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religioused · 3 years

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Queen Esther and the Orange Shirt

Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22 (Contemporary English Version)

The king and Haman were dining with Esther 2 and drinking wine during the second dinner, when the king again said, “Esther, what can I do for you? Just ask, and I will give you as much as half of my kingdom!”

3 Esther answered, “Your Majesty, if you really care for me and are willing to help, you can save me and my people. That’s what I really want, 4 because a reward has been promised to anyone who kills my people. Your Majesty, if we were merely going to be sold as slaves, I would not have bothered you.”

5 “Who would dare to do such a thing?” the king asked.

6 Esther replied, “That evil Haman is the one out to get us!”

Haman was terrified, as he looked at the king and the queen.

9 Then Harbona, one of the king’s personal servants, said, “Your Majesty, Haman built a tower seventy-five feet high beside his house, so he could hang Mordecai on it. And Mordecai is the very one who spoke up and saved your life.”

“Hang Haman from his own tower!” the king commanded. 10 Right away, Haman was hanged on the tower he had built to hang Mordecai, and the king calmed down.

20 Mordecai wrote down everything that had happened. Then he sent letters to the Jews everywhere in the provinces 21 and told them:

Each year you must celebrate on both the fourteenth and the fifteenth of Adar, 22 the days when we Jews defeated our enemies. Remember this month as a time when our sorrow was turned to joy, and celebration took the place of crying. Celebrate by having parties and by giving to the poor and by sharing gifts of food with each other.

The book of Esther does not mention God, prayer, or covenant,(1) and there is not even much theology in Esther.(2) The lack of religious behavior might have reduced the book’s popularity.(3) J.G. McConville, who wrote The Daily Study Bible commentary on Esther, notes that just because God is not mentioned that does not mean that Esther does not teach about God.(4)

There are times when the Bible is political. Esther is political, making the power people in the Persian Empire look bad. Subplots in Esther mock the Persian court and king.(5) The thinly disguised insults were probably enjoyed a lot by the ancient Israelites who listened to the story of Queen Esther.

McConville says Esther “is by any standards a brilliantly written story.”(6) Commentator William Neil gives us the sense that Esther might not be historical but contains enough history to feel realistic. There is enough drama and nationalism in Esther to appeal to the children of Israel.(7) Contributors to the New American Bible state one purpose of the book of Esther is the “glorification of Jewish people.”(8) One theologian considers the book of Esther to be a short novel, a novella, about Jewish people living away from their homeland.(9) While I am very uncomfortable with high levels of nationalism, members of oppressed minority groups need high levels of self-worth to thrive in the face of oppression.

The Bible is a book for the oppressed, for all the oppressed. As we remember Orange Shirt Day, I am going to say that again. The Bible is a book for all oppressed people. I am not going to tell Indigenous people what the story of Esther means to them. I will share some of what the narrative means to me.

The Israelites, who were carried off into slavery in other nations, faced oppression. The passage in the book of Esther is about an extreme act of oppression, the attempt to kill all Jewish people. We study this story on a day when we remember the oppression of Indigenous children who attended boarding schools. The Canadian Encyclopedia says an estimated 6 thousand children died at residential schools.(10)

The school day for Indigenous children started at 5:30 am when the children were expected to get up. Students were malnourished and vulnerable to tuberculosis and influenza. The teachers were generally poorly qualified, and students did not develop the skills needed to be successful when they returned to their communities or went into the larger workforce.(11) Students and parents protested the schools. A few students stole food, ran away, or set fires. Parents and political leaders protested the “harsh conditions.”(12) The students, parents, and political leaders who acted out and who protested strike me as the heroes of the Indigenous residential school era.

The impact of policies that oppressed Indigenous students in Canada continue to this day. While a few Canadians of European heritage see residential schools as an old problem and might not want to talk about it, many Indigenous people daily see the impact in the current lives of their extended families. One way that non-Indigenous people can recognize the inherent, God-given dignity of Indigenous people is to listen, with a sensitive heart, to the stories. I see that as a spiritual call, not as a political statement.

Jewish people around the world remember the story of Queen Esther, her courageous coming out, and the salvation of Jewish people. The holiday is Purim, a word that means lots.(13) The name of the Jewish holiday means lots because Haman cast lots to decide the day Jewish people should be executed. If we were naming the holiday now, we might call it lottery.

Wong Wai Ching Angela is a theologian. She was teaching at The Christian University of Hong Kong when she wrote a short commentary on the book of Esther. Angela makes the point that people in Hong Kong live between two competing sets of values, western values, and Chinese values. Those living in Hong Kong are like the Jewish people living in Persia – living with a tension between being under a colonial power and being Chinese.(14)

Indigenous people live with the tension of living as Canadians and having an Indigenous identity. While Canada is not a traditional imperial, colonial power, some of Canada’s institutions and approaches to First Nations people were developed when Canada was a colony. A few of the policies implemented regarding Indigenous people reflect Canada’s colonial history. Some members of minority groups living in Canada can relate to Esther and to the injustice Esther’s people faced.

The timing of Purim, a day when Jewish people celebrate the story of Esther, remains meaningful. Joseph Stalin was a “ruthless” dictator, who was responsible for the deaths of “millions of innocent people.”(15) He was believed to have had “bloody plans” to solve what he saw as a ‘Jewish problem’ in the Soviet Union.(16) In 1953, when the situation was seen to be a crisis, Joseph Stalin died. He died on Purim.(17)

Some of you might remember the 1990s Gulf War that took place after Iraq invaded Kuwait. For months, Sadam Hussein, Iraq's president, threatened to use SCUD missiles containing “deadly chemical gas" to ‘burn half of Israel.’(18) I suspect many Israelis braced themselves for the worst. As I recall, Israel did not suffer an enormous loss of life. According to a Wikipedia article, three Israelis were killed by missiles, and 71 additional Israelis died as an indirect result of the missiles.(19) The conflict ended on Purim.(20)

The book of Ester is a story of fear, threats, courage, coming out, salvation, and celebration. After a competition, Esther, a beautiful Jewish woman, becomes the new queen of Persia. Esther’s Jewish identity was not well known.

Jewish people fell out of favor with powerful people in Persia. Haman was an important official in Persia, so important that people were supposed to bow to him. Mordecai, a well-known Jewish man, refused to kneel or bow to Haman. Mordecai explained that he did not kneel because he was Jewish. When Haman learned this, he wanted all Jewish people killed.

Mordecai learned of the plan to kill all Jewish people. He put on sackcloth and mourned. Queen Esther, who was a closeted Jewish woman, is notified of the plot. She is asked to appeal to the king to save her people, and she does that. Her first step is to go to the king and to invite the king and Haman to dinner. At the dinner, she invites the king and Haman to a second dinner. This is where we pick up the story in today’s lectionary reading. And you might be able to understand the sense of the poetic justice or the karma of the narrative. Haman had gallows built to kill Mordecai. Haman is hanged on the gallows that he built for Mordecai.

The poetic justice surpasses a modern case of poetic justice. Robert Watson-Watt is generally considered to be the ‘father of radar.’ In the 1930s, he worked with a team that invented radar, a technology that helped detect the presence of aircraft “at any time of the day and in any weather conditions.”(21) When in Canada, Robert was reported to have been caught speeding by a constable with a radar gun. Robert told the constable, “Had I known what you were going to do with it, I would never have invented it.”(22) And if you ever received a speeding ticket, you might be secretly enjoying the irony that the one who helped invent radar got a speeding ticket because of radar.

While a quick read of Esther may give us the sense that there is nothing particularly spiritual or religious about the book, Esther speaks volumes about God’s love and priorities. The fact that the book of Esther builds up the morale and self-esteem of oppressed people says a lot about God. It tells us that God is present and active whenever oppressed people are being encouraged and built up. As people of faith, it is a holy and sacred duty to encourage and build up people, especially people who face systemic oppression. That is not a political statement; it is a spiritual statement, and it is a statement about our God.

The story of Esther takes place after a disaster. Because they were displaced and enslaved by war, there were children of Israel living in Persia. Orange Shirt Day is a reality only because of a disaster of a policy of having boarding schools to teach Indigenous children. We are in the disaster known as the COVID pandemic. During times of personal pain that may blot out the word God and prayer in the narratives of our hearts and lives, Purim speaks to us.

I am going to conclude with a quote from Rabbi Manis Friedman, as he reflects on the meaning of Purim. “God became real enough that we don’t have to refer to Him to know that He is there . . . That is a real achievement. God has become real to us. Our relationship has gotten stronger after the destruction, not weaker.”(23)

Notes

1 Wong Wai Ching Angela. “Esther.” Global Bible Commentary. (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 2004), 139, mentions lack of references to God, covenant, and prayer. McConville mentions a lack of references to God. J.G. McConville. The Daily Study Bible: Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther. (Edinburgh: St. Andrew Press, 1985), 153.

2 McConville (1985), 153.

3 Angela (2004), 139.

4 McConville (1985), 153.

5 Angela (2004), 137.

6 McConville (1985), 154.

7 William Neil. William Neil's One Volume Bible Commentary. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973), 219.

8 New American Bible. St. Joseph Edition. (New York: Catholic Book Pub., 1992), 500.

9 Angela (2004), 135.

10 “Residential Schools in Canada.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. n.d., 22 September 2021. <https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/residential-schools>.

11 “Residential Schools in Canada.” (2021) <https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/residential-schools>.

12 “Residential Schools in Canada.” (2021) <https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/residential-schools>.

13 “What is Purim?” Tori Avey. n.d., 09 September 2021. <https://toriavey.com/what-is-purim/>.

14 Angela (2004), 135.

15 “Purim: What is Purim?” Chabad.org. n.d., 05 September 2021.

<https://www.chabad.org/holidays/purim/article_cdo/aid/645309/jewish/What-Is-Purim.htm>.

16 “Purim: What is Purim?” (2021)

<https://www.chabad.org/holidays/purim/article_cdo/aid/645309/jewish/What-Is-Purim.htm>.

17 “Purim: What is Purim?” (2021)

<https://www.chabad.org/holidays/purim/article_cdo/aid/645309/jewish/What-Is-Purim.htm>.

18 Tzvi Jacobs. “Purim Saddam.” Chabad.org. n.d., 19 September 2021.

<https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/39446/jewish/Purim-Saddam.htm>.

19 “1991 Iraqi Rocket Attacks on Israel.” Wikipedia. July 2021, 19 September 2021. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Iraqi_rocket_attacks_on_Israel>.

20 “Purim: What is Purim?” (2021)

<https://www.chabad.org/holidays/purim/article_cdo/aid/645309/jewish/What-Is-Purim.htm>.

21 “Watson-Watt, Sir Robert.” English Heritage. n.d., 18 September 2021. <https://www.english-history.org.uk/visit/blue-plaques/robert-watson-watt/>.

22 “Watson-Watt, Sir Robert.” (2021) <https://www.english-history.org.uk/visit/blue-plaques/robert-watson-watt/>.

23 Manis Friedman. “The Meaning of Purim in 2 Minutes.” Rabbi Manis Friedman. 08 March 2020, 25 September 2021. <https://youtu.be/kiMCYYEznfE>.

#christian #church #progressive christian #sermon #religion #oppression #Purim #antisemitism #residential school #indigenous #Canada #orange shirt day #orange shirt

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arbenia · 4 years

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The other day on the BBC news I saw a young, educated and eloquent Serbian woman speaking about the life of ordinary citizens under the NATO bombing. The Serbian citizens are afraid, she said. Normal life is more and more difficult. There are power cuts, and people are forced to go several days without access to the Internet. There is also a cigarette shortage. But yes, they are trying to live normally. They go to work, they shop, and they sit in cafes. Of course, the bombing turned the Serbian citizens against NATO, not against Slobodan Milosevic. After all, “bombs are dropping from the sky.”

Clearly, this young woman, like so many Serbs, does not want to understand that her country is at war. They still seem to be thinking, What has all this to do with me? I know this mechanism of denial, because I have seen it before. Serbs by and large ignored the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. It was always happening somewhere else, to somebody else, and they were not involved. It was the Serbian army, the police, the paramilitaries, but not them, the ordinary citizens. But now, when it is happening in Serbia and affecting all of them, they are still somehow surprised.

The young woman on TV used the expression “Serbian citizens,” but her use of this phrase suggested that these Serbian citizens are people struggling to maintain the normality of their daily lives. By “Serbian citizens” she evidently meant only Serbs. Others–that is, Albanians–are simply never mentioned in that context. Their problems are not addressed, by her or other Serbs. In the perception of ordinary Serbs, Albanians are not included in the category of Serbian citizen and therefore are absent from the language as well.

Why? The problem is that Serbs–or anyone else, for that matter–cannot identify with the suffering of others if they are not able to see them as equals. In Yugoslav society Albanians were never visible. There was no need to construct their “otherness”–as, for example, with Jews in prewar Germany or recently with Serbs in Croatia. The Albanians were never integrated into the country’s social, political and cultural life. They existed separately from us, barely visible people on the margins of our society, with their strange language that nobody understood, their tribal organization, blood feuds, different habits and dress. They were always underdogs. What was their place in the Yugoslav literature, in movies and popular culture? What famous Yugoslavs were Albanians? Because of that estrangement, not many voices were raised in protest during the past ten years, when Albanians in Kosovo lived practically under apartheid.

For the older generation, the only visible Albanians were people in white caps coming from Kosovo to their cities to cut wood in the winter. For my generation they were people selling ice cream all over Yugoslavia. They spoke our language with a funny accent and never could pronounce “lemonade” properly. They lived among us, but we chose to ignore them. If we did happen to notice them, we despised them, laughed at them, told jokes about them. I never had an Albanian friend in Zagreb. No one I knew married an Albanian. But the difference between Croats and Serbs was that Croats did not really have to deal with the Albanians; we had no Kosovo.

It was clear that they belonged to a different category from Serbs, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins or Slovenes. Serbs could even fight a war against Croats, but they never perceived each other in the same way they both perceive Albanians. The prejudice against Albanians can be compared to that against Jews or blacks or Gypsies in other cultures. Today every Serb will tell you that Albanians multiply like rabbits–that this is their secret weapon in the war they are waging against Serbs in Kosovo. This is not nationalism; this is more or less hidden racism.

The woman on the BBC the other day may be only an ordinary person, but there are other Serbs who should know better and who can’t use the excuse of innocence so easily. They are the people in the opposition. But all one hears from them is their lament about the destruction of democracy and civil society in Serbia. The NATO bombing is to them a savage attack, a terrible act of aggression against a sovereign state–they all use the language of Milosevic’s propaganda. There is “the other Serbia” they say, a better Serbia of the brave people who fought Milosevic all along.

Surely there is another Serbia that will surface once Milosevic is gone. And surely everyone can understand that opposition people are afraid now. One is tempted, however, to ask, Exactly what opposition, what civil society, what “other Serbia” are we talking about? The one that for more than a decade was not able to produce a democratic alternative to Milosevic? The one that never established contacts with Albanians from Kosovo in order to work together for the common future of both nations? If the opposition, political as well as intellectual, ever had anything in common with Milosevic, it was in its attitude toward Kosovo. Kosovo Albanians were a litmus test for the opposition all these years, and they always failed it. Now they are engulfed in self-pity.

An open letter from Vladimir Arsenijevic, a young Serbian writer of some renown, circulating on e-mail, is a striking example of this invisibility of Albanians. In his answer to a friend from Zagreb, who reproached Serbs for their lack of remorse over the situation of the Albanians, he wrote: “On account of lack of pity for the fate of Kosovo Albanians, I know (from my own experience–and I know that I have no bad feelings whatsoever directed toward anybody, least of all Albanians) that it is very hard to care about somebody else’s problems if you are personally experiencing major problems of your own at the same moment. There is no favoritism in this society. Everybody is too busy surviving here to be able to feel any remorse…. Remorse is a privilege of the well-nourished, clean and civilized. And we are all Albanians here. All of us: Serbs, Montenegrins, Hungarians, Slovaks…. Poor, underfed, degraded, oppressed. And I mean ALL of us, even those who have supported Milosevic with all their heart through all these years of terrible hell.”

