Ayers on Fresh Air

I may have had my own bit of moral luck during that period. In any case, I understand reasonably well where Ayers was coming from.

I don’t think that the criticisms of the Weatherpeople was primarily because of their violence. One criticism was their advocacy of youth revolution, which is sort of a doomed strategy. Another was the fact that they were somewhat of a media creation and a lot of their strategy involved attempts to get media coverage. (Not unique to them, of course.) And then, they were mostly Ivy League types. And IIRC the internal organization of their group was initially rather hierarchal and authoritarian, though also, again IIRC, it tended to splinter into autonomous regional groups.

In actual fact, there really were no legitimate ways of effectively opposing the Vietnam War while it was happening. Before 1968 it was a bipartisan Democratic War which most Republicans supported. Attempts to work within the Democratic Party came to nothing, in part because of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. Neither Johnson nor Nixon needed actual positive support for the war; as long as people worked and paid taxes, and as long as it was possible to find soldiers somehow, the war could proceed in the face of widespread opposition and doubt. So basically the war was going to continue 1968-1972, regardless.

People at the time perceived that by 1972 the Vietnam War would have lasted 7 years by any count, which is already a long war. The feeling was that the choices were resigned acceptance, personal-conscience dissociation from what was happening, or some kind of escalation of opposition by committed anti-war people, who were demographically a not very large minority.

Pragmatically it can be argued either that a.) a less violent, less nihilistic anti-war movement would have gained more popular support and would have been more effective, or that b.) at a certain point the domestic chaos caused some leadership group to decide that the war wasn’t worth it.

“A” just seems wrong to me. Nixon didn’t need active support, he just needed acquiescence. “B” doesn’t necessarily seem right either: from 1965 (escalation) to 1973 (US withdrawal) is eight years, a nice long war. I tend toward Chomsky’s opinion, c.) by devastating SE Asia with bombs the US intimidated the rest of the world and pretty much won. There was really no “Two, three, many Vietnams”.

My argument would be different with someone who felt that the Vietnam War was justified or at least tolerable.

There was a documentary on the 60sâ„¢ that included an interview with a very thoughtful man with an extremely kind face. At least, that was the impression that came to me through the images on the screen. That seemingly gentle man turned out to be Karleton Armstrong who was convicted and served a prison term for the Sterling Hall bombing at the University of WI which killed Robert Fassnacht.

Having lived through that time and a period of martial law during riot season, I knew there were gentle and thoughtful people who considered extreme violence against property and did their best to make sure that there were no human casualties. Of course, it didn’t work out that way but I know that even bombers can be compassionate.

I am thankful that my political activity runs to organizing community gardens, farmers’ markets, and solar barnraisings. I do take the opportunity to question directly some of the media and political bigwigs who appear at Harvard and MIT but they are usually so skilled at BS that my poor attempts at pointedness are easily rebuffed.

Bill Ayers has already faced more public oppobrium than the Bush/Cheney Junta of torturers will ever receive.

“She did push him on whether he was willing to apologize for his actions in the 60’s and he, all but categorically, refuses to apologise, arguing, implicitly (and rightly), that there is a lot more to apologise for than what he did, and suggesting that he would apologise only in the context of a generalised process of truth and reconciliation.”

This seems to be a weird (to me) view of ‘apologize’. You apologize for the things you do. The fact that Stalin really ought to have apoligized to the Russians, or that Pinochet should have apologized to Chileans doesn’t really impact that fact that I should apologize to my sister for pulling her hair.

The fact that Kissinger existed and exists has almost nothing to do with the innocent people that Ayer’s put in harm’s way by blowing up statues in Chicago (Kissinger not present), Molotov cocktails endangering the family of a judge in his home, random people living near them in Greenwich village, random low level police officers in New York city, or women (none high ranking as yet) going to the bathroom at the Pentagon.

And frankly the ‘notifications’ excuse is garbage. You are notifying organizations which you believe are either corrupt or incompetent or both, and then relying on these corrupt or incompetent organizations to keep innocents out of harm’s way.

Do you mean to say that it is impossible to go to war while placing a high value on not killing innocents?

Can’t speak for Harry, of course, but yeah, if you go to war, you pretty much guarantee that innocents will get killed.

Sebastian — yes, I meant that he was right that there was a lot to apologise for, not that that observation yielded the implict conclusion that he has no obligation to apologise for anything absent others apologising. There is an interesting issue about to whom he should apologise.

DC — I meant it as an immanent criticism. He says very clearly that they went to great lengths to avoiod killing innocents, implying that they placed a very high value on not taking innocent life. It seems to me, in fact, that they did not go to the pertinent lengths.

Me, I place a very high value on not killing, and also on saving, innocents. But it is very easy to be overconfident in one’s own assessment of one’s ability to save some innocents by putting fewer other innocents at risk. I suspect that the main vice of the members of Weather Underground was their susceptibility to this standard human weakness. It may well be that Kissinger, McNamara, Bush, Rumsfeld etc have all been susceptible to this weakness, but in none of their cases could it be thought that it was their main vice.

JMHO but the last 40 years speak for themselves. The carnage wrought by politicians on a still unsuspecting public. I wish Bill a sucsessful future.

“There are things that the state can legitimately do that no one else can do, and taking innocent life is one of them.”

So the Israelis have the right to take innocent lives but the Palestinians do not. Ditto native Americans and any colonized peoples who lived on unstaked land. And the US has the right to bomb civilians, which as I remind people often enough a hallmark of modern war.

“…being inclined to see the turn to violence in a liberal democracy as not only elitist and self-indulgent..”

If a North Vietnamese agent had managed to blow up something in this country it would have been an act in a continuing war begun by the French and continued by the US and not self-indulgent at all. General Giap has nothing to apologize for. 10 years ago a retired American officer offered to shake his hand. He refused.

