Category: Politics & History

Mass surveillance is the business model, and we are being sold.

Link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/facebook-the-reign-of-surveillance-capitalism/id73330619?i=1000408798888&mt=2

Link: “Israeli government denounces Natalie Portman for pulling out of prestigious awards ceremony in protest”

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/natalie-portman-israel-government-awards-ceremony-protest-jewish-actor-a8314566.html

You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves.

—James Baldwin, 1961

So true. Read the latest news from Gaza and the West Bank to see what the Jews, hapless victims of that monster, Hitler, have become in Israel. Or read Dante and understand that, beyond the endlessly inventive punishments of the damned, the meaning of Hell is quite simple: our punishment is to be who we have become, people who can commit unspeakable crimes and deny them.

The Supreme Court just ruled that a police officer could not be sued for gunning down Amy Hughes. This has vast implications for law enforcement accountability. The details of the case are as damning as the decision. Hughes was not suspected of a crime. She was simply standing still, holding a kitchen knife at her side. The officer gave no warning that he was going to shoot her if she did not comply with his commands. Moments later, the officer shot her four times.

“Shoot first and think later,” according to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, is what the officer did.

Link: https://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police-practices/supreme-court-gives-police-green-light-shoot

From November 9, 2016:

The country that slaughtered Native Americans in the name of God and freedom, that built its wealth on the cruel enslavement of Africans, that elected Andrew Jackson as its president, that stole whatever land it wanted from anyone weak enough to steal it from, that needed a catastrophic civil war to end slavery, that murdered and lynched mercilessly to protect white supremacy, that exploited immigrants, the poor, and the working class to enrich Wall Street and the industrialists, that made racism the law of the land and embedded it in its business practices and system of injustice, that applauded the Dred Scott decision, that promoted ignorance among its people and exploited that ignorance to enrich its ruling elites, that subverted democratic movements around the globe in the name of anti-communism while making billions selling weapons to dictators, that murdered the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, that sent its agents to murder and imprison anyone who seemed to pose a threat while advocating for justice, that obscenely declared making money to be the only value in life—that America has now reasserted itself under the banner of a shameless self-promoting demagogue who promises to make the country great again.

The Americans who produced the Abolitionist movement, who organized the Underground Railroad, who protested against wars of aggression from the Mexican War of 1846 to Vietnam to Iraq, who fought for women’s suffrage and equal rights, who organized labor unions, who marched and demonstrated for civil rights for African-Americans, for immigrants, for homosexuals, for dissidents and those labeled as “other” in a myriad ways, who again and again poured into the streets to endure beatings and abuse and arrest and even death to stand up for justice, who really believe in freedom and justice for all—those Americans will now once again rise to the occasion.

Here is the story of one of those Americans.

Joe Hill (1879 – 1915) immigrated to America from Sweden in his early 20s and worked as a laborer all across the country. He became active in the struggle for labor rights and achieved fame as a writer of songs for the labor movement. In 1914 he was falsely arrested on murder charges, convicted, and finally condemned to death. Before his execution by firing squad he wrote to Bill Haywood, one of the leaders of the IWW (International Workers of the World).

“Don’t waste any time in mourning,” he said to Haywood. “Organize.”

King was murdered fifty years ago on April 4th, 1968.

We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor—both black and white, both here and abroad.

—from “The Three Evils of Society,” an address delivered at the National Conference on New Politics, August 31, 1967.

Lest someone object that capitalism arose in Europe where there were no (or very few) black slaves, it should be pointed out that the Industrial Revolution was fueled primarily by textile factories, specifically cotton mills—and that the economic revolution produced by the cotton trade was founded on the labor of enslaved Africans working on the cotton plantations of the American South. For more on this history I strongly recommend Empire of Cotton, by Sven Beckert (2014).

I mean, something happened between 1905 and 1970 besides the Vietnam War. If you want to be a revolutionary and change society, you’ve got to study what happened before. I mean, Lenin and Trotsky studied the French Revolution. The French revolutionaries studied the English revolution. The Founders of the Constitution studied the Greek and Roman revolutions. And they really studied it—it’s in the Constitution, it’s in the Federalist Papers, real knowledge, real absorption and distillation of human political experience.