There is something almost obscene in this sudden “visibility” of Albanians, in the Serbs’ desire to achieve the status of victim through this kind of identification. Albanians remain an abstraction, an empty notion with no real substance, used solely as a means of adding visibility to Serbian suffering, thus denying the Albanian identity once more. I can see this young writer sitting at his computer (there must have been no shortage of power then) in his Belgrade apartment: He sends his e-mail letter, checks the latest war information on the Internet and goes to bed. Meanwhile, his Albanian counterpart, with whose suffering he identifies so much, sits in a tent somewhere in Albania or stands in the mud, waiting to cross the Macedonian border. His house is burned down, his computer–if he ever had one–has been taken by Serbian paramilitaries and he doesn’t know where his family is.

If the young writer considers himself an Albanian, why is he not fleeing to Macedonia or Albania as well? How cynical–or young or innocent or perhaps stupid–do you have to be to say that? It is as grotesque as if the Germans, after World War II, had said, “We were all Jews.” After all, had they not suffered occupation, bombardment, rationing?

The writer means to say that if the Serbs are victims, then how can they possibly have anything to do with the responsibility for this war? Or for the Milosevic regime? War goes deeper than bombardment, and the more we pretend it doesn’t concern us, the more it invades us. War is destructive of the human soul. It corrodes human beings, bringing out things we didn’t know about ourselves. And when he says that remorse is a privilege of civilized people, he puts himself and his nation on the level of people without pity. He is justifying the inhumanity of his people, and that is terrible.

This is what the war is doing to the young writer. But like the woman on the BBC, as well as ordinary people and opposition intellectuals, he is not able to realize that. Precisely this denial, blindness, unconscious racism and cruelty toward other human beings, this lack of remorse (but no lack of self-pity!), is what war is doing to Serbs, and it is much more devastating than NATO bombs. Living with Milosevic’s regime and the war for so long takes its toll. It has changed Serbs in the past ten years, and the rest of the world is witnessing this only now, still puzzled and bewildered by it. It is hard to understand that our acquaintances, our lovers, drinking buddies, philosophers, our once dear friends, are different people. It is even harder to understand that they themselves let that change happen.

`(Slavenka Drakulic, a Croatian-born author, is a Nation contributing editor. Her latest book is A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism.)

#albanian #kosovo #kosova #Yugoslavia #Serbia #balkans #balkan

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cabiba · 3 years

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How the US government destroyed the social-political movements of the 1960s-1970s.

Posted on

November 1, 2017

the truth is freedom

Counterintelligence Program [Cointelpro]: The United States government program that destroyed the social and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s

Table of Contents

Counterintelligence Program [Cointelpro] operations in general

Specific covert actions against La Raza

III. Domestic covert action remains a serious threat today

Domestic covert action did not end in the 1970’s

“Bags of dirty tricks”

Counter Intelligence Program (Cointelpro) Operations in General

How the Cointelpro program destroyed the progressive social and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States

Since Cointelpro was used mainly against the progressive movements of the 1960s and 1970s its impact can be grasped only in the context of the momentous social upheaval which shook the country during those years. Chicano and black communities throughout the United States [US] came alive with renewed political struggle. Most major cities experienced sustained disciplined Chicano and black protests and massive barrio and ghetto uprisings. Chicano and black activists galvanised multi-racial rebellion among welfare mothers, students, and prisoners. College campuses and high schools erupted in militant protest against the war in Vietnam. A predominantly white New Left inspired by Chicano and black movements fought for an end to US intervention abroad and a more humane and co-operative way of life at home. By the late 1960s deep-rooted resistance had revived among Puerto Ricans and Native Americans. Millions of people began to reject the dominant ideology and culture plus thousands challenged basic US political and economic institutions. For a brief moment “the crucial mixture of people’s confidence in the government and lack of confidence in them which allows the government and the ruling class to rule threatened to break down.” By the mid-1970s the upheaval had largely subsided. Important progressive activity persisted, mainly on a local level and much continued to be learned and won, but the massive, militant Chicano, black and new left movements were gone. The sense of infinite possibility and of our collective power to shape the future had been lost.

Progressive momentum dissipated and radicals found themselves on the defensive as right-wing extremists gained major government positions and defined the contours of accepted political debate. Many factors besides Cointelpro contributed to this change. Important progress was made toward achieving movement goals to the war in Viet Nam and university reform. The mass media owned or controlled mainly by Jews and their big business and cowed by government and right-wing attacks helped to bury radical activism by ceasing to cover it. Television, popular magazines, and daily papers stereotyped activists as hardened criminals and welfare chiselers or as the supposedly affluent beneficiaries of “reverse discrimination;” white radical and leftist youth were portrayed first as hedonistic hippies and mindless terrorists, later as an apolitical, self-indulgent “me generation” and both were scapegoat as threats to “decent and hard-working middle America.”

During the severe economic recession of the early to mid 1970s former student activists began entering the job market some by taking on responsibility for children. Many were scared by brutal government and right-wing attacks culminating in the murder of rank-and-file activists as well as prominent leaders. Some were strung out on hard drugs that had become increasingly available in black and Latino communities and among white youth. Others were disillusioned by mistreatment in movements ravaged by the very social sicknesses they sought to eradicate such as racism and class bias. Limited by their upbringing, social position, and isolation from older radical traditions, 1960s activists were unable to make the connections and changes required to build movements strong enough to survive and eventually win structural change in the US. Middle-class students did not sufficiently ally with working and poor people and too few white activists accepted third world leadership of multi-racial alliances. Originally motivated by goals of quick reforms, 1960s activists were ill prepared for the long-term struggles in which they found themselves. Overly dependent on media-oriented “superstars” and one-shot dramatic actions, they failed to develop stable organisations, responsible leadership, and strategic perspective. Creatures of the culture they so despised, they often lacked the patience to sustain tedious grassroots work and painstaking analysis of actual social conditions. They found it hard to accept the slow uneven pace of personal and political change. This combination of circumstances, however, did not by itself guarantee political collapse.

The achievements of the 1960s movements inspired optimism and provided a sense of the power to win other important struggles. The rightward shift of the major media could have enabled alternative newspapers, magazines, theatre, film, and video to attract a broader audience and stable funding. The economic downturn of the early 1970s could have united Chicano and black militants, new leftists, and workers in common struggle. Police brutality and government collusion in drug trafficking could have been exposed in ways that undermined support for the authorities and broadened the movement’s backing. While the problems of the 1960s movements were enormous, their strengths might have enabled them to overcome their weaknesses had the upsurge not been stifled before activists could learn from their mistakes. Much of the movement’s inability to transcend their initial limitations and overcome adversity can be traced to Cointelpro. It was through Cointelpro that the public image of Chicanos, blacks and new leftists was distorted to legitimise their arrest and imprisonment and scapegoat them as the cause of working people’s problems. The FBI and police instigated violence and fabricated movement horrors; dissidents were deliberately criminalized through false charges, frame-ups, and offensive bogus leaflets and other materials published in their name. This is why and how Ramsey Muñiz of La Raza Unida Party was framed! [See part V “bag of dirty tricks.”] Cointelpro enabled the FBI and police to exacerbate the movement’s internal stresses until beleaguered activists turned on one another. Whites were pitted against blacks, blacks against Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, students against workers, workers against people on welfare, men against women, religious activists against atheists, Christians against jews, jews against Muslims, while “anonymous” accusations of infidelity ripped couples apart. Backers of women’s and gay movements were attacked as “dykes” and “faggots.” Money was repeatedly stolen and precious equipment sabotaged to intensify pressure and sow suspicion and mistrust. Otherwise manageable disagreements were inflamed by Cointelpro until they erupted into hostile splits that shattered alliances, tore groups apart, and drove dedicated activists out of the movement. Government documents implicate the FBI and police in the bitter break-up of such pivotal groups as the La Raza Unida Party, the Brown Berets, Black Panther Party, Students for Democratic Society (SDS), the Liberation News Service, and in the collapse of repeated efforts to form long-term coalitions across racial, class, and regional lines. While genuine political issues were often involved in these disputes, the outcome could have been different if government agencies had not covertly intervened to subvert compromise and fuel hostility and competition. Finally, it was Cointepro that enabled the FBI and police to eliminate mass movement leaders without undermining the image of the US as a “democracy” complete with free speech and the rule of law. Charismatic orators and dynamic organisers were covertly attacked and neutralised before their skills could be transferred to others and stable structures established to carry on their work.

Corky Gonzalez and Ramsey Muñiz were imprisoned and Malcolm X was murdered in a “factional dispute” which the FBI took credit for having developed in the Nation of Islam. Martin Luther King was the target of an elaborate plot to drive him to suicide and replace him “in his role of the leadership of the negro people” with conservative black lawyer Samuel Pierce [later named to Reagan’s cabinet]. Many have come to view King and Malcolm’s assassinations as in itself a domestic covert operation. Other prominent radicals faced similar attack when they began to develop broad followings and express anti-capitalist ideas. Some were portrayed as crooks, thugs, philanderers, or government agents, while others like David Sanchez of the Brown Berets were physically threatened or assaulted until they abandoned their work. Still others were murdered under phoney pretexts such as “shootouts” in which the only shots were fired by the police. To help bring down a major target, the FBI often combined these approaches in strategic sequence. Take the case of the underground press, a network of some 400 radical weeklies and several national news services, which once boasted a combined readership of close to 30 million. In the late 1960s, government agents raided the offices of alternative newspapers across the country in purported pursuit of drugs and fugitives. In the process, they destroyed typewriters, cameras, printing presses, layout equipment, business records, and research files, and roughed up and jailed staffers on bogus charges. Meanwhile, the FBI was persuading record companies to withdraw lucrative advertising and arranging for printers, suppliers, and distributors to drop underground press accounts. With their already shaky operations in disarray, the papers and news services were easy targets for a final phase of Cointelpro disruption. Forged correspondence, anonymous accusations, and infiltrator manipulation provoked a flurry of wild charges and countercharges that played a major role in bringing many of these promising endeavours to a premature end. A similar pattern can be discerned from the history of the La Raza Unida and Black Panthers. Brutal government attacks initially elicited broad support for these new militant and highly visible national organisations and their popular programs for self-determination. But the repressive onslaught severely weakened these Parties making them vulnerable to sophisticated psychological warfare which so discredited and shattered them to such an extend, that only a few people today have any notion of the power and potential that these organisations once represented. What proved most devastating in all of this was the effective manipulation of the victims of Cointelpro into blaming themselves. Since the FBI and police operated covertly, the horrors they engineered appeared to emanate from within the movements. Activists trust in one another and their collective power was subverted and the hopes of a generation died, leaving a legacy of cynicism and despair which continues to haunt us today.

Specific operations against La Raza

La Raza Unida Party of Texas was plagued with repeated unsolved Cointelpro-style political break-ins. Former government operative Eustacio “Frank” Martinez admitted that after the close of Cointelpro the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) paid him to help destroy “La Casa del Carnalismo” [The House of Brotherhood] a Chicano community anti-drug program in Los Angeles. Martinez, who had previously infiltrated the Brown Berets and the Chicano Moratorium, stated that the ATF directed him to provoke bombings and plant a drug pusher inside of “La Casa del Carnalismo.”

In 1973, Chicano activist and Lawyer Francisco “Kiko” Martinez was indicted in Colorado on trumped-up bombing charges and suspended from the bar. He was forced to leave the country for fear of assassination by police directed to shoot him “on sight.” When Martinez was eventually brought to trial in the 1980s, many of the charges against him were dropped for insufficient evidence and local juries acquitted him of others. One case ended in a mistrial when it was found that the judge had met secretly with prosecutors, police, and government witnesses to plan perjured testimony, and had conspired with the FBI to conceal video cameras in the courtroom. A serious and damaging Cointelpro action against La Raza has been the framing of Ramsey Muñiz. Ramsey Muñiz was an effective leader of La Raza Unida Party in Texas and was its candidate for governor in 1974. Falling victim to trump up charges, Ramsey is now serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole at Leavenworth federal penitentiary. There is a strong movement underway to obtain his freedom and to release him from long term “solitary confinement” within the prison. Starting in 1976 the FBI manipulated the grand jury process to assault both the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements. Under the guise of investigating the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña [FALN] and other Puerto Rican urban guerrillas, the bureau harassed and disrupted a cultural centre, an alternative high school, and other promising community organising efforts in Chicago and Puerto Rican barrios and in the Chicano communities of Denver and Northern New Mexico. It subpoenaed radical Puerto Rican trade union leader Federico Cintrón Fiallo, a key staff of the National Commission on Hispanic Affairs of the US Episcopal Church, to appear before federal grand juries and jailed him for refusing to cooperate. The independent labour movement in Puerto Rico and the Commission’s important work in support of Puerto Rican and Chicano organising were effectively discredited.

On July 25, 1978 an undercover agent lured two young Puerto Rican independence activists, Carlos Soto and Arnaldo Darío Rosado, to their deaths in a police ambush at Cerro Maravilla, Puerto Rico. The agent, Alexander Gonzalez Malave, worked under the direct supervision of the FBI trained intelligence chief of the island’s police force. The FBI refused to investigate when the police claimed they were merely returning gunfire initiated by the activists. Later it was proved that Soto and Dario had surrendered and were then beaten and shot dead while on their knees. Though a number of officers were found guilty of perjury in the cover-up and one was sentenced for the murder the officials who set up the operation remain free. Gonzalez was even promoted. On November 11, 1979 Angel Rodriguez Cristobal, a popular socialist leader of the movement to stop the US navy bombing practice on the inhabited Puerto Rican island of Vieques, was murdered in the penitentiary at Tallahassee, Florida. Although prison authorities claimed “suicide,” Rodriguez Cristobal in the second month of a six-month term for civil disobedience had been in good spirits when seen by his lawyer only hours before his death. He had been subjected to continuous threats and harassment including forced drugging and isolation during his confinement. Though he was said to have been found hanging by a bed sheet there was a large gash on his forehead and blood on the floor of his cell. Another front line organisation victim of Cointelpro type operations was the Brown Beret National Organisation. David Sanchez, its leader, was the victim of a Cointelpro “psychological war” against him. His home was fired bomb during the early 1970’s and this almost resulted in the death of his little sister. He had to disband the Berets during the upheavals of the National Chicano Moratorium Committee marches in East Los Angeles in order to stop the shedding of blood between some of the units. The disunity and division was caused by the infiltration of Cointelpro agents.

III. Domestic covert action remains a serious threat today

The public exposure of Cointelpro and other government abuses elicited a flurry of apparent reform in the 1970s. President Nixon resigned in the face of impeachment. His Attorney General, other top aides, and many of the “plumbers” were prosecuted and imprisoned for brief periods. The CIA director and counter-intelligence chief were ousted and the agency was directed to cease covert operations against domestic targets.

The FBI had formally shut down Cointelpro a few weeks after it was uncovered. As part of the general face-lift the bureau publicly apologised for Cointelpro and municipal governments began to disband the local police “red squads” that had served as the FBI main accomplices. A new attorney general notified several hundred activists that they had been victims of Cointelpro and issued guidelines limiting future operations. Top FBI officials were indicted for ordering the burglary of activists’ offices and homes, two were convicted, and several others retired or resigned. The bureau’s egomaniacal crudely racist, closet homosexual and sexist founder Edgar J. Hoover died in 1972. After two interim directors failed to stem the tide of criticism, a prestigious federal judge, William Webster, was appointed by President Carter to clean house and build a “new” FBI. Behind this public hoopla, however, the bureau’s war at home continued unabated. Domestic covert action did not end when it was exposed in the 1970s. It has persisted throughout the 1980s and become a permanent feature of the US government domestic policy.