It’s not violence per se, it’s dim-witted thoughtless violence and then hypocrisy in its defense. The Weathermen were interested mostly in living their own myth. Hamas makes use of strategies and tactics, some of which are extreme. But they’re not just indulging in theatrics; and that’s why serious Israelis are willing to negotiate with them. The Weathermen on the other hand in their spoiled stupidity are the ancestors of the nihilists of Al Qaeda, Another cult led by another spoiled rich kid.

Basically, Seth and Adam, I don’t think that we ever realized how bad things were, even though we felt hopeless. America was really hard-wired for war, and it still is. That’s just what nations are.

It’s easier to wring your hands and deplore him, than it was…

Sex in the Oval Off bad; “depleted” uranium good. Impeach or eat a peach.

That’s just what nations are.

Some nations.

Charlie,
Ayers went on the radio, I listened, and commented, not especially negatively. Not picking on him especially. If you have actual arguments (as, eg, emerson has supplied, rather well in my opinion) those would be nice to hear. Otherwise your comment just sounds like the kind of macho claptrap that I’m sure prompted a lot of bad decisionmaking in the sixties on the left and the right.

I was a “draft dodger” from the Vietnam war. That is to say I was a war resister who immigrated to Canada. Before I left the U.S. I was active in the April 1967 New York City mobilization against the war. Things looked pretty grim. Hundreds of thousands of people could march in the streets and you didn’t read about it in the paper or see it on T.V. Politicians called for the death penalty for war resisters. That was considered to be within the spectrum of acceptable rhetoric.

At the same time there were millions of young men who were “against the war”, who didn’t enlist but didn’t resist either. They stayed in school, got student deferments and got on with their quiet little lives. Fine, those who were silent are welcome to remain silent. The only people who earned the standing to criticize violent opposition to the war are those who committed and accepted the risks of non-violent civil disobedience. The alternative to violence is NOT grudging acquiescence. The alternative is active non-violence.

The Weather Underground needs to be understood in terms of what it was reacting against

The Vietnam War was far worse than what we are doing in Iraq. This is true by any measure, whether quantitative measures such as the number of American troops killed, or the number of Vietnamese killed, or qualitative measures, such as the intentional killing of enemy civilians, as opposed to combatants, to advance our war aims. More to the point, there is an even starker contrast between the misbehavior of our government at home, as it reacted to anti-war and racial dissent then, and the much milder official criminality we are seeing now. There were police riots, there were police assassinations of radicals, there were show trials and imprisonment, there was the National Guard shooting students at Ohio State, there was eavesdroping and other secret police persecution, and of US citizens, and not just foreigners apprehended on the field of battle. Oh, and those people would have been happy to have just gotten idefinite detention in Guantanamo, which really is Club Med compared to Con Son Island. Folks we captured in battle in Vietnam, or whom we had rounded up from their homes, almost all ended up dead in tiger cages.

But the key difference between then and now, is that the government got away with it all back then, and did not, at the point the Weather movement split off from the SDS in 1970, seem to have any prospect of paying for its behavior at the polls. Everyone understood after Tet that the war was lost, Nixon even ran on that position. But then, once elected, he found that prolonging the war was useful to him for purely political reasons, in that he could use Silent Majority fear of the anti-war movement, and other threats to “law and order” to gin up electoral support as needed. He prolonged the war, at the cost of more than half of the casualties in that war, and the worst excesses of targetting civilians, and inflamed racial tensions in this country, just to get re-elected.

The system seemed to have failed, far worse than at any time in the past eight years, and with far less hope that the electorate would ever, by the practice of ordinary electoral politics, be brought around. In this war, the trend was against the president as early as the Fall 2003, and he seemed in real trouble by Spring 2004. In contrast, by 1970, five years into the war, and two years after everyone paying any attention to its conduct had given it up for lost, the political trend was actually in the opposite direction.

Yes, the radicals of that day can be faulted for impracticality, because violence, even bombs in buildings carefully selected to be empty on detonation, only played into the hands of the right-wing fear-mongers. That was obvious even at the time. But to even think about whispering a word of condemnation of them for “resorting to violence” as a moral failing, as if they were the ones in our politics of the time to “resort to violence”, until and unless you have had Henry Kissinger et al drawn and quartered for their crimes, is a gross miscarriage of justice. That hard rain has yet to fall on the violent political criminals of the Right of that era.

The irony is that the violent revolution that was impractical in the 70s, when some people with high visibility but little practical influence espoused it as a less intolerable alternative than tolerating the crimes of the Right, may come upon us now, long-delayed, when no one expects it, much less espouses it, or looks to it as a solution to our present crisis. The complete triumph of the Right a generation ago both made them proceed so stupidly and unself-critcally that their policies have caused this crisis, and made their way seem so inevitable and unbeatable that they can arrogantly steal billions, as in this CitiGroup bailout, with no apparent thought that the masses of people losing their jobs and their homes in this crisis might not react well to the spectacle. If we get through the next four years without a guillotine set up in the Mall, I will be surprised. Violent revolution seems much closer now than it ever did to me in the worst of the late 60s and 70s.

If you feel your blog post is not critical of Ayers and his methods, not negative or ‘picking on him’, then you are guilty of one of the worst sins in rhetoric: You have no idea what you actually wrote. Your post pretty solidly condemns Ayers methods, motivations, his character, and the efficacy of his methods. Posing your condemnation as a request for comments on the interview is pretty poor camouflage for what is essentially a hit piece on both Ayers and the Weather Underground.

Incidentally, I actually suspect you are correct in thinking that the Weathermen did little or nothing to affect the war, and that many of their plans were futile. But then, a campaign of deadly bombings and political assassinations, which might have actually had the desired effect was outside of both their capability and their apparent moral limits. Pity we can’t say the same for MacNamara, Kissinger, et al.

An interesting side issue to my thesis comes to mind: At what point is one mans terrorist actually not a freedom fighter at all, but just a terrorist. What separates Timothey McVeigh from Che Guevara? Is it really something as cynical as who won?
How do we decide when revolution, armed or otherwise, is justified?

Seth: I have never met a teenage non-idiot, but hey, at least we can’t say they were apathetic!

