Dissident Veteran For Peace

... Jewish involvement in the X-rated industry can be seen as a proverbial two fingers to the entire WASP establishment in America. Some porn stars viewed themselves as frontline fighters in the spiritual battle between Christian America and secular humanism. According to [Luke] Ford*, Jewish X-rated actors often brag about their 'joy in being anarchic, sexual gadflies to the puritanical beast'. Jewish involvement in porn, by this argument, is the result of an atavistic hatred of Christian authority: they are trying to weaken the dominant culture in America by moral subversion. ... Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw, said (on lukeford.net), 'The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We don't believe in authoritarianism.' Pornography thus becomes a way of defiling Christian culture and, as it penetrates to the very heart of the American mainstream (and is no doubt consumed by those very same WASPs), its subversive character becomes more charged. ...

It is a case of the traditional revolutionary/radical drive of immigrant Jews in America being channelled into sexual rather than leftist politics. Just as Jews have been disproportionately represented in radical movements over the years, so they are also disproportionately represented in the porn industry.

* Elsewhere in the article Ford is referred to by the author as an "Orthodox Jew and porn gossipmonger".

Source: Nathan Abrams. "Triple-exthnics". Jewish Quarterly (Winter 2004). No. 196, p. 30.

Ron Jeremy as Jesus in the 2012 film Bloody Bloody Bible Camp. Nathan Abrams calls Jeremy "The doyen of the Hebrew studs ... one of America's biggest porn stars." Note: I have not seen the film and cannot confirm this image appears in it.

Labels: Christianity, Hollywood, Jews, media, prostitution, quotations

It was almost exactly a year ago that I published my first post here on guns and the Second Amendment. In the wake of the ongoing post-Newtown massacre gun control frenzy here's another. I'll try to actually write something in the next week or so but for now a link and a couple videos will have to suffice. The link is assaultweapon.info and the videos are below.

If you are offended by profanity then skip both videos. If you are offended by Jackie Mason (I know I am) then skip the second video or fast forward through the short segments featuring him. Click here to view the public service announcement that inspired the second video.

Labels: civil liberties, guns, Hollywood, politics, video

This is from the transcript of the American Experience documentary The Amish:

Amish Man 5: I have to tell you a little story. There was a tour bus. Amish man got on and they asked him -- what's the difference between you and us? ... Well, he said how many of you have television? All the hands went up. He said, how many of you, if you have a family, think you'd be better off without television? Practically all the hands went up. He said how many of you are going to go home and get rid of it? No hands went up. He said that's the difference between you and the Amish. Because we will do it. If it's bad for the family, we will not have it.

See also: Anarchy, Technology, the Amish & Rumspringa

Labels: Amish, Hollywood, quotations

In "The Magic Jew in the Village" I wrote about how author David J. Smith apparently cooked-the-books to ensure there would be at least one Jew in If The World Were A Village. Recently, I watched the 1970 film Patton and a similar occurrence caught my eye. At about 36:53 into the film General George S. Patton, played by George C. Scott, is shown visiting an American military cemetery in North Africa. As the camera pans right, Scott walks left and pauses just behind a Star of David grave marker. In the entire cemetery scene I counted three Stars of David and sixteen crosses. That would indicate that 15.8% of the graves belonged to Jewish soldiers. How plausible is such a percentage?

Well, Patton led US troops in 1942 and 1943. So, the closest US census data is from 1940. In 1940, the low estimate for the US Jewish population was 4,770,000 and the overall US population was 134,146,298. Thus, the low estimate for the percentage of the US population that was Jewish in 1940 was 3.6%. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, 550,000 Jews "served in every branch of the armed forces of the United States" during World War II and "11,000 Jews were killed, 7,000 in combat." According to a 2010 report prepared by the Congressional Research Service, "American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics," 16,112,566 US military personnel served in WW II with 405,399 total deaths, including 291,557 battle deaths.

Therefore, Jews comprised 3.4% of US military personnel in WW II and suffered just 2.7% of total deaths and 2.4% of combat deaths. The data indicate then that Jews served in the US military in WW II in numbers roughly proportionate to their share of the US population but they died in disproportionately lower numbers compared to non-Jews. Thus, we conclude that there are good grounds for believing there are magic—i.e. contrived, fabricated—Jews in that cemetery scene in Patton. This conclusion is further bolstered when we look at actual photos from the only American military cemetery in North Africa (see images below) where you see nothing like 15.8% of the graves being marked with Stars of David. What else would you expect from Hollywood?

Labels: Hollywood, Jews, military, statistics, War

The Adjustment Bureau is a 2011 film written, directed, and produced by George Nolfi and starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. The god of The Adjustment Bureau, aka "The Chairman", is a very strange fellow and clearly not the god of the New Testament. The Chairman kills people without reservation, or rather, he has his angelic henchmen, known as "Associates", kill innocent people in order to fulfill "The Plan".

A monologue (at about 1:04:00) by one of his chief associates, Thompson, indicates that the Chairman and his minions brought humanity "to the height of the Roman Empire". As if that bloody empire, which killed and enslaved multitudes, including the execution of Jesus Christ, was a good thing. At that zenith, humanity was then granted free will and we ruined things. Among the litany of evils blamed on humanity are the so-called "Dark Ages" and then, after another 600 years of intervention to rescue us from our post-Imperial downfall, "World War I, the Depression, Fascism, and ... the Cuban Missile Crisis". Imperialism, WW II and its other, non-Holocaust atrocities, and the millions of people killed in the name of communism merit no mention. The god of The Adjustment Bureau is apparently quite tendentious. It's also revealed that he is neither omniscient nor omnipotent.

Labels: Hollywood, religion

The television is that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.

Source: Ray Bradbury as quoted in The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011) p. 281.