Domestic covert action did not end in the 1970s

Director Webster’s highly touted reforms did not create a “new” FBI. They served mainly to modernise the existing bureau and to make it even more dangerous. In place of the backbiting competition with other law enforcement and intelligence agencies, which had previously impeded coordination of domestic counter-insurgency, Webster promoted inter-agency co-operation. Adopting the mantle of an “equal opportunity employer,” his FBI hired women and people of colour to more effectively penetrate a broader range of political targets. By cultivating a low-visibility image and discreetly avoiding public attack on prominent liberals, Webster gradually restored the bureau’s respectability and won over a number of its former critics. State and local police similarly upgraded their repressive capabilities in the 1970s while learning to present a more friendly public face. The “red squads” that had harassed 1960s activists were quietly resurrected under other names. Paramilitary police [swat] teams and tactical squads were formed, along with highly politicised “community relations” and “beat rep” programs featuring conspicuous Black, Chicano, and female officers. Generous federal funding and sophisticated technology became available through the law enforcement assistance administration, while FBI-led “joint anti-terrorist task forces” introduced a new level of inter-agency co-ordination. Meanwhile, the CIA continued to use university professors, journalists, labour leaders, publishing houses, cultural organisations, and philanthropic fronts to mold public opinion. At the same time, army Special Forces and other elite military units began to train local police for counter-insurgency and to intensify their own preparations, following the guidelines of the secret pentagon contingency plans called “garden plot” and “cable splicer.” They drew increasingly on manuals based on the British colonial experience in Kenya and Northern Ireland, which teach the essential methodology of Cointelpro under the rubric of “low-intensity warfare” and stress early intervention to neutralise potential opposition before it can take hold. While domestic covert operations were scaled down once the 1960s upsurge had subsided they did not stop. In its April 27, 1971 directives disbanding Cointelpro the FBI provided for future covert action to continue “with tight procedures to ensure absolute security.” The results are apparent in the record of 1970s covert operations, which have so far come to light.

The Native American Movement

The 1970s FBI attacks on resurgent Native American resistance have been well documented. In 1973, the bureau led a paramilitary invasion of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota as American Indian Movement [AIM] activists gathered there for symbolic protests at Wounded Knee, the site of an earlier massacre of Native Americans by whites. The FBI directed the entire 71-day siege deploying federal marshals, US army personnel, Bureau of Indian Affairs police, local Goons [Guardians of the Oglala Nation, an armed tribal vigilante force] and a vast array of heavy weaponry.

In the following years, the FBI and its allies waged all-out war on AIM and the Natives. From 1973-76 they killed 69 residents on the tiny Pine Ridge reservation, a rate of political murder comparable to the first years of the Pinochet regime in Chile. To justify such a reign of terror and undercut public protest against it, the bureau launched a complementary program of psychological warfare. Central to this effort was a carefully orchestrated campaign to reinforce the already deeply ingrained myth of the “indian savage.” In one operation the FBI fabricated reports that AIM “dog soldiers” planned widespread “sniping at tourists” and “burning of farmers” in South Dakota. The son of liberal Senator [and Arab-American activist] James Abourezk was named as a “gunrunner” and the bureau issued a nationwide alert picked up by media across the country. To the same end, undercover operatives framed AIM members Paul “Skyhorse” Durant and Richard “Mohawk” Billings for the brutal murder of a Los Ángeles taxi driver. A bogus AIM note taking credit for the killing was found pinned to a signpost near the murder site, along with a bundle of hair said to be the victim’s “scalp.” Newspaper headlines screamed of “ritual murder” by “radical indians.” By the time the defendants were finally cleared of the spurious charges, many of AIM’s main financial backers had been scared away and its work among a major urban concentration of native people was in ruin. In March of 1975, a central perpetrator of this hoax, AIM’s national security Chief Doug Durham, was unmasked as an undercover operative for the FBI. As AIM’s liaison with the Wounded Knee Legal Defence Committee during the trials of Dennis Banks and other Native American leaders, Durham had routinely participated in confidential strategy sessions. He confessed to stealing organisational funds during his two years with AIM and to setting up the arrest of AIM militants for actions he had organised. It was Durham who authored the AIM documents that the FBI consistently cited to demonstrate the group’s supposed violent tendencies. Prompted by Durham’s revelations, the senate intelligence committee announced on June 23, 1975 that it would hold public hearings on FBI operations against AIM. Three days later, armed agents assaulted an AIM house on the Pine Ridge reservation. When the smoke cleared, AIM activist Joe Stuntz Killsright and two FBI agents lay dead. The media, barred from the scene “to preserve the evidence,” broadcast the bureau’s false accounts of a bloody “indian ambush” and the congressional hearings were quietly cancelled.

The FBI was then free to crush AIM and clear out the last pockets of resistance at Pine Ridge. It launched what the Chairman of the “civil rights” commission described as “a full-scale military-type invasion on the reservation” complete with M-16 rifles, huey helicopters, tracking dogs, and armoured personnel carriers. Eventually AIM leader Leonard Peltier was tried for the agent’s deaths before a right-wing judge who met secretly with the FBI. AIM member Anna Mae Aquash was found murdered after agents threatened to kill her unless she helped them to frame Peltier. Peltier’s conviction based on perjured testimony and falsified ballistics evidence was upheld on appeal. The panel of federal judges included William Webster until the very day of his official appointment as director of the FBI. Despite mounting evidence of impropriety in Peltier’s trial, and Amnesty International calls for a review of his case, the Native American leader remains in maximum security prison.

The black movement

Government covert action against black activists also continued in the 1970s. Targets ranged from community-based groups to the provisional government of the republic of new Africa and the surviving remnants of the Black Panther Party. In Mississippi, federal and state agents attempted to discredit and disrupt the united league of Marshall County, a broad-based grassroots “civil rights” group struggling to stop racist violence. In California, a notorious paid operative for the FBI Darthard Perry, code-named “Othello,” infiltrated and disrupted local black groups and took personal credit for the fire that razed the Watts writers workshop, a multi-million dollar cultural centre in Los Angeles in 1973. The Los Angeles police department later admitted infiltrating at least seven 1970s community groups including the coalition against police abuse.

In the mid-1970s, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms [BATF] conspired with the Wilmington, North Carolina police to frame nine local “civil rights” workers and the Rev. Ben Chavis, field organiser for the commission for racial justice of the United Church of Christ. Chavis had been sent to North Carolina to help black communities respond to escalating racist violence against school desegregation. Instead of arresting racist Klansmen, the BATF and local police coerced three young black prisoners into falsely accusing Chavis and the others of burning white-owned property. Although all three prisoners later admitted they had lied in response to official threats and bribes, the FBI found no impropriety. The courts repeatedly refused to reopen the case and the Wilmington ten served many years in prison before pressure from international religious and human rights groups won their release.

As the republic of new Africa began to build autonomous, economic, and political institutions in the Deep South, the bureau repeatedly disrupted its meetings and blocked its attempts to buy land. On August 18, 1971, four months after the supposed end of Cointelpro the FBI and police launched an armed pre-dawn assault on its national office in Jackson, Mississippi. Carrying a warrant for a fugitive who had been brought to its headquarters by FBI informer Thomas Spells, the attackers concentrated their fire where the informer’s floor plan indicated where President Imari Obadele slept. Though Obadele was away at the time of the raid, the bureau had him arrested and imprisoned on charges of conspiracy to assault a government agent.

The Cointelpro triggered the collapse of the Black Panther Party and support in the winter of 1971 left them defenceless as the government moved to prevent them from regrouping. On August 21, 1971 national party officer George Jackson, author of the political autobiography “soledad brother” was murdered by San Quentin prison authorities on the pretext of an attempted jailbreak. In July 1972, Southern California panther leader Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt was successfully framed for a senseless $70.00 robbery-murder committed while he was hundreds of miles away in Oakland, California while attending a panther meetings for which the FBI managed to “lose” all of its surveillance records. Documents obtained through the freedom of information act later revealed that at least two agents had infiltrated Pratt’s defence committee. They also indicated that the State’s main witness, Julio Butler, was a paid informer who had worked in the party under the direction of the FBI and the Los Angeles police department. For many years, director Webster publicly denied that Pratt had ever been a Cointelpro target despite the documentary proof in his own agency’s records. Also targeted well into the 1970s were former panthers assigned to form an underground to defend against armed government attacks on the party. It was they who had regrouped as the Black Liberation Army [BLA] when the party was destroyed. Files show that within a month of Cointelpro closing, further bureau operations against the BLA were mapped out in secret meetings convened by presidential aide John Ehrlichman and attended by President Nixon and Attorney General Mitchell. In the following years, many former panther leaders were murdered by the police in supposed “shoot-outs” with the BLA.

A recent covert domestic operation by the CIA has come to light. Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News and US representative Maxine Waters has uncovered a “CIA crack cocaine connection” that has shocked the nation. The operation consisted of allowing the importation of tons of cocaine from Colombia in order to fund the right wing “contras” that were operating in Nicaragua. The plot in the early days of the “crack cocaine epidemic” consisted of the manufacture and distribution of crack cocaine in Latino barrios and in black communities through the utilisation of gangs such as the “bloods,” the “crips,” and Chicano gang members. The operation had a double benefit for the CIA. Not only did it provide covert funds but it also assured the addiction to cocaine of potential young leaders in our community.

“Bags of dirty tricks”

Harassment through psychological warfare

While boring from within, the FBI and police also attack dissident movements from the outside. They openly mount propaganda campaigns through public addresses, news releases, books, pamphlets, magazine articles, radio, and television. They also use covert deception and manipulation. Documented tactics of this kind included the following:

False mass media stories

Many Cointelpro documents expose frequent collusion between news media personnel and the FBI to publish false and distorted material at the bureau’s behest. The FBI routinely leaked derogatory information to its collaborators in the news media. It also created newspaper and magazine articles and television “documentaries” which the media knowingly or unknowingly carried as their own. Copies were sent anonymously or under bogus letterhead to activist’s financial backers, employers, business associates, families, neighbours, church officials, school administrators, landlords, and whoever else might cause them trouble. One media fabrication claimed that Jean Seberg, a white film star active in anti-racist causes, was pregnant by a prominent black leader. The bureau leaked the story anonymously to columnist Joyce Haber and also had it passed to her by a “friendly” source in the Los Angeles Times editorial staff. The item appeared without attribution in Haber’s nationally syndicated column of May 19, 1970. Seberg’s husband sued the FBI as responsible for her resulting stillbirth, nervous breakdown and suicide.

Bogus leaflets, pamphlets, and other publications

The Cointelpro documents show that the FBI routinely put out phoney leaflets, posters, pamphlets, newspapers, and other publications in the name of movement groups. The purpose was to discredit the groups and turn them against one another. Cartoon leaflets were used to divide and disrupt the main national antiwar coalition of the late 1960s. Similar fliers were circulated in 1968 and 1969 in the name of the Black Panthers and the “United Slaves” [US] which were a rival black group based in Southern California. The phoney panther leaflets together with other covert operations were credited with subverting a fragile truce between the two groups and igniting an explosion of internecine violence that left four panthers dead and many more wounded in a once-flourishing regional movement decimated. Another major Cointelpro operation involved children’s colouring book which the Black Panther Party had rejected as gratuitously violent. The FBI revised the colouring book to make it even more offensive. Its field offices then distributed thousands of copies anonymously or under phoney organisational letterheads. Many backers of the party’s program of free breakfasts for children withdrew their support after the FBI conned them into believing that the bogus colouring book was being used in the program.

Forged correspondence

Former employees have confirmed that the FBI has the capacity to produce state-of-the-art forgery. This capacity was used under Cointelpro to create snitch jackets and bogus communications that exacerbated differences among activists and disrupted their work. One such forgery intimidated civil rights worker was Muhammad Kenyatta [Donald Jackson] causing him to abandon promising projects in Jackson, Mississippi. Kenyatta had foundation grants to form black economic co-operatives and open a “black and proud” school for dropouts. He was also a student organiser at nearby Tougaloo College. In the winter of 1969 after an extended campaign of FBI and police harassment, Kenyatta received a letter purportedly from the Tougaloo College Defence Committee which “directed” that he cease his political activities immediately. If he did not “heed our diplomatic and well-thought-out warning” the committee would consider taking measures “which would have a more direct effect and would not be as cordial as this note.” Kenyatta and his wife left. Only years later did they learn that it was not Tougaloo students but FBI covert operators who had driven them out. Later in 1969, FBI agents fabricated a letter to the mainly white organisers of a proposed Washington, D.C. anti-war rally demanding that they pay the local Negro community a $20.000 “security bond.” This attempted extortion was composed in the name of the local black united front and signed with the forged signature of its leader. Informers inside the front then tried to get the group to back such a demand and bureau contacts in the media made sure the story received wide publicity. The senate intelligence committee uncovered a series of FBI letters sent to top panther leaders throughout 1970 in the name of Connie Matthew, an intermediary between the Black Panther Party national office and leader Eldridge Cleaver. These exquisite forgeries were prepared on pilfered stationery in panther vernacular expertly simulated by the FBI in their Washington, D.C. laboratory. Each was forwarded to legal attaché at a US Embassy in a foreign country that Matthew was due to travel through and then posted at just the right time “in such a manner that it cannot be traced to the bureau.” The FBI enhanced the eerie authenticity of these fabrications by lacing them with esoteric personal tidbits culled from electronic surveillance of panther homes and offices. Combined with other forgeries, anonymous letters, phone calls, and the covert intervention of FBI and police infiltrators, the Matthew’s correspondence succeeded in inflaming intra-party mistrust and rivalry until it erupted into the bitter public split that shattered the organisation in the winter of 1971.

Anonymous letters and telephone calls

During the 1960s, activists received a steady flow of anonymous letters and phone calls, which turn out to have been from the FBI. Some were unsigned while others bore bogus names or purported to come from unidentified activists in phoney or actual organisations. Many of these bogus communications promoted racial divisions and fears often by exploiting and exacerbating tensions between Jewish and black activists. One such FBI concocted letter went to Students for Democratic Society [SDS] members who had joined black students protesting the New York University’s discharge of a teacher in 1969. The supposed author an unnamed SDS “member” urged whites to break ranks and abandon black students because of alleged anti-Semitic slurs by the fired teacher and his supporters.

Other anonymous letters and phone calls falsely accused movement leaders of collaboration with the authorities, corruption, or sexual affairs with other activist’s. The letters were used to provoke “a lasting distrust” between a black “civil rights” leader and his wife. The FBI authors hoped that his “concern over what to do about it” would “detract from his time spent in the plots and plans of his organisation.” As in the Seberg incident inter-racial sex was a persistent theme. The husband of one white woman active in “civil rights” and anti-war work filed for divorce soon after receiving the FBI-authored letter. Still other anonymous FBI communications were designed to intimidate dissidents, disrupt coalitions, and provoke violence. Calls to Stokely Carmichael’s mother warning of a fictitious panther murder plot drove him to leave the country in September 1968. Similar anonymous telephone threats to leader James Forman were instrumental in thwarting efforts to bring the two groups together. The Chicago FBI office made effective use of anonymous letters to sabotage the panther’s efforts to build alliances with previously apolitical black street gangs. The most extensive of these operations involved the “black stone nation” or “blackstone rangers,” a confederation of several thousand local black youth. Early in 1969 as FBI and police infiltrators in the rangers spread rumours of an impending panther attack, the bureau sent ranger chief Jeff Fort an incendiary note signed by “a black brother you don’t know.”

Fort’s supposed friend warned that “the brothers that run the panthers blame you for blocking their thing and there’s supposed to be a hit out for you.” Another FBI-concocted anonymous “black man” then informed Chicago panther leader Fred Hampton of a Ranger plot “to get you out of the way.” These fabrications squelched promising talks between the two groups and enabled Chicago panther security Chief William O’Neal, an FBI-paid provocateur, to instigate a series of armed confrontations from which panthers barely managed to escape without serious casualties.