—from the documentary film, “I. F. Stone’s Weekly” (1973)

[Moltke, the German Chief of Staff,] did not himself, he said, attach much value to declarations of war. French hostile acts during [recent] days had already made war a fact. He was referring to the alleged reports of French bombings in the Nuremberg area which the German press had been blazing forth in extras all day with such effect that people in Berlin went about looking nervously at the sky. In fact, no bombings had taken place. Now, according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be necessary because of the imaginary bombings.

—Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August, p. 110

The turn of events in Belgium was a product of the German theory of terror. Clausewitz had prescribed terror as the proper method to shorten war, his whole theory of war being based on the necessity of making it short, sharp, and decisive. The civil population must not be exempted from war’s effects but must be made to feel its pressure and be forced by the severest measures to compel their leaders to make peace. As the object of war was to disarm the enemy, “we must place him in a situation in which continuing the war is more oppressive to him than surrender.” This seemingly sound proposition fitted into the scientific theory of war which throughout the nineteenth century it had been the best intellectual endeavor of the German General Staff to construct. It had already been put into practice in 1870 when French resistance sprang up after Sedan. The ferocity of German reprisal at that time in the form of executions of prisoners and civilians on charges of franc-tireur warfare startled a world agape with admiration at Prussia’s marvelous six-week victory. Suddenly it became aware of the beast beneath the German skin. Although 1870 proved the corollary of the theory and practice of terror, that it deepens antagonism, stimulates resistance, and ends by lengthening war, the Germans remained wedded to it. As Shaw said, they were a people with a contempt for common sense.

On August 23 placards signed by General von Bülow were posted in Liège announcing that the people of Andenne, a small town on the Meuse near Namur, having attacked his troops in the most “traitorous” manner, “with my permission the General commanding these troops has burned the town to ashes and has had 110 persons shot.” The people of Liège were being informed so that they would know what fate to expect if they behaved in the same manner as their neighbors.

The burning of Andenne and the massacre—which Belgian figures put at 211—took place on August 20 and 21 during the Battle of Charleroi. Hewing to their timetable, harassed by the Belgians’ blowing up of bridges and railroads, Bülow’s commanders dealt out reprisals ruthlessly in the villages they entered. At Seilles, across the river from Andenne, 50 civilians were shot and the houses given over to looting and burning. At Tamines, captured on August 21, sack of the town began that evening after the battle and continued all night and next day. The usual orgy of permitted looting accompanied by drinking released inhibitions and brought the soldiers to the desired state of raw excitement which was intended to add to the fearful effect. On the second day at Tamines some 400 citizens were herded together under guard in front of the church in the main square and a firing squad began systematically shooting into the group. Those not dead when the firing ended were bayoneted. In the cemetery at Tamines there are 384 gravestones inscribed 1914: Fusillé par les Allemands.

When Bülow’s Army took Namur, a city of 32,000, notices were posted announcing that ten hostages were being taken from every street who would be shot if any civilian fired on a German. The taking and killing of hostages was practiced as systematically as the requisitioning of food. The farther the Germans advanced, the more hostages were arrested. At first when von Kluck’s Army entered a town, notices immediately went up warning the populace that the burgomaster, the leading magistrate, and the senator of the district were being held as hostages with the usual warning as to their fate. Soon three persons of prestige were not enough; a man from every street, even ten from every street were not enough. Walter Bloem, a novelist mobilized as a reserve officer in von Kluck’s Army whose account of the advance to Paris is invaluable, tells how in villages where his company was billeted each night, “Major von Kleist gave orders that a man or, if no man was available, a woman, be taken from every household as a hostage.” Through some peculiar failure of the system, the greater the terror, the more terror seemed to be necessary.

When sniping was reported in a town, the hostages were executed. Irwin Cobb, accompanying von Kluck’s Army, watched from a window as two civilians were marched between two rows of German soldiers with fixed bayonets. They were taken behind the railroad station; there was a sound of shots, and two litters were carried out bearing still figures covered by blankets with only the rigid toes of their boots showing. Cobb watched while twice more the performance was repeated.

