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a2000yearjourney · 3 years

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Rome 49BC: Order from Chaos

Two thousand years ago, at the dawn of the first century, the world was ruled from Rome. Rome was in turmoil. Civil war had engulfed the empire’s capital city. Dictators seized power, and the Roman future seemed bleak. But from the chaos, the Roman Empire would rise stronger and more dazzling than ever before. Within a few short years, it would stretch from Britain, across Europe, to southern Egypt, from North Africa around the Mediterranean, to the Middle East. It would embrace hundreds of languages and religions and would till those diverse cultures into a rich soil, from which western civilizations would grow. Rome would become the world’s first and most enduring super power, spanning continents. The glory days of Rome were studded with names that reach out to us across two millennia: Ovid and Nero, Seneca and Caligula. But the story of Rome is more than the story of famous men. Millions of less familiar figures struck different chords in the symphony of empire. People such as the wealthy benefactor, Umachia. The rebel queen, Boudicca, and countless uncelebrated soldiers and slaves, senators and peasants.

Above them all, is this man, Caesar Augustus. This was the emperor who set the tone for the astonishing renaissance of Rome.

Part one of my history tells the story of Augustus, (the great-grandfather of my 51st great granduncle) and his people, the men and women who wrested order from chaos. They shaped the greatest empire the world has ever seen and launched the Roman Empire in the first century.

Two thousand years after Egypt’s pharaoh’s reigned supreme, four hundred years after the flowering of Greek culture, three hundred years after Alexander the great - a boy named Octavian was born in a small Italian town. The child would one day be called Augustus, and his birth, one ancient historian tells us, would be gilded by legend. His father, leading an army through distant lands, went to a sacred grove, seeking prophecy on the boy’s future. When wine was poured on the altar, flames shot up to heaven. The signs were heard only once before, by Alexander the Great. The priest declared that Augustus would be ruler of the world.

Suetonius tells the story. Writing at the turn of the first century, he based his biography on eyewitness accounts, on common gossip and on research conducted as imperial librarian. In truth, he writes that the prospects of young Augustus were far from grand. The boy was sickly, with few connections. His family were country people. His father was the first in their line to join the Senate. But worse - Augustus was born into dangerous times. Civil war had flared for decades. Feuding nobles fought to gain power for themselves. And Rome’s traditions of open government were often trampled underfoot. So too, were innocent bystanders. When Augustus was just four years old, his father suddenly died. Without a male mentor, the boy’s future looked bleak. But in 49 BC, when he was thirteen, Augustus’ fortunes took a dramatic turn. For in that year, his great uncle, Julius Caesar, gained the upper hand on the battlefield. Leading an army across the Rubicon River, Caesar declared himself master of Rome and ruler of an empire still aspiring to greatness. At the time of Julius Caesar, the Roman Empire was a bit like a boy who has reached six feet tall, yet he’s only fourteen or fifteen years old. He’s not yet a man. The externals of empire were there - the armies were there. The Romans governed most of the coast of the Mediterranean, with the exception of Egypt. However, they had not yet learned to bring that into a functioning organism. The past decades of internal fighting had weakened the empire. Northern tribes harried the borders. Enemies were confronting Rome in the east. And the province of Spain threatened to break free. Julius Caesar moved quickly to bolster the frontiers, and his own legacy. Caesar had no heir, so when Augustus completed a dangerous mission, Caesar adopted the teenager in his will. Karl Galinsky, Professor of Classics, University of Texas, Austin:

“Augustus realized this was a tremendous opportunity. Mind you, he had no military training, but he was the heir of the greatest political figure that was under the Roman sky at that time - and he cashed in on it.”

It was a heady opportunity for Augustus, but also a perilous challenge. For in 44 BC, foreigners were not the only threat to stability. There were enemies within Caesar’s small circle of advisors. They murdered Caesar at a meeting of the Senate. For the second time in his life, Augustus lost a father. Now, on the verge of manhood, he thrust himself into the maelstrom of Roman politics. Keith Bradley, Professor of Greek and Roman Studies, University of Victoria:

“The death of Julius Caesar was not just a turning point in Augustus’ life, it was a turning point in world history. Augustus was extremely young at this time, only in his nineteenth year. Yet when he knew that he had been made Caesar’s heir, he immediately took up the political legacy of Caesar. He entered the mainstream of Roman politics. He didn’t hesitate to try to avenge his father. That meant, of course, stepping onto the stage of politics, raising an army and immersing himself in a contest for supreme political power in Rome.”

He displayed brutality against enemy prisoners. Once, when a father and son were begging for their lives, he ordered that they should draw lots to determine which one should be executed. The father offered himself and was killed. Because of this, the son committed suicide. Augustus watched them both die. Suetonius describes the crisis as “trial by fire” and Augustus didn’t flinch from the task. He formed a strategic alliance with Marc Antony, a powerful general, who also wanted supremacy. Together they massacred their enemies in the capital. Then they pursued their rivals to the shores of Greece, where they fought and won two of the bloodiest battles in Roman history. When the carnage ended, the empire was theirs. Augustus and Antony divided the spoils of war. Augustus remained in Rome. But Antony took control of Egypt, a land not formally joined to Rome, but firmly under the empire’s command. There, he joined forces with Egypt’s queen. Ancient historians, like Cassius Dio, believed that was a fateful move. When Antony fell deeply in love with his new ally, many feared the ambitious queen was scheming to rule Rome herself. Her name was Cleopatra. Cleopatra’s brazen desire for passion and wealth was insatiable. By love, she had made herself queen of Egypt. But she failed in her goal to become queen of the Romans. Judith P. Hallett, Professor of Classics, University of Maryland, College Park:

“Cleopatra did not enjoy a good press in Rome. What really irritated people about Cleopatra was that she was a powerful woman from the east, and from a very wealthy country with a monarchic system of government. She therefore symbolized lack of moderation, lack of control, frenzied fury, everything that Rome tried not to be. Cleopatra and Antony were cast as leaders of the evil empire.” Antony’s alliance with Augustus withered. But Augustus struck first. The poet, Virgil, later cast the battle as an epic struggle of east against west. “Standing high on the stern, Augustus leads the Italians into battle. Carrying with him the bite of the Senate and the people. Opposing him, with barbarian wealth, is Antony, suited for battle. He carries with him the powers of the orient. And to the scandal of all, his Egyptian wife, their monstrous divinities raised weapons against our noble, Roman gods.” Three quarters of the Egyptian fleet was destroyed. Anthony and Cleopatra committed suicide - and the land of the pharaohs was formally annexed to the Roman Empire. Judith Hallet:

“The annexation of Egypt for Augustus was immensely important. It was the equivalent of Hitler’s troops marching through the streets of Paris. Here was a wealthy country that was going to be providing food, that was going to be providing land. But above all, it was a country of great cultural prestige, and once Rome had Egypt as part of its empire, they had truly arrived.”

A Voice:

“There is nothing that man can wish from the gods, nothing the gods can do for men which Augustus, when he returned to the city, did not do for the public, the Roman people, and the entire world. Civil wars were finished - foreign wars ended and everywhere the fury of arms was put to rest.” Upon Augustus’ return to a war torn Rome in 29 BC, the city went wild with enthusiasm. The triumphant general vowed to restore peace and security. It was a promise he would keep. The victory of Augustus launched a period of stunning cultural vitality, of religious renewal and of economic well being that spread throughout the empire. It would be called the ‘Pax Romana’ - the peace of Rome. To many, it marked the return of Rome’s mythic and glorious past. But Augustus himself would never return to the past. He was now a hardened thirty-two-year-old man - the sole ruler of the Greco-Roman world, Rome’s first emperor. Victory had been costly, but the greatest challenge still lay ahead, for to avoid the fate of Julius Caesar, Augustus must disarm the Senate and charm the masses. He must do better than win the war. He must win the peace. That challenge would occupy the rest of his life. A Voice:

“Let me step forward, clear my throat, and announce that I am a native of Soula, a few days’ journey eastward from Rome.” While Augustus fought his way to the pinnacle of power, a boy named Ovid was coming of age under less demanding circumstances. Ovid Speaks:

“I was the second son, a year to the day younger than my brother. We always had two cakes on the birthday we shared, and were close in other ways as well. We studied together, and then went up to Rome to seek our fortunes. I used to waste my time trying to write verses. My father called it waste. He disapproved of any pursuit where you could not turn a decent living, and always used to say, ‘Homer died poor.’” Ovid came from the same stock as Augustus. They were both landed gentries, and like Augustus, the young man found his identity and his ambitions moulded by his demanding family.

Ovid:

“I tried to give up poetry, to stick to prose on serious subjects, but frivolous minds like mine attract frivolous inspirations, some too good not to fool with. I kept returning to my bad habits, secretive and ashamed. I couldn’t help it, I felt like an impostor in serious matters, but I owed it to my father and my brother to try to do my duty.” By Roman law, a father wielded absolute control over his children. Those who displeased him could be disowned, sold into slavery or even killed. The young Ovid tried to meet his father’s expectations. He married, studied law - but the strain proved unendurable. Miserable, Ovid and a friend set out on a journey of self-discovery. Ovid:

“We toured the magnificent cities of Asia. We watched the flames of Mount Etna light up the heavens. We ploughed the waves in a painted ship, and also travelled by wagon. Often the roads seemed short, as we were lost in conversation. When we walked, our words outnumbered our steps - and we had too much to say, even for the long evenings of supper.” Eighteen months later, Ovid settled in Rome, older and more self-confident than before. He resolved to become a poet. He cultivated new friends in Roman literary circles, and soon, Ovid made a name for himself as Rome’s reigning poet - of stolen kisses. Ovid:

“So your husband is coming to this dinner party? I hope he gags on his food. Listen - and learn what you must do. When he settles on his couch to eat, go to him with a straight face. Look modest and lie back beside him. But secretly touch me with your foot. Don’t let him drape his arms around your neck, don’t rest your gentle head against his chest - don’t welcome his fingers to your lap or to your eager nipples. Most of all, no kissing. When dinner is done, your husband will close the bedroom door. But whatever the night shall bring, tell me tomorrow - you refused.”

Keith Bradley:

“It’s a mistake to think that Ovid’s poetry can be read very literally in purely autobiographical terms. That wouldn’t be true, I think, of any poetry from antiquity. But at the same time, Ovid is writing of subjects of which he has some sort of experience and he certainly, through the love poetry, opens up a world that is very different in tone and quality from the official atmosphere.”

While Ovid bloomed as a man of words, the new emperor thrived as a man of action. He rebuilt Rome - and his own family. Divorcing his wife, Augustus married his heavily pregnant mistress - Livia. The move raised eyebrows and hackles, as love was not the only motive. Although Augustus shunned the trappings of absolute power, many suspected he was building a dynasty - a line of heirs to rule Rome for generations to come. Augustus knew it was a dangerous move. He knew that Julius Caesar had been murdered for appearing as a king. Augustus would not make the same mistake. He relinquished high office and struck a delicate balance between fact and fiction.

Augustus writes:

“Having, by universal consent, acquired control of all affairs, I transferred government to the Senate and the people of Rome.” Judith Hallet:

“Augustus was a very cagey political leader because he pretended to be restoring all of these republican political traditions. In fact, what he was running was a full-fledged dynastic monarchy.” A Voice:

“Augustus conquered Cantabria, Aquitania, Pannonia, Dalmatia and all of Illyricum, as well as Raetia.” Augustus not only changed the empire, he expanded it. Egypt had been added early in his career. Soon, Northern Spain was joined. Augustus drove across Europe, into Germany, and he united east and west by adding modern Hungary, Austria, the Balkans and central Turkey. These victories employed Roman soldiers and senators and offered welcome distractions to the city’s poor. When Augustus wasn’t staging chariot races or gladiator shows, he displayed exotic animals, the quarry of Rome’s far-flung empire. A rhinoceros appeared in the arena, Asian tigers in the theatre and a giant serpent in the forum.

Karl Galinsky:

“One key constituency for Augustus was the plebeian population of Rome, and that is basically the city mob. You have several hundred thousand folks here who have no jobs, and to put it very simply, who need to be kept off the streets, and kept from making trouble, because it’s a very volatile, combustible mixture.” The volatile mix that made up Rome stayed quiet for the first four years of Augustus’ rule. Then, in 23 BC, events took a critical turn. Cassius Dio writes that a series of disasters convinced the people that Augustus needed not less power, but more. “The city was flooded by the over flowing river and many things were struck by lightning. Then a plague passed through Italy and no one could work the land. The Romans thought these misfortunes were caused because Augustus had relinquished his office. They wished to appoint him dictator. A mob barricaded the Senate inside its building and threatening to burn them alive, forced the Senate to vote Augustus absolute ruler.” The demands threatened to unsettle the emperor’s precarious political balance. Augustus fell to his knees before the riders. He tore his toga and beat his chest. He promised the mob that he would personally take control of the grain supply. But Augustus refused to be called a dictator. The crowd disbanded, but the lesson was clear. Augustus was riding a tiger. To keep order on the frontiers, the streets and the Senate was a super human task. Super human skills were needed. Luckily for Rome, Augustus had them. Karl Galinsky:

“Then something very fortuitous happens: Halley’s Comet shows up and the word is given out by Augustus that this is the soul of Julius Caesar ascending into heaven. So from this point on he is called Julius Caesar the divine. Politically it became very potent, because what does Augustus do at this point? On all his coinage on all his writings, on all his symbols, whatever, he puts on the words “DF”, meaning Son of the Divine. And it’s really quite an asset in politics to be the Son of the Divine. There are modern politicians I think would be very jealous of being able to do that.”

Augustus enhanced his pious new identity with stories of his lean habits. It was said that he slept in a modest house, and slept on a low bed, that he ate common foods, coarse bread, common cheese, and sometimes, even less.

Augustus:

“My dear Tiberius, not even a Jew observes a fast as diligently on the Sabbath as I have today. I ate nothing until the early hours of evening when I nibbled two bites before my rub down.”

Moral change, Augustus began to argue, was the enemy of Rome. He believed that its future ran through its past, through the restoration of the values he thought had first made Rome great. Augustus:

“I renewed many traditions which were fading in our age. I restored eighty-two temples of the gods, neglecting none that required repair at the time.” In public, Augustus led by example. He sacrificed animals in traditional rituals and he re-established traditional social rules. New laws assigned theatre seats by social rank. Women were confined to the back rows. Adultery was outlawed; marriage and children were encouraged. To many, Roman society had recovered its true course. The son of a god was building an empire for the ages. Augustus:

“Who can find words to adequately describe the advancements of these years? Authority has been returned to the government, majesty to the Senate, and influence to the courts. Protests in the theatre have been stopped, integrity is honored, depravity is punished.” But amid the applause, there were also cries of protest. The emperor’s new traditional values rankled friends and enemies alike. It even rankled his own daughter, Julia. Long a pawn of family politics, Julia assumed that she was exempt from her father’s stringent views. She was wrong. And in the coming years, Augustus, son of a god, would have to confront Augustus the father.

“If there is anyone here who is a novice in the art of love, let him read my book. With study, he will love like a professional.” As the emperor, Augustus firmly charted a course of moral rigor. The poet Ovid staked out different ground. He was now Rome’s most famous living poet, and his boldness grew in step with his reputation. Having all but exhausted the conventions of love poetry, he decided to stretch them. He began composing a manual of practical tips on adultery.

Ovid writes:

“Step one - stroll under a shady colonnade. Don’t miss the shrine of Adonis, but the theatre is your best hunting ground. There you will find women to satisfy any desire, just as ants come and go, so the cultured ladies swarm to the games. They come for the show - and to make a show of themselves. There are so many I often reel from the choice.” Many Romans yearned to follow their emperor back to the good old days of stern Roman virtue. But others reveled in the promises of Rome’s newfound peace. Ovid was one of them. To the youthful poet, old limits seemed meaningless. “Do not doubt you can have any girl you wish. Some give in, others resist but all love to be propositioned. And even if you fail, rejection doesn’t hurt. Why should you fail? Women always welcome pleasure and find novelty exciting.” Indeed, the earlier civil wars had unleashed enormous social change. Some women had gained political clout, new rights, and new freedoms. Tradition holds that one such woman was Julia, the emperor’s only child.

“Julia had a love of letters and was well educated - a given in that family. She also had a gentle nature and no cruel intentions. Together these brought her great esteem as a woman.”

Julia didn’t reject traditional values wholesale. She had long endured her father’s overbearing control. She dutifully married three times to further his dynastic ambitions, and she bore five children. Her two boys, Guyus and Luccius were cherished by Augustus as probable heirs. But like Ovid, Julia expected more from the peace. She was clever and vivacious, and she had an irreverent tongue that cut across the grain of Roman convention. Her legendary wit was passed through the centuries by a late Roman writer called Macrobius.

Macrobius writes:

“Several times her father ordered her in a manner both doting and scolding to moderate her lavish clothes and keep less mischievous company. Once he saw her in a revealing dress. He disapproved but held his tongue. The next day, in a different dress, she embraced her father with modesty. He could not contain his joy and said, ‘Now isn’t this dress more suited to the daughter of Augustus?’ Julia retorted, ‘Today I am dressed for my father’s eyes. Yesterday I dressed for my husband.’

But apparently Julia’s charms were not reserved for her husband alone. The emperor’s daughter took many lovers.

Judith Hallet:

“Her dalliances were so well known that people were actually surprised when her children resembled her second husband, who was the father of her five children. She wittily replied, “Well that’s because I never take on a passenger unless I already have a full cargo.” The meaning here is that she waited until she was already pregnant before undertaking these dalliances, so concerned was she to protect the bloodlines of these offspring.“

Julia, like Ovid, was a testament to her times. But neither of them were average Romans. The life they represented shocked traditional society to the core. And as Julia entered her thirty-eighth year, crisis loom

"In that year, a scandal broke out in the emperor’s own home. It was shameful to discuss, horrible to remember

One Roman soldier voiced deep revulsion at Julia’s extraordinary self-indulgence. "Julia, ignoring her father Augustus, did everything which is shameful for a woman to do, whether through extravagance or lust. She counted her sins as though counting her blessings, and asserted her freedom to ignore the laws of decency.” Julia’s behavior erupted into a full-blown political crisis, which was marked by over-blown claims. The emperor’s daughter was rumored to hold nightly revels in Rome’s public square. She was said to barter sexual favors from the podium where her father addressed the people. When the gossip reached Augustus, the emperor flew into a violent rage. He refused to see visitors. Upon emerging, Suetonius reports, he publicly denounced his only child. “He wrote a letter, advising the Senate of her misbehavior, but was absent when it was read. He secluded himself out of shame, and even considered a death sentence for his daughter. He grew more obstinate, when the Roman people came to him several times, begging for her sake. He cursed the crowd that they should have such daughters and such wives.” As a father, Augustus could not abide Julia’s behavior. As an emperor, he could not tolerate the embarrassment. Augustus banished Julia for the rest of her life. “I was going to pass over the ways a clever girl might elude a husband or a watchful guard. But since you need help - here is my advice.” Soon after Julia’s exile, Ovid released his salacious poem. It couldn’t have been more poorly timed. “Of course a guard stands in your way, but you can still write. Compose love letters while alone in the bathroom and send them out with an accomplice. She can hide them next to her warm flesh, under her breasts or bound beneath her foot. Should your guard get wind of these schemes, she can offer her skin for paper and carry out notes written on her body.” Ovid’s poetry extolled behavior for which the emperor’s daughter was banished. Her fate loomed large as a warning. For the present, the emperor remained mute towards Rome’s most gifted rebel. Ovid turned his hand to less provocative forms of poetry. He remarried, and he embraced a new appreciation for discretion.