Pressure through employers, landlords, and others

Large number of records reveals repeated manoeuvres to generate pressure on dissidents from their parents, children, spouses, landlords, employers, college administrators, church superiors, welfare agencies, credit bureaus, and the like. Anonymous letters and telephone calls were often used to this end. Confidential official communications were effective in bringing to bear the bureau’s immense power. Reports indicate that such FBI interventions denied Martin Luther King and other 1960s activist’s foundation grants and public speaking engagements. It also deprived alternative newspapers of their printers, suppliers, and distributors and cost them crucial advertising revenues when major record companies were persuaded to take their business elsewhere. Similar government manipulation may underlie steps recently taken by some insurance companies to cancel policies held by churches giving sanctuary to refugees from Central America.

Tampering with mail and telephone service

The FBI and CIA routinely used mail covers (the recording of names and addresses) and electronic surveillance in order to spy on 1960s social and political activists. The CIA alone admitted to photographing the outside of 2.7 million pieces of first-class mail during the 1960s and to opening almost 315.000 letters. Government agencies also tampered with mail, altering, delaying, or “disappearing” it. Activists were quick to blame one another and infiltrators easily exploited the situation to exacerbate tensions. Dissident’s telephone communications often were similarly obstructed. The SDS regional office in Washington, D.C., for instance, mysteriously lost its phone service the week preceding virtually every national anti-war demonstration in the late 1960s.

Misinformation to prevent or disrupt meetings and activities

A favourite Cointelpro tactic uncovered by senate investigators was to advertise a non-existent political event, or to misinform people of the time and place of an actual one. They reported a variety of disruptive “dirty tricks” designed to cast blame on the organisers of movement events. In one “misinformation” case, the FBI Chicago office duplicated blank forms prepared by the National Mobilisation Committee to End the War in Vietnam [NMC] soliciting housing for demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention. The FBI filled out 217 of these forms with fictitious names and addresses and sent them to the NMC which provided them to demonstrators who made “long and useless journeys to locate these addresses.” The NMC then decided to discard all replies received on the housing forms rather than have out-of-town demonstrators tried to locate non-existent addresses. The same program was carried out when the Washington Mobilisation Committee distributed housing forms for demonstrators coming to Washington for the 1969 presidential inaugural ceremonies.

In another case, a FBI Midwest field office disrupted arrangements for State University students to attend the 1969 inaugural demonstrations by making a series of anonymous telephone calls to the Transportation Company. The calls were designed to confuse both the Transportation Company and the SDS leaders as to the cost of transportation and the time and place for leaving and returning. This office also placed confusing leaflets around the campus to show different times and places for demonstration-planning meetings, as well as conflicting times and dates for travelling to Washington.

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asiaberkeley · 3 years

Text

Afghan is beautiful

I am a half Afghan woman. An Afghan-European American. An Afghan American.

Admittedly, it took me awhile to offer up this information in the aftermath of 9/11 when Afghanistan became synonymous with terrorism in the eyes of many Americans. Taking pride in my heritage suddenly and painfully became controversial.

People didn’t know about my Afghan-ness though because I had my mother’s surname and not my Pashtun father’s: Hotaki. Also, I didn’t wear any kind of head covering because I was raised Catholic. It was easy to hide and pass for completely White.

My late father, an aspiring doctor and med school student who spoke six languages, left Kabul with his family before the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan as a child. They were the lucky ones. He spent most of his life in Germany where many Afghans have sought refuge. One of my fondest memories is flying kites with him and my Irish-Swedish-French American mother in the Munich Public Gardens as a child. There was no wind that day and we dragged the kites in dizzy circles…laughing together...just as I imagine him now when he was a boy: kite flying in the streets of Kabul.

Since my father died when I was six, I returned to my mother’s hometown of Boston with her in 1996. I was later left to contemplate what it meant to be Afghan in a place with very few Afghans compared to Virginia, California, and New York. In college, as an Asian Studies major at Wellesley College and later at the University of California, Berkeley, I often corrected people who said that Afghanistan is in the Middle East and not in South-Central Asia. I wondered why it seemed that no one had received much education on this country’s history or people outside of reading the popular Khaled Hosseini novel, The Kite Runner, especially since we have been at war—fighting together with the Afghan forces against the Taliban in the longest war in American history.

Many Americans don’t realize that the attackers on 9/11 were not Afghan. The attackers did seek a hiding and meeting place in Afghanistan, however. But those facts shouldn’t matter. Because it doesn’t matter what ethnicity, race, or nationality someone is if they commit a crime and it doesn’t matter where they were hiding. The guilty party does not represent all people of their background or country just like Hitler does not represent all Germans or all of Germany and El Chapo does not represent Mexico or all Mexicans. Similarly, the latest mass shooter in El Paso doesn’t represent all white American men.

After former President Trump pondered out loud the mere possibility of a concocted plan to kill 10 million Afghans and wipe the country off the face of the earth – presumably through the use of nuclear weapons – I have thought more about what it means to be Afghan American today. And it’s not because of those unimaginably cruel musings which add insult to injury in the homes of all Afghans traumatized by decades of war. Indeed, nearly every person who is not a white man has been made to feel worthless, subhuman and criminal under the rhetoric of the former Trump administration...so Afghans are not alone.

But Afghans were alone in the discussion of their genocide in 2019. I have contemplated my identity even more because not one leader or politician in America of any background spoke out formally against those disturbing statements. (And it doesn’t matter if this was an actual plan of his or just an imaginary scenario dangling in the recesses of his mind.) What does the national silence mean?

After 9/11, Afghan American author of West of Kabul, East of New York and Destiny Disrupted, Tamim Ansary, went viral with an email he sent. In it, he wrote:

“The Taliban and Bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They’re not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who captured Afghanistan in 1997 and have been holding the country in bondage ever since. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a master plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think “the people of Afghanistan” think “the Jews in the concentration camps.” It’s not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity, they were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would love for someone to eliminate the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country. I guarantee it…Some say, if that’s the case, why don’t the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban themselves? The answer is, they’re starved, exhausted, damaged, and incapacitated.”

After 2001, my family warned me that just telling people I was Afghan may offend or anger them because they may have lost a loved one on 9/11 or they may have had a son or daughter deployed to Afghanistan. In middle school, a classmate told me I was from the land of the terrorists after I proudly showed her an autographed book I received from an Afghan British writer, Saira Shah, called "The Storyteller's Daughter." My American cousin, a veteran, was later deployed to Afghanistan and brought back a burqa which I showed to my classmates in high school to teach them about the Taliban’s oppression. Contrary to what they may have assumed, what they saw was not traditional Afghan clothing. Traditional Afghan clothing, banned under the Taliban, is colorful, intricate, deeply hued, bright and beautiful. Google it.

A year has passed since Trump discussed wiping Afghanistan off the face of the earth. After it happened, I regularly checked Twitter and the news to see if any of our nation’s leaders denounced those remarks. I called my Governor, Congresspeople, and many others asking if just one would put out a statement to support Afghans and Afghan Americans against talk of our annihilation. The Governor’s office simply said that he did not put out a statement. I still haven’t found any. However, some Americans did speak out on social media. Thank you.

We have studied the long-lasting horrors of the U.S. nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in our classrooms. I thought we concluded as a nation that something like that could never happen again. That not a single person in power thought it worth it to speak out against the possibility of the U.S. committing another nuclear genocide bewilders and frightens me. Is it controversial to say out loud that Afghans civilians do not deserve to die en masse? Are Afghans so vilified in our society that it’s a public risk to defend us?

If you still blame the Afghan people for 9/11 even if only on an subconscious level, think again. Many of the Afghan people are suffering in ways you can only imagine in your worst nightmares. They are not responsible and took no part in this. Like the poor souls who were killed in the Twin Towers, Afghans are survivors and casualties of terrorism as well. Afghan women have lost their entire families. They have been abused and pillaged. Men, women, and children have been bombed and maimed. Their history, including the rich Buddhist Silk Road history of Afghanistan, has been destroyed by the Taliban and others.

Discussing our nation's capability to conduct nuclear genocide of an entire people and country is an affront to all humans.

So I suggest to all of our nation’s leaders who have remained tight-lipped in the face of the unspeakable: Take time to learn something you don’t know about Afghanistan. Perhaps that could start with the story of progressive Afghan Queen and feminist Soraya Tarzi who asked, "Do you think, however, that our nation from the outset only needs men to serve it? Women should also take their part as women did in the early years of our nation..." Or it could be about the life and death of iconic Afghan singer Ahmad Zahir. You could learn about the courageous resistance of Afghan women and girls throughout history or visit that Afghan restaurant you were too timid to enter and try a sweet pumpkin kadoo dish.

As the war in Afghanistan, a war based on lies and deceit, may be coming to another tragic end with even graver implications for the women left behind who have fought so hard for equality, maybe it’s finally time to read another book that is not the Kite Runner... and most importantly, time to look deep inside of ourselves and question the possible anger, hate and bias that has developed towards the Afghan people after the catastrophic and traumatizing events of September 11, 2001.

*See the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers which deemed that the American military did not know what it was doing there and that the war was based on lies and deceit. Government officials misled the American public about the war. The war has cost the lives of thousands of American soldiers with many more wounded as well as 100,000+ Afghan civilians killed or hurt. Many of the American troops have returned with PTSD. 30% of the Afghan casualties were children.

Sources

https://apnews.com/a2a8d7a4f89ec0515379dc4d4a38b56a

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/documents-database/

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the-marx-brothers-will-live-on · 4 years

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Herbert Manfred "Zeppo" Marx (February 25, 1901 – November 30, 1979) was an American actor, comedian, theatrical agent, and engineer. He was the youngest of the five Marx Brothers and also the last to die. He appeared in the first five Marx Brothers feature films, from 1929 to 1933, but then left the act to start his second career as an engineer and theatrical agent.

Zeppo was born in Manhattan, New York City, on February 25, 1901. His parents were Sam Marx (called "Frenchie" throughout his life), and his wife, Minnie Schönberg Marx. Minnie's brother was Al Shean, who later gained fame as half of the vaudeville team Gallagher and Shean. Marx's family was Jewish. His mother was from East Frisia in Germany; and his father was a native of France, and worked as a tailor.

As with all of the Marx Brothers, different theories exist as to where Zeppo got his stage name: Groucho said in his Carnegie Hall concert in 1972 that the name was derived from the Zeppelin airship. Zeppo's ex-wife Barbara Sinatra repeated this in her 2011 book, Lady Blue Eyes: My Life with Frank. His brother Harpo offered a different account in his 1961 autobiography, Harpo Speaks!, claiming (p. 130) that there was a popular trained chimpanzee named Mr. Zippo, and that "Herbie" was tagged with the name "Zippo" because he liked to do chinups and acrobatics, as the chimp did in its act. The youngest brother objected to this nickname, and it was altered to "Zeppo". Another version of this story was that his name was changed to "Zeppo" in honor of the then popular "Zepplin". In a much later TV interview, Zeppo said that Zep is Italian-American slang for baby and as Zeppo was the youngest or baby Marx Brother, he was called Zeppo (BBC Archives).

Zeppo replaced brother Gummo in the Marx Brothers' stage act when the latter joined the army in 1918. Zeppo remained with the team and appeared in their successes in vaudeville, on Broadway, and the first five Marx Brothers films, as a straight man and romantic lead, before leaving the team. He also made a solo appearance in the Adolphe Menjou comedy A Kiss in the Dark, as Herbert Marx. It was described in newspaper reviews as a minor role.

In Lady Blue Eyes, Barbara Sinatra, Zeppo's second wife, reported that Zeppo was considered too young to perform with his brothers, and when Gummo joined the Army, Zeppo was asked to join the act as a last-minute stand-in at a show in Texas. Zeppo was supposed to go out that night with a Jewish friend of his. They were supposed to take out two Irish girls, but Zeppo had to cancel to board the train to Texas. His friend went ahead and went on the date, and was shot a few hours later when he was attacked by an Irish gang that disapproved of a Jew dating an Irish girl.

As the youngest and having grown up watching his brothers, Zeppo could fill in for and imitate any of the others when illness kept them from performing. Groucho suffered from appendicitis during the Broadway run of Animal Crackers and Zeppo filled in for him as Captain Spaulding.

"He was so good as Captain Spaulding in Animal Crackers that I would have let him play the part indefinitely, if they had allowed me to smoke in the audience", Groucho recalled. However, a comic persona of his own that could stand up against those of his brothers did not emerge. As critic Percy Hammond wrote, sympathetically, in 1928:

One of the handicaps to the thorough enjoyment of the Marx Brothers in their merry escapades is the plight of poor Zeppo Marx. While Groucho, Harpo, and Chico are hogging the show, as the phrase has it, their brother hides in an insignificant role, peeping out now and then to listen to plaudits in which he has no share.

Though Zeppo continued to play it straight in the Brothers' movies for Paramount Pictures, he occasionally got to be part of classic comedy moments in them—in particular, his role in the famous dictation scene with Groucho in Animal Crackers (1930). He also played a pivotal role as the love interest of Ruth Hall's character in Monkey Business (1931) and of Thelma Todd's in Horse Feathers (1932).

The popular assumption that Zeppo's character was superfluous was fueled in part by Groucho. According to Groucho's own story, when the group became the Three Marx Brothers, the studio wanted to trim their collective salary, and Groucho replied, "We're twice as funny without Zeppo!"

Zeppo had great mechanical skills and was largely responsible for keeping the Marx family car running. He later owned a company that machined parts for the war effort during World War II, Marman Products Co. of Inglewood, California, later acquired by the Aeroquip Company. This company produced a motorcycle, called the Marman Twin, and the Marman clamps used to hold the "Fat Man" atomic bomb inside the B-29 bomber Bockscar.[citation needed] He invented and obtained several patents for a wristwatch that monitored the pulse rate of cardiac patients and gave off an alarm if the heartbeat became irregular, and a therapeutic pad for delivering moist heat to a patient.

He also founded a large theatrical agency with his brother Gummo. During his time as a theatrical agent, Zeppo and Gummo, primarily Gummo, represented their brothers, among many others.

On April 12, 1927, Zeppo married Marion Bimberg Benda.[15] The couple adopted two children, Timothy and Thomas, in 1944 and 1945, and later divorced on May 12, 1954. On September 18, 1959, Marx married Barbara Blakeley, whose son, Bobby Oliver, he wanted to adopt and give his surname, but Bobby's father would not allow it. Bobby simply started using the last name "Marx".

Blakeley wrote in her book, Lady Blue Eyes, that Zeppo never made her convert to Judaism. Blakeley was of Methodist faith and said that Zeppo told her she became Jewish by "injection".

Blakeley also wrote in her book that Zeppo wanted to keep her son out of the picture, adding a room for him onto his estate, which was more of a guest house, as it was separated from the main residence. It was also decided that Blakeley's son would go to military school, which according to Blakeley, pleased Zeppo.

Zeppo owned a house on Halper Lake Drive in Rancho Mirage, California, which was built off the fairway of the Tamarisk Country Club. The Tamarisk Club had been set up by the Jewish community, which rivaled the gentile club called The Thunderbird. His neighbor happened to be Frank Sinatra. Zeppo later attended the Hillcrest Country Club with friends such as Sinatra, George Burns, Jack Benny, Danny Kaye, Sid Caesar, and Milton Berle.

Blakeley became involved with the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and had arranged to show Spartacus (featuring Kirk Douglas) for charity, selling tickets, and organizing a postscreening ball. At the last minute, Blakeley was told she could not have the film, so Zeppo went to the country club and spoke to Sinatra, who agreed to let him have an early release of a film he had just finished named Come Blow Your Horn. Sinatra also flew everyone involved to Palm Springs for the event.

Zeppo was a very jealous and possessive husband, and hated for Blakeley to talk to other men. Blakeley claimed that Zeppo grabbed Victor Rothschild by the throat at a country club because she was talking to him. Blakeley had caught Zeppo on many occasions with other women; the biggest incident was a party Zeppo had thrown on his yacht. After the incident, Zeppo took Blakeley to Europe, and accepted more invitations to parties when they arrived back in the States. Some of these parties were at Sinatra's compound; he often invited Blakeley and Zeppo to his house two or three times a week. Sinatra would also send champagne or wine to their home, as a nice gesture.