Offhand, I’d say violence should be avoided as a means to effect political change with very, very few exceptions–there is quite a lot to say about why. A major reason is that it is usually ineffective in establishing genuine conditions of social justice.

But I wonder about the idea that somehow liberal democracy makes it particularly wrong. Has the U.S. been a liberal democracy all this time? I can think of many cases in U.S. history where violence was justifiable in one sense because of the structural violence of the state and its questionable legitimacy but unjustifiable because of its likely failure to accomplish anything but more terrible violence. John Brown’s violence was unjustified because it was so unlikely to do anything but create a violent backlash. Except for that, the circumstances justified it. I’d say the same thing for the American Indians, possibly for the Japanese who were being interred, for the Vietnam War. And for the war in Iraq. (Again, setting aside for the moment the most relevant consideration–that violence might harm innocent people and be useless. But if you can’t stop your state from an unjust war that kills hundreds of thousands by any other means? For Iraq, violence is totally off the table. But–and this is just a kind of thought experiment, not a conspiracy theory– what if the U.S. did enter into some general period of violent imperialist conquest?) Maybe I doubt the legitimacy or the mechanisms available to effect change during quite a few periods of U.S. history, for significant numbers of people. Is that why the presence of liberal democracy makes violence illegitimate? Or is there some other reason? (And what is the ‘liberal’ part doing here? Why does the fact the democracy is liberal matter for this question?)

I’m really curious, not trying to push a view.

Shorter Lisa @26: Just how bad does it have to get before you say ‘Fuck it’ and come out swinging?

The answer will be different for everyone, but whatever your answer, you can bet that someone somewhere will soon enough be scoring points off you in their own personal sanctimoniousness stakes.

Without regard to too much of the details of the Ayers case, I do find the semi-consensus that he really ought to apologise faintly nauseating. What conceivable difference, except to commentators’ sense of self-righteousness, would it make if he did? Either an apology lets him off the hook, in which case what he did can’t have been all that bad; or it doesn’t, in which case it’s an exercise in public humiliation without any larger closure.

The past has no cure. Really, it doesn’t.

bad Jim: “it’s generally agreed that Gandhi and King demonstrated that non-violent opposition can indeed effect change in liberal democracies…”

Yes, but ‘non-violence’ invariably involved considerable violence (even if provoked by a most deliberate ‘passivity’) and the victims of that violence were not exclusively the practitioners of non-violence.

A different kind of violence to that practiced by the Weatherman, surely, but a violence, nonetheless.

I believe such (non)violence to have been justified. If you also feel so, what do you think justifies such tactics? If not their efficaciousness, what is it about these violent tactics (which killed many and injured many more) that makes them acceptable, whereas a campaign that was much less humanly destructive is unacceptable? Is it the personal risk to which the practitioners of non-violence exposed themselves (as well as others) to? Their courage? Their greater ‘objective’ political sophistication? The cause they were dedicated to?

The Weatherman were Leninists, so the impracticality of their politics was a feature, not a bug. But “impractical” doesn’t quite get it. “Farcical”?

Lisa, it’s generally agreed that Gandhi and King demonstrated that non-violent opposition can indeed effect change in liberal democracies, while comparable tactics proved ineffective in totalitarian states like the Soviet bloc, China or Myanmar, to name a few.

I think the key distinction isn’t in “liberal democracy” — surely late colonial India was not a “liberal democracy”, even if Great Britain itself was. I believe it is more in a distinction made by Gandhi himself, and relevant for this discussion: non-violent opposition effects nation-scale change only where violent opposition could also have been effective. (A necessary but not sufficient condition; see my remarks about educated classes below.) It’s really a question of the relative quality of outcomes between the two choices. Yes, there is also the relative morality of the two approaches; but recall we’re talking politics here, and also that I’m a Machiavellian when it comes to issues of liberation, and therefore not wedded to ends-means moral consistency in such cases.

There’s no question that a politically unified Indian insurgency could have thrown out the British by force of arms. The problem is that going the armed route would have meant throwing out the British using a coalition of armed actors that, soon afterward, might have simply turned on itself, with devastating results for all, and with democracy a very unlikely outcome on any side. Indeed, post-British India was bloody enough. Ghandi himself succumbed to the resulting paroxysm. Blood is still spilled in Kashmir and in India to this day. And yet, India is a remarkable achievement, and props to the Mahatma for it: it fairly peacefully contains the second-largest national population of devout muslims in the world, under a separate civil law arrangement. Yes, Pakistan spun out, bloodily, and then Bangladesh, and there is still the running sore of Kashmir. However, had the subcontinent descended in total civil war after the exit of the British, India wouldn’t be the place it is today. Armed insurrection would have increased the chances of such a total civil war immeasurably. Thank you, Gandhi, for averting that one.

Dictatorships can be terrible situations to try non-violent revolution, because it’s really very hard to organize any kind of revolution under a dictatorship. Of course, we’ve had a number of relatively successful “people power” transitions. However, virtually all of them featured a sizeable educated urban elite (of the kind staffed government offices) crowding the streets. All of them enjoyed that virtually necessary condition for success even in armed revolutions: the middle class was joined by that part of the educated urban elite known in those nations as “the military officer class” — i.e., a group that, had there been no “people power”, might just as well have staged a reformist coup on their own. The character of that military matters very much.

Myanmar? Run by a not terribly well educated, not terribly urban military officer class. China? Much of China is still as backward and rural as some countries in Africa, and again: when the regional heir to the Mongol’s power, the Yang family, rolled into Beijing in their tanks and crushed the demonstrators in Tian An Men Square, it was an overarmed peasant army coming to the aid of the Party, not the kind of people who clinked glasses with the cadres very often, or who were likely to send their children to universities in the cities. India, by contrast, had (courtesy of relatively enlightened British rule) a segment of the population that was very educated and cosmopolitan. Remember, Gandhi was a lawyer from South Africa who had trained in Great Britain. He was more a citizen of Empire than a subject of it, and found his footing in India in part by swimming in a large pool of likeminded Indians there. Man of the people, salt of the earth, and all that, but also a very connected guy.