Visé, scene of the first fighting on the way to Liège on the first day of the invasion, was destroyed not by troops fresh from the heat of battle, but by occupation troops long after the battle had moved on. In response to a report of sniping, a German regiment was sent to Visé from Liège on August 23. That night the sound of shooting could be heard at Eysden just over the border in Holland five miles away. Next day Eysden was overwhelmed by a flood of 4,000 refugees, the entire population of Visé except for those who had been shot, and for 700 men and boys who had been deported for harvest labor to Germany. The deportations, which were to have such moral effect, especially upon the United States, began in August. Afterward when Brand Whitlock, the American Minister, visited what had been Visé he saw only empty blackened houses open to the sky, “a vista of ruins that might have been Pompeii.” Every inhabitant was gone. There was not a living thing, not a roof.

At Dinant on the Meuse on August 23 the Saxons of General von Hausen’s Army were fighting the French in a final engagement of the Battle of Charleroi. Von Hausen personally witnessed the “perfidious” activity of Belgian civilians in hampering reconstruction of bridges, “so contrary to international law.” His troops began rounding up “several hundreds” of hostages, men, women, and children. Fifty were taken from church, the day being Sunday. The General saw them “tightly crowded—standing, sitting, lying—in a group under guard of the Grenadiers, their faces displaying fear, nameless anguish, concentrated rage and desire for revenge provoked by all the calamities they had suffered.” Von Hausen, who was very sensitive, felt an “indomitable hostility” emanating from them. He was the general who had been made so unhappy in the house of the Belgian gentleman who clenched his fists in his pockets and refused to speak to von Hausen at dinner. In the group at Dinant he saw a wounded French soldier with blood streaming from his head who lay dying, mute and apathetic, refusing all medical help. Von Hausen ends his description there, too sensitive to tell the fate of Dinant’s citizens. They were kept in the main square till evening, then lined up, women on one side, men opposite in two rows, one kneeling in front of the other. Two firing squads marched to the center of the square, faced either way, and fired till no more of the targets stood upright. Six hundred and twelve bodies were identified and buried, including Félix Fivet, aged three weeks.

The Saxons were then let loose in a riot of pillage and arson. The medieval citadel, perched like an eagle’s nest on the heights of the right bank above the city it had once protected, looked down upon a repetition of the ravages of the Middle Ages. The Saxons left Dinant scorched, crumbled, hollowed out, charred, and sodden. “Profoundly moved” by this picture of desolation wrought by his troops, General von Hausen departed from the ruins of Dinant secure in the conviction that the responsibility lay with the Belgian government “which approved this perfidious street fighting contrary to international law.”

The Germans were obsessively concerned about violations of international law. They succeeded in overlooking the violation created by their presence in Belgium in favor of the violation committed, as they saw it, by Belgians resisting their presence.

—From The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman.

From the “Half-Right, Pretty Good” Dept.

1914: The British Ambassador to the United States, Cecil Spring-Rice,

reported that [President Woodrow] Wilson had said to him ‘in the most solemn way that if the German cause succeeds in the present struggle the United States would have to give up its present ideals and devote all its energies to defense which would mean the end of its present system of government.’

—From Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August.

Barbara Tuchman, in The Proud Tower, describes the political philosophy of Lord Salisbury, the British Prime Minister:

Class war and irreligion were to him the greatest evils and for this reason he detested Socialism, less for its menace to property than for its preaching of class war and its basis in materialism, which meant to him a denial of spiritual values. He did not deny the need of social reforms, but believed they could be achieved through the interplay and mutual pressures of existing parties. The Workmen’s Compensation Act, for one, making employers liable for work-sustained injuries, though denounced by some of his party as interference with private enterprise, was introduced and passed with his support in 1897.

He fought all proposals designed to increase the political power of the masses. When still a younger son, and not expecting to succeed to the title, he had formulated his political philosophy in a series of some thirty articles which were published in the Quarterly Review in the early 1860’s, when he was in his thirties. Against the growing demand at that time for a new Reform law to extend the suffrage, Lord Robert Cecil, as he then was, had declared it to be the business of the Conservative party to preserve the rights and privileges of the propertied class as the “single bulwark” against the weight of numbers. To extend the suffrage would be, as he saw it, to give the working classes not merely a voice in Parliament but a preponderating one that would give to “mere numbers a power they ought not to have.” He deplored the Liberals’ adulation of the working class “as if they were different from other Englishmen” when in fact the only difference was that they had less education and property and “in proportion as the property is small the danger of misusing the franchise is great.” He believed the workings of democracy to be dangerous to liberty, for under democracy “passion is not the exception but the rule” and it was “perfectly impossible” to commend a farsighted passionless policy to “men whose minds are unused to thought and undisciplined to study.” To widen the suffrage among the poor while increasing taxes upon the rich would end, he wrote, in a complete divorce of power from responsibility; “the rich would pay all the taxes and the poor make all the laws.”