Blakeley and Sinatra began a love affair, unbeknownst to Zeppo. The press eventually got wind of the affair, snapping photos of Blakely and Sinatra together, or asking Blakeley questions whenever they spotted her. Both Sinatra and she denied the affair.

Zeppo and Blakeley divorced in 1973. Zeppo let Blakeley keep the 1969 Jaguar he had bought her, and agreed to pay her $1,500 (equivalent to $8,600 in 2019) per month for 10 years. Sinatra upgraded Blakeley's Jaguar to the latest model. Sinatra also gave her a house to live in. The house had belonged to Eden Hartford, Groucho Marx's third wife. Blakeley and Sinatra continued to date, and were constantly hounded by the press until the divorce between Zeppo and Blakeley became final. Blakeley and Sinatra were married in 1976.

Zeppo became ill with cancer in 1978. He sold his home, and moved to a house on the fairway off Frank Sinatra Drive. The doctors thought the cancer had gone into remission, but it returned. Zeppo called Blakeley, who accompanied him to doctor's appointments. Zeppo spent his last days with Blakeley's family.

The last surviving Marx Brother, Zeppo died of lung cancer at the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage on November 30, 1979, at the age of 78. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean.

In his will, Zeppo left Bobby Marx a few possessions and enough money to finish law school. Both Sinatra and Blakeley attended his funeral.

#zeppo marx #marx brothers #classic hollywood #classic comedy

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arcticdementor · 4 years

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Although there is almost no historical evidence of St Valentine, the most common tradition is that he was martyred for marrying couples illegally. Desperate for troops, the emperor Claudius Gothicus had prohibited young men from being wed — and therefore escaping military service. Poor Valentine was foolish enough to disobey the Roman Emperor, and that rarely ends well.

Unlike most feast days that grew in popularity during the Middle Ages, Valentine’s survived Reformation and secularisation because it came to celebrate a popular ideal: romantic love. Indeed, it is about more than that: the idea of love as a choice; a choice made by two people that no outside authorities — not even Roman emperors — can stand in the way of.

We take love for granted (it being all around) but marrying for romance is quite a radical idea — a fairly recent one and, from a point of view of outcomes, not a very successful innovation.

…

For most of recorded history, marriage was seen as a contract, largely for the creation of children. If love — agape — developed as a result, all the better, but romance was not a reason for marriage. The Greeks and Romans essentially saw romantic love as a mental illness — “a sickness, a fever, a source of pain” in the words of historian Nigel Saul — while the medieval aristocracy thought of marriages as more like business contracts. Kings used their children as assets with which to make deals, one of the most ruthless being the 12th century Henry II, who had his heir Henry wed when he was five and his bride, daughter of the king of France, just two.

…

One small illustration of the social values of the age comes via a poem celebrating William Marshal, a tournament star and member of Eleanor’s entourage. Marshal went on to serve four kings and helped save Magna Carta, becoming the epitome of medieval chivalry and also providing the inspiration for A Knight’s Tale and Ser Barristan the Bold in Game of Thrones.

Following Marshal’s death, his five sons commissioned a biographical poem to glorify their father, filled with his derring-do as loyal knight and all-round hero; it contains a passage that to modern eyes seems curious. On the road one day, our brave knight came across a young couple who had eloped because they were in love, but their families disapproved. Marshal, the poem boasts, simply robbed them at the point of the sword and, the reader is supposed to see, rightly so.

This episode says much about popular attitudes at the time, when — like in most societies — marrying against your parent’s wishes put you beyond the pale. Marshal’s own wife, Isabel de Clare, had been awarded to him as a reward for his service to Henry II, when Marshal was 43 and his bride 17. Did she want to marry him? No one cared.

…

That we came to think of marrying for love as normal is largely down to the Catholic Church. Christian theologians, following the thoughts of St Paul, saw marriage between man and woman as analogous to that between Christ and his Church. Marriage had to be consensual, willingly offered into — a rule the Church enforced with increasing determination from the 12th century.

…

Western Europeans came to see marriage not just as a business deal between two clans, but a bond between individuals; increasingly, stories about romantic love saw it as likely to lead to not to disaster, but to “happy ever after”.

Along with rules about consent and age, the Church also became increasingly strict about the marrying of relatives, which had a profound effect on wider society. Once people were forced to marry out, their loyalty to their family declined in relation to wider society and this fostered more radical ideas. Maybe Romeo wasn’t just a member of the Montague clan but an individual with his own desires? Maybe his individual happiness was more important than the extended family’s status? The effects have been long lasting, with various studies showing a link between the Catholic Church’s ban on cousin marriage with corruption and democracy.

Yet across the world, and among Asian diasporas, arranged marriage remains the norm, while marriages rates in the west have plummeted since the 1970s. Maybe western ideas of love aren’t the only way forward.

…

Since the final phrase in this great love revolution in the late 20th century, when social pressure to marry early was relaxed, and with it the Church’s long-held prohibition against divorce, marriage rates have fallen dramatically.

There are now around a quarter of a million marriages a year in Britain, just over half the rate in 1969 when the Divorce Reform Act was passed. Marriage has also become a luxury good, with the gap between professional and working classes rising just this century from 22% to almost 50%. The results are huge numbers living alone, a figure that will surpass 10 million by 2040.

Many are happily single, but many others just don’t find the right person through a modern market that is far from efficient.

Maybe arranged marriage makes more sense. When westerners think of the practice they tend to think of forced marriages, and the horrific tradition of honour killings that often result, but arranged and forced marriages are not the same thing.

In many traditional societies, arranged marriage takes the form of sons and daughters being given a short list of potential suitors from which they can choose (assuming the other person picks them, of course). Speed dating originated among Jewish communities in New York for this exact purpose, and mimics traditional practices in certain ways.

And arranged marriages do have better outcomes, on a purely measurable level.

Harvard’s Dr Robert Epstein analysed the phenomenon among south Asians and Orthodox Jews and, with an admittedly small sample, concluded that they were more successful than the secular western route.

…

And while marriage rates in the West continue to fall, especially in the US, young people in India are not spurning arranged marriages as that country gets richer. Likewise, in China and across the East “love” continues to play a far less important role in marriage than in Europe.

Western romantics might see that as cold or cynical, but then, perhaps our attitude is rather naïve and even silly. Love wins — but then sometimes it doesn’t.

#ed west #valentine's day #unherd #arranged marriage #marriage

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didanawisgi · 4 years

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“...I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but it was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of them indulgently accepted by the Roman Pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages – in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little known religions of Asia. This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, "the combination of different forms of belief or practice"; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a silver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth. As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message. One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism. If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge – that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering's alleged statement ("When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun") to the frequent use of such expressions as "degenerate intellectuals," "eggheads," "effete snobs," "universities are a nest of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

4. No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus UrFascism is racist by definition.

6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old "proletarians" are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the U.S., a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson's The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a "final solution" implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler. Since the group is hierarchically organized (according to a military model), every subordinate leader despises his own underlings, and each of them despises his inferiors. This reinforces the sense of mass elitism.

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Falangists was Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as "Long Live Death!"). In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual 8 habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the UrFascist hero tends to play with weapons – doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view – one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People. Because of its qualitative populism Ur-Fascism must be against "rotten" parliamentary governments. One of the first sentences uttered by Mussolini in the Italian parliament was "I could have transformed this deaf and gloomy place into a bivouac for my maniples" – "maniples" being a subdivision of the traditional Roman legion. As a matter of fact, he immediately found better housing for his maniples, but a little later he liquidated the parliament. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in 1984, as the official language of Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show. On the morning of July 27, 1943, I was told that, according to radio reports, fascism had collapsed and Mussolini was under arrest. When my mother sent me out to buy the newspaper, I saw that the papers at the nearest newsstand had different titles. Moreover, after seeing the headlines, I realized that each newspaper said different things. I bought one of them, blindly, and read a message on the first page signed by five or six political parties – among them the Democrazia Cristiana, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Partito d'Azione, and the Liberal Party. Until then, I had believed that there was a single party in every country and that in Italy it was the Partito Nazionale Fascista. Now I was discovering that in my country several parties could exist at the same time. Since I was a clever boy, I immediately realized that so many parties could not have been born overnight, and they must have existed for some time as clandestine organizations. The message on the front celebrated the end of the dictatorship and the return of freedom: freedom of speech, of press, of political association. These words, "freedom," "dictatorship," "liberty," – I now read them for the first time in my life. I was reborn as a free Western man by virtue of these new words. We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be forgotten again. UrFascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, "I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares." Life is not that simple. UrFascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances – every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt's words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: "I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land."

Freedom and liberation are an unending task. Let me finish with a poem by Franco Fortini: Sulla spalletta del ponte Le teste degli impiccati Nell'acqua della fonte La bava degli impiccati. Sul lastrico del mercato Le unghie dei fucilati Sull'erba secca del prato I denti dei fucilati. Mordere l'aria mordere i sassi La nostra carne non è più d'uomini Mordere l'aria mordere i sassi Il nostro cuore non è più d'uomini. Ma noi s'è letto negli occhi dei morti E sulla terra faremo libertà Ma l'hanno stretta i pugni dei morti La giustizia che si farà. (On the bridge's parapet The heads of the hanged In the flowing rivulet The spittle of the hanged. On the cobbles in the market-places The fingernails of those lined up and shot On the dry grass in the open spaces The broken teeth of those lined up and shot. Biting the air, biting the stones Our flesh is no longer human Biting the air, biting the stones Our hearts are no longer human. But we have read into the eyes of the dead And shall bring freedom on the earth But clenched tight in the fists of the dead Lies the justice to be served.) – poem translated by Stephen Sartarelli

#Ur-Fascism #fascism #ideological violence #Umberto Eco #violent crime #psychology #social commentary #sociology #society #philosophy #controversy #debate

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theculturedmarxist · 5 years

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In the long list of enemies maintained by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party of India (BJP), the Muslims of the northwestern state of Kashmir have always held a special place. The only Muslim-majority state in India, and one guaranteed notional autonomy under Article 370 of the Indian constitution, Kashmir is routinely depicted by the right-wing Hindu BJP as the ungrateful beneficiary of Indian munificence, accepting endless sops while returning the favor with acts of terrorism and support for Pakistan.

The BJP on Monday announced in unilateral fashion that it would dissolve Kashmir’s special status and divide the state into two parts, one of which is to be ruled directly from Delhi. The proclamation was accompanied with a curfew in the state that included the house arrest of prominent Kashmiri leaders, the severing of all internet, cellphone, and landline connections, and the deployment of thousands of additional troops in what is already, with nearly a million soldiers, one of the most militarized regions in the world.

While Kashmiris remain completely disconnected from their family and friends, their civil liberties suspended, supporters of the Hindu right have been quick to signal their delirious joy, sometimes from very far away. “I have woken up in NY to the best news of my life about Kashmir,” blowhard actor (and husband to a BJP politician) Anupam Kher wrote on Twitter, making sure in his tweet to thank God, the Indian government, BJP Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Modi’s sinister consigliere, Home Minister Amit Shah.

This is not the first time that the Hindu right, led by Modi, has unleashed mass suffering in pursuit of its vision of Hindutva, an India that is largely or even exclusively for the Hindus. In 2002, when Modi was chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, a pogrom against Muslims left nearly a thousand dead and turned many more into refugees. Since Modi’s tenure as prime minister began in 2014, and especially since being handed a second term in resounding fashion earlier this year, such violence has percolated through the entire nation, provoking lynchings, assassinations, rapes, beatings, imprisonments, and constant abuse on airwaves and social media by Modi’s cheerleaders.

The BJP’s hatred of Muslims is an inheritance from its century-old parent organization, the cultish paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh; the chief of the RSS in the 1940s, M.S. Golwalkar, argued that Muslims were India’s Jews and that Hindus needed to manifest a “race spirit” similar to that of the Nazis. Now, BJP’s targets have expanded to include not just Muslims, but anybody critical of Modi, the party, and Hindutva.

Such hate works, especially as little else in India does. In 2014, Modi and the BJP were voted into power despite their blood-stained record of pogroms and extrajudicial executions in Gujarat. Devotees of the Hindu right were joined in their support by liberals, both in India and in the West, who balanced Modi’s violent, paranoid, and authoritarian personality against the good governance he would supposedly usher in. But while Modi and the party are enamored of capitalism, they especially like crony capitalism, and have only managed to deepen India’s economic, environmental and social crises.

Against this backdrop of perpetual crisis, Modi has perfected the grand, autocratic gesture. In November 2016, he imperiled a sick economy by unilaterally announcing the cancellation of large-denomination rupee notes. This was allegedly done to curb the flow of untaxed income, a ludicrous claim, given the number of his cronies who sit in London and New York after defaulting on massive loans from government banks. The demonetization led to severe misery for a majority of the Indian population, wage laborers, and small traders who conduct their business largely in cash. It transformed everyday life by fiat, with long lines of desperate people outside banks, an eerie mirroring of voters queuing up outside election booths. But Modi’s gesture seized headlines and provided an intoxicating display of power, with the damage to the economy and misery visited upon the majority failing to dent Modi’s popularity. The BJP’s victory margin in last May’s election was even greater than when the party first took control.

Monday’s decision to dissolve Kashmir’s special status is copied from the same template: done suddenly at great cost to a large section of people, but certain to appeal to the Hindutva fanbase. The Hindu right has for decades stoked resentment about Article 370 and its special treatment of Kashmiri Muslims. (At a BJP rally in Kolkata many years ago, I heard a speaker tell the crowd that Kashmiris received subsidized mutton for a special price so low that it would not even buy dog meat in Kolkata.) Targeting Kashmir’s special status is also seen as a blow against the liberal elites who preceded the BJP in governance, and who supposedly lacked Modi’s requisite toughness in dealing with Kashmiri Muslims.

All of this is, of course, fake news. Kashmir, like other border territories absorbed uneasily into the Indian republic, has for decades been treated as a colony by liberal as well as right-wing Indian governments. It is disputed territory, and the special status promised in Article 370 only tells one side of the story. Another side is told by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, a piece of colonial-era legislation, still in effect in Kashmir, that offers virtual immunity to security forces for all acts of violence. India’s military occupation of Kashmir has unfolded apace under this law, spurring massacres, disappearances, torture, rape, and the deliberate blinding of protesters with pump-action shotguns firing cartridges packed with hundreds of tiny “nonlethal” lead pellets.

As with Modi’s demonetization drive, the apparent suddenness of the decision to remove Article 370 and carve Kashmir up into two administrative units is contrived. The declaration was preceded by the announcement of two fall summits in Kashmir for prospective outside investors. What such investment in Kashmir will look like is easy to guess from a cursory glance at the rest of India: more trash, more cars, more pollution, more concrete, more aggressive Hindu rock music, and ever more ugly assertions of the race spirit that Golwalkar wanted Hindus to learn from Nazis. The BJP wants to allow its Hindu majoritarian supporters to expand into Kashmir. If it looks like settler colonialism, that’s because it is.

Elsewhere in India, in the northeastern state of Assam, Modi’s party has created a different kind of misery with a similar aim, by raising the specter of a Muslim migrant influx from neighboring Bangladesh. A nightmarish system of tribunals, detention centers, and updates to India’s “national register of citizens” has sparked what might be the largest disenfranchisement project in the world, as Bengali speakers—largely Muslim and mostly poor—suddenly find themselves registered as foreigners or “doubtful” citizens, with many thrown into prison because they cannot prove their Indianness. The pattern of governance is clear.

The problems India faces are so severe that any political party would be hard-pressed to address them. There is rising inequality, poverty among hundreds of millions, and little hope for job growth. Parched by drought and disoriented by shifting monsoons, the mainland of India is sometimes burning and sometimes flooded. Capitalism has hollowed India out, and climate change is beginning to reveal its devastating face with scant regard for colonial and postcolonial borders. In response, Modi and his party are now attempting to engineer a Hindutva version of lebensraum in Kashmir. Indians, as much as Kashmiris, should hope that he fails.