Could the militants of the Black Power movement have been successful in America, with no non-violent civil rights movement to drain and channel its natural constituency? I’d say so. You’re not talking about some tiny sliver of self-important Ivy League punks here, but a huge portion of the American population, easily large enough to establish majority rule in several U.S. states if it came to that, and in a country with relatively easy access to guns. Their commanders? Probably not the poseurs in the Panthers, in the end, but black Vietnam war veterans, first-hand students of effective insurgency strategy and with a leg up on what sort of counter-insurgency doctrine they’d be facing.

Again, the question would have been one of the quality of the success. Black nationalism established in one or more states of the Union (especially if in the South) might have given rise to a white backlash in other states — not “go back to Africa!”, but “go to Alabama (or wherever) if you don’t like it here!” It would have been intolerably ugly, a huge step backward in most ways, a further legitimation of segregation rather than a blow against it. Far better to have gotten where we are today: a departing administration with a black sitting Secretary of State (and a black former Secretary of State who before that was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among other things), giving way to an administration with a black president. Quite honestly, if I’d read a projection like that for 2008 in a science fiction novel written in the early 1970s (when I was attending Martin Luther King Junior High school in Berkeley), I would have been amused, but still far more willing to suspend my disbelief for the part about the manned mission to Mars. Putting away childish things, now: forget Mars, it can wait, this is the real frontier, and welcome to it.

The Weatherpeople were a small part of the craziness of that time. I think that the reactive rejection of The Left was not based on specific acts but on a general feeling that society was spinning out of control. The political killings were just one piece of evidence. The civil disorder 1967-8 (urban/black riots, Chicago ocnvention 1968, Cambodian invasion disorders 1970) was frightening regardless of death tolls. The drug culture terrified people regardless of death tolls.

My inventory is that the white left death toll during the Vietnam war was three self-killings and one actual murder (in Madison), with three spinoff killings in 1980 or so. If you add the insane, isolated, spiritual/political SLA group, seven self-killings and six other-killings. If you add the racist Manson gang (which the popular mind did) you get fourrteen other-killings. I haven’t tallied the black numbers which were greater though killings of radicals by police far outnumbered killings by radicals.

This kind of statistical rationalization is never convincing, but nonetheless: the number of left-wing killing nationwide 1965-1975 was statistically tiny for a country as big and murderous as the US. (Detroit had 366 murders in 2003, for example). The violence was a hook to hang other sorts of fears onto.

For example, public opinion did not take the seven anti abortion murders 1993-1998 to discredit the anti-abortion cause or to mean that society was breaking down. The scattered killings by many organized militias and neo-Nazis were also rather calmly received. And when almost 200 people were killed in Oklahoma City, as soon as people found out that the killer was a.) white, b.) a native-born American citizen, and c.) not a left-winger or a hippy, for reasons that are very interesting to think about people became less alarmed.

So violence and illegality aren’t the variable here. Anything radical is more objectionable and frightening than anything reactionary. Bill Ayers is more to be despised than Tim McVeigh (who “went too far”.) Law-abiding people with McVeigh’s views are respectable, and law-abiding people with Ayers’ views are not.

My understanding now is that nations are war machines and that national leaders engaging in aggressive wars go into them expecting domestic opposition and planning to ignore it, and that in general they’re right to ignore it, because until there’s an enormous amount of pain and cost anti-war constituencies almost never become powerful enough to overthrow or vote out a government. Perhaps a completely non-violent mass movement would have been more effective, but it’s pretty unrealistic to expect or hope for every member of a mass anti-war tendency to be nonviolent.

I take it that most people here would accept that the Vietcong were justified in their resistance efforts against the American war effort (and that of its south Vietnamese allies)? (Not in every particular tactic or action, but in jus ad bellum terms). How about if they directly aided the Vietnamese by, say, forming an international brigade and fighting in Vietnam itself? What about civil disobedience of any and all kinds short of violence in America?

I’m just trying to tease out what people think would have been (un)justified to stop the war and why. In a sense all anti-war activites threatened the kind of quasi-fascist backlash that seems to be a reason for people’s condemnation of the WU, no?

Incidentally, don’t know if it’s in the cinemas stateside (as it is in Ireland/UK at the moment) but The Baader-Meinhof Komplex is worth checking out for people thinking about this stuff.

I don’t think that in the heat of events it’s reasonable to expect or demand that kind of prudence.

If you’re setting yourself up as a “revolutionary vanguard”, it’s not merely reasonable but necessary that people demand it of you. Understanding prudence is part of what leadership is about, even if it’s not much to be expected in idiot teenagers. But if Ayers is still vacillating on the rights and wrongs of that campaign now he’s in late middle age, it suggests to me that he’s got major problems.

(Incidentally, Bill Gardner, Lenin would have had a short way with the Weather gang as a dangerous distraction from serious revolutionary activity – even if they did claim to be in his fan club.)

We’re still back at the point of deciding whether it was the violence and illegality or the imprudence that we’re objecting to.

To most Leninists The Weatherpoeple were adventurists, infantile leftists, or ultra-leftists. But then, we’re not Leninists here.

I’m not proposing Ayers as a great and wise leader. The Weatherpeople were not universally admired at the time and their politics didn’t work. I’m just arguing against the idea that the Weatherpeople’s turn to violence was a major cause of the rightward swing after 1968. The whole era was chaotic, and the majority of the right believes that the war was justified and that all anti-war people — violent and non-violent, active and passive — were stabbing the troops in the back. (And many of them also despise MLK).

I also believe that the Weather violence was a response to what was accurately perceived to be futility.

kmack — thanks, I think I agree with just about all of that, including the comment that the reading is uncharitable. Just to be clear, I am not worked up about it at all, more bemused. The one thing I am not sure about is that public repentance is a political act — I’m not sure what that means, or whether I agree. I guess one complicated thing is that the conversational situation of a Fresh Air interview makes lack of frankness sound evasive in way that is harder to accept than it would in a less friendly environment.