“Enjoy forbidden pleasures in their place. But when you dress, don’t forget your mask of decorum. An innocent face hides more than a lying tongue.” Ovid was on notice. The order of Augustus had firm bounds of propriety and Ovid had tested them to the fullest. “Now consider the dangers of night. Tiles fall from the rooftop and crack you on the head. And the drunken hooligan, spoiling for a fight, cannot rest without a brawl. What can you do when a raving madman confronts you? Or tenants throw their broken pots out the window? You’re courting disaster if you go to dinner before writing your will.” At the turn of the first century, the poet Juvenal, was writing verses, which exposed much of Rome to scorn. He was acerbic and had a keen eye for the gritty realities of urban life. Juvenal writes:

“Our apartment block is a tottering ruin. The building manager props it up with slender poles and plasters over the gaping cracks. Then he bids us sleep safe and sound in his wretched death trap.” Ronald Mellor, Professor of History, UCLA:

I don’t think our notion of Rome bears much relation to the Rome of every day life. Because what is left today are the big public buildings, not the squalid hovels without plumbing and sanitary conditions that ordinary people lived in. That’s precisely the reason members of the elite preferred to withdraw up into the hills, and to have their villas up on the hills, a little bit away from the noise and away from the stench and away from that incredible hoard of people pressing close together. Juvenal writes:

“I would love to live where there are no fears, in the dark of night. Even now, I smell fire and hear a neighbor cry out for water as he struggles to save his measly belongings. Smoke pours out from the third story as flames move upwards, but the poor wretch who lives at the top with the leaking roof and roosting birds, is oblivious to the danger, and sure to burn.” In the year 4, in the imperial palace, the emperor, Augustus also lost sleep, but not from fear of fire. Now an old man of sixty-six, Augustus has lost much of his youthful vigor. “His vision had faded in his left eye, his teeth were few, widely spaced and worn down, his hair wispy and yellowed. His skin was irritated by scratching and vehement scraping, so that he had chronic rough spots, resembling ring worm.” As the emperor neared death, plots to succeed him sprouted. His grandsons and intended heirs had both died, unexpectedly. And the emperor himself lived under constant threat of assassination. Speaking for Augustus, one ancient historian voiced his dilemma: “Whereas solitude is dreadful,” he wrote, “company is also dreadful - the very men who protect us are most terrifying.” Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Director, British School, Rome:

“In many ways, Augustus looked so solid, and what he created looked so solid you forget the fragility. I think contemporaries were very aware of that fragility. And surely Augustus was, he was - over anxious, in a sense, to provide a secure system after he’d gone.”

At this time, there were unusually strong earthquakes. The Tiber pulled down the bridge and flooded the city for seven days. There was a partial eclipse of the sun, and famine developed. Ancient historians report that natural disasters predicted political ones. In the year 6, soldiers, the backbone of the empire, refused to re-enlist without a pay rise. New funds had to be found. Then, fire swept parts of the capital. A reluctant Augustus turned to taxation. It was a dangerous tactic, and the emperor knew it. Fearing a coup, Augustus dispersed potential enemies. He recessed the courts and disbanded the Senate. He even dismissed his own retinue - Rome remained on edge.

“The mob, distressed by the famine of the taxes after the fire… openly discussed rebellion. When night fell, they hung seditious posters.” The crisis passed. But soon a new and even greater disaster battered the aging Augustus. It began in Germany, a land of fiercely independent tribes, and to the Roman eye, rugged barbarism. The region had been recently conquered, and Roman customs were taking root - or so they thought. “The barbarians had not forgotten their ancient traditions, their free way of life or the power of arms. But, as long as they were assimilated slowly, they did not realize they were changing, and did not resist Roman influence.” That peaceful evolution stopped, however, in the year 9. The year an arrogant young General named Quinctilius Varus became commander of the Rhine army, and brought an iron fist to the province. “He forced more drastic change on the barbarians, and exacted money as if they were his subjects.” Varus disastrously miscalculated the extent of Roman control, and misjudged German compliance. A trusted German chieftain organized a full-scale revolt, and lured Varus’ troops into a trap, deep in unfamiliar terrain. “The mountains were rocky and covered with ravines. The trees were dense and tall so that the Romans were struggling to make progress. Rain began to fall in sheets. The heavy wind scattered their numbers. The ground became slippery around the tree trunks and leaves. While the Romans were dealing with these troubles, the barbarians surrounded them, suddenly coming from everywhere. First, they came from afar. Then, since no one was fighting back and many were wounded, the barbarians came ever closer, and the Romans were unable to retaliate. They kept crashing into each other…They could not grip their arrows or javelins. The rain forced their weapons from their hands. Even their sodden shields were useless. And so every man and every horse was slaughtered.” Three legions were massacred - a tenth of Rome’s army. Augustus, his biographer reports, was traumatized. “They say he was so disturbed, that for several months, he let his hair and beard grow, and would sometimes bash his head on doors and cry out 'Quntillius Varus, give me back my legions.’” The disaster in Germany underscored a stark reality. The empire was born of violence, and to violence, it ever threatened to return. The emperor was in no mood for leniency. “Believe me, love’s climax of pleasure should not be rushed, but savored. But when you reach those places a woman loves to have touched, don’t let shame get in the way, don’t back off. You’ll see her eyes shine with a trembling light, as when the sun glitters on rippling water. She’ll moan and murmur sweet words just right for the game. But don’t outpace your mistress, or let her leave you in the dust. Rush to the finish line in unison. When man and woman collapse together, they both win. That’s the greatest prize.” Ovid’s sizzling words gripped Rome when they were first published. But a decade later, they would return to haunt him. For the patience of the emperor Augustus has reached its lowest point. Beleaguered, he saw plots in every corner, anarchy in every act of disobedience. Blaming the subversive book, Augustus banished Ovid from Rome. “Hello. Are you there? If so, indulge these verses of mine. They don’t come from my garden, or from that old couch I used to sprawl on. Whoever you are and in whatever parlor or bedroom or study, I have been writing on decks, propped up against bulkheads.” The poet was sent to an untamed backwater on the edges of the empire, on the shores of the black sea. For Ovid, the ultimate urban sophisticate, no punishment could have been harsher. His roguish aplomb crumbled to anguish. “When night falls here, I think of that other night when I was cast out into the endless gloom. We managed to laugh, once or twice, when my wife found, in some old trunk, odd pieces of clothing. This might be the thing this season, the new Romanian mode. And just as abruptly, our peal of laughter would catch, and tear into tears. And we

held each other. My wife sobbed at the hearth. What could I say? I took the first step with which all journeys begin, but could not take the second. I was barely able to breathe. I set forth again. Behind me, she fell, rolling, onto the floor, her hair swept onto the hearth, stirring up the dust and ashes. I heard her call my name. I thought I had survived the worst - what could be worst? But my wife arose, pursued me, held on to me weeping. Servants pulled her away. Whatever worth there was in me died there.”

Ovid was sure his talents would bring him home. He wrote constantly. And as he waited, he sought refuge in a remote frontier town. When the temperatures dropped, Ovid wrote, the wine froze in its vessels, the river in its banks. Across the ice thundered hostile horsemen, plundering and killing. It was a brutal life. Ovid wrote home from exile, a side of the empire that few Romans ever saw. “Beyond these rickety walls there’s no safety. And inside it’s hardly better. Barbarians live in most of the houses - even if you’re not afraid of them you’ll despise their long hair and clothes made of animal skins. They all do business in their common language. I have to communicate with gestures. I am understood by no one, and the stupid peasants insult my Latin words. They heckle me to my face, and mock my exile.” Writing for this audience, Ovid complained, was like “dancing in the dark.” As the years passed, Ovid shrivelled into a bony old man. He fell ill. Contrition replaced his former bravado. “Oh, I repent I repent. If anyone as wretched as I can be believed, I do repent. I am tortured by my deed.” Ovid, however, never got an answer to his pleas. And would never get a reprieve. As he approached death, he became sadly resigned to his fate. “Look at me. I yearn for my country, my home, and for you. I have lost everything that I once had. But I still have my talent. Emperors have no jurisdiction over that. My fame will survive, even after I am gone. And as long as Rome dominates the world, I will be read.” Nine years into his exile, Ovid died. He outlived Augustus, but he had bent to the emperor’s will. At the start of the emperor’s public life, Augustus had won the wars engulfing Rome. By the end, he had won the peace, and men like Ovid paid the price. In the years ahead, when lesser men would rule Rome, that price would rise higher still. “Oh Jupiter and Mars and all gods that raise the Roman Empire to ruler of the world, I invoke you and I pray - guard this prosperity, this peace, now and into the future.” In the year 14, prayers such as these were heard around the vast dominion ruled by Rome. For in that year, the empire stood at a precipice. The emperor Augustus had died. Augustus had been a towering figure. He had extinguished a century of civil war. He presided over forty years of internal peace and prosperity. He forged the vision and power that cemented the empire together. But the peace of Augustus came at a price. By the end of his life, Augustus had eclipsed the Senate, ruled as a monarch, and founded a dynasty that was fraught with troubles. His heirs, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius - these men would lead Rome through years of political terror, imperial madness, assassination - and through the distant founding of a new religion that would one day engulf the empire itself. The years to come would be years of trial - testing the endurance of subjects and citizens, soldiers, and slaves. The men and women of the Roman Empire in the first century.

#order from chaos

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arcticdementor · 4 years

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Can you believe ...?

Perhaps no question has been repeated more times in reaction to more events this year than that one.

The most recent major outrage in the Jewish community, now several news cycles behind us, came on the Shabbat before Yom Kippur—the holiest day in the Jewish calendar—when many American Jews seemed dumbfounded by what was to me predictable news: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, progressive superstar, had pulled out of an event honoring Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister assassinated because of his efforts to make peace with the Palestinians. Rabin was, as Bill Clinton said at his funeral, “a martyr for his nation’s peace.”

…

But it wasn’t AOC who was mixed up. The savvy politician had read the room and was sending a clear signal about who belongs in the new progressive coalition and who does not. The confusion—and there seems to be a good deal of it these days—is among American Jews who think that by submitting to ever-changing loyalty tests they can somehow maintain the old status quo and their place inside of it.

Did you see that the Ethical Culture Fieldston School hosted a speaker that equated Israelis with Nazis? Did you know that Brearley is now asking families to write a statement demonstrating their commitment to “anti-racism”? Did you see that Chelsea Handler tweeted a clip of Louis Farrakhan? Did you see that protesters tagged a synagogue in Kenosha with “Free Palestine” graffiti? Did you hear about the march in D.C. where they chanted “Israel, we know you, you murder children too”? Did you hear that the Biden campaign apologized to Linda Sarsour after initially disavowing her? Did you see that Twitter suspended Bret Weinstein’s civic organization but still allows the Iranian ayatollah to openly promote genocide of the Jewish people? Did you see that Mayor Bill de Blasio scapegoated “the Jewish community” for the spread of COVID in New York, while defending mass protests on the grounds that this is a “historic moment of change”?

Listen, it’s been a hell of a year. We all have a lot going on, much of it unnerving and some of it dire. Moreover, many of these stories only surface on places like Twitter; they don’t make it into the pages of The New York Times or your friends’ Facebook feeds, which is where most Americans get their news these days. Reporters don’t cover these stories adequately, contextualizing them, telling readers which ones are true and which ones aren’t, which ones matter and which ones don't.

So it makes sense that many smart, well-intentioned people are confused. Or rather: Looking for someone to explain why an emerging movement that purports to advance the ideals they have always supported—fairness, justice, righting historical wrongs—feels like it is doing the opposite.

…

To understand the enormity of the change we are now living through, take a moment to understand America as the overwhelming majority of its Jews believed it was—and perhaps as we always assumed it would be.

It was liberal.

Not liberal in the narrow, partisan sense, but liberal in the most capacious and distinctly American sense of that word: the belief that everyone is equal because everyone is created in the image of God. The belief in the sacredness of the individual over the group or the tribe. The belief that the rule of law—and equality under that law—is the foundation of a free society. The belief that due process and the presumption of innocence are good and that mob violence is bad. The belief that pluralism is a source of our strength; that tolerance is a reason for pride; and that liberty of thought, faith, and speech are the bedrocks of democracy.

The liberal worldview was one that recognized that there were things—indeed, the most important things—in life that were located outside of the realm of politics: friendships, art, music, family, love. This was a world in which Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg could be close friends. Because, as Scalia once said, some things are more important than votes.

Crucially, this liberalism relied on the view that the Enlightenment tools of reason and the scientific method might have been designed by dead white guys, but they belonged to everyone, and they were the best tools for human progress that have ever been devised.

Racism was evil because it contradicted the foundations of this worldview, since it judged people not based on the content of their character, but on the color of their skin. And while America’s founders were guilty of undeniable hypocrisy, their own moral failings did not invalidate their transformational project. The founding documents were not evil to the core but “magnificent,” as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, because they were “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” In other words: The founders themselves planted the seeds of slavery’s destruction. And our second founding fathers—abolitionists like Frederick Douglass—made it so. America would never be perfect, but we could always strive toward building a more perfect union.

I didn’t even know that this worldview had a name because it was baked into everything I came into contact with—my parents’ worldviews, the schools they sent me to, the synagogues we attended, the magazines and newspapers we read, and so on.

…

No longer. American liberalism is under siege. There is a new ideology vying to replace it.

No one has yet decided on the name for the force that has come to unseat liberalism. Some say it’s “Social Justice.” The author Rod Dreher has called it “therapeutic totalitarianism.” The writer Wesley Yang refers to it as “the successor ideology”—as in, the successor to liberalism.

…

The new creed’s premise goes something like this: We are in a war in which the forces of justice and progress are arrayed against the forces of backwardness and oppression. And in a war, the normal rules of the game—due process; political compromise; the presumption of innocence; free speech; even reason itself—must be suspended. Indeed, those rules themselves were corrupt to begin with—designed, as they were, by dead white males in order to uphold their own power.

…

Critical race theory says there is no such thing as neutrality, not even in the law, which is why the very notion of colorblindness—the Kingian dream of judging people not based on the color of their skin but by the content of their character—must itself be deemed racist. Racism is no longer about individual discrimination. It is about systems that allow for disparate outcomes among racial groups. If everyone doesn’t finish the race at the same time, then the course must have been flawed and should be dismantled.

…

In fact, any feature of human existence that creates disparity of outcomes must be eradicated: The nuclear family, politeness, even rationality itself can be defined as inherently racist or evidence of white supremacy, as a Smithsonian institution suggested this summer. The KIPP charter schools recently eliminated the phrase “work hard” from its famous motto “Work Hard. Be Nice.” because the idea of working hard “supports the illusion of meritocracy.” Denise Young Smith, one of the first Black people to reach Apple’s executive team, left her job in the wake of asserting that skin color wasn’t the only legitimate marker of diversity—the victim of a “diversity culture” that, as the writer Zaid Jilani has noted, is spreading “across the entire corporate world and is enforced by a highly educated activist class.”

The most powerful exponent of this worldview is Ibram X. Kendi. His book “How to Be an Antiracist” is on the top of every bestseller list; his photograph graces GQ; he is on Time’s most influential people of the year; and his outfit at Boston University was recently awarded $10 million from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

…

And just in case moral suasion is ineffective, Kendi has backup: Use the power of the federal government to make it so. “To fix the original sin of racism,” he wrote in Politico, “Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals [sic]: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals.” To back up the amendment, he proposes a Department of Anti-Racism. This department would have the power to investigate not just local governments but private businesses and would punish those “who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.” Imagine how such a department would view a Jewish day school, which suggests that the Jews are God’s chosen people, let alone one that teaches Zionism.

Kendi—who, it should be noted, now holds Elie Wiesel’s old chair at Boston University—believes that “to be antiracist is to see all cultures in their differences as on the same level, as equals.” He writes: “When we see cultural difference we are seeing cultural difference—nothing more, nothing less.” It’s hard to imagine that anyone could believe that cultures that condone honor killings of unchaste young women are “nothing more, nothing less” than culturally different from our own. But whether he believes it or not, it’s obvious that embracing such relativism is a highly effective tool for ascension and seizing power.

It should go without saying that, for Jews, an ideology that contends that there are no meaningful differences between cultures is not simply ridiculous—we have an obviously distinct history, tradition and religion that has been the source of both enormous tragedy as well as boundless gifts—but is also, as history has shown, lethal.

By simply existing as ourselves, Jews undermine the vision of a world without difference. And so the things about us that make us different must be demonized, so that they can be erased or destroyed: Zionism is refashioned as colonialism; government officials justify the murder of innocent Jews in Jersey City; Jewish businesses can be looted because Jews “are the face of capital.” Jews are flattened into “white people,” our living history obliterated, so that someone with a straight face can suggest that the Holocaust was merely “white on white crime.”

This is no longer a fringe view. As the philosopher Peter Boghossian has noted: “This ideology is the dominant moral orthodoxy in our universities, and has seeped out and spread to every facet of American life— publishing houses, tech, arts, theater, newspapers, media,” and, increasingly, corporations. It has not grabbed power by dictates from above, but by seizing the means of sense-making from below.

Over the past few decades and with increasing velocity over the last several years, a determined young cohort has captured nearly all of the institutions that produce American cultural and intellectual life. Rather than the institutions shaping them, they have reshaped the institutions. You don’t need the majority inside an institution to espouse these views. You only need them to remain silent, cowed by a fearless and zealous minority who can smear them as racists if they dare disagree.

It is why California attempted to pass an ethnic studies curriculum whose only mention of Jews was to explain how they, along with Irish immigrants, were invited into whiteness.

It is why those who claim to care about diversity and inclusion don’t seem to care about the deep-seated racism against Asian Americans at schools like Harvard.

It is why a young Jewish woman named Rose Ritch was recently run out of the USC student government. Ms. Ritch stood accused of complicity in racism because, following the Soviet lie, to be a Zionist is to be nothing less than a racist. Her fellow students waged a campaign to hound her out of her position: “Impeach her Zionist ass,” they insisted.

It is why the Democratic Socialists of America, the emerging power center of the Democratic Party in New York, sent a questionnaire to New York City Council candidates that included a pledge not to travel to Israel.

It is why Tamika Mallory, an outspoken fan of Louis Farrakhan, gets the glamour treatment in a photoshoot for Vogue.

And this is why AOC, the standard bearer of America’s new left, didn’t think Yitzhak Rabin was worth the political capital, but goes out of her way, a few days later, to praise the Black Panthers. She is the harbinger of a political reality in which Jews will have little power.

It does not matter how progressive you are, how vegan or how gay, how much you want universal health care and pre-K and to end the drug war. To believe in the justness of the existence of the Jewish state—to believe in Jewish particularism at all—is to make yourself an enemy of this movement.

…

If you’re nearing the end of the essay wondering why this hasn’t been explained to you before, the answer is because, yet again, we find ourselves in another moment in Jewish history at a time of great need and urgency with communal leadership who, with rare exception, will not address the danger.

I understand why people have been blind to this. Life has been good—exceedingly good—for American Jews for half a century. Many older communal leaders seem to lack the moral imagination to see this threat. It’s also hard for anyone to hear the words: They’re just not that into you.

So when I try to discuss this with many Jews in leadership positions, what I face is either boomer-esque entitlement—a sense that the way the world worked for them must be the way it will always work—or outright resistance. Oh please, wokeness isn’t important anywhere but in silly Twitter microclimates. When you explain that no, in fact, this ideology has taken over universities, publishing houses, the media, museums and is now making quick work of corporate America, you hit another roadblock: Isn’t this just righting some historical injustices? What could go wrong? You then have to explain what could go wrong—what is already going wrong—is that it is ruining the lives of regular, good people, and the more institutions and companies fall prey to it, the more lives it will ruin.

…

Last month, I participated in a Zoom event attended by several major Jewish philanthropists. After briefly talking about my experience at The New York Times, I noted that if they wanted to understand what happened to me, they needed to appreciate the power of that new, still-nameless creed that has hijacked the paper and so many other institutions essential to American life. I’ve been thinking about what happened next ever since.

One of the funders on the call launched into me, explaining that Ibram X. Kendi’s work was vital, and portrayed me as retrograde and uncool for opposing the ideology du jour. Because this person is prominent and powerful enough to send signals that others in the Jewish world follow, the comments managed to both sideline me and stun almost everyone else into silence.

These people may be the most enraging: those with the financial security to oppose this ideology and demur, so desperate to be seen as hip; for their children to keep their spots at the right prep schools; so that they can be seated at the right tables at the right benefits; so that they are honored at Brown or Harvard; so that business does well enough that they can renovate their house in Aspen or East Hampton. Desperate to remain in good odor with the right people, they are willing to close their eyes to what is coming for the rest of us.