Labels: Hollywood, quotations, technology

Five hundred years ago we were Seneca and Cree and Hopi and Kiowa, as different from each other as Norwegians are from Italians, or Egyptians from Zulus. ...

America pre-Columbus was a riot of vastly different cultures, which occasionally fought each other, no doubt sometimes viciously and for stupid reasons. If some Indian societies were ecological utopias with that perfect, elusive blend of democracy and individual freedom, some also practiced slavery, both before and after contact. Yet the amazing variety of human civilization that existed five centuries ago has been replaced by one image above all: the Plains Indians of the mid-nineteenth century. Most Indians weren't anything like the Sioux or the Comanche, either the real ones or the Hollywood invention. The true story is simply too messy and complicated. And too threatening. The myth of noble savages, completely unable to cope with modern times, goes down much more easily. No matter that Indian societies consistently valued technology and when useful made it their own. The glory days of the Comanches, for example, were built on European imports of horses and guns. ...

I suggest that a powerful antidote to the manufactured past now being created for us is the secret history of Indians in the twentieth century. Geronimo really did have a Cadillac and used to drive it to church, where he'd sign autographs. Quanah Parker, the legendary leader of the Comanches, became a successful businessman after the war. He was part owner of a railroad, and endorsed farming and Jesus. At the same time he was leader in the Native American Church and advocated the use of peyote. One of the most instructive lives is that of Black Elk, one of our greatest heroes and most revered spiritual leaders. His astonishing life included a stint in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show and surviving the Wounded Knee massacre. An impresario-anthropologist named John Neihardt wrote of his fantastic visions in Black Elk Speaks. ...

I found it fascinating that despite hearing about Black Elk for many years, I had no idea he spent most of his life as a Catholic. I learned that many believe that Black Elk and white assistants sat down and invented practically a new religion, explicitly designed to blend teachings of Christianity and Lakota spiritualism. At the time he was working as a catechist for the Roman Catholic Church of Nebraska. Essentially he was a lay priest. I also learned he had a first name, and that it was Nick. ... Do any of these facts about Nick Black Elk invalidate his contribution to the Lakota people, or his spiritual teachings? I think that to say they do is to say the invented, impossibly wise sages are preferable to the people who actually lived. Nick Black Elk, an extra in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, a paid employee of the Catholic Church, only becomes more interesting, not less, and his accomplishments even more remarkable. Those who would have it otherwise cherish the myth more than the genuine struggles of real human beings.

Source: Paul Chaat Smith in Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong (Minneapolis, Univ of Minnesota Pr., 2009) pp. 19-22.

See also: "A Brief History of Native Stereotyping" on the Blue Corn Comics site.

Labels: Black Elk, Hollywood, identity, Indians, Paul Chaat Smith, quotations, religion

They were, in a way, trying to imitate us [in film representations of Indians] but in another way they were trying to remember who they were. Every human being is a descendant of a tribe. So, these White people, they're the descendants of tribes, there was a time in their ancestry when they wore feathers, all right? And they wore beads and shells. There was a time in their ancestry, all right, before this colonizing mentality came and did to them, to turn them into the White people they are, and then it came and did it to us. The very same thing that happened to us happened to them.

Source: John Trudell, Lakota activist/poet in Reel Injun (Rezolution Pictures & the National Film Board of Canada, 2009)

See also:

• Indians at home – Indians in Cornwall, Indians in Wales, Indians in Ireland
• Skins & Fighting for Uncle Scum
• Quotable: "We believe in America"
• The "lower class" as Indians (and vice versa)
• Beads & Shells

Labels: art and literature, Empire, Hollywood, identity, Indians, White folks

Recently, I read somewhere that some rabbis were very unhappy with Monty Python's film, The Life of Brian, when it first came out. Indeed, according to the New York Times (Aug. 28, 1979; p. C8) several American rabbinical organizations, including the Rabbinical Alliance of American and the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, "condemned" the film as "blasphemous," a "crime against religion," and "a vicious attack upon Judaism and the Bible ..."

Naturally, I wanted to watch the film again now that I have those special sunglasses that help me see things more clearly. Well, I can see what upset the rabbis but according to a post by Eric Verlo at Not My Tribe there's even more to the story.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of most of Verlo's post but I can say that it is true that "The Criterion edition of Monty Python's Life of Brian has some" deleted scenes and that those scenes do indeed appear to have their own deletions.

There is the scene that includes the first appearance of "Otto, the Nazirene" (pictured at right). Verlo says that the first Otto scene appeared in the film's original theatrical release. I don't know if it appeared in the UK release but that doesn't seem to be the case for the US version. The New York Times published several articles on the controversy over the film but none of them mention Otto.

In Blasphemy in the Christian world: a History, author David Nash says, "A sequence which involved a character representative of extreme forms of Zionism [that would be Otto] eventually was consigned to the cutting-room floor, in the interests of smoothing the way for the film's distribution in America." As for whether that deleted scene has been edited on the DVD release you can read Verlo's post and then watch the video below. There is definitely a jump after Otto introduces himself and that is on the DVD version, too.

Labels: art and literature, Hollywood, video, Zionism

"Among all of you, I'm a gefilte fish out of water," said Dick Cook, referring to his non-Jewish-sounding name. The Walt Disney Studios chair joked that Disney is the synagogue he most often attends, and instead of an eight-pronged menorah, there's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves greeting him at the entrance.

The creme de la creme of Hollywood executives spent a Thursday evening honoring Cook when he was presented with the Dorothy and Sherrill C. Corwin Human Relations Award at the American Jewish Committee's "A Celebration of Imagination" dinner Oct. 18. ...

Source: Danielle Berrin. "A gefilte fish story, Art of Brain." Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. November 1, 2007.