I also agree with you about 35: emerson is reminding me why I like having him here to discuss everything except political philosophy.

One thing that irked me about Obama’s high road to the presidency is that he refrained from defending his association with Ayers in the one way that would have skewered Sarah Palin and the Christian right.

He won and Palin looked like a nitwit talking about Ayers. I’m happy with that.

So the real complaint appears to be that Ayers is not publicly repentant. He rightly takes public repentance to be primarily a political act. And in the political realm, it does seem kind of bizarre to get particularly worked up about Ayers’s refusal to apologize given that “there is a lot more to apologise for than what he did.”

Thank you. I’ve been trying to sort out my own rather murky thinking about this stuff, and that is one of the most genuinely helpful ways of looking at it that I’ve come across.

But don’t kid yourselves that there was much virtue on the other side…

Straw man alert! Straw man alert!

The members of ‘violent’ activist groups like WU and the Black Panthers were basically Drama Queens…

Sigh. Big sigh. Big long aspirated sigh.
That’s a statement in response to received media imagery, built on nothing more than media imagery. Smug, fatuous, substanceless.
Conflating the Panthers with Ayers et al. well gosh. Gee whiz.
Conspicuous in their absence here are Susan Jane Olson, Leonard Peltier, Angela Davis, Fred Hampton, George Jackson, Randy Weaver…and umpteen many that never made headlines but got taken down just the same.
Sadness, futility, violence. Loss.
And what was really there nicely covered over in simple flat images that can pass for historical accuracy.
As far as the Vietnam war goes, well, it was a mess.
Yep. Yeppers. Sure was.
And thank heaven we’re all done with messes now, boy howdy for sure you betcha.
He won and…
Something won, and Obama is the face of that.
It was a very cathartic election. But then so were the last three before it.

“When my cat eats a bug, something eats, and my cat is the face of that.”

Well, I don’t always agree with Roy, to put it mildly, but I think there’s a bit more substance to his comment than that.

Not speaking for Roy, but for me one of the things that won with Obama was the Beltway’s (largely undeserved) self-regard. Bush is out and now everyone in Washington who is not part of Bush’s inner circle thinks we can all be one big happy bipartisan family again–no regrets, nothing to get too self-reflective about (like hundreds of thousands dead and 4 million refugees, for example.) Kind of funny imagining that someone like McCain or Hillary, for instance, could be tainted if they had been friends with Ayers.

John E.,
I never understood before what it meant when people said “after 1968 the opportunities for political action dried up.” Thanks.

N-E-O-C-O-N
Oh wait, that’s not it.
No really, the neocons lost right?
So all those destructive policies, all that anti-American self-interested dual loyalty b.s.
All gone now.
Oh wait, my cat has a tapeworm.
So…when he eats…the tapeworm eats!
Synergy!
Symbiosis!
Something!

“Something!”

Trickledown?

No Bubba, the neocons lost. Victory! Yay!
But that wasn’t it even when it was it, was it?
So whatever that was that wasn’t it but was, really, was what won.
With Obama as its face.
Instead of Bush.
Now.
Whatever it was that neocon wasn’t, was it, and that was what won.
But for those who read this exchange with honest incomprehension, my point was the sad and bitter fact that the innocence and idealism that put him in office has already been betrayed by Obama, and that what people thought they were electing, just like in 2006, is not at all what they’re getting.
Just like it was not then what it was they thought they got, then, it is that, now, what they are not getting. Again.
Spell it anyway you want.

Clearly it is just the face of the something that it is.

Peter: This country was founded on revolution. How does that square with your statement?

“Do not wait until you win your independence to discover that self-government requires not just political power, but political responsibility.”

How profoundly true that observation is; and how profoundly fortunate we are that so many posters in discusssion of this ilk will never be in a position to fail to learn that lesson.

Yours, waiting to see if this post will be randomly ‘moderated’ out of existence, like several others of mine.

38: That’s convenient, so long as you don’t live in the likes of Vietnam or Iraq and are confident that bombs won’t regularly be exploding in your village.

It was a statement of principle, not a description of fact.

The implication from the earlier statement that “why should villagers in East Armpit Massachusets not have to worry about bombs exploding, when villagers in Viet Nam watched it happen EVERY DAMNED DAY.” seemed to me to imply that people in East Armpit Massachusets should be bombed because they were no more deserving of peace and security than the occupants of a village in Vietnam. I’ll agree with that latter point, but the idea that this means everyone (or rather, the poor schmucks of East Armpit) deserves to be bombed is stupid and vindictive.

Has Bill?

“For this purpose, I am greatly in need of a little money, and I come to you, brother, with my heart full of contrition.”
~ Vic Hugo

Seems that’s his sentiment at every speaking event. So in a sense, every time he’s handed a speakers fee it’s really an apology and I’m sure once he hits the billion mark he’ll sum it all up. ;)

Dan S. at 52: Yeah, that was excessive. People like Eric Rudolph and Claude Dallas were local heroes in Republican parts of the country, but they never became respectable or publicly accepted, especially not nationally. Though on the other hand, Ayers never did kill anybody, and was only not jailed because of prosecutor misconduct.

Patrick’s 62 is really good. Thanks.

Peter: This country was founded on revolution. How does that square with your statement?

So what?

There is no such thing as “original sin” and the fact that a nation was founded in violent revolution simply does not necessarily imply anything about it’s fundamental nature.

simply does not necessarily imply anything about it’s fundamental nature

Surely it does “imply” something, unless of course we’ve been limited to but one ‘original’ nature, otherwise we’d not be arguing about 2nd amendment rights and kids blowing their heads off at machine gun camps, gun show loopholes and how being by far the biggest spender on all that is military and the biggest by far supplier of weaponry to the rest of the world…

During the 90’s I was tangentially involved with the Michigan Milita, a group I’m sure everyone here loaths as much as I loath the Weathermen. (In part, I think, due to a very carefully crafted ignorance of what we were really about.) I think it’s worth noting that, at a time when the government was killing it’s own citizens for peacefully exercising an explicit civil right, we generally did NOT resort to terroristic violence, and rightly despised those few who did.