Young Jews who grasp the scope of this problem and want to fight it thus find themselves up against two fronts: their ideological enemies and their own communal leadership. But it is among this group—people with no social or political capital to hoard, some of them not even out of college—that I find our community’s seers. The dynamic reminds me of the one Theodor Herzl faced: The communal establishment of his time was deeply opposed to his Zionist project. It was the poorer, younger Jews—especially those from Russia—who first saw the necessity of Zionism’s lifesaving vision.

Funders and communal leaders who are falling over themselves to make alliances with fashionable activists and ideas enjoy a decadent indulgence that these young proud Jews cannot afford. They live far from the violence that affects Jews in places like Crown Heights and Borough Park. If things go south in one city, they can take refuge in a second home. It may be cost-free for the wealthy to flirt with an ideology that suggests abolishing the police or the nuclear family or capitalism. But for most Jews and most Americans, losing those ideas comes with a heavy price.

#bari weiss #tablet magazine #anti-semitism #cancel culture

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lokilickedme · 5 years

Text

Part 2 of Read By Loki Laufeyson - High Rise

By request

Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own in 2016 (no longer available there)

Rating: Mature

Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: F/M

Fandom: Loki - Fandom, High-Rise (2015), Tom Hiddleston - Fandom

Relationship: Loki/His Book

Character: Loki (narrator), Robert Laing, Richard Wilder

Additional Tags: Explicit Language, Loki Has Issues, Spoilers, Loki Does What He Wants, stick to the damn book Loki, lewd passages quoted from the book, references to bestiality and incest (thanks a lot for that, Ballard. You’re a dick)

Series: Part 2 of Read by Loki Laufeyson

Stats: Published: 2016-02-21 Words: 1220 (original version)

Part One: Loki Reads Chapter 9 of The Night Manager

High Rise, Read by Loki Laufeyson

by lokilickedme

Summary: Loki narrates another audiobook. Apologies to JG Ballard, though not very sincere ones. In fact I take it back, I’m mad that I ever had to read this.

Notes: See the end of the work for notes

Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog...

Well shit, lets just not waste any time at all getting to the good stuff, shall we? When a book has the unmitigated balls to start off with a barbequed canine for the first course, you know you're in for an entertaining evening chock full of questionable culinary choices written in dirty grey prose, which we all know is just a gateway to every sort of perversion familiar to man and a handful or two heretofore known only to the Aesir - and I’ll tell you right now they get up to some kinky shit that’d make you want to tie your ballsack to a goat. That’s not a metaphor, they’re known for literally tying their ballsacks to goats. Okay, one of them is known for it. Okay, I’m known for it. It was me. So once one has committed to snacking on the family pets, what comes after the appetizer, sex with a budgie? What sort of sauce is the fellow using? Did he sautee the dog or is that fucker deep fried? Or am I missing a particularly rude innuendo here and he's actually giving the beast a blow job? If that's the case then this might end up being a worthwhile read after all, and I can’t think of a much more romantic place than the balcony if you’re actually going to commit to pleasuring the wife’s poodle.

...Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months. Now that everything had returned to normal -

Hold up. NOW everything's returned to normal? You're eating a fucking dog, sir, either that or you're fellating it. In what twisted realm is either of those scenarios considered normal? We’re not counting Asgard, by the way. And I'd rather like to know which part of the beast we're talking about here, I mean if it's the drumstick or the tenderloin then I hope you basted it with some herbs and a bit of olive oil before you slapped it on the hibachi. If you're committing cunnilingus, then I'm presuming you know which part you're dealing with and I'll leave you to it, though the olive oil could serve dual purpose here. But it does beg the question - is the beast male or female? Not making a judgement, just getting the visual.

While we're pondering that, I'm going to do us all a colossal favor and skip ahead a bit. This book really is difficult, and by difficult I mean I've had torture sessions on asteroids that were less annoying. The story itself is good, heaven knows I enjoy chaos and mayhem and bestiality as much as the next power mad despot, but word for word this tale reads a bit like Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl having the slowest orgasm in history during a mutual masturbation session while smoking Edgar Allen Poe’s gym shorts. I actually think I might be having the slowest orgasm in history.

'Come whenever you want to.' Laing put his arm around her shoulders, steadying her in case she lost her balance. In the past he had always felt physically distanced from Alice by her close resemblance to their mother, but for reasons not entirely sexual this resemblance now aroused him. He wanted to touch her hips, place his hand over her breast. As if aware of this, she leaned passively against him.

And there it is my friends. All good stories need an element of the forbidden, and it looks like sister-diddling wins the perversion jackpot for this evening. This Laing fellow has the whoo hoos for big sis. And you people give me shit over my "alleged" deviant relationship with my brother? Last I recall adopted siblings were free to black hole it all they want, yet here we have a pair working out a tag-up without the benefit of notarized adoption papers. Since we seem to be condoning this, lets all remember our hypocrisy the next time I'm catching grief for banging Thor, shall we? And while we're at it, are we all just ignoring the Oedipus train wreck this man just owned up to driving straight into the wall? 'Big sis you look like mummy, here let me drug you and keep you as a sex slave while this whole place goes to hell around us.' I may or may not be skipping ahead but I'll save you a little time and drudgery - it goes there, people.

He pulled the drawers on to the floor, heaved the mattresses off the beds, and urinated into the bath.

Ah, Wilder. I do love a good silly mustache-twirling villain with self aggrandizing dreams of conquering worlds several floors above his own social status. Because in the end we all want more than what we’ve got, don’t we? Thrones, love, respect, use of the penthouse, a herd of stoned females. At least he didn't piss on the mattress. Nobody likes a bedwetter, even in hell.

His burly figure, trousers open to expose his heavy genitalia, glared at him from the mirrors in the bedroom. He was about to break the glass, but the sight of his penis calmed him, a white club hanging in the darkness.

Yes my good man, welcome to the fellowship of the knob, our universal handshake is to sit on the sofa with one hand down the front of our pants. Our penises calm us all.

He would have liked to dress it in some way, perhaps with a hair-ribbon tied in a floral bow.

Huh. Just when I rather think I like this Wilder fellow and his obvious off kilter mental status, he shows us his wiener. Which was more than enough in itself, thanks so very much for that. Elegant move there, dipshit - whip it out and slap a bow on it, for times when you really want to class things up. I for one can't think of anything more entertaining or intellectually fulfilling on a Friday night than tying a pretty ribbon on my schlong and running about with it hanging out of my trousers while I harass and terrorize feral women in derelict apartment buildings. Sometimes I like to really mix things up by borrowing a pair of mother's clip-on earrings and dangling them from my testicles. It makes me feel so fucking manly. You know, for those times when you really want to bang your sister who looks like your mom and you know you stand a better chance of scoring if you really put in some effort with the self decor. Or you could go all out impressing the masses by tying your ballsack to a goat, but granted, it’s not for everyone.

This ultimate role had helped him on one occasion, when a marauding band of women led by Mrs Wilder had entered the apartment. Seeing Laing being abused, and assuming him to be Eleanor's and Alice's prisoner, they had left. On the other hand, perhaps they understood all too well what was really taking place.

Yes, what was really taking place was this fellow Laing got himself a couple of kinky babes who were willing to tie him to a chair and beat him with the hind leg of an Alsatian. I mean, who doesn't get off on that? I tip my cap to you, Sir. Never go fifty shades with one woman when you can go full-on Marquis de Sade with two. And seeing as this merry band of female visigoths was led by that Wilder chap's wife, one can only assume he pilfered her pretty hair bows one time too many and the poor woman felt compelled to start tucking the ginsu’s into her gingham apron and go on raiding parties with her Wednesday night book club group. Or perhaps it was the 'heavy genitalia' on display out of the front of his pants that drove her over the edge. I understand leaving one's trousers open while traversing rapidly declining self-contained bastions of reverse civilization is valid grounds for divorce in some states.

First she would try to kill him, but failing that give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps feel affection for him. Then, the moment he was asleep, cut his throat. The synopsis of the ideal marriage.

What - all marriages aren't like that?

I’m going to stop right here so we can all go take a break, order in some Alsation, chase our sisters and next door neighbors around the room with gardening implements and figure out where we hid our morphine stash - which sounds disconcertingly like a typical Saturday evening in Valhalla to me, quite honestly - and summarize the rest of the book, which goes a little something like this: Madness, mayhem, perversion, murder, violence, death, and why the fuck don’t these people just walk out of the damn building? Yes I know, it’s an allegory on class warfare and societal prejudices and the shitty tendency humanity has to turn on each other and finally itself when faced with a breakdown in the decency and polite behavior that tentatively holds people at arm’s length until the shit hits the fan and everyone starts coming at each other with golf clubs. Humans have a disturbing desire to go all Lord of The Flies the moment order breaks down, and this book casts a bloodshot eye on the fucked up results. I’m telling you though, it’s nothing a good tug’o war match with a goat couldn’t have fixed.

All in all I would say this book is a challenging read, but worth it in the end if for nothing other than the visual of that guy with the bow on his schnitzel. Best read while mainlining household cleaners directly into your lungs blindfolded and waterboarding yourself while listening to Raul Julia sing the Ave Maria on 45 rpms. Trust me, you'll understand once you get to the part where the old ladies in cocktail gowns are brawling over use of the elevator.

End Notes

#Loki Reads #Part 2 #High Rise

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anhed-nia · 5 years

Text

BLOGTOBER 10/23 & 10/25/2018: HALLOWEEN (2007) & HALLOWEEN II (2009)

By the time Rob Zombie made the bold move of remaking John Carpenter’s name-making classic HALLOWEEN, the horror rock-star’s directorial career had already proved to be incredibly divisive. His 2003 film debut, HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES drew a cult from among diehard fans of his music, but was largely panned by critics who identified it as a ramshackle, self-indulgent disaster. The movie was little more than a Frankensteining-together of Zombie’s favorite things, but he managed to follow it up swiftly with 2005′s semi-sequel, THE DEVIL’S REJECTS. With this project, he appropriated three of the principle characters from his cartoony, ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW-like first feature, and reimagined them as the redneck antiheroes of a story that plays like a cross between THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and THE WILD BUNCH. While DEVIL’S REJECTS showed major improvements in terms of drive and focus, it still felt unsettled. It is an emotionally confused movie that has trouble deciding whether its tale is more tragic for the innocent victims of its psychopathic protagonists, or more triumphant, for the Rejects’ anti-establishment swagger and charisma. Rob Zombie displays a refined aesthetic sense, and seems sincere in his storytelling, but he didn’t have much time to let these things ferment into a more potent cinematic brew before he stepped up to bat again with his controversial remake of the beloved HALLOWEEN in 2007.

Reviled even by the likes of John Carpenter himself, Zombie’s dour, ponderous retelling of the archetypal slasher story was baffling to critics and genre buffs alike. Loaded up with clunky psychoanalysis that flies in the face of Carpenter’s original intention--Michael Myers is PURE NO-REASON EVIL, FULL STOP--this iteration of HALLOWEEN worked for few people besides Zombie’s hardcore stans. In spite of that very large and general problem, the writer-director was back again in 2009 with a sequel to his own remake. With HALLOWEEN II, he took two major creative risks: Bringing the ubiquitous Sheri Moon Zombie back even though her character died early in the first film, and centering the narrative on Laurie Strode’s psychological recovery, or lack thereof, from her original ordeal. It is easy to see how this setup would draw more complex and ambivalent responses. Mrs. Zombie’s appearance as the ghost of Myers’ mother, whose character is plagued by a lot of Jungian nonsense, was identified fairly as ludicrous by many viewers. On the other hand, Scout Taylor-Compton’s return as Laurie Strode takes a character who was little more than a cardboard cutout in the first film, and turns her into a convincing mass of trauma who undergoes a profound transformation over the course of this sequel. As with THE DEVIL’S REJECTS, HALLOWEEN II suggests that even while Rob Zombie can be an incredibly frustrating filmmaker, he still seems to be on to something. Even in my most stuck-up moments, when his smug use of slow motion and arias of unshocking cuss words make me want to forget everything I just watched, his movies nag at me in a way that I have a hard time describing. I’m just now starting to formulate an understanding of why.

Often, I find myself asking: Who is Rob Zombie? First and foremost, he is a professional nerd. His music, art, videos, and feature films are strung together by his scholarship in all things genre, whether he’s invoking Tobe Hooper’s snuff-like realism, or the innocent sitcom pleasures of the Munsters. Zombie is vastly erudite about horror, and really anything remotely culty. This is actually to the detriment of HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES, which is so bloated with pop culture references that it almost chokes out the movie’s dubious originality. But while he has that irritating nerdy compulsion to competitively show off what he knows, he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who buys and bags comics without even cracking them open. Rob Zombie is clearly, legitimately passionate; it’s heartwarming, and enough to make you want to root for him even when you don’t totally love what he’s doing. His craftsmanship is on point, too, as a multimedia artist whose talent has been abundantly evident since the early band flyer days. It comes as no surprise that he attended Parsons School of Design, and he occasionally shows his hand as an amateur film historian with a love for golden age Hollywood. So, whatever he wants you to think about his hellbilly stage presence, he’s clearly no hick, and no basement-dwelling dweeb either. He’s an educated artist with a background in New York City’s brainy ‘80s noise rock scene. It’s because of this that I find the worshipful attitude his films take toward their sociopathic murderers to be, well...kind of annoying. Why am I supposed to think it’s so cool, as the movies’ punk rock tone suggests, that the Firefly family tortures random bystanders to death for no apparent reason? Why doesn’t Rob Zombie know how tired the whole “scary clown” thing is, and has been for a long time already, even when it’s someone as magical as Sid Haig under the greasepaint? Why do I feel like Zombie’s interest in pimps and ho’s is deeper than just exploitation pastiche, which makes it potentially worse than if it were just a shallow affectation? The thought of this Massachusetts-born college boy fantasizing obsessively about being so crude and violent and salt-of-the-earth is kind of lame. So, instead of just, you know, being a hater as usual, I looked it up--and discovered that Rob Zombie’s roots are actually in the fairway. As Wikipedia aggregates from various interviews:

While raising their sons, Rob's parents worked in a carnival, but they chose to leave after a riot broke out and tents were set on fire. Zombie recalled the experience in an interview, stating, "Everybody's pulling out guns, and you could hear guns going off. I remember this one guy we knew, he was telling us where to go, and some guy just ran up to him and hit him in the face with a hammer – just busted his face wide open. My parents packed up real quick, and we took off."

Suddenly, it all started to make sense. Sure, the costumed popstar isn’t an undead cross between Jerry Lee Lewis and Charles Starkweather in real life, but he isn’t a complete poseur either. It isn’t immediately clear, from underneath his mountain of collectory movie references, that he is, more or less, writing what he knows. He isn’t just emulating his cultural heroes, he’s mythologizing his own childhood.

In view of this, the key to Rob Zombie’s movies is not an awareness of horror history and semiology; it’s actually all about outlaw culture. So, back to 2007′s deeply flawed HALLOWEEN. It’s a heavily bro-y movie, in its outsidery way, that breaks up the Dr. Loomis-Michael Myers-Laurie Strode love triangle, and focuses almost entirely on building a Myers biography. The fascinatingly sullen Daeg Neergaard Faerch plays young Michael, a fatherless boy on the verge of snapping from the relentless torment coming at him from all directions: his slutty sister, school bullies who fixate on his stripper mom (Sheri Moon Zombie), and his mother’s latest violent, depraved boyfriend. Michael follows the serial killer script perfectly, graduating rapidly from torturing animals to brutalizing other kids to annihilating his sister, her boyfriend, and his mother’s beau one Halloween night when his sibling chooses sex over taking her little brother trick-or-treating. He soon finds himself installed in a mental institution where he moves on to slaughtering the staff. Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) spends years evaluating the boy, though he is ultimately stymied by Michael’s profound lack of humanity. As Michael increasingly retreats behind the folksy homemade masks he spends all day crafting, the opportunistic Loomis gives up on him, instead committing his energy to a money-making true crime/pop psychology book about Myers. Flashing forward, we find the hulking adult Michael Myers (played by the 6′8″ wrestler Tyler Mane) getting ready to bust out of the asylum and wage war on his home town of Haddonfield. There we finally meet teen dream Laurie Strode, a spunky babysitter with a gaggle of gal pals who are perfect grist for the slasher mill. In the final leg of the film, Myers carves his way through Laurie’s social circle, in an apparent attempt to reunite with his sister: Laurie herself. Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif) reveals that when Michael’s despairing mother committed suicide years ago, he took her infant daughter and had her adopted out anonymously to insulate her from her family’s tragic history. Laurie, for her part, is unaware of anything other than her need to survive, which she only barely accomplishes.

Naturally, Laurie’s story is the weakest part of a movie that is otherwise so focused on male experience. That is, the experience of needing a father, the ambivalent and ambiguous craving for maternal intimacy, the trauma of having your masculinity impugned by your (fag-obsessed) peers, and perhaps even the undermining influence of academia and capitalism on a man’s natural-born strength and worth. When the newly-freed Michael Myers storms through a truck stop to begin his pilgrimage to Haddonfield, and Rob Zombie chooses to accompany this scene with Rush’s regal outlaw anthem “Tom Sawyer”, it tells you everything you need to know about this take on HALLOWEEN. Like the rampaging Firefly family in DEVIL’S REJECTS, Michael is certainly evil, but he also represents something essential about the formation of and reinforcement of one’s individuality in the face of castrating societal norms--something the carnies among whom Rob Zombie grew up would have found very relatable.

It’s worth noting here that, while the sexuality of the women in Michael’s life plays a role in his distorted development, he is not reacting to their sexuality in and of itself. Michael Myers is not driven by the kind of covetousness that we associate with the archetypal slasher, who gives sexually frustrated male viewers a vicarious thrill by punishing sluts and teases. Michael’s problem is that his mother and sister’s sexuality contributes to his isolation. His classmates use his mother’s profession against him, and that profession keeps her from being able to tuck him in at night. Similarly, Michael doesn’t get to enjoy Halloween with his family and the other neighborhood kids, because his sister is too busy getting laid. Michael is abandoned, even while he still has a home to return to, an outsider even in his own house.

This leads me to an important point about why the portion of the movie that is devoted to Laurie's struggle is so ineffective. It is a flaw in the film, but a virtue of the director: Normal, attractive teenagers are not Rob Zombie’s people. He doesn’t even participate in traditional slasher movie misogyny, he’s so far away from thinking about them. His movies are full of badass women who are fully possessed of their sexuality, and who wield it like a weapon against hypocrites and assholes, and this is always shone in a heroic light. Moreover, he delights in casting women of all shapes and ages, often assigning them immense personal power, as in LORDS OF SALEM, an enormously satisfying movie about society’s original persecuted outcasts: witches. Rob Zombie is deeply committed to outsiders, and his definition of them isn’t limited to banal lawbreaking--he also rejects conventional beauty and our cultural obsession with youth. His films are populated by all manner of human beings, and the farther away they are from looking like model material, the more likely it is that they’re meant to be the heroes. On that note, whatever you think of his movies, you have to acknowledge that they are almost never dehumanizing. Zombie is an accomplished actor’s director who gets a full spectrum of emotion out of his performers, and who excels at creating a feeling of camaraderie within his ensemble casts. It is this surprising sweetness, and compassion even for the victims of the villains he lionizes, that makes HALLOWEEN II so peculiarly effective.

If 2007′s HALLOWEEN was a remake on which Rob Zombie couldn’t resist draping some of his personal hangups, HALLOWEEN II is almost a completely original and separate entity from what one thinks of as the franchise started by John Carpenter. In it, Michael Myers is presumed dead but his body is missing--and indeed, his character is missing for much of the movie. We find a disturbed, scarred-up Laurie Strode living with her surviving friend Annie, and Annie’s father, Sheriff Bracket. Laurie is dealing, poorly, with a heavy dose of PTSD. Along with nightmares and flashbacks, she also has trouble just being nice to people, or accepting affection. Annie and her father’s attempts to be charitable with their adoptive family member are no match for Laurie’s increasing surliness and mistrust of the world. Once a good-natured and optimistic young woman, her appearance becomes vagrant-like (curiously similar to Rob Zombie’s own casual look), her attitude is more and more nihilistic, and she develops a drinking problem. I’ve always wanted to see a movie with a slasher-like narrative foundation, but that focuses on aftermath and recovery, and recent gimmicky efforts like FINAL GIRL and LAST GIRL STANDING did absolutely nothing for me. HALLOWEEN II--at least, the superbly-acted Strode part of it--is the movie I’ve been asking for.