Labels: art and literature, Hollywood, Jews, media, quotations, United States

I recently watched Capricorn One, The Family That Preys, and Boy A. I told the friend I was watching Capricorn One with that this was the kind of major Hollywood film that could only have have been made in the Woodward and Bernstein era and a few minutes later there was a reference to the Watergate duo in the film. An original 1978 movie poster sums up the film's plot: "The mission was a sham. The murders were real." The mission was a manned landing on Mars.

The Family That Preys is a recent offering by Tyler Perry, who has created and dominates a film niche that caters primarily to Black audiences. Perry's films feature predominantly Black casts and include some of the big names in Hollywood. TFTP included Alfre Woodard, Kathy Bates, and Sanaa Lathan. If you want insight into the values and dreams/illusions of much of the Black American middle-class then watch Perry's films.

Boy A is a compelling adaptation of a novel of the same name. The novel and film are British and the film provides a striking contrast to what is known as an "American ending" in cinema. A typically American ending is a happy ending with no loose ends. It tends to minimally, if at all, engage the intellect and the imagination. An American or Hollywood ending encourages passivity in the viewer as the sweet, but ultimately poisonous, syrup is spoon-fed to you. The best of the non-American endings (and American films can have such endings) provide no neat resolution and, thus, engage viewers intellectually and imaginatively.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the insidious nature of the "American ending" as well as the remarks of Dan Glickman. At a major film industry convention last month Glickman, the Motion Picture Association of America Chairman and CEO, told his audience:

... the fact that in the dark ... in the theater ... we are on ... and if only for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, nice guys finish first ... underdogs have their day…and whether it's autobots versus decepticons ... Harry versus Voldemort ... humans versus cyborgs ... or guinea pigs versus billionaires ... the good guys carry the day ... and the little guy can take on the system and win. In the global cinema, this is known as the American ending--the happy ending.

Few people know better than Dan Glickman just how heavily the deck is stacked against the underdog and in favor of the billionaires in real American life. Thus, the surfeit of vicarious victories in reel American life.

In 1998, as Secretary of Agriculture in the Clinton administration, Glickman defended a $600 million federal ethanol subsidy saying: "Political theory is really the rationalization of economic interests." The chief beneficiary of the subsidy was corporate agro-monster Archer Daniels Midland. Among other things, in 1996, ADM agreed to pay a $100 million fine for illegally manipulating the price of lysine. Of course, none of this deterred Congress or Glickman and the rest of the Clinton administration from giving hundreds of millions of tax dollars to ADM.

Labels: art and literature, Black America, Clintons, Hollywood, Jews, media, politics, United States

Until recently, I had seen the film but I had never read Ken Kesey's novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The book is all about America's culture of death. Chief Bromden, the novel's narrator, calls it "The Combine" and it was The Combine that sucked the life out of his father, robbed his tribe of their land along the Columbia River, and then drowned the Celilo Falls. The mental hospital that is the main setting of Cuckoo's Nest is part of The Combine and Nurse Ratched is its living embodiment.

Not coincidentally, all three of novel's main characters are Army veterans. Chief Bromden says, "I was hurt by seeing things in the Army, in the war." McMurphy's Army record is summed up succintly: "Distinguished Service Cross in Korea, for leading an escape from a Communist prison camp. A dishonorable discharge, afterward, for insubordination."

In contrast to Bromden and McMurphy, Nurse Ratched has internalized the worst of military values and adapted them to the civilian world. As Robert Faggen writes of her in his introduction to the 2007 Penguin Classics edition:

Funny though she may seem at times as Big Nurse, her manipulative skill and ability to destroy by insinuation render her an infuriating and insidious corporate tool. She executes her cold professionalism with an unshakable sanctimonious piety. A former army nurse--part of the military hierarchy--she does her job without emotion, and her almost puritanical sexlessness makes her inscrutable and indeed "wretched." She represents a sentimental culture that has taken genteel manners into the workplace to fill the void empty of any other compelling spiritual or moral authority. ... This beneficent beast of prey enforces benefits calculated to soothe the inmates out of their wits.

When manipulation and "genteel manners" fail her, the "Big Nurse" falls back on the brute force of her orderlies, drugs, electroshock therapy, and finally, in the case of McMurphy, lobotomy. By 1975, when the film was released, James W. Gibson's cultural "New War"--fought over issues of "power, sex, race, and alienation"--was already under way. Hollywood was one of the main weapons used to wage the "New War" and, thus, there is no mention of the Army in the film.

When Hollywood got Cuckoo's Nest in its clutches they left in much of the latent misogyny but robbed the novel of most of its powerful cultural and political critique. Crucially, in the film, Chief Bromden's voice and his back story almost disappear. The Combine, in concept or word, is never uttered or identified. Thus, although the mental hospital and Nurse Ratched still don't come off well in the film, the larger system/society that destroys people and their fishing grounds and produces 'mental patients,' mental hospitals, and Nurse Ratched is left unexamined. For its efforts, Hollywood gave itself all five major Academy Awards for the film version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Funny how that works.

See also "Celilo Falls Video"

Labels: art and literature, critical thinking, film & television, Hollywood, Indians, Ken Kesey, repression, United States, War

Do a Google search on the phrase "we love death" and you will get more than 37,000 hits, many of them describing a purportedly essential feature of Islam. But consider that it is primarily Christian nations that have the world's largest nuclear and conventional arsenals. Further, the predominantly Christian United States has likely been responsible for the violent and other premature deaths of more people than any other country in the last sixty years--including half-a-million children under the age of five in Iraq during the 1990s.

In the last seven years, the predominantly Christian US has invaded and occupied two predominantly Muslim countries: Afghanistan and Iraq at the cost of more than a million dead Afghanis and Iraqis. Over the last sixty years, the predominantly Christian US has been the most important backer of Israel which displaced the predominantly Muslim Palestinian people and continues to visit murder and mayhem upon them. The Christian President-elect Barack Obama has spoken openly about attacking another predominantly Muslim country, Pakistan.