#national security #nationalism #reacciones #reactionary politics #india #kashmir #pakistan #indian muslims #indian hindus #politics #indian politics #asian politics #nuclear war #nationalism is always reactionary

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poorguysheadisdoingwhatnow · 6 years

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A Newsies history lesson: Joseph Pulitzer

I haven’t done a Newsies history lesson in a while, so I thought I’d do another one about arguably one of the most interesting people in the story: Joseph Pulitzer, The World publisher and antagonist of the musical.

Buckle up, y’all, because this is a long one (but his life is worth the read, I’d say).

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Early Life

Joseph Pulitzer was born on April 10, 1847, in Mako, Hungary to a wealthy Magyar-Jewish family. His father was a grain merchant who retired in Budapest, where Pulitzer grew up and attended school.

In 1864, when he was seventeen-years-old, Pulitzer tried enlist in the Austrian Army, Napoleon’s Foreign Legion, and the British Army, but he was rejected because of his poor eyesight and bad health.

Pulitzer still wanted to become a soldier, however, so he enlisted as a substitute for a draftee after meeting a bounty recruiter for the U.S. Union Army. Pulitzer enlisted for a year in the Lincoln Calvary, which worked for him because there were many German soldiers in the unit. Pulitzer was fluent in German and French; however, he spoke very little English.

After a year in the Lincoln Calvary, Pulitzer left for St. Louis, where he worked odd jobs as a muleteer, baggage handler, and waiter, among others.

While in St. Louis, Pulitzer studied English and the law at Mercantile Library, and it was here, actually, that his journalism career began.

The Start of Pulitzer’s Journalism Career

Pulitzer met two editors of the leading German language daily, Westliche Post, while observing and critiquing their chess game, and they offered him a job after engaging him in conversation and finding him rather impressive.

In 1872, four years after beginning work for the Westliche Post, Pulitzer had already built a reputation as a journalist. He became a publisher for the paper at age 25, and by 1878, he had bought and become owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, another St. Louis-based newspaper. Pulitzer was already making his mark on the world of journalism.

Pulitzer worked tirelessly to improve and change the St. Louis Post-Dispatch into a spectacular newspaper. His specialties were investigative articles and editorials exposing corruption, tax-dodgers, and gamblers, and he did it incredibly well. This type of dramatic news was popular with the public, and the St. Louis Dispatch became very popular.

The World

In 1883, Pulitzer met with Jay Gould, the financier, and bought The New York World, a newspaper close to bankruptcy. He immersed himself in The World, changing everything from its editorial policy to its format, and used some of the techniques that had helped the St. Louis Post-Dispatch prosper to build back up The World’s circulation.

“He crusaded against public and private corruption, filled the news columns with a spate of sensationalized features, made the first extensive use of illustrations, and staged news stunts,” a biographical article by Seymour Topping on the Pulitzer Prize website reads. “In one of the most successful promotions, The World raised public subscriptions for the building of a pedestal at the entrance to the New York harbor so that the Statue of Liberty, which was stranded in France awaiting shipment, could be emplaced.”

These techniques proved very successful, and over the next ten years, The World’s circulation increased to more than 600,000, and it became the largest circulating newspaper in the United States.

However, all this success came with a price that had only been building since the beginning of Pulitzer’s journalism career: both his health and his eyesight were rapidly failing, and there were many factors that only exacerbated the problems. One was Pulitzer’s unrelenting dedication to his work, and the other was a slanderous campaign against him by Charles Anderson Dana, publisher of The Sun, a competing newspaper.

Dana was frustrated by The World’s success, so he took matters into his own hands by attacking Pulitzer and his Jewish ancestry, writing him as “the Jew who had denied his race and religion”, and seeking to “alienate New York’s Jewish community from The World” (Topping).

This attack caused further stress on Pulitzer and caused his health to deteriorate to the point that he was virtually blind by 1890, when he then withdrew from the editorship of The World and was unable to return to its newsroom. Pulitzer also had severe depression, which was the partial cause of an illness that left him extremely sensitive to noise. Because of this, Pulitzer spent a great deal of the next portion of his life in soundproofed “vaults”, as he called them, “ aboard his yacht, Liberty, in the "Tower of Silence" at his vacation retreat in Bar Harbor, Maine, and at his New York mansion” (Topping).

Despite the fact that he was constantly travelling, trying in vain to find a cure for his illnesses, Pulitzer still kept a close eye on his newspapers and was very much involved in their editorial and business direction. He was so intent on keeping his communications with the newspapers secret that he actually kept a code book of approximately 20,000 names and terms.

The War, The Journal, and Yellow Journalism

1896 to 1898, Pulitzer found himself engaging in what has been described as a “bitter circulation battle” against William Randolph Hearst, who ran The New York Journal, during the years of Cuba’s rebellion against Spanish rule. The headlines and stories in both newspapers became increasingly sensationalized and inaccurate, coming to a head when the U.S. battleship Maine blew up and sank in Havana in February of 1898, and both The World and The Journal called for war against Spain.

After the Spanish-American War, Pulitzer withdrew from the battle with Hearst and what had become known as “yellow journalism” - the act of using sensationalized news, headlines, and cartoons to attract readers and increase circulation.

The Newsboys Strike of 1899

During the war, 200 publishers raised the price of a one-hundred paper bundle from 50 cents to 60 cents, which worked well for a time because so many newspapers were being sold due to the exciting headlines. Once the war ended, most papers brought their prices back down, but some--most notably The World and The Journal--did down, much to the anger of the newsboys who distributed those papers. The newsboys and girls (both groups referred to as newsies for the sake of consistency) declared a strike against the newspaper companies.

There were rallies in the name of the strike that drew more than 5,000 newsies from all over the city. Below is an excerpt from strike leader Kid Blink’s speech, quoted in an article by The New York Tribune:

“Friens and feller workers. Dis is a time which tries de hearts of men. Dis is de time when we’se got to stick together like glue…. We know wot we wants and we’ll git it even if we is blind.”

After two weeks, the newspapers and the newsies came to a compromise: the price of the papers would not decrease, but the newspaper companies would buy back any papers the newsies did not sell.

Columbia University

In 1903, Pulitzer donated $2,000,000 to Columbia University to help create the Columbia University School of Journalism. According to the State Historical Society of Missouri, “the school oversees the Pulitzer Prize, an award given to those who excel in journalism, literature, and music. The prize began with a donation from Pulitzer and was first awarded in 1917.”

“In May 1904, writing in The North American Review in support of his proposal for the founding of a school of journalism, Pulitzer summarized his credo: ‘Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations’“ (Topping).

Political Views

Pulitzer was active in politics in his twenties, and was elected to the Missouri state legislature in 1869. From 1871 to 1872, he helped to organize the Liberal Republican Party in Missouri, which nominated Horace Greeley to run for President in 1872. Greeley lost the election, the party collapsed, and Pulitzer became and remained a Democrat for the rest of his life.

According to the United States History website, “Pulitzer supported organized labor, attacked trusts and monopolies, and exposed political corruption. He was committed to raising the standards of the journalism profession.”

Joseph Pulitzer and Theodore Roosevelt

There isn’t much on what Pulitzer wrote about Roosevelt before the latter was elected governor (at least not where I have easy access to it), but there is still controversy an event in 1909, when The World exposed a fraudulent payment of $40 million by the US to the French Panama Canal Company. Roosevelt then accused Pulitzer of spreading false information, and the federal government indicted Pulitzer for criminally libeling Roosevelt and the banker J.P. Morgan, as quoted in an article in The Herald and News (quotes by Roosevelt):

“The real offender is Mr. Joseph Pulitzer, editor and proprietor of the World. While the criminal offence of which Mr. Pulitzer has been guilty is in the form of a libel upon individuals, the great injury done is in blackening the good name of the American people. It should not be left to a private citizen to sue Mr. Pulitzer for libel. He should be prosecuted for libel by the government authorities.

“In point of encouragement of iniquity, in point of infamy, of wrongdoing, there is nothing to choose between a public servant who betrays his trust, a public servant who is guilty of blackmail or theft or financial dishonesty or any kind, and a man guilty as Mr. Jos[sic] Pulitzer has been guilty in this instance. It is, therefore, a high national duty to bring to justice this villifier of the American people, this man who wantonly and wickedly and without one shadow of justification seeks to blackmail the character of reputable private citizens and to convict the government of his own country in the eyes of the civilized world of wrong doing of the basest and foulest kind, when he has not one shadow of justification of any sort or description for the charge he has made. The attorney general has under consideration the form in which the proceedings against Mr. Pulitzer shall be brought.”

However, the courts ultimately dismissed the indictments against Pulitzer, and he won an important journalistic victory concerning freedom of the press.

Death

Joseph Pulitzer died on October 29, 1911, aboard his yacht. The following is an excerpt from his obituary in the New York Times:

“CHARLESTON, S.C., Oct. 29.--Joseph Pulitzer, proprietor of The New York World and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, died aboard his yacht, the Liberty, in Charleston Harbor at 1:40 o'clock this afternoon. The immediate cause of Mr. Pulitzer's death was heart disease. Although he had been in poor health for some time, there was no suspicion on the part of those accompanying him that his condition was serious.

The change for the worse came at about 2 o'clock this morning, when he suffered an attack of severe pain. By daylight he appeared to be better and fell asleep soon after 10:30. He awoke at 1 o'clock and complained of pain in his heart. Soon he fell into a faint and expired at 1:40 o'clock.

Mrs. Pulitzer, who had been sent for, arrived from New York today, and reached the yacht shortly before her husband died. At his bedside also when the end came was his youngest son, Herbert, who has been cruising with his father.

Mr. Pulitzer's body will be taken north at 4:30 tomorrow afternoon on a special Pullman car. The funeral will be held at Woodlawn Cemetery in New York probably toward the end of this week.

Mr. Pulitzer's son, Joseph, Jr., is now on his way from St. Louis with his wife, and one of his daughters will come from Florida. Ralph Pulitzer, the eldest son, is on the way to Charleston, and will meet the train en route.

Up to an hour and a half before his death Mr. Pulitzer's mind remained perfectly clear. His German secretary had been reading to him an account of the reign of Louis the Eleventh of France, in whose career Mr. Pulitzer had always taken the liveliest interest. As the secretary neared the end of his chapter and came to the death of the French King, Mr. Pulitzer said to him:

‘Leise, ganz leise, ganz leise.’ (softly, quite softly.)

These were the last words he spoke.”

Joseph Pulitzer may have been the antagonist in Newsies, but he also definitely led a very interesting life, and it is safe to say that he and his newspaper had a great impact on journalism, and will continue to for years to come.

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Sources:

photo from the New World Encyclopedia

Biography of Joseph Pulitzer - The Pulitzer Prizes

Yellow journalism

Extra! Extra! Newsies Strike of 1899

Joseph Pulitzer - The State Historical Society of Missouri

Joseph Pulitzer - Jewish Virtual Library

Joseph Pulitzer - American newspaper publisher

Joseph Pulitzer - United States History

Obituary: New York Times

#let me know if y'all want more of these #newsies #joseph pulitzer #please read this i legit spent like 5 hours on it

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jewishshadowhunters · 5 years

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Judaism 101: Places of Worship

Terminology, Functions and Organization, and all you need to know about Jewish Places of Worship.

First: The Temple; what do Jews mean when they refer to “the Temple”

When Jewish people speak of The Temple, we speak of the place in Jerusalem that was the center of Jewish worship from the time of Solomon to its destruction by the Romans in 70 C.E.

This was the one and only place where sacrifices and certain other religious rituals were performed. It was partially destroyed at the time of the Babylonian Exile and rebuilt.

The rebuilt temple was known as the Second Temple. The famous "Wailing Wall" (known to Jews as the Western Wall or in Hebrew, the Kotel) is the remains of the western retaining wall of the hill that the Temple was built on. It is as close to the site of the original Sanctuary as Jews can go today. You can see a live picture of the Kotel and learn about it at KotelCam. The Temple was located on a platform above and behind this wall.

Today, the site of The Temple is occupied by the Dome of the Rock (a Muslim shrine for pilgrims) and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Dome of the Rock is the gold-domed building that figures prominently in most pictures of Jerusalem.

Traditional Jews believe that The Temple will be rebuilt when the Mashiach (Messiah) comes. They eagerly await that day and pray for it continually. In Jewish tradition, Jesus is NOT the messiah. I will talk another day about “Jews for Jesus” and “Messianic Jews” that are Christian sects appropriating Jewish culture and traditions and trying to convert Jews to Christianity.

Modern Jews, on the other hand, reject the idea of rebuilding the Temple and resuming sacrifices. They call their houses of prayer "temples," believing that such houses of worship are the only temples we need, the only temples we will ever have, and are equivalent to the Temple in Jerusalem. This idea is very offensive to some traditional Jews, which is why you should be very careful when using the word Temple to describe a Jewish place of worship.

Terminology

Throughout our posts, I have mainly used the term “synagogue” to refer to the Jewish house of worship. However, there are several other terms used to describe it, and those terms can tell a lot about the religious background of the Jewish person using them.

The Hebrew term is beit k'nesset (literally, House of Assembly), although you will rarely hear this term used in conversation in English.

The Orthodox and Hasidim typically use the word "shul," which is Yiddish. The word is derived from a German word meaning "school," and emphasizes the synagogue's role as a place of study.

Conservative Jews usually use the word "synagogue," which is actually a Greek translation of Beit K'nesset and means "place of assembly" (it's related to the word "synod").

Reform Jews use the word "temple," because they consider every one of their meeting places to be equivalent to, or a replacement for, The Temple in Jerusalem.

I, a Sephardic European Jew, have always used and always heard the word “synagogue” being used, with some rare exceptions.

The use of the word "temple" to describe modern houses of prayer offends some traditional Jews, because it trivializes the importance of The Temple. The word "shul," on the other hand, is unfamiliar to many modern Jews. When in doubt, the word "synagogue" is the best bet, because everyone knows what it means, and I've never known anyone to be offended by it.

Functions of a Synagogue

At a minimum, a synagogue is a beit tefilah, a house of prayer. It is the place where Jews come together for community prayer services. Jews can satisfy the obligations of daily prayer by praying anywhere; however, there are certain prayers that can only be said in the presence of a minyan (a quorum of 10 adult men), and tradition teaches that there is more merit to praying with a group than there is in praying alone. The sanctity of the synagogue for this purpose is second only to The Temple. In fact, in rabbinical literature, the synagogue is sometimes referred to as the "little Temple."

A synagogue is usually also a beit midrash, a house of study.

Contrary to popular belief, Jewish education does not end at the age of bar mitzvah. For the observant Jew, the study of sacred texts is a life-long task. Thus, a synagogue normally has a well-stocked library of sacred Jewish texts for members of the community to study. It is also the place where children receive their basic religious education.

Most synagogues also have a social hall for religious and non-religious activities. The synagogue often functions as a sort of town hall where matters of importance to the community can be discussed. In addition, the synagogue functions as a social welfare agency, collecting and dispensing money and other items for the aid of the poor and needy within the community.

Organizational Structure

Synagogues are, for the most part, independent community organizations.

In the United States, individual synagogues do not answer to any central authority. There are central organizations for the various movements of Judaism, and synagogues are often affiliated with these organizations, but these organizations have no real power over individual synagogues.

Synagogues are generally run by a board of directors composed of lay people. They manage and maintain the synagogue and its activities, and hire a rabbi and chazzan (cantor) for the community.

Yes, you read that right: Jewish clergy are employees of the synagogue, hired and fired by the lay members of the synagogue. Clergy are not provided by any central organization, as they are in some denominations of Christianity.

However, if a synagogue hires a rabbi or chazzan that is not acceptable to the central organization, they may lose membership in that central organization. For example, if an Orthodox synagogue hires a Reform rabbi, the synagogue will lose membership in the Orthodox Union. If a Conservative synagogue wishes to hire a Reconstructionist rabbi, it must first get permission from the USCJ.

The rabbi usually works with a ritual committee made up of lay members of the synagogue to set standards and procedures for the synagogue. Not surprisingly, there can be tension between the rabbi and the membership (his employers) if they do not have the same standards, for example if the membership wants to serve pepperoni pizza (not kosher) at a synagogue event.