The other part of the movie is also interesting--or more specifically, it’s as ballsy as it is flawed. The movie gets off on kind of a bad foot when a title card quotes an obscure psychology text book called The Subconscious Psychosis of Dreams:

WHITE HORSE - instinct, purity, and the drive of the physical body to release powerful and emotional forces, like rage with ensuing chaos and destruction.

This is the excuse we have for the fact that the ghost of Deborah Myers arrives with a white horse to compel her son to find his sister Laurie Strode, aka Angel Myers, to reunite their family, presumably in the afterlife. Deborah Myers is kind of a spectral cross between Glenda the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch of the West, at once welcoming and sinister, drifting in and out of Michael’s consciousness in the company of a sort of ghost of his childhood (Chase White Vaneck, who is no Daeg Faerch honestly). It might be easy to dismiss this anomaly as an expression of Michael’s mental illness, and his desire to experience an idealized version of his youth in which his mother still looks after him--except that later in the movie, during the final standoff, Laurie is shown to be physically affected by these spirits. Maybe the implication is that she and Michael suffer the same psychological ailments, but for them to share such specific hallucinations without speaking is borderline supernatural in and of itself. So, while Sheri Moon Zombie does her best with her impressive force of personality and compelling physical presence, it’s hard to say what this part of the movie serves. When I first saw the film, I was completely outraged by this, not only because it made no sense to me, but because it felt like a cheap ripoff of Sarah Palmer’s similar prophetic visions of a white horse in Twin Peaks. That was all I managed to make of it.

Today, I still don’t love it, but I have more trouble faulting Rob Zombie for trying to make HALLOWEEN his own, something more than a remake. He also does this by truly letting go of the Shape. The famous William Shatner mask was blown in half by Laurie at the end of the 2007 HALLOWEEN, and scarcely makes much of an appearance in this movie. Michael Myers is a disheveled drifter, literally haunted by his past, whose only real aim is to find a place to belong. It’s sort of funny, in retrospect: When John Carpenter made the first HALLOWEEN, he-by-way-of-Dr. Loomis declared Michael an empty shell of a person, someone who was simply born evil, as reflected by the empty-eyed mask he wears. For some reason, though, a whole legacy of directors just couldn’t resist trying to explain Myers away. The original HALLOWEEN II then says, “Well...what if Michael Myers is on a rampage because LAURIE STRODE IS HIS SISTER? What’s that you say? Why is that a reason to rampage? Ummmm...” And then HALLOWEEN 4 sees him pursuing other young female relations of his, and then in subsequent movies there’s an accursed rune, and druids, and immortality rites, and by the time you get to HALLOWEEN 6 you have this absurd stone soup of bad ideas. It’s a miracle that this franchise became such a thing. Rob Zombie makes the same fundamental mistake, but at least he tries it in the simplest possible way, asserting plainly that Nurture, not Nature, made Michael into a killer. Now, terminally lonely, he’s like a clown waking up in his trailer to find that the carnival left without him. Exiled from mainstream society, he seeks out what remains of his family, who, due to his own violent actions, has grown up more like him than he may have imagined.

I’m not saying I think this was the best thing to do with HALLOWEEN 2. Personally, what I crave in horror movies is something that is farther beyond explanation than this--something that gesturally resembles my life experience, but that plunges past the veil of mundanity into a deeper, darker world of primordial fears and urges, addressing things that unsettle me because I cannot rationalize them. For me, horror is definitionally incomprehensible, and Rob Zombie’s HALLOWEEN diptych is fundamentally sane. But, I think what I’ve discovered is that these movies are not proper horror movies, in spite of their relentless sadistic violence. They are outlaw fables, with more DNA in common with something like EASY RIDER, than with FRIDAY THE 13TH. It’s funny to watch myself coming to a compassionate understanding of these movies that are themselves about outsiders and rejects who are specifically deprived of understanding. My goal in all this was not so much to convince people of the value of these movies, which one might reject on any number of reasonable counts, but to explain to myself why I keep coming back to them. It isn’t to condescendingly heckle them, and it isn’t just because they’re often handsome-looking, or because they’re so emotionally authentic even when the narrative is less than compelling. It must be because, even when I’ve found him challenging, I can’t help seeing Rob Zombie as a person with vision, someone who heroically eschews common consensus on taste and sense-making--the consensus even among horror fans and his own cinematic heroes--in order to say what makes sense to him personally. Finally, he has begun to make sense to me, too.

#rob zombie #halloween #2007 #halloween ii #2009 #blogtober #remake #John Carpenter #sheri moon zombie #michael myers #laurie strode #scout taylor-compton #brad dourif #malcolm mcdowell #tyler mane #the shape #horror #slasher #outlaw culture

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pip-n-flinx · 5 years

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Little bit of Mass Effect Salt Incoming

So, one of my favorite twitch/youtube personalities recently released a video about his favorite series ever, mass effect! While I was initial thrilled (I didn’t even know he played ME tbh) I gotta say I’m a more than a bit salty about it. I still love him and and watch his stuff, clearly ain’t nobody perfect, but I want to get some things off my chest and most of the people I know who are into ME follow me here. SO here goes.

Here’s the thing, he absolutely hates one of my favorite characters from the franchise. He made jokes about leaving them to die, not regretting it, how horrible a character they are, and even references several moments in the first game as the source of his opinions. He goes into far less details from the 2nd and 3rd games in the franchise, but contends that they failed to change his mind.

Now, it will come as no surprise to some of you that he hates Ashley Williams.

For the sake of clarity, I’m going to get some stuff out of the way right here before explaining to you what he said and why I disagree:

- I have done multiple playthroughs of ME. One included the Ash Romance.

- Most of my playthroughs I romanced Liara.

- My opinions are not ‘ASH IS BEST GIRL CHANGE MY MIND’

- Before someone @’s me with some bullshit, I’d just like to observe I’ve heard a ton of Ash Hatred since I got into the fandom. I would be surprised if you were bringing something new to my attention when it comes to Ash. I’ve spent a great deal of my time playing this game and even more following other content creators of any medium I could find. Please Please Please PLEASE don’t waste your time regurgitating something you heard someone else say and I SWEAR BEFORE ALL THAT IS GOOD if I hear one more “She’s just a ____” comment I will end you no character in this series is “just” anything.

- THIS IS NOT KAIDEN ALENKO HATRED. I actually find the Virmire decision heart wrenching every time.

- Finally, before we move on, I’m not telling you how to play the goddamn game. I have enough trouble with Virmire, Horizon, and the Coup d’etat missions in my own playthrough, I have no intention of re-living the guilt and stress of it for someone else’s Shepard. I got enough emotional baggage from this game already thanks. MOVING ON “Ashley is a space racist.” ALRIGHT listen up kiddos. Her Grandfather, the one who started the Williams Curse? He did that by creating and signing off on Cerberus during the First Contact War. The pro-human splinter group founded during the first encounter and conflict with aliens that humanity experiences? That was her Grandfather’s Idea. And yes, she begins ME1 with some pretty racist commentary. “Can’t tell the aliens from the animals” is a reprehensible line. Now, I don’t think she says anything reprehensible when she talks to Shepard about not liking the aliens on the Normandy, but I can also agree that it comes from a place of fear and discomfort, and that definitely contributes to the argument that she’s a space racist. HOWEVER: what a lot of the Ash haters miss is a moment after Virmire on the Citadel, in the wards, when a isolationist xenophobic populist party known as the Terra Firma party approaches Shepard asking for their support in the next election. This comes after Ashley has had a chance to work with Wrex, Garrus, Tali, and Captain Kirrahe. She DRAGS the leader through the muck, stating that while she likes some of the parties platform the party is full of racists and the refusal by the Terra Firma leaders to denounce the racist comments and racists members of the party is enough to lose them her vote already. She gets so heated about Shepard has to command her to stand down. You don’t get to cherry pick her interactions from ME1 and ignore her character growth. She also falls right into her big sister roll with Tali almost immediately. She tells Tali that it took years to get women accepted in the military. When Tali responds that the Migrant Fleet doesn’t have the luxury of sexism, she replies “sounds great, but I don’t think I could get used to the uniform.” In ME2 she refuses Shepard’s offer, despite earlier referring to Shepard as “a god back from the dead.” Why does she refuse? Because Shepard is working with Cerberus, the organization her GRANDFATHER CREATED. She’s all for the Alliance, and the Alliance is either working with or directing the Citadel Council having earned an honored spot after the Geth attack 2 years before. She is committed to working with the government that is dealing with the other races and refuses to work for Cerberus even though you could argue its in her blood and definitely in her upbringing. Honestly, I can’t fathom why people bring up this scene when trashing Ash, this is a moral stand from a woman accused of being a racist and the flip flop here even from people in the fandom I respect is baffling to me. In ME3 there are a whole plethora of scenes you could pick from but I want to talk about her reuniting with Tali. She immediately tells Tali to drop rank with her, observing they’ve been through enough together that the rank isn’t important. This is especially poignant to me if Tali herself is exiled after the events of ME2.

“Ashley is just a soldier, she doesn’t have any personality beyond that.” BULLSHIT she doesn’t. She’s struggled to find her place in the military due to the family stigma around her grandfather, so she hangs a ton of her personal identity on her family. She’s a supportive older sister, an adoring daughter, at least passingly religious if only because “there are no atheists in a foxhole.” She calls her sisters regularly, tells stories about growing up with them, mourns her late father and reads a ton of poetry, demonstrating a more critical appraisal of literature than Shepard, Vega, Joker, or even Kaidan (”its about not giving up?” is that the best you’ve got Shep? thats pathetic.) Whats more, she doesn’t just read one poet, she picked up some poems from both her “sappy” dad and more pragmatic mom. She’s also a great window to military families in ME, which you can’t really say for Kaidan or 2 out of 3 Shepard backstories. I think in a story about a war to end all wars it would be a disservice to not write about all the widowed men, women, an aliens who are living not quite far enough from the war.

“Why can’t she just trust Shepard? Why does she have to refuse to help in ME2 and then be so standoffish in ME3?” Honestly? If my lover had been declared KIA and then magically came back working under cover for a shady organization with a history of criminal crimes like murder and torture I TOO would have trust issues. I feel like we often gloss over just how horrible an organization Cerberus really is. Even ignoring the “they rebuilt you” angle which gets EVEN CREEPIER in the first Mars mission in ME3 I can’t imagine immediately flip flopping between Cerberus are war criminals to my best friend presumed dead is working for them to its alright now totally nothing out of the ordinary that compromised my opinion of their judgement took place.

So I just can’t see the Ashley Williams hate. I can see leaving her behind (no I can’t, no one ever dies in this series, how dare you tell me anyone dies?) on Virmire. But I just can’t fathom the hatred.

With all that said Kaidan is not boring, Ash is more than a racist soldier, and I love all the characters in the ME trilogy. Thank you. Good Night.

#Mass Effect #Tier List #Personal Rant #Sir that is my emotional support character #but honestly every mass effect character is my emotional support

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savedfromsalvation · 5 years

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Compiled by Jim Walker

Babylon Is Fallen

"And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground." (Isaiah 21:9)

Comment

Many soldiers have used Bible verses to justify horrific destruction against their enemy. Such beliefs can comfort the minds of men to do virtually any kind of atrocity against men, women, and children of the enemy. The Crusaders of the 12th century, slaughtered or tortured anyone who stood in their way. The Bible's words gave them their justification.

Even today, our government, military and religious leaders judge wars as "moral" based on Biblical reasoning. Fighting men feel, not only comforted, but glorious in their actions against the destruction of fellow human beings. In the Gulf War, for example, an F-16 fighter/bomber had "Isaiah 21:9" written on its bombs.

David Slaughters Them

"And he brought out the people that were in it, and cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes..." (I Chronicles 20:3)

Comment

Chapters 17-19 (17-18-19) tells us that David killed 22,000 Syrians and that Abishai killed 18,000 Edomites. No one expresses shame at such slaughters.

Here in 20:3, we have David, counted as a great leader of the Israelites, slaughtering captives after the cessation of hostilities. From what high moral ground should we admire this action?

Decapitate Them!

"And Israel joined himself unto Baalpeor: and the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel. And the LORD said unto Moses, 'Take all the heads of the people and hang them up before the LORD against the sun, that the fierce anger of the LORD may be turned away from Israel.'" (Numbers 25:3-4)

Comment

Those who worshipped other gods must die, and even more horribly, their heads displayed publicly. Either God never said anything so cruel, or we truly live in a cursed universe, ruled by a maniac Supreme Being.

Millions of people, today, switch their religions. If God had any interest in this ongoing process, there appears no evidence of this.

Gideon Slaughters

"And Gideon said, Therefore when the Lord hath delivered Zebah and Zalmunna into mine hand, then I will tear your flesh with the thorns of the wilderness and with briers" (Judges 8:7)

"Now Zebah and Zalmunna were Karkor, and their hosts with them, about fifteen thousand men, all that were left of all the hosts of the children of the east: for there fell an hundred and twenty thousand men that drew sword." (Judges 8:10)

Comment

The Gideon Society places Bibles into motels and hotels across America. One would assume Gideon lived as a person of exemplary character and great worth to have a worldwide society named after him. Below describes some of Gideon's accomplishments:

Gideon slaughtered thousands in battle by plotting with the "Lord" to use Treachery.

Gideon murdered thousands more for worshipping "false Gods."

Gideon tortured and killed still more for daring to taunt him.

Gideon plundered the bodies of his victims (to fashion a jeweled priestly vestment).

Gideon fathered an offspring who killed 69 of his stepbrothers.

Read the story of Gideon in Judges, chapters thru 6-9 ( 6-7-8-9). The tale of Gideon describes just one of the many horror stories in the Bible, a book that glorifies behavior abysmal to modern society. The clergy and leaders have hoodwinked millions of people about the stories in the Bible. Don't let others decide for yourself.

God Buries Them Alive

"And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods. They, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them: and they perished from among the congregation. And all Israel that were round about them fled at the cry of them: for they said, Lest the earth swallow us up also. And there came out a fire from the LORD, and consumed the two hundred and fifty men that offered incense." (Numbers 16:32-35)

Comment

Moses relays a sadistic threat that asks us to believe that God punishes members of families, including innocent infants. And again we have the Satanic fire coming from God burning his creations.

God Kills The Firstborns!

"And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle. And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead." (Exodus 12:29-30)

Comment

If we believe every word in the Bible as coming from God, then it stands to reason that the violent actions from the God described in Exodus cannot give us a moral comparison to live our lives in a peaceful world.

If one wishes to believe that God possess love for His creations, then the killing of innocent children cannot possibly come from God, and therefore, these verses from the Bible must have come elsewhere. But note that if one takes the Bible's words as absolute truth, then not only did God smote the firstborn children, but all firstborn regardless of age. This means all firstborn teenagers, firstborn men & women, firstborn octogenarians, and even all firstborn cows and bulls. Regardless of how much love, charity, or goodness they may have imparted to the world, if they had the unfortunate luck to have first passed through their mother's vagina in the land of Egypt, according to the Bible, God killed them!

God Sends Pestilence

"Either three years' famine; or three months to be destroyed before thy foes, while that the sword of thine enemies overtaketh thee; or else three days the sword of the LORD, even the pestilence, in the land, and the angel of the LORD destroying throughout all the coasts of Israel..." (I Chronicles 21:12)

"So the LORD sent pestilence upon Israel: and there fell of Israel seventy thousand men." (I Chronicles 21:14)

Comment

David made an offense against God in taking a census of the people, so God gave David a choice. Oddly enough, David ignores God and never actually gets around to making a choice; so the Lord makes the decision for him and sends pestilence upon Israel.

It appears unclear as to why David committed a crime, but why shouldn't God have punished individual offenders instead of killing an army of innocent bystanders? Atrocities such as this appear outrageous enough when perpetrated by Attila the Hun, Hitler or Pol Pot, but when it comes from a, supposedly, loving God, it should make one wonder if this represents a Devil instead of a God.

God Slaughters Blacks

"And there came out against them Zerah the Ethiopian with an host of a thousand thousand, and three hundred chariots..." (II Chronicles 14:9)

So the LORD smote the Ethiopians before Asa, and before Judah; and the Ethiopians fled. (II Chronicles 14:12)

Comment

It appears that Black Christian Bible studies programs ignore these verses, for it says that the Lord God slaughtered over a million blacks.

The association of black with evil goes far back in Western Christian culture. The early Church fathers, Origen, Jerome, and Augustine of Hippo wrote about devils appearing as Ethiopians.

White racist groups (such as the Ku Klux Klan who think of themselves as opposite of black devils) see these Biblical verses as evidence to justify their beliefs. We still hear phrases such as "Prince of Darkness" or "Black magic" which link blackness with sin.

In the story of Ham and Japheth, the word "ham" has connotations of "hot" and "dark" in Semitic languages. To the ancient Israelites, as well as some modern Jews and Christians, the "children of Ham" had dark skin and lived in eastern Africa. Thus they see the "Curse of Ham" as a link with black skin and sexual license.

God's Threat To Kill

"And Moses said, Thus saith the LORD, About midnight will I go out into the midst of Egypt: And all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill; and all the firstborn of beasts." (Exodus 11:4-5)

Comment

After reading such verses, it would become apparent, even to a child, that this does not describe the actions of a loving Being. Anyone who reconciles the killing of innocent children with an intelligent and loving Creator can only come from great ignorance under the addiction of blind faith.

"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize humankind."

--Thomas Paine

Godly Head Wounds

"But God shall wound the head of his enemies, and the hairy scalp of such a one as goeth on still in his trespasses. The Lord said, I will bring again from Bashan, I will bring my people again from the depths of the sea: That thy foot may be dipped in the blood of thine enemies, and the tongue of thy dogs in the same." (Psalms 68:21-23)

Comment

If anyone believes these sadistic words come from God, then it might serve prudence to stay away from such people. For anyone who holds to such beliefs may very well do the same to others.

Godly Mass Murder

"And he smote the men of Bethshemesh, because they had looked into the ark of the LORD, even he smote of the people fifty thousand and threescore and ten men: and the people lamented, because the LORD had smitten many of the people with a great slaughter." (I Samuel 6:19)

Comment

Here we have just one more instance of God performing mass murder, a sadistic killer far worse than Hitler, Attila the Hun or Pol Pot.

These verses should insult the intelligence of any person who thinks that God possesses a loving nature.

One should not dismiss the Old Testament's repeated demand for the vilest atrocities as something peculiar to the early Hebrews. Even today, our most atrocious wars, terrorism and hate crimes occur around the world based on ancient religious beliefs, many of them coming directly from verses in the Old and New Testament.

Kill All Unbelievers

"And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death; because he hath spoken to turn you away from the LORD your God..." (Deuteronomy 13: 5)

"If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers;" (Deuteronomy 13: 6)

"Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people." (Deuteronomy 13:8-9)

"Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword." (Deuteronomy 13:15)

Comment

These severe laws commanded the members of the Hebrew religion to murder even their own children if they did not worship Yahweh (God).

These Bible words can justify, to a fanatical fundamentalist believer, the killing of friends or family simply because they may fail to change their beliefs.

Why anyone today would accept these words, much less allow them to exist in a sacred book goes against the nature of any tolerant and loving people.

Kill Man, Woman, Infant

"Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." (I Samuel 15:2-3)

Comment

No matter how one can justify possible crimes from adults, suckling infants have no means of acting out crimes. And what evil against God could the animals have possibly performed? Only an evil entity could kill innocent infants and animals, no matter what their parents and owners may have done.

King David's Holocaust

"And he brought forth the people that were therein, and put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under the axes of iron, and made them pass through the brickkiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon. So David and all the people returned unto Jerusalem." (II Samuel 12:31)

Comment

From the sacred scripts from the Bible we learn that the great King David carried out atrocities that rivaled the cruel acts from the holocaust of World War II. If we condemn the Nazi's for their atrocities, why should we not do the same for David's bloodthirsty actions?

Moses' Mass Murder

"Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the LORD in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the LORD. Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves." (Numbers 31:16-18)

Comment

Moses commands the murder of approximately 100,000 young males and, roughly, 68,000 helpless women.