In "The Spirit of Disobedience," Curtis White eloquently ties these threads together:

In the end, evangelical Christianity conspires with technical and economic rationalism. In the end, they both require a commitment to "duty" that masks unspeakable violence and injustice. In the end, the Muslim whose legs are being reduced to pulp by his American tormentor doesn't care if he's being murdered because he is despised by Christians or because he is an impediment to economic rationality. He understands far better than we do how the two become one at the end of the torturer's rod. The Predator missile, product of American scientific ingenuity, that homes in on his head is both self-righteously and arrogantly evangelical and meanly pragmatic. It is the empire that the rest of the world reads in George Bush's smirk. As John Ruskin understood 150 years ago, "The only question (determined mostly by fraud in peace, and force in war) is, Who is to die, and how?"

If we live in a "culture of death," as Pope John Paul II put it, it is a culture that is made possible by the advocates of both Reason and Revelation. In the opposition of Reason to Revelation, death cannot lose. Ours is a culture in which death has taken refuge in a legality that is supported by both reasonable liberals and Christian conservatives. Our exploitation of humans as "workers" is legal and somehow, weird and perverse though it may seem, generally acknowledged as part of our heritage of freedom, and virtually the entire political spectrum falls over itself to praise it. When Wal-Mart pays its employees impoverishing wages without adequate health or retirement benefits, we justify it out of respect for Wal-Mart's "freedom," its "reasonable" need to make itself "competitive," and because what it does is legal. As George Whalin, president of Retail Management Consultants, put it, "They don't have a responsibility to society to pay a higher wage than the law says you have to pay." Similarly, our use of the most fantastically destructive military power is also legal and also somehow a part of our heritage of "protecting freedom," no matter how obscene and destructive its excesses. The grotesque violence of video games and Hollywood movies, doing God knows what to the "individual morality" of teenagers, is legal and somehow now a protected part of our freedom of expression. Even, as the more thoughtful anti-abortionists complain with some justice, the legality of abortion at times covers over an attitude toward human life that subjects life to the low logic of efficiency and convenience. The idea of abortion as a minor "medical procedure" becomes Orwellian in its intense determination not to "know what we do." Or, perhaps most destructively, the legality of property rights condemns nature itself to annihilation even as we call it the freedom to pursue personal happiness and prosperity through the ownership of private property. This legality formalizes and empowers our famous "unalienable right" to property (especially that most peculiar form of private property known as the corporation), the exercise of which will profoundly alienate those on whom this right is inflicted: workers, children, foreign enemies, and animals. In its most extreme and universal form, our constitutional rights are reducible to the right not to have to love our neighbor. The irony is that the more energetically we pursue our individual, socially isolated right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," the deader the social and natural worlds become.

So, just who is it that demonstrably loves death, even if it is not articulated clearly? An American and/or Christian culture of death is abundantly evident. But what got me thinking about this subject was part of a post on the ZionistsOut blog about the head of the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor. It says:

The new JFGAA Executive Director is David Shtulman, a dual US-Israeli citizen, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) veteran, and, in all likelihood, a current IOF reservist. ... in his weekly shabbat message--wittily entitled "The New Year Enters with a Bang!"--Herr Shtulman refers to the Israeli attacks as an "Israeli counter-attack on Hamas."

Shtulman next pulls a predictable role reversal of the Judaic culture of death with the unsourced claim: "Hamas has often responded with the mantra, 'We will win because we love death and Israel loves life.' " If Hamas uses this "mantra" frequently then it is pretty strange that it is not attributed to Hamas in the New York Times even once. In fact, in searches using two different databases, the phrase "we love death" turns up in the NYT archives only three times between 1851 and the present. The "mantra" never made it onto the news pages of the NYT.

In two instances, it appears in editorials by Jewish neoconservative pundit David Brooks. In March 2004, Brooks attributed it to Al Qaeda and by September of that year he had expanded it to the "fringes of the Muslim world." The third instance, was just five days before Brooks' second invocation of the "mantra." At the invitation of the NYT "Op-Ed page," in his proposed "conclusion to President Bush's [2004 RNC] address," former Bush I speech writer Daniel McGroarty attributed the phrase "to the statement the terrorists released to claim responsibility for the carnage ... in Madrid."

Terrorism: A Documentary and Reference Guide by Burns and Peterson (Greenwood, 2005), which includes Hamas, has only one documented reference to terrorists loving death and that is a statement attributed to "al-Qaeda in Europe" in connection with the Madrid bombings. It says: "You love life and we love death." There are two problems, though.

First, this is one of at least two statements claiming responsibility for the 2004 Madrid bombings. The apparently first alleged claim of responsibility by al-Qaeda does not say anything about loving death. It was discredited by the pro-Israel group, MEMRI. More importantly, a "two-year investigation into the attacks has found no evidence that al-Qa'ida helped plan, finance or carry out the bombings, or even knew about them in advance," which would indicate that both of the claims of responsibility are fabrications.

It is plausible that Shtulman's claim began as an Israeli false flag operation to smear Islam (see also the "Gil Affair" and "Israeli Psyops Against EU and US"). If that is the case, then it is awfully helpful to have someone to discredit the competing claim of responsibility. In this case the guy doing the discrediting, author of the MEMRI analysis, was Yigal Carmon, an IOF Colonel who served at least twenty years (1968-88) in the Israeli intelligence service. In sum, there is nothing credible linking Shtulman's "mantra" to Hamas. But since when have supporters of Israel ever cared about the truth?

