forget what it was for.  It was sometime in the late 1950s and I was a very young child, holding on to grandma’s hand as we sat waiting for mom.  In those days there was still legalized and enforced race segregation and the station had separate areas for "whites" and "coloreds."  But grandma was tired that day, and had decided to take us to the first seats she saw available…in the colored section.

A kindly station manager came over and politely told grandma she had to move, she was in the wrong part of the station.  I forget now what exactly he said to her, only that it provoked one of grandma’s stock in trade fire and brimstone sermons.  How dare he, she thundered, set himself above anyone for the color of their skin!  How dare he tell people where they could sit because of the color of their skin!  I suppose if we were both black the police would have been promptly called and we’d have both gone off to jail.  But this guy just shook his head and walked away with grandma still sniping at him as he left.  The station was mostly empty anyway.

It was years later before I finally realized what it was that had so deeply offended grandma.  She wasn’t angry that this guy thought that black people were inferior.  What had pissed her off was that he thought because he was white, he wasn’t. 

I’m telling you this, because of an amazing book of history I’m reading now.  And like all truly amazing history books, this one is a personal account, told by an average everyday person who actually lived it, who saw it with his own eyes. 

How I came to find it: In comments to my post a few days ago on Why American News Sucks In A Nutshell, Peterson Toscano linked to this article on AlterNet, Creeping Fascism: From Nazi Germany to Post 9/11 America.  That article by Ray McGovern begins thusly:

Americans today are seeing the same sheepish submissiveness that characterized Germany after the burning of the Reichstag.

"There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater … Perhaps the only comparably odd thing is the way that now, years later …"

These are the words of Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel), who as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover and wrote a firsthand account. His children found the manuscript when he died in 1999 and published it the following year as "Geschichte eines Deutschen" (The Story of a German). The book became an immediate bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages — in English as "Defying Hitler."

I recently learned from his daughter Sarah, an artist in Berlin, that yesterday was the 100th anniversary of Haffner’s birth. She had seen an earlier article in which I quoted her father and emailed to ask me to "write some more about the book and the comparison to Bush’s America … this is almost unbelievable."

At the end of the article, which mostly recounts the passivity of the press and congressional democrats to the Bush republicans in-your-face violations of constitutional law in order to spy on American citizens, McGovern turns finally to Haffner’s book and the parallels to what Haffner saw as the Nazis rose to power become scary…

In his journal Sebastian Haffner decries what he calls the "sheepish submissiveness" with which the German people reacted to a 9/11-like event, the burning of the German parliament building (Reichstag) on Feb. 27, 1933. Haffner finds it quite telling that none of his acquaintances "saw anything out of the ordinary in the fact that, from then on, one’s telephone would be tapped, one’s letters opened and one’s desk might be broken into."

But it is for the cowardly politicians that Haffner reserves his most vehement condemnation. Do you see any contemporary parallels here?

In the elections of March 4, 1933, shortly after the Reichstag fire, the Nazi party garnered only 44 percent of the vote. Only the "cowardly treachery" of the Social Democrats and other parties to whom 56 percent of the German people had entrusted their votes made it possible for the Nazis to seize full power. Haffner adds:

"It is in the final analysis only that betrayal that explains the almost inexplicable fact that a great nation, which cannot have consisted entirely of cowards, fell into ignominy without a fight."

The Social Democratic leaders betrayed their followers — "for the most part decent, unimportant individuals." In May they sang the Nazi anthem; in June the Social Democratic party was dissolved.

The middle-class Catholic party Zentrum folded in less than a month and in the end supplied the votes necessary for the two-thirds majority that "legalized" Hitler’s dictatorship.

As for the right-wing conservatives and German nationalists: "Oh God," writes Haffner, "what an infinitely dishonorable and cowardly spectacle their leaders made in 1933 and continued to make afterward. … They went along with everything: the terror, the persecution of Jews. … They were not even bothered when their own party was banned and their own members arrested." In sum:

"There was not a single example of energetic defense, of courage or principle. There was only panic, flight, and desertion. In March 1933 millions were ready to fight the Nazis. Overnight they found themselves without leaders. … At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed. They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown. … The result is today the nightmare of the rest of the world."

This is what can happen when virtually all are intimidated.

Our founding fathers were not oblivious to this; thus, James Madison wrote:

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. … The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home."