He did not believe in political equality. There was the multitude, he said, and there were “natural” leaders. “Always wealth, in some countries birth, in all countries intellectual power and culture mark out the man to whom, in a healthy state of feeling, a community looks to undertake its government.” These men had the leisure for it and the fortune, “so that the struggles for ambition are not defiled by the taint of sordid greed. . . . They are the aristocracy of a country in the original and best sense of the word. . . . The important point is, that the rulers of a country should be taken from among them,” and as a class they should retain that “political preponderance to which they have every right that superior fitness can confer.

There was a nation in the land of America, whose name was USA; and that nation was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil.

And there were living therein some three hundred million souls.

The nation’s wealth was infinitely more than seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she asses; so that this nation was the greatest of all the nations in the world.

And its citizens went and feasted in their houses, every one his day; and sent and called for their fellow citizens to eat and to drink with them.

And it was so, when the days of their feasting were gone about, that the leaders of the nation sent and sanctified them, and rose up early in the morning, and offered burnt offerings according to the number of them all: for the leaders said, It may be that our citizens have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts.

Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them.

And the LORD said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.

And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered USA, that there is no nation like it in the earth, a perfect and an upright state, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?

Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, Doth USA fear God for nought?

Hast not thou made an hedge about these Americans, and about their houses, and about all that they have on every side? thou hast blessed the work of their hands, and their substance is increased in the land.

But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that they have, and they will curse thee to thy face.
And the LORD said unto Satan, Behold, all that they have is in thy power; only upon the Pentagon put not forth thine hand. So Satan went forth from the presence of the LORD.

And Satan found a man named Trump, from whose mouth spewed bullshit at every breath; and Satan said, I shall make this man President.

And Satan went to speak with the Russians . . . .

Information has, in the internet age, moved to the forefront in the arsenal of weapons used in political and international struggles. China emphasizes defensive measures in the new information wars, investing heavily in its “Great Firewall” to cut off its citizens’ access to news and ideas the government deems inappropriate or dangerous. Russia is taking the offensive approach, flooding the media with disinformation to such an extent that many people, not knowing what to believe, cease to believe anything they read or hear. The United States, with its Wild West adulation of “Freedom!” above all, has proved particularly vulnerable to the torrent of lies and half-truths found today on the internet. In their responses to this torrent, Americans resemble the young students I have taught over the years. When a claim or idea they previously believed to be true is shown to be false, they rush to the conclusion that there is no truth at all. When political leaders they had formerly admired, or at least had assumed to be honorable, turn out to have been dishonest, they rush to the conclusion that all politicians are corrupt. “The system is rotten to the core!” people exclaim, and others from all points on the political spectrum nod their heads vigorously.

But there are honest, conscientious politicians, and there is a difference between truth and lies. So how can we recover our footing? Our response to these challenges may well determine whether the democratic experiment begun in America in 1776 continues, or whether the chaos grows so pervasive that Americans decide that, for the moment at least, they would prefer more order and less freedom.

Many people wiser and more experienced than I will have ideas, but here are three to start with—none of which is original to me.

•We need to make it possible to run for political office without having to raise millions of dollars. Our politicians should not have to spend their time fundraising instead of working to solve our society’s problems, and they should never have to feel pressured by rich donors and special-interest groups who, if offended, could engineer their defeat in the next election.

•We need to reform or replace PBS and NPR so that we have a completely non-partisan, independently-funded, non-profit source of news that is freely accessible to all. Commercial media organizations depend on advertising for their funding, which means they must keep their ratings as high as possible by publishing sensational content, while avoiding the sort of “boring,” long-form material that would actually do justice to the complex political and social and economic issues before us. Dependence on advertisers also means that commercial media organizations are subject to pressure from their advertisers to avoid controversial material.