One other example of a Muslim claiming a love of death is, perhaps, more credible than the claims attributed to al-Qaeda in 2004. A 2001 story by the Telegraph (UK) quotes a veteran Afghan fighter:

Maulana Inyadullah, who began fighting the Soviet invasion in 1982 at the age of 16, declared that his fellow Afghans relish the prospect of an American attack.

"War is our best hobby. The sound of guns firing is like music for us. We cannot live without war. We have no other way except jihad," he said. ...

Mr Inyadullah, 35, said: "The Americans would be easier to defeat than the Russians. The Americans lead lavish lives and they are afraid of death. We are not afraid of death. The Americans love Pepsi Cola, we love death."

But only an idiot or a liar would read this as a broad cultural embrace of death or a statement of theological principle. Rather, it is not a desire to die but an express willingness to do so, if need be, in the service of home and hearth with a good dose of braggadocio mixed in for good measure.

A willingness to die is similarly expected of American combat troops. And if Americans put greater stress on killing the enemy then, perhaps, it is simply because they ruthlessly put a premium on killing others and because the commanders know overcoming the normal human aversion to kill is the more difficult task unless, perhaps, you live in America where we are programmed to kill.

The willingness to sacrifice oneself, even in battle, is more humane and noble than the willingness to kill. As Jesus Christ said, "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends." But this is an ethos that Christianity turned against centuries ago when it joined with the Roman Empire--the very empire that carried out the death sentence of Jesus. The "Constantinian moment" marks the key point in the transformation of the cross from a symbol of love, self-sacrifice, and hope into a symbol of death, empire, and greed. In the wake of this transformation came forced conversions, the Crusades, the Inquisition and the like. Whatever lip service they may pay to the older, nobler meanings, it is clear that for most Americans (and their victims) the deeper, lived reality is that the cross is a symbol of death and devout American Christians are largely "guilty bystanders," if not active participants, in the crimes of empire.

See also:

• "Judaism's Culture of Death"
• "Ralph Peters on Pax Americana & American Culture"
• "The 'General Eisenhower Warned Us' Hoax"
• Women Leaders in Muslim & Christian States

Labels: abortion, Christianity, critical thinking, Curtis White, Empire, Hollywood, Islam, Islamophobia, United States, violence

LTC Ralph Peters (US Army, ret.) has an article, "Blood borders: How a better Middle East would look" in the June 2006 issue of the Armed Forces Journal that's making the rounds on e-mail and in the blogosphere. Peters argues for, among other things, dividing Iraq into three separate countries.

Back in 2003, I heard NPR's Neal Conan yucking it up with Peters and wrote the unpublished "Open Letter to National Public Radio's Ombudsman" that appears below:

March 29, 2003

Dear Mr. Dvorkin:

Last Thursday, I heard the host of National Public Radio's (NPR) Talk of the Nation, Neal Conan, joking with retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Ralph Peters as they began a discussion of the US invasion of Iraq. This isn't the first time I've heard Peters on NPR but hearing him again got me wondering how many NPR listeners and staff members are familiar with his work--I doubt very many

So, as a courtesy, I thought I would provide some representative selections from LTC Peters' 1999 book for you to share with NPR listeners:

There are two obstacles to a genuine Pax Americana in the coming century. The first is a series of technological barriers. We shall overcome these. The second--and far more challenging--is moral relativism. We must leave behind this era of self-debasement. American civilization is the most humane, hopeful, decent, magnetic, and generous of opportunity in history. It marks a break with all that has come before, leaving behind even northwestern Europe, with its drab cubicles of the spirit and pared-down lives.

With America, the twenty-first century might see the triumph of good. But we must accept the responsibilities of our power and our civilizing mission. We will be in a position to bring the world lasting peace. But to do so, we must say good-bye to the crippling notions that all cultures, no matter how odious, enjoy equivalent validity, and that even the most wicked foreign leader is inviolable in his person. The American peace will have to be on American terms, and those terms cannot be negotiable.

The goal, initially, is not to interfere in the affairs of foreign states, as long as they behave humanely toward their populations. The first--realizable--step is to force an end to interstate warfare. We alone will have the wealth and power to do it--plus, we could collect defense taxes from states that benefit from our actions. As the world's only extant empire of law and justice, we also have the right and responsibility to do it. We need have no moral reservations about outlawing aggression and then enforcing that prohibition.

Should we have the moral authenticity to grasp this opportunity, we may at last see the withering away of military establishments, since they will prove unusable. Only constabularies and police forces need remain, except for our own forces and those of a few morally coincident allies, such as the other English-speaking, law-cherishing states.

There is no real legal or moral requirement to grant foreigners the same rights and protections as we do our own citizens. To do so is pompous stupidity that endangers our own citizens while preventing us from helping the foreign victims of dictators, criminals, and terrorists.

We must regain a sense of who we are and pride in what we are about. We do have a right to act abroad, whether in cyberspace or on foreign soil, if it benefits our citizens and the global rule of law.

The greatest opportunity for us, and the greatest danger to us, will come with the development of behavior-control weapons by the middle decades of the next century, if not sooner. On the one hand, these will be the weapons most horrible to our civilization, but we will be unable to prevent their development. In their perfected form, they will permanently alter the perceptions and beliefs of men and women.

Attacking the human body has been a sloppy and inefficient means of making war. Attacking the mind may prove the culmination of military history.

This is our choice: Shall we dominate the earth for the good of humankind? . . . Or will we continue to insist that diplomatic niceties and the social prejudices of global elites demand that we wait, decade after decade, for evil men to act first?

The passages that appear above are from the title essay of a collection entitled Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? published by Stackpole Books. The essays first appeared in Parameters, a journal of the US Army War College and Strategic Review, a journal of the Strategic Studies Institute. The book was favorably reviewed by US Navy Captain Jan Van Tol, in the spring 2001 edition of the Naval War College Review.