Haffner’s words spoke to me…they grabbed me by the collar…

"There was not a single example of energetic defense, of courage or principle. There was only panic, flight, and desertion…millions were ready to fight the Nazis. Overnight they found themselves without leaders. … At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed. They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown. … The result is today the nightmare of the rest of the world."

…and I had to get a copy of his book.  I’m reading it now.  I’m only into the opening chapters, where he relates his experiences growing up during the first world war, as a necessary background to understanding what came later.  But it is already an absorbing, disturbing read.  I find myself devouring it.

As usual, when reading a firsthand account of a period of history that you thought you knew from the books and grainy black and white newsreel footage, you discover quickly that what you thought you knew was only a small slice of the whole, and that you were missing things, many things, especially those little commonplace day-to-day things that fade with time and memory, allowing you to keep history’s terrible events at a safe distance from the present.  Oh…that could Never happen nowadays.  Already just a few chapters into his book, Haffner has obliterated that distance for me, and his past becomes all too real, all too immediate…

I need to show you this, from the third chapter of his book.  Here, Haffner is describing how the first world war affected him, and his childhood companions…

For a schoolboy in Berlin, the war was something very unreal; it was like a game. There were no air raids and no bombs. There were the wounded, but you saw them only at a distance. One had relatives at the front, of course, and now and then one heard of a death. But being a child, one quickly got used to their absence, and the fact that this absence sometimes became irrevocable did not seem to matter. As to the real hardships and privations, they were of small account. Naturally the food was poor. Later there was too little food, and our shoes had clattering wooden soles, our suits were turned, there were school collections for bones and cherry pits and surprisingly frequent illnesses. I must admit, all that made little impression. Not that I bore it all "like a little hero". It’s just that there was nothing very special to bear. I thought as little about food as a soccer enthusiast at a cup final. The army bulletins interested me far more then the menu.

The analogy with the soccer fan can be carried further. In those childhood days, I was a war fan just as one is a soccer fan. I would be making myself out worse then I was if I were to claim that I was caught up in the hate propaganda that, from 1915 to 1918, sought to whip up the flagging enthusiasm of the first few months of the war. I hated the French, the English and the Russians as little as the Portsmouth supporters detest Wolverhampton fans. Of course, I prayed for their defeat and humiliation, but only because those were the necessary counterparts of my side’s victory and triumph.

What counted was the fascination with the game of war, in which, according to certain mysterious rules, the number of prisoners taken, miles advanced, fortifications seized, and ships sunk played almost the same as goals in soccer and points in boxing. I never wearied of keeping internal scorecards. I was a zealous reader of the army bulletins, which I would proceed to recalculate in my own fashion, according to my own mysterious, irrational rules: thus, for instance, ten Russian prisoners were equivalent to one English or French prisoner, and fifty airplanes to one cruiser. If there had been statistics of those killed, I would certainly not have hesitated to "recalculate" the dead. I would not have stopped to think what the objects of my arithmetic looked like in reality. It was a dark, mysterious game and it’s never-ending, wicked lure eclipsed everything else, making daily life seem trite. It was addictive, like roulette and opium. My friends and I played it all through the war: four long years unpunished and undisturbed. It is this game, and not the harmless battle games we organized in the streets and playgrounds nearby, that has left its dangerous mark on all of us.

Sound familiar?  Haffner goes on to say later, that the Nazi base came mostly from his middle class generation, untouched by war except as a series of army bulletins, seeing it only in the abstract, somewhat like a soccer game. 

From 1914 to 1918 a generation of German schoolboys daily experienced war as a great, thrilling, enthralling game between nations, which provided far more excitement and emotional satisfaction then anything peace could offer; and that has now become the underlying vision of Nazism.  That is where it draws its allure from: its simplicity, its appeal to the imagination, and its zest for action; but also its intolerance and its cruelty toward internal opponents.  Anyone who does not join in is a spoilsport.  Ultimately that is the source of Nazism’s belligerent attitude toward neighboring states.  Other countries are not regarded as neighbors but must be opponents, whether they like it or not.  Otherwise the match would have to be called off!