And yet, I’m haunted by the thought that maybe McVeigh was right, in the sense that the government would never have pulled back from the abyss it was teetering at the edge of, if somebody hadn’t seen to it that it got a taste of it’s own, and removed that sense of invulnerability. That’s the sort of thought that keeps me sleepless some nights.

Just thought I’d share that.

As for Ayers, my only thought is what a pity he didn’t meet the same fate as McVeigh.

Fundamental nature.
Creation myths have some bearing there as well. The Judeo-Christian Fall of Man.
The Jewish Passover, the Christian Redemption, neither has a fundamental regard for the “natural” world, the biological, more like disdain than anything else. As if biology weren’t fundamental at all, but something superficial.
The Chumash of California came out of the sea as dolphins, and took up life on land. That story informed something deep and central in them, shaping their attitudes toward what is after all essential to all of us, land and sea . It also resonates pretty tightly with the creation myth of contemporary science.
How much of the violence in America’s founding is carried forward to today doesn’t seem as important as how far the once fiercely independent “fundamental nature” of the US citizenry, embodied in men like Franklin and Paine, has shifted toward childish obedience and complacent unquestioning acceptance of what is basically an unseen authority.
Thus the stunned but not really outraged posture of those who are getting reamed by the so-called economic crisis.
These conditions are very similar to what produced the American Revolution in the first place.
But violence, which then enabled the severing of the parasitic attachments of corrupt power, which as revolution was the founding of the US as nation, while now evident as hell in the actions of the government itself as it serves and protects the interests of its masters, is, former militiamen notwithstanding, nowhere to be seen in its citizenry.

“Tim’s tangent with the MM”, references to him being “linked to” them aside, (Wonderfully ambiguous word, “linked”; Delightfully self-referential at times, too.) consisted of a boot to the rear accelerated trip out the door. We used to say that you could identify the federal infiltrators, because they were the ones urging that we commit crimes… Our view of what we were about was rather different from what Ayers thought he was up to. We thought we were preparing in case the government became a tyranny that needed to be warred against, not that it already was such a tyranny.

No, I don’t wish Ayers had been more violent, I’m just disturbed by the possibility that a moral monster had a clearer grasp of the situation than those of us with more scruples; Ghandi used to say that non-violence would only work against civilized opponents, that against the truly evil it was suicide. Did McVeigh correctly identify the nature of what we were up against, because like recognized like?

Our view of what we were about was rather different from what Ayers thought he was up to.

My eyes sees a strong similarity, the biggest difference being the when the “in case” occurred[s] / definition of tyranny.

disturbed by the possibility that a moral monster had a clearer grasp

Did they/he not undertake actions against the machine they deemed tryannical, something you/MM were prepared to also do upon whatever definition y’all had arrived at – knowing that Congress or SCOTUS for example, were unlikely to make such a declaration on their own and thereby sanction your violence?

On a side tangent there’s been much talk here about the non-violence of Ghandi [which in and of itself is highly admirable] that tries to negate it seems the fact that a considerable portion of his/their success was owing to massive amounts of violence in the form of world wars that both altered their oppressors thoughts/behavior in terms of colonialism and their ability to maintian it if it did turn to mass violent action. Maybe we should all practice brahmacharya….

Beryl, I went there and I looked at that. And what I came away with was different: that Gandhi was faulting German Jews for not resisting en masse. Well, what does “Never Again!” mean but “never again shall we be so meek”? I also seem to read that Gandhi thought that a self-sacrifice of “hundreds”, even “thousands” would have brought the Holocaust (or perhaps even pre-Holocaust depredations) to the attention of the world in ways those events hadn’t already. This seems a far cry from what it sounds like you think he was saying: that all six million should have killed themselves, rather than ever resort to violence resistance.

@91,

In case you thought I was being unfair (from the same site)…

If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, [i.e. non-violence] he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength. The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.

‘Deliverance’? ‘Joyful’? ‘Refreshing’? These were not the words that came to mind when I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington last year.

R. Bubba,

I didn’t say Gandhi’s prescription was “wrong”. (Given the context, I can hardly imagine how it could have been “right”.) I simply called it peculiar. And his post-Holocaust remarks are abhorrent. Coating it all in religious mysticism does not lessen its repugnance.

Beryl 11.25.08 at 11:37 pm:
I may regret asking, but can someone deconstruct “all that anti-American self-interested dual loyalty b.s.” for me?

Beryl 11.27.08 at 3:12 pm
These were not the words that came to mind when I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington last year.

Dan, we’re both in trouble already.
What I clarified was the dishonesty in Beryl’s first statement.
Disingenuous at best, manipulative and deceitful at worst.
Our, and by that I mean you and me and Beryl and all the rest of us, inability to have open honest discussion, argument, explication, about these issues, which are central to this historical moment,in any open forum anywhere, has consequences, dire consequences in my opinion, for all of us.
And by all of us I mean you and Beryl and me, inclusive.
Possibly not that Bubba person though.

There’s nothing about judaism that’s incompatible with being a loyal american. It’s only american zionists who must suffer divided loyalties between nations whose interests are fundamentally opposed.

What’s all this about “zionists”? That wasn’t in this thread, was it? I don’t find anybody talking about that.

Beryl was talking about the Holocaust and Gandhi’s attitude towards it. That, in Roy’s view, made her an example of “anti-American, self-interested, dual-loyalty b.s.”. Do the math.

As for Zionists and “dual loyalties”, is any American who supports any nation or group outside the US thereby guilty of “dual loyalties”, if you consider that support to be against American interests? Am I entitled, for instance, to consider any pro-Palestinian American guilty of “dual loyalties”, given the Palestinian population’s and leadership’s constant, virulent, occasionally violent anti-American animus?