According to the biography on the book jacket, Peters is "a best-selling and critically acclaimed novelist" whose "profoundly influential" analysis is the "result of firsthand experience in more than forty countries . . . and in assignments that took him from an infantry battalion to the Executive Office of the President. He campaigns for military and policy reform in a wide range of media outlets and lectures internationally on cultures in conflict and the future of war." Peters was interviewed for the PBS Frontline documentary "The Future of War."

I confess, Mr. Dvorkin, that I find LTC Peters' analysis and vision of the future disturbing, as many other NPR listeners might. What is more disturbing, though, is that views such as those expressed above have achieved considerable acceptance among the ruling elite of this country. See, for example, last year's US National Security Strategy which I mentioned in a letter to the United Nations' Security Council last year.

Nevertheless, despite my misgivings I am not, by any means, asking to have Peters banned from NPR. On the contrary, I hope NPR will do several in-depth segments on this "new thinking" in US foreign policy and military doctrine and the chilling technologies Peters envisions. More importantly, though, I hope you will endeavor to bring more enlightened commentators on NPR to critique or offer alternatives to the Bush Administration's and LTC Peters' dark visions of a global "Pax Americana" imposed and maintained by force and "behavior-control weapons." Perhaps, the readers of this letter can provide you with some suggestions.

Author's note: You can e-mail the NPR's Ombudsman at ombudsman@npr.org. Talk of the Nation can be contacted at totn@npr.org.

In some ways, the imperial candor of guys like Peters is refreshing. I'll share a few more 'gems' from Peters' writings. He published "Constant Conflict" in Parameters in Summer 1997 while he was still on active duty. Here are a few excerpts (emphasis in bold added):

We have entered an age of constant conflict. Information is at once our core commodity and the most destabilizing factor of our time. Until now, history has been a quest to acquire information; today, the challenge lies in managing information. Those of us who can sort, digest, synthesize, and apply relevant knowledge soar--professionally, financially, politically, militarily, and socially. We, the winners, are a minority.

For the world masses, devastated by information they cannot manage or effectively interpret, life is "nasty, brutish . . . and short-circuited." The general pace of change is overwhelming, and information is both the motor and signifier of change. Those humans, in every country and region, who cannot understand the new world, or who cannot profit from its uncertainties, or who cannot reconcile themselves to its dynamics, will become the violent enemies of their inadequate governments, of their more fortunate neighbors, and ultimately of the United States. We are entering a new American century, in which we will become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite hatreds without precedent.

We live in an age of multiple truths. He who warns of the "clash of civilizations" is incontestably right; simultaneously, we shall see higher levels of constructive trafficking between civilizations than ever before. The future is bright--and it is also very dark. More men and women will enjoy health and prosperity than ever before, yet more will live in poverty or tumult, if only because of the ferocity of demographics. There will be more democracy--that deft liberal form of imperialism--and greater popular refusal of democracy.

Commentary: The phrase "clash of civilizations" comes from Samuel P. Huntington who, in the same book, also wrote:

"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do."

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) pg. 51.

... (of note, the internet is to the techno-capable disaffected what the United Nations is to marginal states: it offers the illusion of empowerment and community). ...

Commentary: On the UN and diplomacy, a couple of quotes come to mind:

"It is part of the wisdom, I think, of the religious tradition always to be skeptical of what governments are doing. If their acts are done in secrecy, all one can do is to draw into that darkness the light of one's own nonviolence, plus the lessons of their past conduct. ... One has to keep reminding oneself and other people that an exalted contempt for human life lies at the basis of diplomacy; and that one had better think of the unprotected and innocent, and be prepared for the bad news when the leaders meet."

Daniel Berrigan and Thich Nhat Hanh. The Raft is Not the Shore: Conversations Toward a Buddhist/Christian Awareness. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975) p. 69.

"It would be some time before I realized that the United States sees little need for diplomacy; power is enough. Only the weak rely on diplomacy. This is why the weak are so deeply concerned with the democratic principle of the sovereign equality of states, as a means of providing some small measure of equality for that which is not equal in fact. Coming from a developing country, I was trained extensively in international law and diplomacy and mistakenly assumed that the great powers, especially the United States, also trained their representatives in diplomacy and accepted the value of it. But the Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States. Diplomacy is perceived by an imperial power as a waste of time and prestige and a sign of weakness."

Former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in his book, Unvanquished: A U.S.-U.N. Saga (New York: Random House, 1999) p. 198.

These noncompetitive cultures, such as that of Arabo-Persian Islam or the rejectionist segment of our own population, are enraged. Their cultures are under assault; their cherished values have proven dysfunctional, and the successful move on without them. The laid-off blue-collar worker in America and the Taliban militiaman in Afghanistan are brothers in suffering. ...

It is fashionable among world intellectual elites to decry "American culture," with our domestic critics among the loudest in complaint. But traditional intellectual elites are of shrinking relevance, replaced by cognitive-practical elites--figures such as Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Madonna, or our most successful politicians--human beings who can recognize or create popular appetites, recreating themselves as necessary. Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures. While some other cultures, such as those of East Asia, appear strong enough to survive the onslaught by adaptive behaviors, most are not. The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people's culture. It stresses comfort and convenience--ease--and it generates pleasure for the masses. We are Karl Marx's dream, and his nightmare.

Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can't wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather "Baywatch." America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine. There is no "peer competitor" in the cultural (or military) department. Our cultural empire has the addicted--men and women everywhere--clamoring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.

American culture is criticized for its impermanence, its "disposable" products. But therein lies its strength. All previous cultures sought ideal achievement which, once reached, might endure in static perfection. American culture is not about the end, but the means, the dynamic process that creates, destroys, and creates anew. If our works are transient, then so are life's greatest gifts--passion, beauty, the quality of light on a winter afternoon, even life itself. American culture is alive. ...