It is worth noting that a synagogue can exist without a rabbi or a chazzan: religious services can be, and often are, conducted by lay people in whole or in part. It is not unusual for a synagogue to be without a rabbi, at least temporarily, and many synagogues, particularly smaller ones, have no chazzan. However, the rabbi and chazzan are valuable members of the community, providing leadership, guidance and education.

Synagogues do not pass around collection plates during services, as many churches do. This is largely because Jewish law prohibits carrying money on holidays and Shabbat.

Tzedakah (charitable donation) is routinely collected at weekday morning services, usually through a centrally-located pushke, but this money is usually given to charity, and not used for synagogue expenses. Instead, synagogues are financed through membership dues paid annually, through voluntary donations, through the purchase of reserved seats for services on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur(the holidays when the synagogue is most crowded), and through the purchase of various types of memorial plaques.

It is important to note, however, that you do not have to be a member of a synagogue in order to worship there. If you plan to worship at a synagogue regularly and you have the financial means, you should certainly pay your dues to cover your fair share of the synagogue's costs, but no synagogue checks membership cards at the door (except possibly on the High Holidays mentioned above, if there aren't enough seats for everyone).

Ritual items at the Synagogue

The portion of the synagogue where prayer services are performed is commonly called the sanctuary. Synagogues in the United States are generally designed so that the front of the sanctuary is on the side towards Jerusalem, which is the direction that we are supposed to face when reciting certain prayers.

Probably the most important feature of the sanctuary is the Ark, a cabinet or recession in the wall that holds the Torah scrolls. The Ark is also called the Aron Kodesh ("holy cabinet"), and I was once told that the term "ark" is an acrostic of "aron kodesh," although someone else told me that "ark" is just an old word for a chest. In any case, the word has no relation to Noah's Ark, which is the word "teyvat" in Hebrew.

The Ark is generally placed in the front of the room; that is, on the side towards Jerusalem. The Ark has doors as well as an inner curtain called a parokhet. This curtain is in imitation of the curtain in the Sanctuary in The Temple, and is named for it.

During certain prayers, the doors and/or curtain of the Ark may be opened or closed. Opening or closing the doors or curtain is performed by a member of the congregation, and is considered an honor. All congregants stand when the Ark is open.

In front of and slightly above the Ark, you will find the ner tamid, the Eternal Lamp. This lamp symbolizes the commandment to keep a light burning in the Tabernacle outside of the curtain surrounding the Ark of the Covenant. (Ex. 27:20-21).

In addition to the ner tamid, you may find a menorah (candelabrum) in many synagogues, symbolizing the menorah in the Temple. The menorah in the synagogue will generally have six or eight branches instead of the Temple menorah's seven, because exact duplication of the Temple's ritual items is improper.

In the center of the room or in the front you will find a pedestal called the bimah. The Torah scrolls are placed on the bimah when they are read. The bimah is also sometimes used as a podium for leading services. There is an additional, lower lectern in some synagogues called an amud.

In Orthodox synagogues, you will also find a separate section where the women sit. This may be on an upper floor balcony, or in the back of the room, or on the side of the room, separated from the men's section by a wall or curtain called a mechitzah. Men are not permitted to pray in the presence of women, because they are supposed to have their minds on their prayers, not on pretty girls.

That separation is also present in Sephardic synagogues, at least the ones I am aware of. The synagogue I attended at my grandparents’ as a child had women and children on a balcony.

I will discuss the Role of Women in Judaism in another post coming up later.

Non-Jews Visiting a Synagogue

Non-Jews are always welcome to attend services in a synagogue, so long as they behave as proper guests.

Proselytizing and "witnessing" to the congregation are not proper guest behavior. Would you walk into a stranger's house and criticize the decor? But we always welcome non-Jews who come to synagogue out of genuine curiosity, interest in the service or simply to join a friend in celebration of a Jewish event.

When going to a synagogue, you should dress as you would for church: nicely, formally, and modestly. A man should wear a yarmulke/kippah (skullcap) if Jewish men in the congregation do so; those are available at the entrance for those who do not have one.

In some synagogues, married women should also wear a head covering. A piece of lace sometimes called a "chapel hat" is generally provided for this purpose in synagogues where this is required.

Non-Jews should not, however, wear a tallit (prayer shawl) or tefillin, because these items are signs of our obligation to observe Jewish law.

Be careful to know what kind of synagogue you’re attending, and follow the sitting arrangements there. If women and men are separated, you should follow the rule of the congregation.

During services, non-Jews can follow along with the English, which is normally printed side-by-side with the Hebrew in the prayerbook. You may join in with as much or as little of the prayer service as you feel comfortable participating in. You may wish to review Jewish Liturgy before attending the service, to gain a better understanding of what is going on.

Non-Jews should stand whenever the Ark is open and when the Torah is carried to or from the Ark, as a sign of respect for the Torah and for G-d. At any other time where worshippers stand, non-Jews may stand or sit.

For trans people attending a synagogue:

I would recommend checking with your friend (if you’re attending with a friend), or the synagogue itself if you will be able to sit with your gender. It would avoid for you to be on the receiving end of transphobic ideas and experience some difficult times, and maybe dysphoria.

I cannot promise you that all synagogues will be open to trans people sitting with people of the same gender as they identify as.

Modern Judaism tends to accept trans people and allow them to wear kippot if they identify as men. It does also sometimes allow women to wear traditionally “male” garments like kippot, tefillin or tallit.

#judaism 101 #temple #synagogue #jewish life #original #mod A #resources

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ruminativerabbi · 5 years

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Defending Dr. King’s Legacy

It’s hard to imagine anyone arguing with the notion that freedom of the press will always be among the most basic features of life in any democratic state. And, indeed, ever since December 15, 1791, when the first ten amendments to the Constitution were formally adopted, this has been true with respect to our American republic not merely philosophically but legally as well. That, surely, is as it should be. But, just as freedom of the press exists specifically to permit the publication of even the least popular ideas, so do citizens have the parallel right—perhaps even the obligation—to respond vigorously to published essays rooted in ignorance, fantasy, and a prejudicial worldview. And it is with that thought in mind that I wish to respond to a truly outrageous op-end piece about Israel—and, more precisely, American support for Israel—published in the New York Times last Sunday in which the author appears to have no understanding of ancient or modern history, no sympathy for any of Israel’s security needs, no ability critically to evaluate even the most baseless Palestinian claims about the history of the land, and no interest even in getting the facts straight.

The author, Michelle Alexander, is formally employed as an opinion columnist at the Times. And her essay, published on Martin Luther King weekend, presented itself as the result of the author’s brave decision finally “to break the silence” regarding the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It’s hard to imagine what silence the author imagines she has boldly broken by daring to criticize Israel viciously and in print—just lately the number of opinion pieces hostile to Israel published by her own newspaper gives lie to that notion easily. Nor was there anything at all new or groundbreaking in her essay, which mostly just parroted the same propagandistic claptrap the enemies of Israel cite regularly to justify their anti-Israel stance. But most outrageous of all was the suggestion that she was somehow keeping faith with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy by finding the courage to speak out against Israel. That last point, then, is the first I will address.

I am personally too young to have been present in 1968 when, just a week before his horrific death, Dr. King came to the annual convention of the Rabbinical Assembly, my own professional organization, and spoke these words:

Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all of our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity and the right to use whatever sea lanes it needs. I see Israel, and never mind saying it, as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality.

Those were his final remarks about Israel, never revised or updated. How could he have? He was dead a week later! And, with his horrific end, his unqualified support for the right of Israel to defend itself against its enemies entered history as part of his formidable legacy, a legacy that touched on many areas of American domestic and foreign policy and not solely on the questions related to civil rights, non-violent protest, and race relations for which he is justifiably the most famous.

In her essay, Alexander broke no new ground. She seemed ignorant about Israel—about its history, its foreign policy, its long history of one-sided overtures to the Palestinians, its withdrawal from Gaza, and the restrained way it has responded not to dozens or hundreds but thousands of separate acts of terror aimed specifically at the civilian population over these last years alone—and neither did she seem to know, or care, how it was that Israel came to control the West Bank in the first place. But when boiled down to its basics, she seemed unable to move past her sense that the Jews who founded the State of Israel were colonialist interlopers from Europe who were intent on doing to the indigenous Arab population what the Belgians in that same era were attempting to do to the Congolese, the British to the Indians, and the French to the Algerians: seize other people’s land and then ignore the presence of those people other than when it came to subduing them and forcing them to serve their new masters. As I read it, that was the core of her argument.

The fact that the Palestinians have refused offer after offer to negotiate a fair, just peace seems to be unknown to her. Perhaps more to the point, the fact that there is nothing at all preventing the Palestinian leadership from doing what they should have done in 1947 and finally declaring a Palestinian State, then negotiating its borders with the neighbors and getting down to the business of nation building—this too seems not to have occurred to Alexander, who finds it courageous to support the notion of boycotting Israel (and who is paradoxically appalled by the publication of the names of individuals who support the BDS movement, although you would think she would be proud for their names—and her own name—to be known widely in that context). And she certainly has no interest in responding thoughtfully (or at all) to the inconvenient fact that the Arabs, hardly the indigenes, came to the Land of Israel in a series of invasions in the seventh century CE in the course of which they successfully wrested control of the land from its then Byzantine masters. (Nor was the Land of Israel the sole target of the Caliph Umar and his hordes back in the day: the Arab armies, true colonialists precisely in the style of the age of imperialism, also overran modern-day Turkey, Cyprus, Armenia, and most of Northern Africa.) On the other hand, there is every imaginable kind of evidence—literary, archeological, genetic, epigraphical, and numismatic—to support the argument that the ancestors of today’s Jewish people were present in the land in hoariest antiquity and have remained present, one way or the other, ever since. But of that truth, Alexander has nothing at all to say.

It’s true that there have been Arabs living in the Land of Israel for many centuries. But the detail Alexander passes quickly by is precisely that there is nothing at all preventing the outcome she clearly dreams to see: the establishment of a Palestinian state in the Middle East. If they will it to happen, then it will surely be no dream! (I’ve lost track of how many nations already recognize the non-existent State of Palestine as though it were an actual political entity.) Yet all the misery of the Palestinians, so Michelle Alexander, is exclusively the fault of Israel. The Jordanians, who ruled over the West Bank for nineteen years and kept the Palestinians interned in refugee camps, are not mentioned. The extraordinary acts of violence directed against Israel—the tens of thousands of missiles fired at civilian towns and villages within Israel from Gaza, for example—these too are left unreferenced. Perhaps the author considers each of those missiles to constitute a valid expression of political rage. But I would only begrudgingly respect her right such an opinion if she were to write similarly about the people who brought down the Twin Towers on 9/11—that they weren’t terrorists or violent miscreants, just brave martyrs making a searing political statement.

Alexander makes much of the fact that Martin Luther King apparently cancelled plans to travel to Israel after the Six Day War in 1967. She cites a phone call—but without saying to whom it was made or where recorded—according to which King based his decision on the fear that the Arab world would surely interpret his visit as an indication that he supported everything Israel did to win the war. That King had misgivings about this or that aspect of Israeli military or foreign policy is hardly a strong point—I myself harbor grave misgivings about many Israeli policies, including both domestic and non-domestic ones—but infinitely more worth citing are Reverend King’s remarks the following fall at Harvard. Some of the students with whom he was dining began to criticize Zionism itself as a political philosophy, to which criticism King responded by asserting that to repudiate the value or validity of Zionism as a valid political movement is, almost by definition, to embrace anti-Semitism: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism!” And King’s final statement about Israel, cited above, certainly reads clearly enough for me!

To take advantage of the freedom of the press guaranteed by the Constitution implies a certain level of responsibility to the facts. To be unaware that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 is possibly merely to be uninformed and lazy in one’s research. To write about the West Bank as though it were the site of a formerly independent Palestinian state now occupied by Israeli aggressors is either to be willfully biased or abysmally ill informed. But to write about Israeli checkpoints designed to keep terrorists from entering Israel without as much as nodding to the reason Israelis might reasonably and fully rationally fear a resurgence of violence directed specifically against the civilian population—that crosses the line from ignorance and poor preparation into the terrain of anti-Semitic rhetoric that finds the notion of Jewish people doing what it takes to defend themselves against their would-be murderers repulsive…or, at the very least, morally suspect.

I have been a subscriber to the New York Times forever. My parents were also subscribers. In my boyhood home, the phrase “the paper” invariably referenced The Times. (If my father meant The Daily Mirror or The Post, he said so. But “the” paper without further qualification was The Times.) Much of what I grew up knowing about the world and thinking about the world came directly from its editorial and, eventually, its op-ed pages; that the writing in “the” paper was presumed unbiased, informed, and honest went without saying. That, however, was then. And this is now. I haven’t cancelled my subscription. Not yet, at any rate. And I really do believe that people should be free to express even the least popular views in print without fear of reprisal. But when someone crosses the line from harsh criticism of Israel to propose that there is something reprehensible about Israel defending itself vigorously against its enemies—that is where I stop reading and try to calm down by looking at the obituaries or the crossword puzzle instead.

#Dr. Martin Luther King #Zionism #Israel #Michelle Alexander #The New York Times

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marcjampole · 6 years

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The real tragedy of separating children from their parents will come years from now when the kids suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

These past few days, I’ve been feeling a special empathy with the children whom the United States government ripped from their families at the border and sent to special facilities. My empathy comes from knowing in the most intimate way possible some of the emotional challenges that these children will face throughout their lives.

You see, I’ve been having one of my occasional bouts of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) caused by traumatic events I suffered during my childhood. My PTSD manifests itself as sudden feelings of unexplained anxiety or full-blown panic attacks in which I lose all control of my ability to focus, have hot and cold flashes at the same time, feel as if I’m going to burst out of my skin, and am unable to focus on anything. I’ll spend hours alternatively pacing and trying to remain still long enough to get some work done or sleep. I sometimes also experience sudden feelings of guilt, shame and anger, all typical of survivors of war, natural disasters, epidemics, famine, family suicide or childhood trauma.

My occasional symptoms are not the only manifestations of PTSD that inflict sufferers. Far from it. Here are some worse ones: Substance abuse, flashbacks, bad dreams, extreme depression, sleeplessness, loss of memory, sudden bouts of aggression, an inability to form relationships and a lack of trust in others, even loved ones. Everyone can experience these problems from time to time, but when they last more than a month and someone has been involved in a shooting war, raped, escaped a flood or lost their home, it’s a safe bet that they have PTSD.

Experts like to estimate the percentage of people who have had a specific trauma who end up suffering from PTSD, e.g. only (only!) 30% of Vietnam War veterans will display PSTD symptoms during their lives. Overall, the medical community believes that about 10% of the population will have PSTD, with the occurrence more common in women. I think all the official percentages of those experiencing traumatic conditions who end up with PSTD are low. Lots of people just suffer in silence, or they present symptoms that are poorly understood, e.g., the horde of men who came home from World War II and turned into distant, unemotional fathers and focused their waking hours solely on their careers and/or hid their fears and anxieties inside a bottle. As significant as underreporting is under-diagnosis: society has a vested interest in minimizing the psychic damage to those who fight wars; women who suffer sexual abuse; and the poor, usually minorities, who face food insecurity or have been moved out of their neighborhoods by urban planning or gentrification.

Whatever the unalloyed numbers are, only a fool or an ideologue would deny that a large percentage of the children torn from their families at border crossings will be scarred for life, unhappy, unable to achieve their potential, prone to depression or substance abuse, perhaps always feeling like a lonely outsider. These are human tragedies that didn’t have to occur.

But wait, the cynic among us, will say. These children were refugees from natural disasters or violence, so they already have undergone much trauma. These self-serving apologists seem to forget the special bond between children and their parents. Before the teen years, children’s lives revolve around their parents, who protect them, shelter them, feed them, love them, teach them basic values and provide them with models of human behavior. There’s a lot that parents do to protect children from trauma. They can do without so their children get what they need. They can turn a flight from terror into an adventure. They can articulate a rosy vision of the wonderful future in their new home. They can hug them and tell them they love them and that everything is going to turn out fine.