•We need to honor education, and educated people. We need to promote education as a good in and of itself, in addition to whatever economic benefits it may bring. The deeply-ingrained suspicion of education in American culture, the denigration of “intellectuals,” the insistence that ignorance and manual labor go together, and that the ignorant manual laborer is more admirable than the ivory-tower university professor—these attitudes are unsustainable in a democracy that depends on every citizen being educated, well-informed, and highly skilled in the critical thinking that, today more than ever, citizens must employ to make wise decisions in the voting booth.

Discuss.

I was sufficiently aware of Mao Zedong’s attempts to export ‘people’s war’ to believe that the United States could not afford to lose in Vietnam. In that, too, I was distinctly a man of my times. It proved to be a disastrously wrong position. The problem was that I knew too much about the international Communist movement and not enough about the United States government and its Department of Defense. I was also in those years irritated by campus antiwar protesters, who seemed to me self-indulgent as well as sanctimonious and who had so clearly not done their homework [on the history of communism in East Asia]… As it turned out, however, they understood far better than I did the impulses of a Robert McNamara, a McGeorge Bundy, or a Walt Rostow. They grasped something essential about the nature of America’s imperial role in the world that I had failed to perceive. In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar protest movement. For all its naïveté and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong.

Link: http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175286/chalmers_johnson_portrait_of_a_sagging_empire

This is really heartwarming, and heartbreaking.

‘Maria Cioffi was 11 when war broke out in the Balkans, a bloody conflict in which U.N. rules forced Canadian peacekeepers to stand by and watch the slaughter. Now, 25 years later, a letter written by Cioffi is bringing solace to the soldiers who have been haunted by their helplessness.’

Link:
http://www.cbc.ca/listen/shows/the-current/segment/15532086

Rich Lowry on why Trump and the Republicans are joined at the hip:

Trump’s welfare is inextricably caught up with the party’s. Every point his approval rating ticks up means fewer House seats lost in the midterms. It’s quite possible that in 2020 his prospects will be the difference between Republicans controlling one or more of the elected branches in Washington, or unified Democratic control.

Link: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/28/never-trump-rich-lowry-217756

From the “Plus ça change . . . ” Dept, American Nativism Division:

Though we often think of our era as polarized, the political climate of the 1850s was far worse. At the center of that decade’s violence and vitriol were secret anti-immigration societies. Called “Know Nothings” because their members would play dumb if asked about the organizations, they considered themselves “Native Americans” opposed to increasing immigration. To combat “foreign” influence they tampered with elections, intimidated voters, and attacked immigrants. One popular Detroit Know Nothing even enjoined his readers to “carry your revolver and shoot down the first Irish rebel that dare insult your person as an American!” In the era before the Civil War, a startling number of Americans responded to the arrival of “Celt scoundrels” with firearms.

Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20070929122824/http://www.americanheritage.com/events/articles/web/20061104-know-nothing-nativism-american-party-immigration-catholicism.shtml

Buzzfeed: ‘The author of the famous Trump dossier provided a secret report to the FBI asserting that RT founder Mikhail Lesin was bludgeoned to death by thugs hired by an oligarch close to Putin. Three other sources independently told the FBI the same basic story, contradicting the government’s finding that Lesin’s death was accidental.’

Link: https://www.buzzfeed.com/jasonleopold/christopher-steele-mikhail-lesin-murder-putin-fbi

A short piece by George Lakoff makes the distinction crystal clear.

Unfortunately, that distinction is not generally accepted in the United States, and as a result a great deal of bigotry is tolerated on the grounds of First Amendment rights.

For example, the Charlottesville march by neo-Nazis, the KKK, and other white nationalists was defended by many as an exercise of free speech.

Here is Lakoff’s article: Why Hate Speech Is Not Free Speech.

A web site offering guidance to those who want to do something to improve conditions for people living in extreme poverty.

https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org

From the “Decline of Western Civilization” Dept, North American Division.