Ours is also the first culture that aims to include rather than exclude. The films most despised by the intellectual elite--those that feature extreme violence and to-the-victors-the-spoils sex--are our most popular cultural weapon, bought or bootlegged nearly everywhere. American action films, often in dreadful copies, are available from the Upper Amazon to Mandalay. They are even more popular than our music, because they are easier to understand. The action films of a Stallone or Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris rely on visual narratives that do not require dialog for a basic understanding. They deal at the level of universal myth, of pre-text, celebrating the most fundamental impulses (although we have yet to produce a film as violent and cruel as the Iliad). They feature a hero, a villain, a woman to be defended or won--and violence and sex. Complain until doomsday; it sells. The enduring popularity abroad of the shopworn Rambo series tells us far more about humanity than does a library full of scholarly analysis.

When we speak of a global information revolution, the effect of video images is more immediate and intense than that of computers. Image trumps text in the mass psyche, and computers remain a textual outgrowth, demanding high-order skills: computers demarcate the domain of the privileged. We use technology to expand our wealth, power, and opportunities. The rest get high on pop culture. If religion is the opium of the people, video is their crack cocaine. When we and they collide, they shock us with violence, but, statistically, we win.

As more and more human beings are overwhelmed by information, or dispossessed by the effects of information-based technologies, there will be more violence. Information victims will often see no other resort. As work becomes more cerebral, those who fail to find a place will respond by rejecting reason. We will see countries and continents divide between rich and poor in a reversal of 20th-century economic trends. Developing countries will not be able to depend on physical production industries, because there will always be another country willing to work cheaper. The have-nots will hate and strive to attack the haves. And we in the United States will continue to be perceived as the ultimate haves. States will struggle for advantage or revenge as their societies boil. Beyond traditional crime, terrorism will be the most common form of violence, but transnational criminality, civil strife, secessions, border conflicts, and conventional wars will continue to plague the world, albeit with the "lesser" conflicts statistically dominant. In defense of its interests, its citizens, its allies, or its clients, the United States will be required to intervene in some of these contests. We will win militarily whenever we have the guts for it.

There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing. ...

Commentary: Several quotes on the military and the US economy come to mind here:

"In spite of the enthusiasm Americans affect for general freedom of commerce when such liberty is favorable to them, they will be equally warm for an exclusive system when they can apply it advantageously to their commerce. They share this way of thinking with all merchants, alternately zealous for a monoploy and for free trade according to the interest of the moment."

French Minister Louis Guillaume Otto in 1785. Quoted in David P. Szatmary, Shay's Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection. (Amherst, MA: Univ. of Mass. Pr., 1980) p. 20.

". . . I am decidedly of [the] opinion we should take no part in European quarrels, but cultivate peace and commerce with all, yet who can avoid seeing the source of war in the tyranny of those nations who deprive of us our natural right of trading with our neighbors? The produce of the U.S. will soon exceed the European demand. What is to be done with the surplus, when there is one? It will be employed, without question, to open by force a market for itself . . . "

Letter from Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, dated Dec. 4, 1788.

" . . . globalization requires a stable power structure, and no country is more essential for this than the United States. . . . The fact that no two countries have gone to war since they both got McDonald's is partly due to economic integration, but it is also due to the presence of American power and America's willingness to use that power against those who would threaten the system of globalization--from Iraq to North Korea. The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designers of the US Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. And these fighting forces and institutions are paid for by American taxpayer dollars.

"With all due respect to Silicon Valley, ideas and technologies don't just win and spread on their own. 'Good ideas and technologies also need strong power that promotes those ideas by example and protects those ideas by winning on the battlefield,' says foreign-policy historian Robert Kagan."

Thomas L. Friedman. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999). p. 373. Friedman, a Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times foreign affairs columnist, is a staunch proponent of corporate globalization.

For a generation, and probably much longer, we will face no military peer competitor. Our enemies will challenge us by other means. The violent actors we encounter often will be small, hostile parties possessed of unexpected, incisive capabilities or simply of a stunning will to violence (or both). Renegade elites, not foreign fleets, should worry us. The urbanization of the global landscape is a greater threat to our operations than any extant or foreseeable military system. We will not deal with wars of Realpolitik, but with conflicts spawned of collective emotions, sub-state interests, and systemic collapse. Hatred, jealousy, and greed--emotions rather than strategy--will set the terms of the struggles.

We will survive and win any conflict short of a cataclysmic use of weapons of mass destruction. But the constant conflicts in which we selectively intervene will be as miserable as any other form of warfare for the soldiers and Marines engaged. The bayonet will still be relevant; however, informational superiority incisively employed should both sharpen that bayonet and permit us to defeat some--but never all--of our enemies outside of bayonet range. Our informational advantage over every other country and culture will be so enormous that our greatest battlefield challenge will be harnessing its power. Our potential national weakness will be the failure to maintain the moral and raw physical strength to thrust that bayonet into an enemy's heart.

Pilots and skippers, as well as defense executives, demand threat models that portray country X or Y as overtaking the military capability of the United States in 10 to 20 years. Forget it. Our military power is culturally based. They cannot rival us without becoming us. Wise competitors will not even attempt to defeat us on our terms; rather, they will seek to shift the playing field away from military confrontations or turn to terrorism and nontraditional forms of assault on our national integrity. Only the foolish will fight fair.

... Beyond the Beltway, the United States is wide awake and leading a second "industrial" revolution that will make the original industrial revolution that climaxed the great age of imperialism look like a rehearsal by amateurs. Only the United States has the synthetic ability, the supportive laws, and the cultural agility to remain at the cutting edge of wealth creation. ...