It seems to me that reasonable debate about foreign policy is impossible if any disagreement about America’s best interests can be attributed to fundamental disloyalty rather than good-faith differences of opinion.

I suppose I do regret asking, after all. I thought there must be something more insightful to the comment and I was missing it. I was wrong. Now that I see what was crawling underneath, perhaps I should not have lifted this rock.

“Neocon” means “People who called themselves neocons up until the Iraq War they strongly advocated went bad and was blamed partly on them.” Many, but not most, studied with Leo Strauss, and many, but probably not most, are Jews.

Harry,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trotskyism

A follower of Trotskyist ideas is usually called a “Trotskyist” or (in an informal or pejorative way) a “Trotskyite” or “Trot”

Hmm, can’t decide between informal or perjorative.

[pejorative – sp!]

I didn’t say Gandhi’s prescription was “wrong”. (Given the context, I can hardly imagine how it could have been “right”.)

Well, I can see a way it could have been right. But it would have required a tremendous agreement among the european jewish community, something that jewish communities are not noted for.

Suppose for the moment that many germans thought of jews as a threat. They thought it was not just a few jewish bankers and bureaucrats etc that created the bad armistice and the tragic Weimar republic, but a more-or-less-universal conspiracy. Then jews anywhere would look like a threat.

I remember a story from the relatively early days, where the SS found a collection of jews including a bunch of children, and the local commander gave the order to kill the children too. His argument was, “Why should we let these children grow up when they will be our ineveitable enemies?”.

In the USA when our WWII started we went after each german citizen in the USA and the FBI interviewed his friends etc to get an idea whether he’d be a threat. A few germans got “concentrated”. But japanese were rounded up wholesale, perhaps because the FBI didn’t trust their friends to tell the truth about them. We didn’t particularly mistreat them because we didn’t need to, they were a relatively small number of people and we were winning handily. We could afford to give them plywood and window screens and even medicine, and let them grow gardens etc.

So, just suppose that these germans thought that jews were a threat. And suppose that jews could strongly show that they weren’t a threat. That would tend to get germans to question their choices. Direct resistance couldn’t work, it would only persuade germans that they had been right all along, and the strength difference was too large.

(Could they have gotten some results with suicide bombing? Yes, they could have made the nonjewish population take larger losses, but if anything they would have been killed more remorselessly.)

It would have taken a lot of dedication. A small minority of jews doing violence would have scared people. Maybe it was impossible. In far less extreme circumstances it worked for US blacks. Most of them presented themselves as nonviolent christians, and we got some civil rights instead of a great big clampdown. Even though there was a certain amount of arson etc. I figure the more extreme the situation is already, the less violence it takes to make it worse.

In general, if you can’t win a fight and you aren’t even strong enough to deter one and you can’t run away, the best approach is to look harmless. Exactly how to look harmless will vary by circumstance. It isn’t a sure thing but there aren’t any sure things in that case.

intense zionist propaganda

I haven’t been to the museum. Is it that?

but then you let slip that you exposed yourself to intense zionist propaganda and tried to spread it, I think Roy jumped to the conclusion that you were one of the dishonest people who argue in favor of zionism, as opposed to somebody who was so clueless you didn’t know what was going on.

To all CT-ers:

My sincere apologies. I truly never realized how insidious Zionism could be. I promise to be more careful in the future.

I’m sorry, J Thomas; “expos(ure)” to “intense zionist propaganda” can do that to people. Maybe they could post a warning sign outside the museum.

Beryl, you were taking partisan one-sided positions in 2006, so I think we can discount a single visit to the Holocaust Museum last year as an explanation for your behavior.

Beryl, you were taking partisan one-sided positions in 2006, so I think we can discount a single visit to the Holocaust Museum last year as an explanation for your behavior.

No, you’re probably right. I was ripe for the picking. It’s remarkable how they can recognize the weak ones.

http://preview.tinyurl.com/5q5fnt

As for me, I’ve actually been banned from one CT poster’s comments

do you have any idea how ridiculous you are, Dan?

CT is rife with conspiracy theories about “Zionists”/”Likudniks”/”neocons” that are completely indistinguishable from standard anti-Semitic propaganda about Jewish power, Jewish disloyalty and ZOG

and while it is not my place to decide on comments policy for one of Harry’s posts, this transparent bollocks surely shouldn’t go completely unchallenged.

J Thomas is wrong, we have not had ‘fifty years of lobbying from people whose only loyalty is to Israel’, that would perhaps not have caused so much harm. What we have had is people lobbying for their own interests and a theoretical construct that never existed.

You’re right. At various times the israeli government has seemed to me to mirror them, but even then the americans have been more extreme.

Most people are neither Jew-haters or Palestinian-haters.

Support for fantasy “israel” doesn’t equate to palestinian-haters, though. It isn’t exactly arab-haters or muslim-haters either. It’s hate for all fantasy enemies of israel including americans who don’t “support” israel enough.

So lets drop the term ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘Zionism’ and ‘conspiracy’

My first thought was that this would do no good. But you’re right that the labels are vague and tend to lead the brouhaha into the same abstract patterns each time. If we were to look at individual issues, who knows what might result? So it’s worth a try.

@128: on the last point, it is fundamental to the western tradition that in such circumstances one goes down fighting, clawing the eyeballs out of the tyrant’s lackeys with the last ounce of one’s strength, leaving a glorious example for those that will come from the shadows to continue the struggle. Since Horatius at the bridge it has been thus [not that he died…] “We shall fight them on the beaches… fields … landing-grounds … hills… never surrender…”

Unfortunately it sometimes turns out that you were the one that was on the wrong side. As the French singer Renaud remarks in one of his opuscules, with the history of both the Resistance and Algeria behind him, “We’re not all Jean Moulin”.

The trouble with suggesting that Jews in Germany laying down their lives in perhaps the hundreds of thousands might have averted the Holocaust somehow is that it rather insidiously demands magical perception on their part that the Holocaust was something that was going to happen.