The Founding Fathers feared direct democracy, and referred to it as “mob rule.” Recent events may tend to increase our sympathy for such an elitist and decidedly old-fashioned idea. We may also pause for a moment to appreciate the ironic role played in these events by the Electoral College, which was invented by those same Founding Fathers both to satisfy the fears of slave-owning states that they would be outvoted by “free” states, and to prevent “the mob” from making a populist demagogue their President.

We have had Presidents on television for a while, but now we have our first Television President. A man who doesn’t, and quite possibly cannot, read. A man who watches TV addictively, and has even confessed in an interview that he gets his information about foreign policy by watching television. A man whose core support comes from people who seem to be equally addicted to watching television, and equally allergic to reading, and whose view of the world often has the same relation to reality as popular TV programs.

How long will it be before someone seriously suggests reviving literacy tests for voter registration—not as a tool to stop African-Americans from voting, but as a tool to prevent the utter destruction of the nation by millions of people who depend on TV for their information?

In the past, dynasties and monarchies declined and fell when their leaders became corrupt, decadent, and weak—but there was always a group of new, vigorous leaders at hand who sooner or later took power and restored order. What happens in a democracy when a substantial portion of the electorate declines intellectually, and morally? We take it as a commonplace that some “developing” nations are not ready for democracy because too many of their people are uneducated, and therefore unprepared to function as well-informed voters. We accept the idea that such nations require authoritarian government, at least for a while.

By that logic, wouldn’t a nation whose people, in significant numbers, lack the education and knowledge to function as citizens—who function, essentially, as a mob—wouldn’t such a nation also require authoritarian rulers?

Finally, if we accept the claim that large numbers of Americans are now ignorant, misinformed, and incapable of intelligently discussing economics, foreign affairs, and social policy, how in the world could this have happened in “the greatest nation on earth”? I can think of numerous factors that probably helped bring us to this sad condition. But let historians charting the decline of the United States note that while the seeds of decay were planted when the economy was hijacked by the military-industrial complex, the final collapse was precipitated by two generations of Americans filling their bodies with sugar-laced junk food, and their minds with the stupidities of television.

The Television President was elected, after all, by the Television Nation.

Someone with talent in the visual arts should produce a parody of the famous scene from The Wizard of Oz in which Toto pulls back the curtain that has been hiding Professor Marvel as he works the controls to produce the phantasmagoric speaking head of the Wizard. Marvel sees Dorothy and her friends looking at him, panics, and then cries desperately into his microphone, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”

In the parody I imagine, the speaking head, of course, is Mr. Trump, mesmerizing the nation with his buffoonish, button-pushing tweets. Unlike Professor Marvel, Trump has an assistant in this task: the irrepressibly dishonest Kellyanne Conway. Behind the curtain of Trump’s carnival show is a whole collection of men who will be doing the real work of his administration, and it is those people who we should be attending to, not the bubbling, blathering head that is Donald Trump, or his deliberately provocative spokesperson, Conway.

The media have, so far, been unable to break the Pavlovian cycle in which Trump tweets and they rush to thesauruses searching out fresh synonyms for outrageous, untrue, and offensive. It is their job, of course, to report the President’s words, but the real problem, as has been the case all along, is that Trump is great for their ratings, i.e., his mouth is money in the bank for them. If in the meantime the country is being liquidated by the men behind the curtain, well, that doesn’t make such good copy. That doesn’t generate many clicks.

It is up to all of us, therefore, to deny Trump the attention he craves, and to instead keep our focus on the work being done behind that curtain. Don’t share or re-post or comment on the latest blast of verbal garbage from our President. Instead, seek out news of what his cabinet officials, his other appointees, and his Republican allies in the Congress are doing. Share, re-post, and comment on those news items.

Pay no attention to that babbling head up on the screen.

. . . you don’t like weak women

You get bored so quick

And you don’t like strong women

‘Cause they’re hip to your tricks . . .

—Joni Mitchell, “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio”

Hillary Clinton is far from the first strong woman in public life to be slandered relentlessly by her political opponents and those offended by feminine leadership. Let us take a brief tour.

Wu Zetian (624 – 705) was the only female emperor of China. Despite being a strong ruler who governed well, her reputation as a scheming, ruthless woman willing to do anything to gain and keep power overwhelmed her accomplishments.

Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122 – 1204) was Queen of France, then Queen of England, and the mother of three kings of England. She was highly educated, and played an important role in the political and military struggles during the latter part of Henry II’s reign as King of England. In the popular imagination, however, her reputation was formed by fanciful stories of her leading a group of decadent nobles in scandalous sexual practices, and a vicious rumor that she had murdered one of Henry’s mistresses.

Isabeau of Bavaria (1370 – 1435) became Queen of France at the age of fifteen when she married Charles VI. Caught up in vicious power struggles when Charles’s mental illness left him unable to rule, Queen Isabeau was accused of about every crime possible, including adultery and witchcraft. This reputation lasted until 20th-century historians reviewed the evidence and discovered that she was intelligent, well-educated, pious, devoted to her children, and an effective ruler in her husband’s place.

Catherine de Medici (1519 – 1589) was Queen of France from 1547 to 1559 and played a leading role in the Byzantine power struggles among the French nobility during the Wars of Religion between Catholics and Protestants. Though clearly no better or worse than the Bourbons and Guises and other rivals for power, Catherine—as not only a woman but a foreigner, being the daughter of Lorenzo de Medici of Florence—got most of the blame for a host of poisonings, assassinations, and political back-stabbings.

Catherine the Great (1729-96) ruled Russia for more than thirty years. Compared with other Russian emperors, she was clearly above average as a reformer and a supporter of Enlightenment ideals. Like her male counterparts, she took lovers, but the stories told about her falsely accused her not just of licentiousness, but of perversion. These slanders culminated in the rumor that she died from a stroke suffered while attempting to have sexual intercourse with a stallion.

Empress Dowager Cixi of China (1835 -1908) was a remarkable woman who began her imperial career as a lowly concubine but ended up as the mother of the heir to the throne and, as Regent, the nominal ruler of China for decades. Surrounded by powerful factions in a dying empire, Cixi successfully navigated among them but was slandered as vicious, sexually perverse, manipulative, extravagant, power-hungry, and so on.

So is Hillary the devious, lying, scheming, ambitious, ruthless harridan that the Republicans say she is? Sure. And do you know the story of the servant girl that Cixi murdered by throwing her down a well?

Camp Director:

All right, folks, settle down there. I want to welcome you all to Human Rights Camp. You will all say that you are not here by your own choice, but we know that’s not true. Each of you has chosen to commit gross violations of human rights, despite repeated complaints, criticisms, and remonstrations from all over the world. So let’s start by owning what we’ve done. Russia, you go first., and then we’ll go around the circle clockwise.

Russia:

Why me first?

CD:

Because you always want to be #1.

Russia:

Oh. Well, in that case . . . I’ve been murdering journalists and opposition politicians who criticize Mr. Putin. And committing other crimes in the Ukraine.

Saudi Arabia:

Our women have very limited rights. We execute anyone who criticizes us. And then there’s Yemen . . .

Israel:

We are squeezing the Palestinians on the West Bank, keeping them virtual prisoners in Gaza, beating and arresting any of them who protest, shooting any of them who we think are trying to attack us . . . shall I go on?

CD:

No, Israel, that’s enough for now.

United States:

Well, there’s the torture, and the illegal invasions, and the secret CIA prisons in foreign countries, and the drone bombs killing innocent bystanders, and at home our police shoot brown people for no good reason on a fairly regular basis.

Iran:

You remember our response to the mass protests a while back, right? We haven’t had much trouble since then.

China:

Anyone who criticizes the Party or agitates for more freedom just disappears.

Syria:

How much time do we have here?

CD:

Not enough, Syria. We’ll get into the details in tomorrow morning’s session.

China:

Where’s North Korea? They’re much worse than we are.

United States:

I agree! And what about Cuba?

CD:

As you can see, we have limited facilities here. Those countries you mention, along with several others, are scheduled for the next session.

Well, that was a good beginning. It seems you all have gotten past the denial stage and are ready to work on changing your behavior. I have to warn you, this is going to be a tough two weeks. At the end of it, though, you’ll be able to walk out of here with a new sense of self-respect, and a set of practical strategies that will help you to stop yourself from falling back into old habits. And of course, we will always be available for crisis intervention, should you ever need our support. We are here for you.