Many things later bolstered Nazism and modified its character, but its roots lie here: in the experience of war – not by German soldiers, but by German schoolboys at home.  Indeed, the front line generation has produced relatively few genuine Nazis, and is better known for its critics and carpers.  That is easy to understand.  Men who have experienced the reality of war tend to view it differently.  Granted there are exceptions: the eternal warriors, who found their vocation in war, with all its terrors and continue to do so; and the eternal failures, who welcome its horrors and its destruction as a revenge on a life that has proved too much for them.  Göring perhaps belongs to the former type; Hitler certainly to the latter.  The truly Nazi generation was formed by those born in the decade from 1900 to 1910, who experienced war as a great game and were untouched by its realities.

Sound Familiar? 

All my grade school life, and for decades after, I’ve been told that Hitler rose to power because of a character flaw of the German people, something specific to the German soul that the rest of humanity somehow naturally rose above.  I’ve never believed it.  Never.  Thanks I’m certain, to that Baptist upbringing I had, and my church’s constant drumming into my head that the human race was a pretty sad, sorry, good-for-nothing thing that no amount of fixing could improve, and the best we could do was beg God for forgiveness.  I’ve never believed that either I’m pleased to say, but at least I seem to have absorbed the lesson that, for good or ill, we’re all pretty much the same deep down inside.  The irrational passions that move your neighbors one day, might just as easily grab you by the collar the next if you’re not careful.  We are not fallen angels, but risen apes.  Our line is legitimate, and thoroughly anchored to the natural world, and to that ancient past from which we emerged so many millions of years ago.  Old…very old…tides pull and tug at our consciousness.  We are capable of great things, but also terrible things.  All of us.  What happened to the German people could just as easily happen to us.  Maybe it already is.

I’ll probably be posting more about Haffner’s book as I continue reading it.  But you should go buy it.  Sit down with it and read it.  Let it transport you back to a time and place you only think you know about.  Then lift your eyes from its pages, and look around.

by Bruce | Link | React!

January 9th, 2008

Climate Of Hate…Blood On The Street…

The Christian Science Monitor has an article up about The Watchmen On The Walls

Alex Shevchenko has been arraigned for a hate crime tied to the assault and eventual death of Satender Singh in July. According to prosecutors, Mr. Shevchenko and Andrey Vusik taunted Mr. Singh in a park because they thought he was gay. Mr. Vusik eventually threw a punch that toppled Singh, dashing his head, they charge.

Gay leaders in Sacramento say the incident followed several years of escalating tensions with some Slavic immigrants.

"The gut feeling of the [gay] community is that preaching among the local Russian evangelical community is breeding hate and that something would happen. And Satender was the something that happened," says Ed Bennett, a gay Democratic activist.

While Slavic leaders say their community is being unfairly scapegoated for legitimate political protests and deeply held religious beliefs, some monitors warn that an emerging group called the Watchmen on the Walls may be fomenting a dangerous atmosphere within the ranks of Slavic immigrants here.

I’ll say it’s dangerous.  Scott Lively, one of the group’s founders, is also the author of The Pink Triangle…a Holocaust revisionist book that argues that the Nazis were basically a homosexual movement and that rather then being among the victims of the Holocaust, homosexuals were the primary instigators of it.  Consider that Lively is now preaching this message to Slavs in what was the eastern Soviet bloc at one time…a people who suffered a staggering loss of life at the hands of the Nazis during world war two…

Videos of Watchmen conferences abroad suggest some leaders are less modulated, and their audience less against violence. One video shows Lively giving a version of Singh’s killing different from reported facts, including the notion that Singh was undressing in front of children. The audience cheered twice as Lively recounted the punch and the death of Singh – a reaction Lively rebuked, saying: "We don’t want homosexuals to be killed. We want them to be saved."

The camera was on and Lively knew it.  There is no way on God’s green earth Lively doesn’t know the impact his message that the Nazis were homosexuals and homosexuals are all basically Nazis has on this particular group of people.  He knows Exactly what he’s doing.  He has never publicly condemned the killing of Satender Singh by a group of young Slav men in Sacramento.  There’s a reason for that.

by Bruce | Link | React! (1)

Visit The Woodward Class of '72 Reunion Website For Fun And Memories, WoodwardClassOf72.com


What I'm Currently Reading...




What I'm Currently Watching...




What I'm Currently Listening To...




Comic Book I've Read Recently...



web
stats

This page and all original content copyright © 2024 by Bruce Garrett. All rights reserved. Send questions, comments and hysterical outbursts to: bruce@brucegarrett.com

This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.