Consider women and children of your own family: No matter how sick they may lay, or how they may go against a religion, how would you feel if a man named Moses, claiming to speak for God, sent men into your house and hacked to pieces the women and male children? Also, how would you react if they spotted a female child, dragged her off with them to do as they please with her? Note that these innocent virgins served for their own sexual pleasures.

Midian, the land of the Midianites, did not reside in an area regarded as a natural enemy of Israel for centuries, and in fact lay hundreds of miles away from the Israelite encampment. Moses, himself, had lived in Midian as fugitive after committing his first murder. In short, Midian presented no threat to God's "Chosen People."

Nail His Head!

"Then Jael Heber's wife took a nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died." (Judges 4:21)

Comment

In verse 16 the Israelites surprise Sisera's army and that "there was not a man left," except Sisera who deserts his army and flees, a deed punishable by court martial today. Sisera then goes to the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber. Jael takes him in, hides him under a blanket, gives him milk to quench his thirst, and promises to stand guard at the door while he sleeps. Then Jael kills Sisera!

We see no telling of the slightest shame, but rather, Jael proudly flaunts her kill. The author of this piece of Scripture makes it clear that the passage represents a deed, not only as grand and heroic but also consistent with the will of God (see Judges 4:23).

Raping And Killing

"Every one that is found shall be thrust through; and every one that is joined unto them shall fall by the sword. Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished." (Isaiah 13:15-16)

Comment

These verses foretold the deaths of the people of Babylon. Fortunately not everyone in Babylon (now modern Iraq) fell by the sword or had their children dashed to pieces or their wives raped (just another instance of errors in the Bible). How some people who believe in an infallible Bible can accept these verses as God inspired, or morally uplifting can only give evidence to the blinding nature of belief. For if we believe these words as God inspired, then the killing of children and the raping of wives must also come as an inspiration from the Supreme Being.

Shed The Blood

"And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made the man." (Genesis 9:5-6)

Comment

Some anti-abortionists have used these words to justify the killing of abortionists. As such, these words helped inspire Michael Griffin to kill Doctor David Gunn on March 10, 1993.

Consider that the Bible never directly addresses abortion, much the less the condemnation of it. On the contrary, God himself has condoned, not only miscarriages, but has personally called for the killing of suckling infants and the bashing of children against the rocks.

(See Numbers 5:26-27, I Samuel 15:2-3, and Psalm 137:9)

Slaughter Of Innocents

"And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain." (Deuteronomy 2:34)

"And we utterly destroyed them, as we did unto Sihon king of Hesbon, utterly destroying the men, women, and children, of every city. But all the cattle, and the spoil of the cities we took for a prey to ourselves." (Deuteronomy 3:6-7)

Comment

Such words helped give justification to mediaeval Crusaders who slaughtered men, women and children along their way to Jerusalem and stole the spoils of the cities. Even today, many Christian military men use Scripture to justify their actions. If any soldier harbors doubt about killing his fellow humans, he need only consult a military chaplain or read the Bible to calm their worries. Even George Bush (the First), with Billy Graham beside him, proclaimed the Gulf War as "moral." George Bush (the Second) continued in his father's steps by killing thousands of Iraqi civilians in the Iraqi war. Such moral wars result in thousands of "utterly destroyed" innocent men, women and children.;

(For a few more examples [but not all] see also Deuteronomy 3:3, 7:2, 20:16-17 , 25:19; Joshua 6:21, 8:26, 10-28-40; Numbers 31:17-18; I Samuel 15:3; Isaiah 13:16; and Hosea 13:16)

Slay Old And Young

"And to the others he said in mine hearing, Go ye after him through the city, and smite: let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity: Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and woman: but come not near any man upon whom is the mark; and begin at my sanctuary. Then they began at the ancient men which were before the house." (Ezekiel 9:5-6)

Comment

These words, commanded by God, orders the slaying of not only women and the old, but of little children. These accounts of cold-blooded massacres occurred simply because people refused to accept Yahweh. These phrases should give warning to anyone who knows a person who believes every word in the Bible.

For what sense of moral reasoning should we allow ourselves to admire such Biblical verses?

The Survivors

"Saying, Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads. And I heard the number of them which were sealed: and there were sealed an hundred and forty and four thousand of all the tribes of the children of Israel." (Revelation 7:3-4)

"And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power. And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads." (Revelation 9:3-4)

"And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty [and] four thousand, having his Father's name written in their foreheads." (Revelation 14:1)

"...the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth. These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins." (Revelation 14:3-4)

Comment

Here we have the great future destruction where billions of people will die. Only 144,000 virgin Jews with a protective mark on their heads will survive. (I suppose the 'Jews for Jesus' cult would serve as the leading candidates.)

How many believers realize that this means the death of everyone on earth but a few virgin Jews? And this includes the destruction of all Christians! (Of course the alleged Jesus, a virgin Jew, who claimed only a few would enter heaven would agree with this).

Note: Of course faithful Christians cannot accept the 144,000 figure so they must either become atheists, ignore these verses, reject Revelation as just dream nonsense, or try to revise its meaning to something they can accept. Some try to get creative by claiming that

Rev. 7:-9

,"...a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues...," means an unlimited number will enter heaven. Not so. The "all" in this verse speaks about all the tribes of Israel (the Jews) scattered around the nations of the world. The verse comes right after listing the tribes in

Rev. 7:1-8

. And man doesn't name the number but rather the angel who speaks in John's dream. And John reports the number, three times, in chapters 7 and 14, as shown above. Sorry Christians but all of you will have to suffer with all the atheists and unbelievers in God's hell. Welcome to the club!

Beware of a future "Armageddon" caused by religious people. Belief in self-fulfilling prophesies creates self-fulfilling acts.

Utter Destruction, 1

"And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword." (Joshua 6:21)

Comment

These "God inspired" words give not a hint of mercy to innocent slaughtered women, children or the old.

After Moses and Aaron died, Joshua assumed command and the Israelites entered Jericho. Note that in the same siege, "all the silver, and gold, and vessels of brass and iron, are consecrated unto the Lord: they shall come into the treasury of the Lord" (Joshua 6:19)

In the battle of Ai, the Bible tells that twelve thousand, the whole population of Ai, got slaughtered. (Josh. 8:25)

Note that many invaders throughout history have used such words as justification for wars and looting.

Utter Destruction, 2

"Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree: And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place." (Deuteronomy 12:2-3)

Comment

The Lord, here commands the destruction of all the places where people worship other gods. There appears not a shred of religious tolerance here!

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own-- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism."

--Albert Einstein

(For other examples of utter destructions, see Numbers 21:2; Deuteronomy 3:6-7, 7:2, 13:15, 20:17, Judges 21:11, II Chronicles 20:23; I Kings 20-42; Isaiah 11:15, 15:3, 9, 18; Jeremiah 12:17, 25-9, 50;21, 26, 51:3; Daniel 11;44; Amos 9:8 )

Washing Feet In Blood

"The righteous shall rejoice when he sees the vengeance. He shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked." (Psalms 58:10)

Comment

How many "good" Christians realize that such a verse appears in the Bible? Of course most preachers keep these bloodthirsty words away from their congregations, and the few Christians who do come across these verses, re-interpret them for their own purposes, not realizing the impact these words can have on others. Unfortunately the few that take these verses literally can justify atrocities against anyone who they wish to define as "wicked."

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whatisonthemoonarchive · 5 years

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Appreciate the history lesson Robert M.

https://www.firstthings.com/article/1999/12/john-paul-ii-and-the-crisis-of-humanism

What ever our contribution, we as Moonies still have a voice as witnesses to history and watching John Paul 2 getting gunned down in St. Peter's square was the culmination of a process that we were swept into and out of our innocence.

Whether we choose to educate ourselves about the essential nature of Communism or even modern Liberal Democracy for that matter is almost irrelevant to the core message. Atheistic materialist Communism=bad. Democratic Capitalistic Consummerism=bad. Christian piety charity=good.

We made these choices every day as Moonies from the first day that we were induced to reject "Hippie freedom", (speaking for myself, of course). To consecrating our lives in a form of martyrdom to Jesus Christ. It would be many years before we discovered that Moon himself didn't believe in it but was another of the incessant weeds thrown up to misguide and redirect impressionable souls to largely politically convenient ends.

Communism was destined to collapse upon it's own preposterous claims and everybody intuitively understood this. Including Pope John Paul, Moon, Solzhenitsyn, C.I.A. Director George H. Walker Bush, Reagan, Andropov and his successors, The Bank of London, Federal Reserve bank, etc, etc. The only ones who didn't know how or when were the actual folks caught in it's meat grinding mechanism on either side of the wall.

When the wall finally started to crumble there were no shortage of lunatics claiming responsibility. Fortunately, it was fairly evident to the rest of the world that it was the indomitable spirit of God deep inside the hearts of men and women trapped behind the wall that collapsed the monstrosity.

The Pope went down in a hail of gunfire as if to punctuate the orgy of madness. Naturally, it was perceived to be a militant muslim at first. Very convenient. Further public investigation perhaps fueled by the remnants of the K.G.B. revealed that Turkish Grey Wolves were in fact an appendage of the C.I.A. A cacophony of indignation from the west flipped the story to blame the K.G.B. and it cohorts in Bulgaria. The Pope would survive and the world breathed a sigh of relief. Blame didn't seem appropriate any more as the Pope expressed forgiveness and Christians responded. The secret remained with him until his death. Yet another martyr for God.

The Moonies were beside ourselves. What to do now? Hundreds made the pilgrimage to mother Russia to claim victory for God, including yours truly. Most of us were confused by what we saw. Young Russians, Tartars, Georgians, etc. Swarmed to our workshops guided by former, or perhaps, current K.G.B. functionaries. The kids were extraordinarily well educated and well behaved. Most spoke fluently at least 2 languages and were well versed in something known to them as "the classics". I personally was utterly humbled. The experts organizing the events for the church were besides themselves alternating between threats and cajoling us not to fraternize to deeply with the locals. I threw caution to the wind and immediately embraced our new friends. Some were obvious, like little Vladimir who was the spitting image of early Lenin but older than the others who privately indicated to me that he was the designated F.S.B. representative monitoring our activities. He continuously plied me with offers to help him escape with his family, to the U.S. or anywhere that wasn't there. I assured him that I had no ability to do so but he persisted throughout the entire time. The other children of probably mostly former Communist officials were a delight. They loved Americans and were disappointed when I told them I was Canadian. Most of the male moonies had multiple offers of marriage in their first week there which I assumed were politely turned down in favor of our Moonies blessed wives. We were instructed by our handlers to return to Moscow and stay together as a group by train from the Sanitorium on the Black Sea in Yalta where the workshop was held. I rejected this out of hand and chose to follow up little Vladimir's offer to stay with his family in their flat in Moscow. His wife and family were wonderful he had a modest apartment with the usual amenities which I discovered later was an anomaly. I visited in turn all of my guests in Moscow and discovered that most Russians lived in dire poverty usually with three Generations crammed into Tenements blocks without a stick of furniture save a table with a couple chairs. Vladimir has lost control of me by then as well. I hopped from apartment to apartment meeting people that you and I would never have access to in the United States. One girls father was a Scientist working on Artificial Intelligence at the time (1993). I hadn't a clue what that was, sounded important so I feigned astonishment and shook his hand emphatically. He revealed to me in perfect English that a taxi driver made more money than he did because they had access to foreign exchange. I knew that was true because I had taken about thirty people out for Ice cream the previous night and spent the equivalent of two Baskin and Robbins sundays. I commented on this to an American participant next to me and he cautioned me to keep quiet about it so not to offend our hosts. I agreed. Everywhere I went I was plied with shots of Vodka or I "was not a friend". Originating from Canada, I had no problem complying to my new found friends. I was escorted through dazzlingly clean and orderly cavernous subway terminals all over the city from one district to the next. I went horseback riding outside of Moscow at a Orthodox Monastery that had miraculously survived the Communist purges.

A week had passed before I collected my senses and realized that my plane rendezvous was quickly approaching. I found my way to the original Unification church lodgings which was a former Hotel close to the Airport. I was strictly admonished by the church leadership and plied with questions about my adventure. I assured them that their fears were completely and utterly groundless and that they may be suffering from some sort of cultish miasma themselves. They told me that I was never to return to Russia and I assured them that it probably wouldn't be necessary. Russians and everyone else from the former C.I.S. states would descend upon us like a swarm in the days ahead. My newfound Russian friends showed up at the airport to see me off with a flurry of embraces and kisses on the lips, much to the astonishment of the workshop organizers. Some were crying, I was feeling it too but managed to keep my sh*t together. Yes, I was still married to my Moonie bride and maintained my integrity throughout my experience.

I never returned to Russia like others did, but was content to correspond for a few years after, including with little Vladimir. I was busy raising a family in rural Alabama trying to deal with the local Unification church leadership that was starting to resemble the former autocrats of Communism. Moon himself made the unlikely effort to reach out to his perceived counterpart in North Korea. I understood the process but was still taken back by how easily Moon had embraced his former sworn enemy. Amid showers of multi-millions of dollars in gifts, Moon had reached an understanding with his former nemesis to open businesses in North Korea and foster a new age of cross cultural exchange. We later found out that Moon personally profited from this arrangement, seemingly at the expense of his former countrymen. While the overtly Communist Government of North Korea went on to systemically starve their citizens and develop dreadful weapons of mass destruction in order to secure their control.

Why did I relate all of this you may ask? Since my experience both in the Moonie cult and my travels during. (Russia, C.I.S., El Salvador, during the revolution, Korea, both pre-cold war and post.) My mind has expanded, thankfully, to God. Yeah, I concede that Moon played a role here too. We eventually arrived at something called the Internet with which to educate ourselves in order to digest these experiences. What we have come to fathom, much in line with the admonishments of Pope John Paul 2 and others. Is that God exists and pours his love upon us daily whether deserving or not, in such volume that we are affected in spite of the desperate tangle of 'Isms and ideologies seemingly designed to distort and confuse our spirits from that which we naturally cherish. Someone tried to murder John Paul but they forgot that Catholics, and many others follow someone known as Jesus Christ. We don't even worship the dude but seek his guidance provided in a little handbook called New Testament. Sometime I remember to crack it open in a moment of anguish and my heart was melted in utter complete surrender. Not by force of course, but because my mind could suddenly absorb the kernels of truth from the scant but magnificent parables taught over 2000 years ago by this guy to a bunch of miscreants. Not unlike myself, abandoned by the wealthy and powerful who always seem to be with us but not of us. Trying to control and take what they can from us including our impoverished spirits. But no. Not this time. It is nothing but sand. Of course Jesus said it best. Matt. 4:1; Mk. 1:12; Lk. 4:1

"You will bow down and serve your God and creator" (paraphrasing Jesus speaking to Satan in the wilderness). I concur, God's will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Thanks for reading. Shout out to John Paul and all the saints. I'm unworthy but have committed myself to do what I can, come what may.

Frank F

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pamphletstoinspire · 6 years

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EDITH STEIN’S JOURNEY TO SAINTHOOD

At the end of her life, Edith Stein considered herself one of the countless “hidden souls” who are part of the invisible Church and who regularly remain hidden from the whole world. She was a contemplative nun, a member of the Discalced Carmelite Order.

Yet, as Edith herself pointed out, throughout the history of humankind the visible Church has grown out of this invisible one. In the Old Testament, as the patriarchs allowed themselves to be used as God’s pliant instruments, “[God] established them in an external visible efficacy as bearers of historical development.” And every one of the events and persons who intertwined in the mystery of the Incarnation — Mary, Joseph, Zechariah, Elizabeth, the shepherds, the kings, Simeon, and Anna — had behind them “a solitary life with God and were prepared for their special tasks before they found themselves together in those awesome encounters and events.” To most hidden souls, their impact and affinity can remain hidden even from themselves and others for their entire lives, Edith wrote the year before her death.

But it is also possible for some of this to become visible in the external world. . . . The deeper a soul is bound to God, the more completely surrendered to grace, the stronger will be its influence on the form of the church. Conversely, the more an era is engulfed in the night of sin and estrangement from God, the more it needs souls united to God. And God does not permit a deficiency. The greatest figures of prophecy and sanctity step forth out of the darkest night. . . . Certainly the decisive turning points in world history are substantially co-determined by souls whom no history book ever mentions. And we will only find out about those souls to whom we owe the decisive turning points in our personal lives on the day when all that is hidden is revealed.

During one of the darkest periods of our human history, deeply rooted in this “estrangement from God” and “the night of sin” and death that she describes, Edith Stein chose to take on the name of Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross and to unite her soul to God fully and completely as a contemplative nun. Surely, this is no coincidence.

This is Edith Stein’s legacy.

Long before Pope John Paul II proclaimed Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross a saint in the Catholic Church in 1998, the “hidden life” of Edith Stein had become known and remembered in faith communities, mostly throughout Europe. This hidden soul and her complete trust in divine grace became slowly visible to the external world, as Catholics throughout that continent recognized the unparalleled, deliberate, and brilliant legacy left behind by the interior life of this woman of Jewish descent who fell in love with Truth and transformed her entire life because of that encounter with Jesus Christ. Her surrender to grace is all the more visible because of the dark night that enveloped the period of history in which she lived — and died — years when millions of men and women were systematically murdered by the Nazi regime in the name of diligent ethnic cleansing.

Edith Stein was passionate, purposeful, faithful, and committed. She was a brilliant philosopher who lived and thrived in the intellectual university community of 1910s Germany. She was also a young Jewish woman who shocked her intellectual community when she fell in love with Jesus Christ and became a Roman Catholic, being baptized in 1922. More shocking still, eleven years later, Edith entered the cloistered Carmelite order in Cologne, Germany, to follow a life of mystic and contemplative prayer in the cloister under the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Today, as the meaning of feminism is lost in a world of relativism, Edith Stein provides a model for a true feminist — a woman who authentically integrates faith, family, and work.

In 1942, Edith and her sister Rosa, a lay Carmelite living with her at the monastery in Echt, Holland, were forcefully taken by the Gestapo and transported by train to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they were both murdered in the gas chamber on August 9. Edith Stein’s profound spirituality, however, had left a mark not only on those who had personally known her as a philosopher, a teacher, and a speaker, but also on all who learned of her through her many writings, essays, articles, letters, and stories.

“Today we live again in a time that urgently needs to be renewed at the hidden springs of God-fearing souls,” Edith wrote for the feast of the Epiphany, 1941, a meditation requested by the Echt Prioress. “Many people, too, place their last hope in these hidden springs of salvation. This is a serious warning cry: Surrender without reservation to the Lord who has called us. This is required of us so that the face of the earth may be renewed. In faithful trust, we must abandon our souls to the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit. . . . We may live in confident certainty that what the Spirit of God secretly effects in us bears fruits in the kingdom of God. We will see them in eternity.”

Not in spite of, but because of, Edith’s hidden life, one can easily paraphrase what G. K. Chesterton wrote of Thomas More: if there had not been that particular woman at that particular moment, the whole of history would have been different. Not only is Edith Stein the first recognized saint in the Catholic Church since the end of the apostolic age to have been born and raised in a practicing Jewish family, but, even more significant, because of her legacy of faith and philosophy, our understanding of Catholicism is richer, deeper, and more profound.

Much like the spread of the Christian message in the early Church, the story of the Discalced Carmelite nun named Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Edith Stein, traveled swiftly by word of mouth. And through ordeals that sound like an episode of Mission Impossible, Edith’s original manuscripts were stashed away, concealed, and even literally buried underground during the Second World War, in an effort to preserve her unique and insightful work from the Nazi death machine. It is amazing and outright miraculous that so much of Edith’s work was ultimately preserved — in spite of the gruesome persecution and physical devastation left behind by the war.

It is not hard to see, therefore, how the story of such a radical and orthodox Catholic woman could not only grab the attention of the community of believers, but also inspire them to follow the way to Christ. A short twenty years after her death, the official process of beatification and canonization for Edith Stein was set in motion. Whether through reading her numerous writings, which are now translated into several languages, or through hearing her story, it became natural to anticipate that Edith would one day be formally honored because of her faith. On May 1, 1987, she was beatified in Cologne by Pope John Paul II, in a ceremony attended by seventy thousand people, including some of her Jewish relatives and Carmelite Sisters who had known and lived with her.