The cafeteria staff tell me that supper is ready, so let’s go eat. After the meal we’ll watch some Amnesty International videos, and then we’ll have an early “lights out” tonight, because tomorrow is going to be a long, hard day.

If you ask Chinese people to compare traditional Chinese medicine with Western medicine, they will say that Western medicine is very strong and works quickly, while Chinese medicine is gentle and works slowly. Western medicine works quickly, but it only treats symptoms; Chinese medicine aims to restore health to the body by addressing the weakness or imbalance that caused the illness in the first place. The Chinese people I know will use both Western medicine and Chinese medicine, often in combination, depending on the situation. They know that Western medicine will quickly treat the immediate problem and allow them to continue with their daily lives, but that without restoring balance they will fall ill again and again.

Yesterday’s terrorist attacks in Paris reminded me of how Westerners, and Americans especially, treat political problems in the same way they treat medical problems, and with similar results: temporary relief, followed by repeated bouts of illness. Terrorists bent on mass murder resemble a serious infection that must be treated quickly, with strong and effective medicine, or perhaps even surgery. If we do not consider the causes of these infections, however, and address the causes at the same time we respond to the immediate crisis, then we condemn ourselves to chronic illness. And that is what I see today.

As an example, consider a different chronic political illness in the United States: racism. The white majority generally ignores this issue until a crisis brings their attention once again to the daily injustices experienced by people of color in America. Responses to the crisis vary, but are invariably short-term and focused on the immediate situation. Most white Americans prefer to ignore the obvious truth—that racial politics in the U.S. have deep roots in our history, and that the unaddressed consequences of that history continue to poison us. Poverty, discrimination, educational disparities, social injustice, and injustices in the legal system continue to blight the lives of many Americans of color. Until those deep causes are dealt with, along with the racism that continues to linger in white America, sometimes overtly but more often under the surface, we will suffer periodic crises, as we have seen in recent years when police violence against African-Americans have provoked outraged protests. Predictably, however, those crises have been short-lived, and once the situation calms down we return to business as usual. So long as there are no riots or mass demonstrations in Baltimore or Ferguson or Philadelphia, most white Americans turn their attention elsewhere. We are like chronically ill people who, in between trips to the doctor’s office or the emergency room, continue the unhealthy eating and living habits that cause our debilitation. We will continue to suffer until we address the root causes of our national illness.

America’s racial differences tend to disappear when it comes to foreign policy. There, too, however, we are behaving like diabetes patients bingeing on candy bars between trips to the ER. Why do we not smarten up, and start looking for the causes of terrorism? Because we love our candy bars, and we don’t want to give them up. Our foreign policy addictions, since the end of World War II, have centered on three simplistic ideas: opposition to Russia and communists everywhere; promotion of American corporations in foreign countries; and the imperative to acquire and secure access to massive amounts of petroleum resources. Our obsession with these aims have blinded us to numerous, repeated acts of gross injustice that we, our allies, and our intelligence services have committed around the world. Any foreign leader or movement or government that threatened or seemed to threaten these aims became our enemy. Any foreign leader or movement or government that opposed communism and welcomed American corporations and sold us oil became our friends, no matter how many horrific crimes they may have committed against their own people in the process. The list of democratically-elected leaders we have conspired to assassinate or overthrow, and of dictators and oppressive regimes we have supported, and continue to support, is too long to repeat here. If you are one of the far too many Americans who are unfamiliar with this history, it is a few clicks away in your favorite search engine. However, the people who have suffered around the world as a result of America’s foreign policies know this history very well. They know, too, that it continues today. And a very small fraction of them are radicalized by this knowledge, and become terrorists.

In the short term, we must do whatever we can to find those people who are determined to commit mass murder, and stop them. Longer-term, however, we will never rid ourselves of terrorism until we attend to its root causes. The U.S. government must shed its obsessive fear of left-wing ideology, must end its unthinking support of corporate profits at any cost, and must end its marriage with Big Oil. In the place of these misguided and failed attachments that have caused so much suffering, it must dedicate itself to peace and justice and real democracy, even when peace and justice and democracy bring to power leaders and movements that do not love Exxon and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who may call themselves socialists, and who are not VIP customers of the U.S. arms industry.