War, famine, terror, flooding, food insecurity, a sudden plunge into poverty—all children or young adults will handle any trauma better when part of a loving (or even not so loving) family when they face these evils.

But to do it without a parent? To be alone in a large cage inside a windowless building, being herded around by ominous-looking strangers, not knowing if and when you’ll ever see your family—the center of your life—again, not knowing where they are? Why were you torn away from them? When will you see them again? Why won’t they come get you? Don’t they love you anymore?

No matter how horrible a child’s life has been, it gets worse when it is taken from its family. Always.

The Trump Administration has tried an odious argument in favor of parent-child separations, stating that in many cases, the adults aren’t really the parents, but drug dealers who bought, borrowed or stole the children to make it easier to get through border control. Oh, sure there are. Just as there really was at least one woman on welfare who drove a late-model, fully-loaded Cadillac in the late 1970s. And I’m sure that Willie Horton really did commit a violent crime while on parole. But like Reagan’s welfare queen and Bush I’s paroled violent offender, the child who is part of an elaborate ploy to gain illegal admittance to the United States is a statistical anomaly. Studies show that there has never been very much welfare fraud and that most cons on parole say clean. And I’m quite certain that virtually all children who arrive at the border with adults are coming with their parents or another close family member, and not a drug dealer.

Reagan, Bush I and Trump all argued from anecdote and not from fact. The fact is that the United States started doing the “extreme vetting” Trump called for during the 2016 presidential campaign long before Trump demanded that we build a wall along the Mexican border. The proof of it is in the fact that immigrants—legal and otherwise—commit far fewer crimes per capita than native-born Americans. Under Clinton, Bush II and Obama, we developed a state apparatus which is quite good at keeping out bad actors. Breaking up families has not helped fight drug smuggling. It has done nothing but increase misery and assure that perhaps thousands of children will have emotional problems later in life. There was never any reason to automatically separate children from their parents at border control points.

Except of course, to assuage the base urge to be cruel to the downtrodden.

The cruelty of creating thousands of future PTSD sufferers is part of the greater cruelty of turning away refugees at the border. It reminds me of the cruelty with which southern sheriffs enforced Jim Crow laws or attacked Civil Rights protesters. It reminds me of the cruelty with which German soldiers treated Jews, white masters treated African-American slaves, and conquerors have treated the conquered throughout the ages. It’s as if the perpetrator of pain took—and takes—a special sadistic pleasure in hurting others.

In all cases, the underlying reason for the cruelty may have been humanity’s essential bloodthirstiness, but the excuse was that these were lesser people or not people at all—animals as Trump sometimes calls non-European immigrants.

But human beings are not animals. Those who think that some people are animals or no better than animals or want to treat them as animals are despicable human beings. The real deplorables, to take a phrase from the winner of the 2016 presidential popular vote.

American policy at home and abroad should not be to create more victims of PSTD, but to reduce the circumstances that lead to this psychic ailment.

#border #family separation

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hadarmarkin · 6 years

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Encountering a tiger by the Well: Stories from Rural Yemenite Communities

Now comes the story of a community that is so distinct and fascinating that it deserves its own blog. The Yemenite Jewish community is large in size and presence, and historically and culturally different from the general Sephardic diaspora. However, for various reasons, mainly the human need to classify, Yemenite Jews are often included under the Sephardic umbrella.

Living in a fairly remote location shaped the distinct folklore, liturgy and cuisine (more on that later) of the Yemenite community. And although Yemenite Jews were not detached from the major events happening in the Jewish world, local factors such as Yemen’s history, diverse terrain (jungle, seaside or dessert) and wildlife were the most influential. Another striking characteristic of the Yemenite Jewry is its demography: the majority of Yemenite Jews resided in villages scattered around the land - often one or two families per village. However, despite being surrounded by a (frequently hostile) Muslim majority, Yemenite Jews maintained a very observant Jewish lifestyle. A book that portrays this arduous and yet unique existence in the first half of the twentieth century will be reviewed later in this post entry. But first, here is a brief overview of the Yemeni community.

Historical Glance: From Queen Sheba to Zionist Aspirations

Jewish Monarchy in Late Antiquity

Yemen’s current status as a poor and divided nation obscures the country’s glorious past as an ancient civilization known as the fertile oasis of the Arabian Peninsula. Jews immigrated to this promising land fairly early. Biblical texts (Book of Ezra) indicate a Jewish settlement in Yemen circa the destruction of the First Temple (587 BCE). Another legend says that Yemeni tribes converted to Judaism after the Queen of Sheba's visit to King Solomon.Yet, historians assert that the Jewish immigration took place later, starting in the second century CE. Regardless of this dispute, all sides consent that Jews were a key political and economic force during the pre-Islamic era.

A prime example of their power occurred in the 6thcentury when the kingdom’s aristocracy converted to Judaism. Some sources suggest that the king himself, Joseph Dhu Nuwas,was zealous for Judaism.According to these sources, Dhu Nuwas sought to convert Yemeni Christians to Judaism, but they refused to renounce Christianity. What exactly happened afterwards remains murky given the conflicting accounts. Yet, it appears that Dhu Nuwas died as part of the religious rivalries. His death ended the Jewish hegemony in Yemen.

Maimonides and Messianic Aspirations

The 7thcentury Muslim conquest of Yemen marked a negative shift in the history of the Jews in Yemen. Historical knowledge about these early stages of the Muslim reign in Yemen is limited, but several sources from the Cairo Geniza indicate that the Jewish community was in a plight. The new Sharia law defined Jews as Dhimmis- or second class citizens. In essence, Jews were granted with freedom of worship but were subjected to additional tax and other (often humiliating) restrictions.

Although Islamic law categorized Jews as a protected minority, Jews suffered ongoing persecution under the various Muslim rulers. From the 10thcentury on, the living conditions of Yemeni Jews deteriorated significantly as the relatively tolerant Sunni sovereign was overthrown by the radical Zaidis (a Shia sect) dynasty. In the 1160s, the local ruler Iben Mahdi forced Jews to convert to Islam. As a result, a false prophet arose, proclaiming the amalgamation of Judaism and Mohammedanism. This messianic revival evoked the concern of Maimonides. The latter addressed the Jews of Yemen in an epistle, entitled Iggeret Teman,in which he urged them to remain faithful to their religion. The intervention of a scholar of that scale had a great impact on the Jews of Yemen; the false prophet was condemned, and thename of Maimonides was added to the Yemenite version of the Ḳaddish prayer. The defeat of Iben Mahdi in battle in 1173 and the conquest of Yemen by the brother of Saladin brought relief to Jewish community and those who had been forced to convert reverted to Judaism. Around this time, two sub groups were formed among the local community: theShami, who partly assimilated into the Sephardic culture and liturgy; and the Baladi, who followed Maimonides, especially the rules in his “Mishneh Torah”. Both sub groups fostered the mysticism prominent in Sephardic traditions.

Above: Maimonides

The Modern Era: Zionism as the New Messianism

Fasting forward to modernity, the 19thcentury brought dramatic change in the life of the Yemenite community. At this time, the population was divided between the minority, who lived in urban-gated centers (such as, Sana and Aden), and those who resided in remote villages surrounded by Muslim neighbors. Commerce and craftsmanship (including carpenters and blacksmith) were common trades. Regardless of location and profession, the life of the average man was rough. The community was subjected to the jurisdiction of the local Imam (Muslim Zaidileader), and suffered from endless restrictions, limiting their transportation and monetary transactions.

The most notorious act enforced by the Zaidi rulers was the Orphan’s decree, which mandated the Zaidi government to take under its protection and to educate in Islamic ways anyJewish child whose parents had died when he or she was a minor. Accounts from this period portray numerous cases of abduction and forced conversion of children. As a measure of protection, child marriage became increasingly prevalent. Another consequence of this plight was yet again intense messianism, including three incidents of pseudo-messiahs in the second half of the 19thcentury.

Under these circumstances, Zionist ideology spread by emissaries from Palestine found a good nesting ground. During the period from 1881 to 1914, about 10% of the Yemeni Jews immigrated to Palestine (the rest immigrated in the late 1940’s and 1950’s). Many died during the dangerous journey, and those who made it were recruited to work as cheap labor in the new Zionist settlements. They were housed in barns and provided with meager food and water. The exploitation of Yemenite Jews reveals an ugly chapter in the history of the early Zionist history. This tragedy opened the path to even more horrifying cases of discrimination, and mainly to the explosive affair of the possible abduction of Yemenite babies and toddlersin 1950’s Israel. According to this controversial case, the abducted Yemeni children were sold or given to Ashkenazi families, mainly to Holocaust survivors who could not have kids. The State of Israel firmly denies all allegations.

Above: Yemeni workers in Kinneret

Sapri Tama Tamimaby Sarit Gradwohl

In the context of the turmoil of the first half of the 20thcentury, the book Sapri Tama Tamimaby Sarit Gradwohl offers a fascinating lens to explore the world of rural Yemenite Jews and their uneasy immigration process to Israel. Gradwohl recorded the personal accounts of her grandparents (mainly her grandma) and weaved them into a captivating novel. Gradwohl’s family memoire begins in a small isolated village in Yemen. Her grandmother, Hamama, is then a young child curious about the world. Through her childhood memories, we discover the rough existence, including constant harassments by Yemenite soldiers, the limited food and the presence of wildlife. One of the saddest stories in the book is the death of Hamama’s younger sister from a heart failure after encountering a tiger by a well.

As Hamama matures she falls in love with her cousin, Hassan, a resourceful and fervent Zionist. Soon after their marriage, they embark on the treacherous journey to Israel, then mandatory Palestine. In 1942, they finally made it to the Promised Land, only to be placed in a transit camp by Haifa. Then begins their second adventure. They face many challenges, including living in tents for several years and suffering from prejudice by the Ashkenazi population. In addition, coming from traditional households, they are also bewildered by secular Judaism and cannot grasp how the Kibbutznikim and the Zionist leadership strayed so far from Jewish law. Yet, despite the barriers and through hard work and perseverance, Hamama and Hassan built a happy life together with a strong sense of family.

Last November, I had the pleasure to meet with Sarit Gradwohl in her house in Skokie. In our fascinating conversation, Gradwohl shared additional insights about her grandparents’ immigration to Israel. From her perspective, they acknowledge that they were mistreated in certain times, but they never labeled these experiences as discrimination nor did they harbored resentment towards the State of Israel. They remained, she proclaimed, innocent in heart and faithful to their core values: the love for Judaism and the land of Israel.

Above: Gradwhol and her Grandfather

Lasis-A Dish Worth Fainting

When I met with Gradwohl, we talked more about her grandma’s special delicacies, particularly Asid Va’zom, a dairy soup/ porridge eaten at the end of Yom Kippur, and her aromatic lentil soup. She also told me about her grandma’s Jachnun making techniques. This dense pastry dish became a Shabbat breakfast staple in Israel, served savory with mashed tomato and hardboiled egg or sweet with honey. Some buy it frozen, but it is best homemade cooked overnight on the Plata (the Shabbat hot plate).

Despite the popularity of doughy Yemeni dishes, such as Jachnun and Malawach,Gradwohl debunked the common misconception in Israel that the key ingredient in Yemeni food is starch. Backed with academic research, Gradwohl argued that traditional Yemeni cuisine is mainly composed of fish, legume and grain dishes. The use of puff pastry type dough was a later Turkish influence. Gradwohl also added that Yemenite families did not suffer as much as Ashkenazi families during the austerity period in 1950’s Israel, in which eggs and dairy products were rationed. Since Yemenite women were skilled in making beans and lentils dishes, they were able to create nourishing meals using simple plant based ingredients.

Above: Jachnun

An example of a basic legume dish is the Lasis, a slow cooked bean dish served on Shabbat. One of the most endearing stories in the book is the anecdote about little Hamama marching for hours with a jug of Lasis on her head. When she finally arrives home, her siblings falsely accuse her of stealing the favorite dish. Infuriated she runs away outside of the village, where she is nearly attacked by monkeys. Overly excited she runs back home, and receives the Michva treatment- a tribal remedy used to calm the agitated. After the hot iron rod is placed on her head, she faints.

Lasis might not be a reason for a family drama, but it is definitely worth making at home. It is easy to make, satisfying and delicious. Below, is a recipe recommended by Gradwohl. Slow cooking the beans overnight definitely helps to accentuate the flavor.

Lasis

Ingredients

2 cups - red kidney beans

0.5 tsp - baking soda

Salt

water

4 hard-boiled eggs

Cumin

Schug(Yemeni hot sauce)/ Jalapeno based hot sauce

Making

1. Soak beans overnight with baking soda

2. Drain and rinse beans

3. Place beans in slow cooker or pot with hard-boiled eggs and salt, cover with water and let it cook very slowly

4. Serve with a generous sprinkle of cumin and drizzle some chug

Above: Lasis in the making

The Great Yemeni Cultural Contribution

This blog entry would not be complete without paying tribute to the rich cultural contribution made by Yemeni Jews to Israeli society. From the colorful Hinna (pre wedding) celebrations to Yemenite folk dancing, Yemenite Jews deeply influenced mainstream Israeli culture and particularly Israeli music. In the sea of great artists, I would like to highlight three particularly inspiring ones.

Zohar Argov (1955-1987)

In his short sad life Zohar Argov redefined the Israeli music scene. His distinct sound brought the Yemeni Piyutim (liturgical chants) from the synagogue into the ears of every Israeli, and created the genre widely known today as Muzika Mizrachit (Oriental Music). Initially, his music was turned down by the local radio stations, but through pirate cassettes and unforgettable performances Argov became a legend during his lifetime. Despite the catchy tunes, Argov’s lyric are often somber, addressing drug addiction and loneliness. Fame did not cure his mental issues, and Argov put an end to his life at age 32. However, his legacy is long lived by many Israeli musicians today, who still refer to him as HaMelech (the King). Below is his most famous hit- Ha’Pereach Be’Gani, a must have in every Israeli wedding to bring people onto the dance floor.

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Ofra Haza (1959-2000)

Ofra Haza was one of the most popular singers in Israel in all times. Having a sweet tender voice and being extremely beautiful, it was hard not to be a fan. During the 1980’s and 1990’s she was everywhere: kids TV shows, movies, national ceremonies and on teenagers walls. In 1983, she touched the entire Israeli nation when she performed the song Chai (Alive) in the Eurovision Song Contest in Munich Germany, only 30 kilometers from the Dachau Concentration Camp. Haza was also a renowned artist outside of Israel, taking a lead role in the Ethnic Pop wave in 1980’s Europe. Her breakthrough as an international singer happened in 1984 after she released the album Shirei Teiman (Songs of Yemen), which consisted of songs she had heard in childhood, mixing authentic Middle Eastern percussion with dance bit rhythms. Throughout her career, she earned many platinum and gold discs and was nominated for the Grammy award. Like Argov, Haza died young at, at the age of 41, of AIDS - related pneumonia

Below is the song Im Nin’alu a prime example of her ability to combine an ancient liturgical poem with a catchy tune. The beautiful video clip was set to emulate the landscape of Yemen.

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Adi Keissar (born 1980)

Adjectives, such as provocative, uncompromising and straightforward, do not begin to describe the pungent poet Adi Keissar. Born and raised in Jerusalem, Keissar is using her poetry to criticize Israel social illnesses, and to spread her own agenda of prompting the culture and civic rights of Mizrahi Jews. Keissar strongly objects to the elitist reputation of poetry, and therefore she established the Ars-Poetica club, where poets from different walks of life come to share their words. Besides poetry, the Ars-Poetica club offers a fun celebration of Mizrahi culture, including belly dancing performances and Sephardic food banquet. Because of her sharp tongue and natural charisma, Keissar made poetry relevant again. People memorize her poems by heart, and she inspired so many others to follow her path. Below is a video clip of one of her inspiring poems.

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