Eleven years later (the same number of years that Edith waited between her baptism and her entry into Carmel) Edith Stein — the philosopher, convert to the Catholic Faith, Carmelite nun, and martyr at Auschwitz — was declared a saint in the Catholic Church. At a Mass in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday, October 11, 1998, Pope John Paul II presented “this eminent daughter of Israel and faithful daughter of the Church as a saint to the whole world.” At the liturgy attended by nearly one hundred members of the Stein family, many who remain devout Jews, the Holy Father declared, “The spiritual experience of Edith Stein is an eloquent example of this extraordinary interior renewal. A young woman in search of the truth has become a saint and martyr through the silent workings of divine grace: Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, who from heaven repeats to us today all the words that marked her life: Far be it from me to glory except in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,’ ” the Pope continued, echoing the words of St. Paul to the Galatians (6:14).

Edith Stein died a follower of Jesus Christ, “offering her martyrdom for her fellow Jews,” wrote Priors General Father Camilo Maccise, O.C.D., and Father Joseph Chalmers, O.Carm., in 1998 in a circular to Carmelite men and women around the world on the occasion of Edith Stein’s canonization. “The canonization of Edith Stein is a new plea that God makes to the Church, to Carmelites in particular, on the eve of the Third Millennium. The life of this great Jewish woman, who sought the truth and followed Jesus, offers a timely message for relations between faith and science, for ecumenical dialogue, for consecrated life and for spirituality, speaking, as it does, to the members of the Church and those outside it.”

Even as we continue the process of “getting to know” Edith, as more of her theological works, letters, and philosophical essays are translated into English, it is my hope that we never lose sight of the loving teacher and friend Edith Stein, who is still remembered by many of her students and colleagues in Europe. I echo the words of Carmelite Sister Josephine Koeppel, who recommended in a published interview: “Get to know her as a person with a heart that really can be touched. First, get to know her as that. Then respect her brilliance.”

Ultimately, it is my hope and my prayer that you be inspired not simply by this holy woman’s death but by her remarkable and heroic life. “Pure spirits are like rays of light through which the eternal light communes with creation,” Edith once said. “To believe in saints, means only to sense in them God’s presence.”

Carmelite Prayer

Lord, God of our ancestors, You brought St. Teresa Benedicta to the fullness of the science of the Cross at the hour of her martyrdom. Fill us with that same knowledge; and, through her intercession, allow us always to seek after You, the supreme Truth; and to remain faithful until death to the covenant of love ratified in the blood of Your Son for the salvation of all. Grant this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Written by: CHARLIE MCKINNEY

#st teresa benedicta #edith stein

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fletchermarple · 6 years

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Quick Review of the True Crime Books I read in 2017 (Part 1)

Review of books in 2016 Part 1 and Part 2

Review of books in 2015

One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway -- An its Aftermath by Asne Seierstad: You can tell that this well researched book has the signature of an experienced investigative journalist like Asne Seierstad. The novel offers a very clear and engaging account of the 2011 Norway massacre, in which Anders Breivik killed 77 people, most of them teenagers, as a misguided stance against multiculturalism, which he felt was ruining his country. Using Breivik’s own writings, police records and witness’ interviews, Seierstad builds a fascinating and deep profile of a perpetual loser with delusions of grandeur. At the same time offers, without judgment of her own, an interesting look into the mind of a mass murderer. Breivik might not be a school shooter, but you can certainly make some connections to them. The author alternates Breivik’s life story with that of two of his victims, which helps put a clear face to that horrendous death toll. I can only assume she chose those two because their families were willing to talk to her, but to be honest, their stories are very ordinary and she makes them look like perfect kids, so the chapters focused on them are not as compelling. But this is definitely a must read for anyone interested in true crime and especially in mass shootings.

JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation by Steve Thomas: This book was frustrating, both because of what’s happening in the story and also because the obvious bias of the author makes it difficult to look at the case with any perspective but his own. Thomas was one of the main investigators in the early years of the JonBenet Ramsey case, and is very clear about his belief that her parents, John and Patsy, are responsible for her death and staged the crime scene, and he has some decent arguments to support that staging. The problem comes when he has to explain how and why the murder happened, then his theory falls short. This has always been my issue with the Ramsey case: there’s just not one theory that fully makes sense. Thomas’ opinion (he’s very fond of the “In my opinion” phrase) is that Patsy accidentally killed her during a fit of rage because she had wet the bed, but I just don’t see it. And while pushing that forward, he ignores other variables and suspects (Burke just doesn’t exist in his vision). He’s very adamant about the Ramseys avoiding police and getting special treatment (which in itself is no evidence of guilt), but he’s very vague about, for example, whether JonBenet had a history of sexual abuse. He mentions clearing “hundreds of suspects” for the intruder theory, but doesn’t say who or how. Thomas details the way that the DA’s office kept meddling in favor of the Ramseys, to the point that they are likely the main reason why this case went unsolved (along with some mediocre police work, no matter how Thomas tries to embellish it), but the problem is that his frustration with that --that eventually led him to quit not just the case, but the whole police force-- colors pretty much everything he has to say. He comes across as so angry and bitter, that when I finished I felt that I was missing a big part of the story he just didn’t seem willing to tell us. Bottomline, this is a fundamental read in the JonBenet saga but it would be a mistake to consider it an absolute truth and must be read with a healthy touch of skepticism.

Bitter Remains by Diane Fanning: I like reading books about crimes I have absolutely no prior knowledge about, and that was the case here. The novel, written by one of the big american names in the true crime genre, tells the story of Laura Ackerson, murdered by her ex, Grant Hayes, and his wife Amanda. The story is extremely tragic and gruesome, with the book focusing on the victim’s troubled life and how she was managing to overcome her problems and make a better life for herself and her two sons when she was killed at only 27. Fanning does her best to present us with all the context about the case, but she doesn’t pretend to be understanding or sympathetic with the two killers, especially Grant who seems to be one of the most despicable people you’ll ever read about. This book really lays down in all its horror how human life holds so little value to some people.

For Laci by Sharon Rocha: I thought a book couldn’t get more heartbreaking than Sue Klebold’s A Mother’s Reckoning, but I was wrong. Sharon Rocha’s grief over the loss of her daughter Laci --who disappeared while heavily pregnant on Christmas’ Eve of 2002, only to be found five months later, her body decapitated-- grips you through the pages and squeezes your heart. In Sharon’s words, Laci comes alive as a likeable, cheerful woman who made the world a better place. On the other hand, her husband Scott Peterson, currently in death row for murdering her and their unborn son, is portrayed as a callous, cold and narcissitic individual who would rather end his wife’s life than deal with a messy divorce or be tied down by a kid. As you can imagine, Sharon’s presentation of the case is the same as the police’s and prosecution’s, and it’s the version I believe. The circumstancial evidence against Peterson is too overwhelming, and tied together builds a stronger case than any DNA sample without context could ever make. Sharon describes Laci and Scott’s relationship and his growing distaste of the idea of becoming a father, and also her own struggle when she started to realize that the son in law she was publicly supporting was guilty (on a side note, Scott’s parents are particularly terrible, at least in Sharon’s eyes). Unless you somehow believe that Peterson is innocent, this is a very poignant and touching read.

Illusion of Justice by Jerome F. Buting: This book was written by one of Steven Avery’s defense lawyers, who also happens to be my favorite character in Making a Murderer. Here, he explores not only the behind the scenes of the Avery trial, but also other cases of his stellar career and why he believes the justice system is broken. And he succeeds in making you understand why there can't be real justice if the process to convict someone isn't clean. The author talks a lot about his own life, which I found quite interesting, particularly the cancer that almost killed him. He’s a man of strong convictions who’s worked hard to improve a flawed system. I was expecting more revelations about the Avery case, and he does sheds some light on what was going on that we didn’t see in the documentary (I especially love his jabs at unethical prosecutor Ken Kratz), but nothing truly shocking. He clearly believes in Avery's innocence, although he doesn’t say it outright. Instead, he focuses on explaining why his arrest and trial was a miscarriage of justice. And he has a point. There’s also a segment in the last part in which he addresses frequently asked questions and misconceptions that people have about the case (for example this confusion about “sweat DNA”). He also devotes plenty of time to talk about another big case of his, the one of Ralph Armstrong, who spent almost 30 years in jail for a horrible crime he didn't commit. If you enjoyed Making a Murderer and are interested in the judicial aspects of true crime, this book is for you. It's very informative, told in an easy, fluid narrative.

The Innocent Man by John Grisham: As a big fan of courtroom dramas, I love most of John Grisham’s stories (A Time to Kill is among my favorite novels, period). I was excited to check out this, his first non fiction story, which focuses on Ron Williamson, a mentally ill man and drug addict who, along with his friend Dennis Fritz, was sent to death row for the horrific 1988 rape and murder of Debbie Carter. DNA testing cleared them both 11 years later. All the elements are there: a fascinating case of wrongful conviction, the mystery of who the real killer was (although the book makes it pretty obvious from the start), the fight to make justice. But I have to admit I was underwhelmed by it. There was something very tedious about the way Grisham decided to write it, and I think part of it isn’t really his fault, it’s just that Ron Williamson is not an interesting character, aside from being wrongfully accused, and the big chunk of his story that makes up for the first half of the book really made me lose interest.

Similar Transactions by S. R. Reynolds: Ever heard of Larry Lee Smith? I hadn’t before I read this book. He’s a serial rapist who most likely also murdered 15 year old Michelle Anderson in 1987, although that case is still officially unsolved. This book is the effort a woman called Sasha Reynolds to shed some light to Michelle’s case and to tell the story of Smith, an unrepentant predator who went back to attacking women every time he was released from jail. Halfway through the book, Reynolds inserts herself in the story but in the third person. She explains she did it so she wouldn’t mess with the narrative, but it felt a little weird to me. She, however, doesn’t put herself at the center of the story and makes the victims the protagonists. Because of the nature of the crime, in the wrong hands this book could be too graphic or sensationalist, but Reynolds is very careful and respectful without hiding the horrors all these women went through. In times when sexual abuse is on the frontline news, this books really shows the way such stories should be covered.

Overkill by Lyn Riddle: Despite that ghastly cover, that makes this novel look like a cheap thriller, the book is a serious attempt to cover in excruciating detail the senseless murder of Laurie Show. In 1991, the 16 year old was beaten and stabbed by Lisa Michelle Lambert, who had started harassing her because Laurie briefly dated her boyfriend Lawrence Yunkin while the two were separated. Yunkin and a friend of Lambert, Tabitha Buck, also actively participated in the crime and the three of them were convicted for it. Lambert, a master manipulator that would put Jodi Arias to shame, said that the police framed her with the murder to hide the fact they had gang-raped, and managed to convince a judge to overturn her conviction. He even went as far as to forbid the state from re-trying her. That was eventually scratched, and Lambert went back to jail where she’s staying for good. It’s a long and complicated legal process, and the main problem of this book is that it goes so deep into it, it becomes incredibly boring. Even for someone like me, that likes the trial part of any case, it was almost impossible to go through. The book has good elements, like a nuanced portrayal of all the characters involved, but it’s so repetitive and exhausting that I just can’t bring myself to recommend it.

#true crime #tcoriginal #anders breivik #jonbenet ramsey #steven avery #laci peterson #john grisham #ron williamson #larry lee smith #laurie show #review #book review

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ahopkins1965 · 4 years

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Verse of the Day ▼

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Home Verse Of The Day Judges 6:23

◄ What Does Judges 6:23 Mean? ►

The LORD said to him, "Peace to you, do not fear; you shall not die."

Judges 6:23(NASB)

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Picture courtesy of Moody Publishers

Verse Thoughts

How we all delight to read through the chapter on faith in the book of Hebrews, and rejoice as we consider the exploits of so many godly men and women of faith. How often we wish that we were like these spiritual heroes, and that our faith was as sure and strong as that great cloud of witnesses, who by God's grace, were saved by faith, lived by faith, gave honour to God, and found their way into the holy Scriptures.

We think of Joshua, who was strong and very courageous, whom God chose to lead the people of Israel across the Red Sea and into the promised land, and of David, the shepherd boy of Israel who was chosen to be king and who penned many psalms that have encouraged multiple generations. We remember the beautiful Queen Esther, who was used by God to save the entire nation of Israel from genocidal extermination, and the apostle Paul, who has inspired generations of Christians. And we think of the gallant Gideon, who was the mighty man used by God to save His people from the terrifying Midianite army.

Every one of them was used mightily of God, and yet each one had significant character flaws. Each one compromised their testimony by doing things in their lives that dishonoured God. Joshua brought the people into Canaan, but failed to secure the land, as instructed. David was a man after God's own heart, but he committed both adultery and murder.

The courageous Esther was prepared to participate in an ungodly beauty contest, in a pagan nation, and devalue her virginity. Paul, the mass-murder of Christians, was the wretched man of Roman 7, before he discovered that God's grace is sufficient and His strength is made perfect in our weakness, and Gideon was a frightened little man, who secretly threshed his wheat in a winepress to avoid being intimidated by the Midianites.

The powerful nation of Midian had harassed Israel for seven years. They made themselves dens in the mountains and constructed strongholds in the rocks, so they could attack Israel and spoil their goods. They flooded into the land at harvest time, to spoil Israel's crops and steal their possessions, before retreating to their own land. God permitted them to prevail, as a punishment for His erring people, who had rebelled against the Lord, broken their covenant with Him, adopted pagan practices, and even started to worship the evil gods of their wicked neighbours.

For seven years the Midianites swooped down to destroy Israel's crops and steal their harvest, such that nothing was left to feed the people or their animals. So numerous was the Midianite army, that they were like locusts for number - both they and their camels were innumerable, and they came into the land to devastate it. It was at this point that Gideon was called by God to become one of the primary Judges of Israel.

The Lord had heard the cries of His people and chose Gideon to free His desperate nation from the Midianite snare, and so the angel of the Lord came to Gideon as he was threshing some wheat in the winepress, in an attempt to save his family's crop from the Midianites. The angel of the Lord - a pre-existent appearance of Christ, came to him and said, "The Lord is with you, O valiant warrior." God wanted to use Gideon to turn the hearts of the people back to Himself.

"Go in this your strength and deliver Israel from the hand of Midian." Gideon was commanded, "Have I not sent you? - Surely I will be with you, and you shall defeat Midian as one man." However, this scared little farmer was anything but a gallant fighting soldier. He had become a double-minded man, who showed a lack of faith and a compromised character. He pleaded his inexperience and inferiority to execute such a calling and demonstrated his lack of faith in the angel's promise by destroying the false god in his father's household in the dead of night!

When Gideon realised the Angel of the Lord was God Himself, he cried out in fear and said, "Oh no, Lord God! I have seen the Angel of the Lord face to face!" The job for which Gideon was being commission terrified the man, for the Midianites caused him and the entire nation to fear greatly, but the Lord comforted him, gave him reassurance, and said to him, "Peace to you. Do not fear. You shall not die."

But Gideon, like all the other saints of old, is recorded in Hebrews as a man of faith, whom God's used in a mighty way to forward His plans and purposes. God equips those He calls with the grace and strength that is required for the task before them, so that the glory goes to God and not to man. God did not call a great and mighty warrior to defeat the multitudes of Midianites, but a frightened little farmer and 300 foot-soldiers who trusted the Lord.

And His promise to Gideon, and to ALL who are willing to be used by God is, "Surely I will be with you - do not fear. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid - I am your peace."

Gideon finally allowed the God of peace to guard his heart and trusted His Word, and Gideon discovered an attribute of God that had hitherto been hidden from humanity - that God was His peace - his Shalom. That He is the Author of peace and the Finisher of peace. And Gideon came to understand that when the peace of the Lord guards one's heart - there is no need to fear.

Gideon was one of the named people in the Hebrew's chapter on faith - "And what more shall I say? For time will fail me if I tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets, who by faith conquered kingdoms; performed acts of righteousness; obtained promises; shut the mouths of lions; quenched the power of fire; escaped the edge of the sword; from weakness were made strong; became mighty in war; put foreign armies to flight."

If God was able to use flawed people like Joshua, David, Esther, Paul, and Gideon, to do mighty things, do you not think that He is equally able to equip you?

My Prayer

Heavenly Father, how encouraging it is to read about the exploits of flawed people like Joshua, David, Esther, Paul, and Gideon, whom You graciously used to carry out Your plans and purposes for the furtherance of your kingdom in the ongoing history of the world. As you continue to bring Your plan of salvation through Jesus Christ our Lord to its consummation, I pray that You would use me, in whatever way You choose. Help me to trust Your Word, more and more, and allow Your perfect peace to guard my heart, for Your greater praise and glory. This I ask in Jesus' name, AMEN.

Picture courtesy of Moody Publishers

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ashfaqqahmad · 4 years

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Can religion be logical 4

Click here to read the previous part of this article

Was the Quran really tampered with

However, there were disputes over the Quran that a group of Muslims (belonging to the Banu Quraysh) attacked and besieged Uthman’s house. One of the charges of that mob was the tampering with the Quran and they killed him with swords.

There are many controversies on this, that next tampering took place in the time of Hajjaj bin Yusuf. Despite all these reforms, one thing missing in the original content of the Quran is that there are direct messages in the rest of the chapters except Surah Al–Fatihah (this is a prayer which cannot be recited from the original content because God will not ask for blessings by himself). It is difficult to interpret whom it is being offered to and what is the context of it, hence the scope of the bracket was made in it and so there was a difference in the interpretation of the verses at many places.

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This means that the group of Deobandis forbids Mazar parasti (worshipping graves of great men) with these verses, and the group of Barelvis justifies Mazar parasti, Shaksiyat Parasti (worshipping great man – Rasool) with the same verses. Except this, a bracket was also used to add the newly available knowledge and science.

Did Islam spread by the sword

There is often an accusation against Muslims that Islam spread by the sword. This is a universal reality but does not fit in the context of India. Obviously in India, like other places, the rule was achieved by the sword only.

There were three main reasons for the spread of Islam in India. The most prominent was exploitation from the upper cast masses, then the influence of Sufism (liberal Islam) and third was greed for concessions, facilities, positions, power and domination during the rule of the Muslim kings or the Mughals. In the context of India, it is wrong to say that it spread by sword.

But elsewhere it is a global reality. It was only after the Prophet’s immigration to Medina that these battles started aiming to convert people into Islam, and after Rasool’s death, Hazrat Abu Bakr also launched a campaign in Arabia for the elimination of religions other than Islam. In which self-proclaimed Prophets like ‘Musaylimah’ and many minor religions were abolished. Later, with increasing strength it expanded from Arabia to Indus.

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While the Arab region was Islamized during Prophet’s life, Rashidun Caliphate (Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, Ali), which remained from 632 to 661, established its rule in the surrounding areas outside Arabia and after them, Umayyad Dynasty, established in the period of Muawiyah from 661, extended this Islamic empire from North Africa, Spain to the Indus, to about 38-39 countries with fourteen hereditary rulers till 750.

They were followed by the Abbasi dynasty, which started from 750 lasted until 1257. Also from 921 to 1171, there was Fatimid rule in many countries from Arabia, Egypt to Malta, Italy and after that came the Osmania Empire (Ottoman), which began in 1299, established rule in about 48 countries of Europe, Asia and Africa till 1923 and ended in the colonial period.

If God is there then how can it be from the point of view of science

In the midst of all this, millions of Jews, Christians and people of other religions were killed and millions of people became Muslims, then the strong notion of the sword might have spread because of this.

Had both Hazrat Ali and Hazrat Ayesha been fighting right?

However, if we talk about Islam then you will find a terrible contradiction here. Under normal circumstances, if there is a war in which the corpses are piled up, then you will stand in favour of either of the two sides and will justify only one but the Muslims have stood in favour of both. That is, it is believed that both these people were right and fighting for truth even after the massacre.

At the time of Hazrat Uthman’s assassination, Ali‘s sons were also posted for his protection so an accusation came to him that the murderers were among his people whom Hazrat Ali tried to save instead of punishing after becoming the Caliph. On this basis, Hazrat Ayesha fought with him in 656, Jang-e-Jamal (Battle of Camels), in which an estimated thirteen thousand people from Hazrat Ayesha’s side and five thousand people from Ali’s side died. Ther were mother-in-law and son-in-law and all the deceased were Muslims. But according to Muslims both were right. An Ummul-Muslimeen and an Islamic Caliph.