Yes, foreign cultures are reasserting their threatened identities--usually with marginal, if any, success--and yes, they are attempting to escape our influence. But American culture is infectious, a plague of pleasure, and you don't have to die of it to be hindered or crippled in your integrity or competitiveness. The very struggle of other cultures to resist American cultural intrusion fatefully diverts their energies from the pursuit of the future. We should not fear the advent of fundamentalist or rejectionist regimes. They are simply guaranteeing their peoples' failure, while further increasing our relative strength.

It remains difficult, of course, for military leaders to conceive of warfare, informational or otherwise, in such broad terms. But Hollywood is "preparing the battlefield," and burgers precede bullets. The flag follows trade. ... Our unconscious alliance of culture with killing power is a combat multiplier no government, including our own, could design or afford. We are magic. And we're going to keep it that way. ...

Labels: capitalism, critical thinking, Empire, Hollywood, militarism, military, National Public Radio, quotations, Thomas Jefferson, United States, US Founding Fathers

John Bolton, a "Defender of Israel" and recess appointee to the post of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations is back in the news. According to "Battle Over Bolton Could Be Decided by Jewish Support" by Randy Hall (July 27, 2006) of CNSNews.com:

Increased support from the Jewish community might make the difference between last year's Senate decision not to confirm John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and this year's debate on the nomination, the head of a Jewish organization told Cybercast News Service.

"I believe almost every Republican will be supporting" Bolton in the Senate, and "you're going to have a surprising number of Democrats supporting him because of his record" of "courage, intelligence and eloquence," said Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).

Bolton is "a man who does what he believes no matter what the consequences are for himself politically, and that's really rare," Klein noted. "This man looks at what's good for our country and what's good to reflect his principles."

In addition, "the organizational Jewish leaders I've spoken to have all spoken positively to me about Bolton" because "he's shown to be an outstanding public servant both for America and those who care about strong U.S.-Israel relations," he stated.

That support could be critical if Senate Democrats decide -- as they did last year -- to filibuster Bolton's nomination. To obtain the 60 votes necessary to end debate through a cloture resolution, the 55 Republicans would need the help of at least five other senators.

Klein told Cybercast News Service that such support might come from states where the status of Israel is a significant issue, including New York, where "important friends" of Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton told him the senators are "seriously reconsidering" their position on Bolton.

"If they came out against him, I would be somewhat surprised," Klein said of Schumer and Clinton, who were outspoken in their opposition to Bolton last year but have remained silent on the nomination so far this year. "I think there's a reasonable chance they might support him this time around."

However, "with politics, you never know," he added.

Along with the ZOA, other Jewish groups endorsing Bolton so far this year include the Republican Jewish Congress and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.

...

In "Republican Jews urge Bolton confirmation," the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, quoting from a July 24, 2006, press relase, reports:

The Republican Jewish Coalition urged the U.S. Senate to confirm John Bolton as U.N. ambassador.

"Ambassador Bolton has expressed President Bush's unwavering support of Israel in a time of crisis," the coalition said in a statement Monday.

"He has vetoed Security Council resolutions which condemned Israel and excused the terrorists Israel is fighting against."

...

Here, back in December 08, 2005 , according to ZOA president Morton Klein, is why Bolton was recognized as a "Defender of Israel:"

...

Ambassador Bolton’s recent efforts on the Netanya bombing and Hezbollah follow a long, principled record of support for Israel . He has been very active in recent weeks attempting to trim the wastage of the U.N. budget on propaganda efforts on behalf of the Palestinians through U.N. bodies paid for, among others, by the American taxpayer, such as the UN Division for Palestinian Rights, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People and the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices in the Occupied Territories.

It is also vital to mention in this context that it was Ambassador Bolton who piloted through the U.N. the rescission of the infamous "Zionism is Racism" resolution in 1991, something he proudly describes as a "highlight of my career" and one that removed "the greatest stain on the U.N.’s reputation."

...

If Bolton is confirmed then it will be an impressive achievement for mainstream American Jews, a group that represents only 2% of the U.S. population. Here is a reflection on the influence of Jews in American society from an anti-immigration article by Dr. Stephen M. Steinlight of the Center for Immigration Studies:

... American-Jewish leadership is experiencing profound vertigo as it seeks to chart a course through circumstances that appear logical only to a schizophrenic.

On one hand, they’re leaders of a community that feels a sense of belonging unknown in the history of Diaspora Jewry. America’s Jews have attained success and acceptance beyond their forebear’s fondest dreams. They’re influential far beyond their miniscule percentage of the population. They wield significant political power and cultural influence. Nearly half the money spent in Democratic Party presidential primaries comes from Jewish contributors. In recent years, Jewish presence at the highest levels of government has become routine. A majority of Clinton’s cabinet members were Jews. Jewish advisors play key roles in the Bush administration’s national security, foreign and military affairs. Had Gore become President, an Orthodox Jew would have been a heartbeat away from the nation’s highest office. If John Kerry is elected the next President, he will be the country’s first chief executive with Jewish roots.

Among the best-known indices of its success, 10 percent of the U.S. Senate is Jewish, as is a majority of the presidents at Ivy League universities, and faculties and student bodies at elite colleges and universities are typically 30 to 40 percent Jewish. Jews form a high percentage within the learned professions and among writers, nationally syndicated journalists, and publishers of some of the nation’s leading newspapers and periodicals, and as creators and disseminators of high and popular culture. They play the predominant role in Hollywood, and thus shape much of our self-definition as Americans. Jews also hold key positions within many leading financial institutions, especially within investment banking and the brokerage industry.

...

See also "Israel's Man at the UN" by Tom Barry of the International Relations Center (July 26, 2006).

Labels: Clintons, Hollywood, Israel, Jews, John Bolton, Zionism