Then again on this issue Muawiyah fought Jang-e-Siffin (Syria) with Hazrat Ali in 657 in which 65000 (unconfirmed) people were killed and injured. Here too Muslims do not consider any of them wrong and Muawiyah became Caliph after Ali. In these cases, the Shias still have only one stand to believe everybody wrong except Ali.

History of early Islam is full of violence

It is an irony that there are two beliefs about Rasool’s death. One that he was poisoned, due to which he died slowly and second, that he was caught by a mysterious fever (they write chronic illness). Then there was an attack on the house of his daughter Hazrat Fatimah, whose accusation is also on Rasool’s close companions, where Hazrat Fatimah was so injured that she had miscarriage and soon died. According to a belief, her last wish was with regard to those companions of Rasool so that they do not come to her exequy.

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Since the first Caliph Abu Bakr, was older, he died soon of natural death, but in the later Caliphs, Hazrat Umar was slaughtered, Hazrat Uthman was slaughtered, Hazrat Ali was slaughtered and that too in mosque, while reciting namaz. Among the grandchildren, Hassan was poisoned and killed, Hussain was killed with family in battle of Karbala. They were all the special people of God but God did not help anyone out.

After Karbala, Yazid’s army invaded Mecca and Medina. Thousands of people were slaughtered, many sahaba were killed, literature was burnt, women were raped, Kaaba was damaged, the Nabi’s mosque was converted into camel stables but God did not come for rescue. But for such incidents, they will ingeminate a dialogue that it was a trial of God. Interestingly, despite all this, there was no rebellion against the Umayyad dynasty, Umayyad was not rejected from Islam and even today the entire period of Umayyad is called Islamic rule.

Even today, if anyone makes a cartoon of Muhammad Sahab, the followers start bloodshed, but in the past the house of the same prophet’s daughter was attacked, his son-in-law was murdered, Muawiyah broke the agreement with Hassan, grandchildren were murdered, but nobody dared to react. Stories were made to justify those incidents with great innocence and Yazid was declared culprit.

Despite this, see the acceptance of Yazid that today Muslims even hate the name of Yazid, there was nothing like that at that time because, in the same Umayyad Sultanate, Yazid II (720-724) and Yazid III (744) were also became kings and accepted.

Can the hadiths be the true history of Islam

Now imagine that in the midst of all these situations, for two and a half hundred years (from the seventh century to the ninth century), how the hearsay about the past (which were later written in the hadiths), would remain intact?

When these things were compiled in the ninth century, there were nearly six lakh stories floating around in public legends. Most of which were created for some benefit or selfishness, of which more than 90% were rejected but what is the guarantee for the rest that they are non-tampered and absolutely accurate?

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However, as a hadith collection, Sahih Bukhari (7225), Sahih Muslim (4000), Tirmidhi (3891), Abu Dawood (4800), Ibn Mazah (4000), An Nasai (5662) are valid texts. And interestingly, the wife who had been with Rasool for about twenty-four years has very lesser and Ayesha, who had been with him for a few years, has the highest number of hadiths.

Crusade is the jihad of Christians

Although Muslims are more notorious for bloodshed, Christians have not committed lesser slaughter. Even if the violence that broke out in Europe before the origin of Islam is ignored, Christians have laid the corpses of their loved ones and strangers in the crusade wars in the name of religion.

Just as there was a movement in India in the name of Ram Janmabhoomi liberation, in the fourth century they fought to get the church built by the mother of Constantine at the tomb of Jesus from the Muslims which had been in the possession of Rashidun Caliphate since 636. Apart from this, one reason for crusade (holy war) was to establish the dominion of the pope who was more powerful than the emperors there.

The first crusade happened in 1096 in which millions of people took part, but they were divided into two groups. One group of a mob of extremist people who were killed mostly by Turks due to their own ineptness. The second group was of the armies of skilled feudal lords who captured Jerusalem in 1099 and laid the corpses of Muslims and Jews.

In 1144 the Ottoman ruler of Mosul, Imadud-Din Zengi, re-captured the Edessa County of the same region and sought assistance from the Pope. Saint Bernard announced the crusade. King of France, Louis Seventh and Germany’s Conrad III set out for war with an army of three lakhs. Despite losing thousands of soldiers on both sides for the next three years, they failed.

While Saladin, who emerged in the Ottoman Empire, invaded and captured Jerusalem in 1187 against which again a crusade was called for and the kings of England, Germany and France took part, and even this war that lasted thousands of years was not successful.

Click here to read the next part of this article

इस लेख को हिंदी में पढ़ने के लिये यहाँ क्लिक करें

#religion and science #faith and logic #faith vs fact #crusade #islamic dynasty

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welikeitspicyreviews-blog · 5 years

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Auteur Theory using the films of Lino Brocka ‘s Maynila sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag and Insiang.

Auteur Theory is a method for mainly focusing at movies that express that the director is the "author" of a film. The Auteur theory contends that a movie is an impression of the director’s creative vision; thus, a movie directed by a given filmmaker will have familiar, repeating concepts and visual lines that illuminate that allows its viewers to recognize who the director is and demonstrates a certain signature style all through that director’s filmography. This theory started when Andre Bazin proposed the idea. Andre Bazin is an eminent French Film Critic, who had a great influence on the film industry. Bazin accepted and supported movies having Realism contents. He has been considered as probably one of the best critics; it is likewise viewed as that the founder of “Cahiers du cinema”. Andre Bazin opened the way for an achievement in traditional filmmaking to French New Wave. He had led the way of Auteur theory into use that said directors are the makers of the film. Creating the director’s own style just makes the film remarkable and imaginative. After the idea of the Auteur theory that says the directors as authors of the film was expressed coherently, following directors oftentimes started to make progressively and self-referential works. So basically, if anyone ask who made the film, it is the director. It often comes down to the director because he will be the one helping each department execute the script. Auteur theory is a substandard way for envisioning film that as often as possible neglects to perceive the commitments of the various individuals who take an interest during the time spent making a film. In any case, the possibility of a single imaginative shaping of a film gave the youthful art of film another sheen of masterful authenticity and decency. It likewise enables us to make a well-ordered story of true to life history and to watch the manners by which the thoughts and obsessions of an incredible director (especially one who controls different parts of the filmmaking process) do shape a film. Whatever its inadequacies, auteur theory is an essential apparatus of literacy in the film world.

Lino Brocka is a prominent filmmaker who is known for his socially conscious films that still remain a masterpiece until today. Maynila sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag and Insiang are two of his works which were always about societal issues tackled in the most subtle, but powerful way. Being a thorough filmmaker, Brocka mostly ponders on topics that are the predicament of the overlooked and ignored sectors of Filipino society. With his socially conscious films, Brocka likewise talked about subjects of sexuality, which directors during his time would in general maintain a strategic distance from. Amplifying the oppression and disregard of the common masses, Brocka's movies are also very character driven where the poor scarcely rejecting by while fending off maltreatment from the administration. He frequently cast obscure actors to concentrate more on the story and not on the big name. On-screen characters, for example, Bembol Roco, Hilda Koronel and Laurice Guillen are among the obscure actors that worked with him more than once for quite a long time, and after some time getting to be stars in their very own right. Lino Brocka is arguably the Philippines' most recognizable director. Aside from the widely released. The usual suspects are Insiang (1976), Bona (1980), and Maynila: Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Neon), Brocka's arguably most complicated work which landed in some international critics' lists as one of the most important films ever made.

MAYNILA SA MGA KUKO NG LIWANAG

As the film starts, we see still shots of Manila in black and white, first in quite a while calm state, at that point bit by bit transforming into a swarmed, occupied city. Just sounds from the genuine scene were being appeared, which rapidly sets up the truth of Manila and demonstrates the obvious feeling of authenticity by the director, Lino Brocka. It has a series of well formed images captured raw and genuine. The pictures are accused of an earnestness, a quickness particularly Brocka's- - as though Brocka had shot the image directly outside the theater where it's screening, built up the surges, and hustled inside to spool the print into the projector, new and smoking hot. From its opening shot of littered walkways, The scene backs off at seeing Julio's face falling down at the base of an impasse rear entryway. This scene also showed the capacities of Brocka to depict the spinning feelings of the executive and the entertainer, which is a blend of dread, outrage, and distress. Basically, the story’s plot is a love that is lost and the protagonist ventures out to find the love of his life after receiving a letter that his lover is lost at the city she went to. Amidst finding his lover, he had experienced the very different lifestyle he was familiar with. There he learned the streets of Manila being vicious and unpredictable. While in Manila, he had experienced different types of jobs that portrayed the problem of wages here in the Philippines and other social issues that were often overlooked. Julio, the protagonist, experienced a series of unfortunate events where he became homeless and met a man in the streets of Manila. Due to a desperate need of means to live in Manila and to earn fast money, he became a prostitute. The film closes with a huge crowd chasing after Julio because he had just killed who he believed to be Ligaya’s Chinese husband, or oppressor, as he is portrayed. In the end, Julio is trapped in a dead end right after committing murder and being chased by a mob ready to beat him up in all probability to death. Lino Brocka didn’t show Julio’s violent last dying breath but centers on his face instead. Trapped and wide-eyed, flashback to the moment he landed a foot in Manila, Julio had no clue whether he’ll ever find Ligaya, or what would eventually happen to him. But in his last moments, you can tell that he knew very well that was the last of his breath.

In spite of the way this is a film done in 1975, the social conditions stay unaltered, if not more awful, in the present-day Philippines. The issue of wages for those with members of the working class, the human trafficking for men and women alike, and every one of these issues are present in the film. It depicts the few disorders the nation was and is confronting. Watching it in the present modern times would even indicate its influence, since it stays to be relevant in spite of decades after its release. These things happened as a result of Brocka's creation. The mind reels at what Brocka would have made all things considered. Offering life to the authenticity, obviously, is Brocka's melodramatic energy. In the event that the characters in Maynila don't profit by the three-dimensionality of the best screenwriting, they- - the leads down to the overflowing additional items - are honored with that intense, Brocka-mandated character of individuals battling angrily to live, to clutch each hopeless urge of life. You understand that the figures, the outlines you have glimpsed on screen that adamantly decline to determine into conspicuous people are quite outlines. You quit searching for the mental profundity that isn't there and rather recline to savor the general terms, the all encompassing perspective. The protagonist of the film, notably, isn't Julio, or Ligaya, or the different other supporting characters; it's simply the city. The significance of Maynila: sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag as a Filipino film shines even up to this date. It is Filipino auteur Lino Brocka's showstopper—one that underlines his political activism and affinity for utilizing mistreated characters who steadily arrive at an awakening. This film was created during Martial Law, when the Marcos system was advancing Manila as a city filled with dreams and all things fantasy. Their image of progress, however, was to disregard the wild neediness in the city. Brocka's vision, in this manner, is a courageous one. The film demonstrates what the Marcos system needed to stow away: Manila's poor living in frail conditions, compelled to work in exploitative occupations that neglect to pay a living salary, and now and again in any event, depending on prostitution to endure. This vision is the thing that makes Maynila: sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag applicable decades later. The issues it brought up in 1975 are as yet present even up to now—Manila's rural still live in alternative houses adjacent to streams, steady employments are still rare, many still work in prostitution so as to eat.

Maynila: sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag is the only Filipino film to make it to be included in the film anthology 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. This only shows Lino Brocka’s effectiveness as a director.

INSIANG

Brocka is known for his capability to consolidate imagery with the real world, and this is very noticeable in Insiang, which was one of the Filipino movies to be presented in Cannes. By turns expressive and rough, laid-back and incoherently overheated, Lino Brocka's "Insiang" that was released in 1976 is without a moment's delay unique but so natural that you may end up commenting on it with true to life commentaries as the story unfurls. The director, Lino Brocka, portrayed the house with a blend of metal, wood and cardboard, an early point of convergence, transforming it into a little community of the spread and a very unfortunate condition that encompasses it. As Mr. Brocka plays with his encircling, going from tight to wide, placing the scene's instability into distinct visual terms, he changes this one family into something that is bluntly pungent for a city. The exaggerated hardware kicks in after Mr. Brocka oils it with some horrid scene-setting, beginning with the terrible picture of a pig being gutted in a slaughterhouse loaded up with shouting, biting the dust creatures that prompts a narrative arrangement of human lack of sanitization — this ends up being a get ready for the brutalization of Insiang, the protagonist, including by Tonya, the protagonist’s mother. All throughout, Mr. Brocka, working with his remarkable chief of photography, Conrado Baltazar, makes pictures of astonishing force, similar to that of vicious hands gripping in the void. Insiang's obstinate measures give the film a role as a shocking tribute to feminist self-completion. However, with his torment fashioned finale, and its tangled bunch of unwavering, unpredictable, unfulfilled sentiments and wants, Brocka guarantees that any minor triumph appreciated by his ethically and sincerely distorted protagonist is tempered by an revoking portion of mixed distress and hopelessness. The first Philippine film ever displayed at Cannes, Brocka's portrayal of familial betrayal form and societal deserting channels its drama through the channel of neorealism, its story's elevated feelings kept at a stew by a simmer.

In Brocka's film, the ruinous mother - daughter relationship is odd even by the gauges of the maternal acting. Regularly, in Hollywood and European exposition, maternal drama sees at any rate one of the ladies leaving with some proportion of joy. The threatening vibe among Tonia and Insiang got under the skin of Marcos-time controls, who dismissed a situation that closures with the daughter revel on over her vengeance and communicating total scorn of her mom. Brocka surrendered by taping a compromise endeavor however punctuated it with a chilling response to quietness. There is no illuminating exercise toward the finish of this fearless film in light of the fact that Insiang is, as Brocka portrayed it, an "immorality tale." As the characters start to perceive their essential sadness, they go to damaging acts that cut out their specialties in damnation. Without the standard reclamation account, the plot pursues an alternate direction. It starts with stupendous theatricality and finishes in absolute quietness. This inversion of sensational develop powers the film to wander in the center, investigating fringe characters and building a detailed cosmology of the ghettos before continuing its course toward the savage peak foreshadowed toward the beginning.

In the event that inside workmanship in the category of film, there comes the moment inclination toward less the film than the name — the almighty auteur that probably doesn't need to bow down to corporate experts — at that point even with a film as promptly striking as 1976's Insiang, we start with its creator, Lino Brocka. Indeed, even in a real existence cut heartbreakingly off, he left a sufficient imprint to in any case be viewed as the Philippines' most noteworthy director, among his shrubs being the country's first director to play in competition at Cannes. A specific affiliation made with him was a frank analysis of the dictatorship reign of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines during that time. It additionally straightaway gives the audience a sample of Brocka's figurative nature.

LINO BROCKA AS A DIRECTOR

Brocka's films feature the predicament of the overlooked and ignored sectors of Filipino society: the slum occupants, prostitution, road hawkers, just as the individuals who were victimized essentially in light of sex or sexuality – subjects that no other director set out to focus on, particularly while under the Marcos tyranny. The bold brutalness and unquenchable absence of morals in his movies can be overpowering, yet it evokes a specific good reaction from his viewers that makes them mindful of the discouraging situation in the general public. Under the Marco tyranny, exacting restriction was authorized in the media and Brocka had to carry his films out of the nation for screenings to maintain a strategic distance from overwhelming cuts. Lino Brocka is like a giant in a world with individuals who overlooked issues that really matter and relevant with films filled with remarkable bravery and powerful experiences. Through Lino Brocka’s qualities, the auteur theory is being discussed. By his cinematic style, we can distinguish the films that were being produced as his masterpiece.

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corporateespionage · 7 years

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Longest bio ever:

“My Official Statement today is that, I speak for No One I speak for no one, EXCEPT for all the Ancient Afrikans of Kemet- the original name that was changed by the greeks to Egypt- who were invaded and murdered in mass numbers, over the course of centuries by:the hyksos, the assyrians, the libyans, the persians, the turks, the greeks, the romans, the spanish, the portuguese, the french, the british and the arabs-all of whom desecrated and pillaged Kemetic Temples, Royal tombs, and robbed from these Afrikan sanctuaries priceless artifacts and sacred texts that now sit in european museums, â€œprestigiousâ€� university basements, and the private homes of the rich throughout the world.I speak for no one, EXCEPT for all of the Afrikans who were enslaved, shackled, made to march miles and miles over the Sahara by the Arabs who committed this atrocity for a period of approximately 1,300 years. According to some research, over 50 to 80 million Afrikans were murdered during this Arab enslavement. The survivors of this savage devastation were forced onto slave ships by these same Arabs and exported over the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea to parts of Asia, Europe, and the Mediterranean.I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions of the Afrikans in West Afrika who were terrorized and kidnapped by the europeans and enslaved in the dungeons of El Mina, Cape Coast, and in the hellholes of dungeons in Senegal.I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions of Afrikan men in those dungeons who refused to submit and were put three to four in a cell and were left there for all of the other enslaved Afrikans to see them die a slow and painful deathI speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions of Afrikan women who were put 200, 300 and sometimes more in a stone room no bigger than small auditorium where they had to fight each other to get air that came only through a hole in the rock cell no bigger than the size of a soccer ball.I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions of Afrikan women who were selected by the white commander of the dungeon to be raped repeatedly and sometimes left to die in their own blood.I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions of Afrikan men and women who survived the dank, cold dungeons only to face being forced through THE DOOR OF NO RETURN and onto waiting ships that would transport them to places of grief and agony beyond their own Afrikan comprehensionI speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions of Afrikans who were shackled to the bowels of stink ships where they had to ride next to their dead uncle, dead brother, dead sister, or dead mother on the long journey to lands where incomprehensible anguish awaitedI speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions of captive Afrikan women aboard those ships who felt compelled to murder their own beautiful babies so these infants would never know or experience the nightmare of enslavement.I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions of captive Afrikan men who tore off their own legs from the shackles to dive overboard from those stinking vessels and who would rather face death in the jaws of man-eating sharks than remain enslavedI speak for no one, EXCEPT for those millions of Afrkan men, women and children who suffered THE MIDDLE PASSAGE and whose bones are in the watery burial ground called the Atlantic Ocean- better known to those who know their history as THE AFRIKAN OCEAN because it overflows with the blood and life force of over 100 MILLION AFRIKANSI speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions of Afrikans who landed in the Caribbean Islands where they underwent THE SLAVE MAKING PROCESS of further de-humanization and the breaking of their arms, legs and AFRIKAN SPIRITS in preparation for the long and hard work and burdens they were to bearI speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions of the Indigenous of the americas who were savagely brutalized, tortured, raped, secretly given smallpox in blankets, and murdered, simply for opening their hearts, minds and arms to white strangers coming off a long and weary journey. Impact of christopher columbus, as written by Father Bartolome De Las Casas in his book, â€œThe Disruption of the Indies”, highlighted that, directly or indirectly, columbus was responsible for the deaths of between 12 to 25 MILLION indigenous. The population of the indigenous was reduced from 100 MILLION to 25 MILLION, according to T. Browder, Nile Valley Contributions to Civilization.I speak for no one, EXCEPT for all those Afrikans who arrived in North America bewildered, brutalized, weak, robbed of their culture, language, religions, families, cosmologies and longing for their own homelandI speak for no one, EXCEPT for all the Haitians who soaked the earth with their own blood in war by giving their lives to defeat Napoleon, who led the mightiest army of that time. I speak for Boukman, for Toussaint, for and Dessailines, the leaders of the Haitians who never gave up their struggle for Freedom and IndependenceI speak for no one, EXCEPT for Harriet Tubman, who made 19 trips to free enslaved Afrikans, forcing some, as she said, â€œto be Free or Dieâ€� In her moments of contemplation, she was overheard saying, â€œ I freed hundreds of slaves, and would have freed hundreds more, if only they knew they were slavesâ€�I speak for no one, EXCEPT for Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, Fredrick Douglass, and all the Black people who begged and petitioned the american government to intercede to stop white people from the wanton beatings, murdering, lynching, raping and terrorizing of Black men, Black women and Black children-the government did nothing-the deaths continuedI speak for no one, EXCEPT for all of the thousands upon thousands of the enslaved Afrikans who were set â€œfreeâ€� by the emancipation proclamation but given absolutely nothing by their former slave masters: no food, only the clothes on their backs, and no way to get awayI speak for no one, EXCEPT for the thousands of newly â€œfreedâ€� enslaved Afrikans who were arrested en masse as vagrants, panhandlers, and bums; then hired out to corporations and chain gangs to be forced to work for free, again, and these men literally worked themselves to deathI speak for no one, EXCEPT for the thousands of Black soldiers who gave their lives in the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Vietnam, and the Gulf War only to return to their america and be lynched, physically, economically or socially, while wearing their u.s. uniforms as white people sang â€œAmerica the Beautiful”I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the over 2 THOUSAND Black people, mostly men, who, at the turn of the 19th century, were lynched, castrated, some burned alive, and others whose fingers, toes, penises and eyeballs were cut from their living bodies and used as souvenirs and trophies by white peopleI speak for no one, EXCEPT for the many men, women and children who were murdered in Wilmington, North Carolina and Tulsa Oklahoma-both considered BLACK WALL STREETS- and their land stolen from them with the sanction of the american government. Mention here about Las Vegas where Black people lost their land, like they did in Tulsa, OklahomaI speak for no one, EXCEPT for the Tuskegee men who were experimented on by the white doctors who intentionally gave the Black men syphilis while the antidote was withheld as the experiment went on for some 40 yearsI speak for no one, EXCEPT for the 7,600 Black and poor women in North Carolina, and two other states, who were sterilized without their knowledge or permission in clinics as part of the population control program. These sterilizations went on from 1929 to 1974- 65,000 Black and poor women, in this country, were sterilized during this period.I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the over 6 million Black people in america who were members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and who mourned the arrest, trumped-up trial and deportation of the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey. This man, the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey, was a man who wanted only to give his people back their true BlackNificent history, teach them meaningful skills, teach them to love their BLACK SELVES, and return to AFRIKA and resurrect the Black Woman and the Black Man to their rightful place of glory and majesty among the families of the earthI speak for no one, EXCEPT for all those Black people around the country who watched in anguish as the u.s. government harassed Elijah Muhammad, W.E.B Dubois, Paul Robeson, and many others and drove one of our greatest politicians, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., out of office on concocted charges.That night, October 14, 2005I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the 1,227 Black troops who were SLAUGHTERED, BY THEIR OWN WHITE SOLIDERS, AND BURIED IN a MASS GRAVE-at Camp Van Dorn, a military base in southwestern Mississippi and near a small town called Centerville. The full story is outlined in the book, â€œThe Slaughterâ€�, by Carroll Case.I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the many Black people who supported William Patterson and Paul Robeson who were two of the many authors of a petition to the United Nations entitled â€˜WE CHARGE GENOCIDEâ€�, that catalogued the evidence in the form of names, dates, times and places of Black people murdered around america at the hands of savage white people, while no one in government did anything to stop the violence or improve the social, housing, educational or health conditions of under which Black people lived..I speak for no one, EXCEPT for all the Black Panthers who were killed under COINTELPRO, and for Dr. Mutulu Shakur, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Imam Jamil- Al- Amin, and all the MANY BLACK POLITICAL PRISONERS who languish in the maximum-security hell pit jail cells of america. I speak for those Black political prisoners who have been held for over twenty to thirty years and are tortured, experimented on and put on hallucinogenic experimental drugs because their crimes include trying to stop the police murders of young Black men, implementing breakfast and food programs for those in their communities, trying to provide decent housing and good health care for all those in need and trying to educate the children so they donâ€™t grow up ignorant.I speak for no one, EXCEPT for all the dead members of M.O.V.E., in Philadelphia, who the city decided to drop a bomb on and kill babies, children, women and men in an act of premeditated murderI speak for no one, EXCEPT for Emmitt Til and the countless Black boys and Black men who have been murdered by white men and their bodies thrown in swamps, rivers, streams or whose lifeless Black bodies now rest in shallow, unmarked graves all around the countryI speak for no one, EXCEPT for all the mothers, and grandmothers, who have lost their sons to the streets, drugs, prisons and graveyards, and their daughters to a concocted white standard of beauty that is absolutely impossible for them to attain. These inherently beautiful Black girls and women have spent millions and millions of dollars every year in an industry that helped to create an inferiority complex in them and then profits from it.I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the untold numbers of young Black men who write to me from prison cells asking me to send them books, or who are on death row, soon to be executed, screaming to me through their letters, â€œI DIDNâ€™T DO IT, MY LAWYER OR JUDGE MADE MISTAKES DURING THE TRIALâ€�I speak for no one, EXCEPT for all the young Black men who come to me, just released from prison who, like the newly freed enslaved Afrikans under emancipation, have no where to go, no job possibilities, and no hope for a brighter future. Those who have skills and are working, are fired when it is discovered they have a prison record. The only place that will accept them is the newly built prison.I speak for no one, EXCEPT for all the beautiful Black children who are so excited to start school and have big plans for success, only to get there and find that the white female teachers already have quite a different plan for them.I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the millions, upon millions of Black babies who died from poor health care during pre-natal term and for those who came to term but died from poor nutrition or malnutrition. And for the many children, teens, young adults and adults today who are raised eating techno-food, fast food, and who have never tasted any real food. And for those whose brains are short-circuited, from a lack of proper minerals and vitamins, who are labeled â€œspecial educationâ€�, mentally retarded or hyperactive-the new code words that replace those used in the early eugenics movement.I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the elderly Black people, who have struggled most of their lives to navigate through a system that was against them all the way, only to reach eldership status and find they have inadequate health care, no decent food, and are trapped in a system that considers them disposable peopleI speak for no one, EXCEPT for the Herrero people of Namibia who were eradicated by the germans, the Tasmanians, eradicated by the white australians, the 130 million southern Afrikans murdered by cecil rhodes so he could control diamond and gold mines, the 13 million Congolese whose arms, legs and ears were cut off and murdered by leopold, of belgiumI speak for no one, EXCEPT for the Black people who marched-and got murdered by whites, those Black people who voted and got murdered by whites, those Black people who tried to go to school to get an education and got murdered by whites, those Black people who have tried to start their own businesses and got murdered by whites, those Black people who have become politicians to try to make a better way for Black people and got murdered by whites, those Black people who have tried to set up their own little independent groups and got character assassinated.I speak for no one, EXCEPT for the worldwide Afrikan victims of A.I.D.S and any and all man-made diseases, who have died and are in the process of dying.I speak for no one, EXCEPT for myself, as I watch while white people, who have power, guns, information and influence, ride around in 60-70 thousand dollar cars, waste millions of gallons of water watering lawns and golf courses, run off on luxury cruises, conceal their identities and criminality by hiding behind â€œIncâ€�, make 80 billion dollars in profits off of oil, while ordinary people and the elderly freeze to death in small apartments, while the government bails out (code word for welfare) airlines that lose millions in one fiscal quarter yet, simultaneously, cutback on financial aid to Black students, while Black professors in white higher educational institutions have to struggle for fairness in the hiring and tenure process, while Black students seek constantly for fairness in grading and assessment, while Black faculty and Black staff have to seek constantly for fairness in evaluations, while white people window shop in malls, play golf, play bridge, sit in T.V. studios watching Dr. Phil or at home watching foolishness, and, by their actions, convey, generally, they just donâ€™t give a damn about the great, great, great grandchildren whose Ancestorsâ€™ blood is soaked in the very ground on which we all standI speak for no one EXCEPT for the 600 million to ONE BILLION Afrikan people killed worldwide, from the time the Afrikan first encountered the white man, in the greatest atrocity this earth has ever seen â€“ some call it â€œThe Black Holocaustâ€�, others call it â€œThe Maafaâ€�, but in the realm of this context and reality, there is no word for it. And when all is tabulated about what has happened, AND STILL HAPPENING, to the Afrikan, Black people, it defies and goes well beyond human comprehension. Some have asked white people, referring here to the government and corporations, to just consider talking about reparations, and those requests have fallen on deaf ears. Are there no reparations for Black people? Who is the best qualified on this earth, other than the Afrikan, Black people, to receive justice, compensation, due process and whatever else the reparation people are proposing? Why are white people not listening to, and implementing, the National Urban League when it issues the annual report, â€œThe State of Black Americaâ€�? Why are white people not listening to, and implementing, the suggestions of all the civic groups trying to advance the social, economic, educational, health and cultural concerns of Black people?I speak for no one, EXCEPT for my Ancestors, our dead, and for myself and I am saying that I donâ€™t even know half of the true history of Black people, but I have seen and know enough to be able to say, â€œthe war and genocide against Black people, in all of the areas of life activity, worldwide, must stop.”Do you have a better solution to offer to solve this problem?”

What pill is this???

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tuckinpodcast-blog · 7 years

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EPISODE 2: THE HAYS CODE AND OTHER BAD IDEAS.

LISTEN: SOUNDLCOUD / ITUNES / GOOGLE PLAY (coming soon!)

NOTES: minimal note-shuffling, I promise. Google Play is reviewing the podcast as we speak, so we should be up soon!

SOURCES: listed at end of transcript

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi! I'm Jack, and this is Tuck In, We're Rolling: Queer Hollywood Stories. This week's episode is titled 'The Hays Code and Other Bad Ideas'. This is gonna be a long episode, but it's a really important one, because it lays down the basis for a lot of our future discussions.

Let's start off with the basics. The Hays Code came about in 1930 but it wasn't really enforced until 1934. Basically, what happened was way back in 1915, the Supreme Court heard a case called “Mutual Film Corp. V. Industrial Commission of Ohio”, and voted 9-0 that free speech didn't extend to films. The courts kind of reasoned that, as a form of mass media, movies could literally be used “for evil”, and for some reason this decision also applied to circuses? I don't know, not entirely relevant, but I thought it was a weird aside. The decision by the court was what drove the studios to more closely regulate their content, and the decision was eventually overturned in 1952 with the hearing of the “Joseph Burstyn Inc. V. Wilson”, also known as the “Miracle Decision” because of the short film “The Miracle” that the case was heard over, and it really kind of marked a decline in movie censorship in the US, but by this time, the damage had already been done.

So, what was the Hays Code?

The Hays Code was basically the theaters and the studios agreeing to self-censor in order to avoid losing money from religious-led boycotts or local governments refusing to show so called “immoral” films. As I've mentioned, times were kinda tough in Depression era Hollywood, and a lot of studios went under or cut their contract stars to save money or try to cut costs somehow. The Code is actually called “The Motion Picture Production Code”, but it's known as the Hays Code after William H. Hays, who was the head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, and it's basically the racist grandfather of the MPAA ratings system we all known and love today.

How does this come back to queer history? Thanks for asking, all six of my followers on SoundCloud! Let me read the entire section of the Hays Code pertaining to what it calls “impure love”:

“In the case of impure love, the love which society has always regarded as wrong and which has been banned by divine law, the following are important:

Impure love must not be presented as attractive or beautiful.

It must not be the subject of comedy or farce, or treated as material for laughter.

It must not be presented in such a way to arouse passion or morbid curiosity on the part of the audience.

It must not be made to seem right and permissible.

It must not be detailed in method or manner.

I've included a link to a copy of a Hays Code pamphlet and the transcript of it that I just read from so you can go check out the kind of stuff it talks about. And it talks about a lot. No interracial marriage or romance, no adultery, no white slavery. No boobs, no disrespecting the American flag, no dissing the clergy. It's kind of intense, and it explains some of the weird wholesomeness and out-of-left-field endings you get with a lot of the movies from the 30's and 40's.

Now, there were, obviously, stereotypes and stigma around being queer before the Hays Code, but it really cemented this feeling of “othering” – extending beyond queer people as well.

Pre-code, you had a lot of movies that used drag or gender role reversal for laughs. In 1915, Charlie Chaplin dressed in drag for his movie A Woman, and so did Fatty Arbuckle in Miss Fatty. Early films used the “sissy” or “pansy” stereotype – you know, and you've seen it today, the flamboyant, effeminate gay man who had no real humanity to speak of but was only there for a laugh. It was kind of the beginning of that stereotype, and even if it wasn't harmful – and still is – it wasn't as overtly hateful as some of the things we'll see later on.

I've done a lot of digging into what was going on with pre-code lesbians, and I found some movie titles and a few references, but not a lot. Lesbians weren't shown nearly as much as their gay “pansy” counterparts – but if they were shown, they were butch crossdressers for the audience to laugh at, or they were weirdo older spinsters who were dead by the end of the movie – huge surprise, right? Some notable portrayals of lesbians, overt or implied, include Louise Brooks in the 1929 German film Pandora's Box, this is one where the romantic relationship is implied. There's Marlene Dietrich in Morocco in 1930 – and we're gonna talk about in detail in a later episode. There's a girl-on-girl dance scene in 1932's Sign of the Cross, and a butch lesbian in 1933's Women They Talk About. And of course, there's Greta Garbo kissing another woman in Queen Christina in 1933. Of course, it's kind of difficult to find these references, so I want to point out that people have been dismissing lesbians and women who love women as just 'gals bein' pals' for a really, really long time.

After the Hays Code, a lot of this overt sexuality got swept under the rug and buried in subtext. Culturally, you're looking at a time – again, going back to what we talked about with masculine panic – when men are looking at homosexuality as a direct attack on their masculinity. During the Depression, men were already feeling emasculated because they were losing their jobs and they couldn't afford to take care of their families. They're looking at effeminate men and masculine women, and they start to freak out even more. So even though pre-code movies were using shock value – things like queer people or prostitution and violence – to get butts into seats and boost ticket sales, there was still this pervasive anxiety from men getting scared about their masculinity, and from religious groups that were worried about the effects of on-screen sinning on polite society.

The Code essentially killed the pansy, and buried queer people in hints and subtext. So in the 1930's and 40's, if you were queer in a movie, you were either really vaguely defined like Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon, who is explicitly gay in the source material, or you're a villain, also like Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon. Censorship evolved a little to say, basically, you can show perversion of almost any kind, but you can't show it in a positive light. And this sort of gels with the feelings of the time. You have characters running around committing crimes because of their sexuality, because back then people thought that being gay drove you insane as well as being a sin. People thought of being gay as being a disease or a defect and police were running around raiding gay bars and harassing women dressed in men's clothing, and it's really not a great time to be queer.

In 1948, Hitchcock's Rope comes out, and he's very obviously skirting the censors with the two antagonists. It's very thinly veiled that they're in a romantic relationship, but they're also still murderers. But that kind of moves us along into the 50's, when that 'Miracle Decision' has the courts saying that, no, films are protected by the first amendment and they're an art form, and this is really when censorship in film starts to decline. This is also about the time that its ruled that the studios can't own the movie theaters that distribute their films, so the monopoly on the film industry is broken up and the power of the old studios is drastically reduced.

There's still a censorship code at this point, of course, but it's really loosening up in the mid-50's. The code at that time allowed for hints of queerness as long as it was used for humor or if the person was punished for their “deviance”, which eventually led to 1959's Suddenly, Last Summer, starring big names like Liz Taylor, Katherine Hepburn, and my favorite actor Monty Clift. This movie is a landmark because it has what's considered to be the first movie with a named, explicitly gay character.

Now, that's great and all – but the shitty part comes from the plot. Basically, this guy is murdered violently and his cousin, played by Katharine Hepburn, sees it and goes nuts, so the mom – played by Liz Taylor – tries to bribe Monty Clift's character into giving her niece a lobotomy so that no one finds out that her son was gay. And don't worry, I'm going to talk a lot about Monty in a later episode and we'll talk about what kind of effect the movie had on him as closeted gay man, but this movie basically proved to the public that being a “mama's boy” or being controlled by your mom led to being gay, and it was sort of implied that violent murder was the inevitable fate of gay men, and that they kind of deserved it.

This is sort of a trend, moving into the 60's. You've got a lot of subtext in the 1959 remake of Ben-Hur, a lot of covert themes and implications. But at the same time, audiences aren't so interested in boycotting a film because of religious leaders, and movies with “questionable content” didn't really need production code or religious approval anymore. But even though we've got the code loosening to compete with television and the rise of the indie studio after the break-up of the old studio monopoly, you've still got a lot of queer characters who are miserable and depressed, or suicidal and homicidal. A lot of them are still dead by the time the credits roll.

In 1965, a movie called Inside Daisy Clover comes out, and there's a gay man in it. He isn't miserable or struggling, and he survives the entire movie – but he's never really explicitly named as gay. It's all still buried in subtext. In 1967, we get Marlon Brando and Liz Taylor in Reflections in a Golden Eye, starring Brando as a repressed gay Army major – a role that was supposed to be Monty Clift's, but he turned it down due to his declining health, supposedly. This is kind of an interesting, weird movie about sexual repression, both heterosexual and homosexual, and the violence it can spark. I'm going to talk in detail about this movie when I do my Brando episode, so I'm gonna put a pin in this discussion for now.

The sixties also brought us the beautiful weirdness of Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and other people like them who were giving us fully realized and complex queer characters, but we don't see any movies marketed towards a gay audience until the 1970's. In 1968, the final death knell of the Hays Code came with the introduction of the MPAA rating system we're all familiar with today.

So, why the long history lesson? I wanted to talk about this bit of film history for several reasons.

First of all, chronologically it makes sense in the context of the show. Last week, we talked about noted vampire Rudolph Valentino – I finished American Horror Story: Hotel, by the way – and he died before the Hays Code was even written, a whole year before, to be exact.

Second of all, it's important to talk about all of this to give context to our future discussions about Hays-era movies and about the environment that actors were working in. Next week, we're going to be talking about some ladies I mentioned this week – Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Katherine Hepburn, women who's work snapped from pre to post-code, and we're going to pick this thread of queer representation post Hays Code in a few episodes, but for now, you have some background on the subject.

And third of all, and most importantly, now you can look at some of the stereotypes that we still have today and be able to trace them back to their origins. You see these harmful stereotypes all the time, on TV and in the movies. So we have like, Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, and we can draw a straight line back to Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon. None of this is an excuse or anything – it was wrong then and it's wrong now – but now we have context. We can ask Hollywood, “Why haven't you changed? Why do these offensive things still happen?” You know, back in the 1950's, it was playing into toxix masculinity and that same fear of independent women that was driving criticism of Valentino in the 20's. And for whatever reason, we still have caricatures of queer people on screen as well as this same pervasive toxic and performative masculinity. We have a lot of trouble finding fully realized queer characters that don't end up dead or alone, or even still hidden in subtext.

There's this great moment in the last season of True Blood, maybe the only great moment other than Ryan Kwanten and Alexander Skarsgaard's sex scene – when Lafayette lashes out at Jessica after she catches him and her current boyfriend hooking up, and it's so good and sums up what I want to say so well, that I'm going to leave you with it:

“Everybody else in this fucking town is falling in love and getting engaged and having babies! Has it ever occurred to you that Lafayette – that queen that makes all you white heterosexuals laugh and feel good about yourselves – has it fucking ever occurred to you that maybe I want a piece of that happiness too?”

Thank you for listening to Tuck In, We're Rolling: Queer Hollywood Stories. This episode was researched, written and recorded by me, Jack Segreto. You can find a transcript of this episode and all of our episodes, along with some fun facts and photos, on our tumblr, tuckinpodcast.tumblr.com. You can also give us a like on Facebook at facebook.com/tuckinpodcast. We accept messages on both of those platforms, so feel free to shoot us suggestions for future shows and comments. We upload new episodes every Wednesday and you can find us on iTunes, Soundcloud, and now Google Play. Don't forget to rate and subscribe so more people can find us! Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

SOURCES:

The Motion Picture Production Code (PDF)

The Hays Code - Arts Reformation

From Sissie to Secrecy: The Evolution of the Hays Code

The Hays Code: Censorship, Sexism, and the Code that Built Pop Culture

Homosexuality in Film

Gay and Lesbian Characters in Pre-Code Film

History of Homosexuality in Film (yeah, I got lazy and used Wikipedia. SUE ME, OKAY, I WORK 40+ HOURS A WEEK)

True Blood Wiki: ‘Lost Cause’ Synopsis & Quotes

OKAY BYEEEEEE

#queer history #queer history podcast #lgbt history #lgbt history podcast #the hays code #history of lgbt characters in film #hollywood podcast #( TRANSCRIPTS & SHOW NOTES. )#( EPISODE 2. )#[ friends #i haven't done this much research on a thing since before i got my degree #it's in mortuary science btw #if anyone was curious THOUGH I DON'T THINK YOU WERE ]

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