Since very few believed at the time it could be possible that human beings could do something so monstrous, why should it be demanded of the ultimate victims, who probably had families and jobs and lives that they wanted to protect thank you very much, that they forsee the unforeseeable, and then lay down their lives?

The idea that there wasn’t any resistance to the Holocaust, or even that if only “the Jews” had better resisted it it wouldn’t have happened is ridiculous and offensive. There was resistance and it didn’t stop it.

Xian martyrdom is for wimps, real men burn witches.

No, I am not being serious, but then this discussion left those shores a while ago.

Michael Turner @126,

The stench from this thread is hard on my breathing, but yours is a thoughtful comment that deserves notice.

I see Ghandi saying that the “deliverance” of the Jews would have been in their rescue by Western powers once their plight was brought to unavoidable global attention, not in their death at the hands of the Nazis. I also see him saying that the relative few who did die in nonviolent resistance (even if that “relative few” would be measured in hundreds of thousands) would at least see heaven.

Michael, I’ve looked at the pertinent quote again…

But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant.

… and still hold to my understanding. But there is too much religious mumbo-jumbo in these words for me to dispute your interpretation.

On the other hand, everything I know about 1933-45 suggests that the plight of the Jews was brought to Western attention. Repeatedly after 1938. (The Holocaust Museum has much documentation to this effect.) And yet (dare I compare them to the Cambodians, Rwandans, Bosnians and Darfurians?) the Jews were pretty much left to their own inadequate devices. Western Jews marched and held rallies, to no avail. Their governments had other issues that they considered politically more pressing. Their borders remained closed to refugees. To be sure, even into 1943-44, the enormity of the Holocaust, the sheer industrial scale of the genocide (a label I don’t think is as easily applied to the catastrophes I mentioned above), was still hard to accept. This wasn’t an obscure atrocity happening a distant corner of the third world. It was taking place in the heart of the “civilized” world, in the lands of Beethoven and Chopin and Tchaikovsky. Many Jews themselves, who after centuries of persecution had learned not to make waves, found it hard to believe that this pogrom was different.

But all of this is hindsight. What I find particularly objectionable are Gandhi’s post-Holocaust comments. It’s as if he’s scolding the Jews for not taking his advice. Had they done so, he is implying, they would have had death with honor. As opposed to what?! I find his position far too close to that of what today we might call “concern trolls”, always ready to offer friendly advice to the Jews. At least Gandhi was criticizing them for being too meek. These days — it would seem from some commenters here — they control the world.

CT is rife with conspiracy theories about “Zionists”/”Likudniks”/”neocons” that are completely indistinguishable from standard anti-Semitic propaganda about Jewish power, Jewish disloyalty and ZOG

Important clarification: CT’s comments section is rife with such conspiracy theories. The posters themselves have never, to my knowledge, explicitly endorsed any such claims, although they do allow them to be freely promoted in the comments, and occasionally clamp down hard on commenters such as myself who identify them for what they are.

Dan Simon employs a somewhat extended ad-hominem argument, the fact that some anti-Zionists are anti-Semites does not make all anti-Zionists anti-Semites.

I don’t dispute that for a moment–in fact, I’ve made it myself in the past. For example, DJW, above, offers a point of view that I obviously disagree strongly with, but that is utterly, blissfully devoid of the kind of ugly anti-Jewish conspiracy-mongering that accompanies such a distressingly large fraction of the debate on this subject around here. (Indeed, if he/she hadn’t mentioned “Israeli security” at all, and simply declared an anti-Israel policy to be in America’s national interest, the assertion by itself, while completely wrong in my view, would still have given no offense.

On the other hand, the ZOG crap being peddled by the likes of Belmont, Thomas and others…

On the other hand, everything I know about 1933-45 suggests that the plight of the Jews was brought to Western attention. Repeatedly after 1938. …. To be sure, even into 1943-44, the enormity of the Holocaust, the sheer industrial scale of the genocide (a label I don’t think is as easily applied to the catastrophes I mentioned above), was still hard to accept.

I think that was part of it. Sure, the camps where political dissidents including jews were worked to death were bad, they were as bad as the russian gulag. Ideally we would have conquered germany and russia both over that.

But it was hard to believe in the industrial-scale genocide. It was easy to think that was just disinformation, lies intended to fan the war effort. And in reality it was not the major thing — perhaps 4 million people died in the death camps, including probably more than 2.5 million jews, when the other stuff — work-to-death, rifle and grenade raids, etc — killed something like 7 to 9 million including around 3 million russian POWs.

But the information before 1945 was not obviously reliable. People had every reason to think they were being lied to about german atrocities just as they had been in WWI. The death camps were hard to believe, and the stuff that was clearly true was true of our russian allies too.

God, I think I’ve rarely heard something so offensive. I’m sure you’ll be the first in front of the guns next time your imagination leads you to the conclusion that the unimaginable is coming.

Some people believe they own the Holocaust, but it’s been shared so widely it’s public property.

I hope that Michael and I both take early action when the big threats come again. But times have changed and it’s too soon to say what could work. The germans had asked for mercy after WWI and they didn’t get it. So they decided they weren’t going to be all hypocritical, they were going to say openly that nobody liked them and the only way they could get by was to take what they wanted by brute force. And millions of jewish civilians wound up individually begging for mercy from them and they didn’t get it either. What’s particularly horrifying is the lack of hypocrisy, the germans came right out and said what they were doing.

And so after the war a lot of israelis took the wrong lesson from all that, they went out and took what they wanted too, though they kept a halfway-decent level of hypocrisy.

Very different from the british in india. Indians tolerated british rule just fine when they were clearly better than the Raj. They set up telegraph and railroad, they built textile factories that made cloth cheap, etc. The british didn’t begin to have the military force in india to suppress revolt — they depended on native troops for much of that. So when a whole lot of indians were ready for the british to go, the british were going to go. Gandhi figured out that it didn’t take violence, and his plan worked that time. It was a best-case example. Note that the british didn’t and couldn’t control communications in india. There just werent enough brits there. They could impose some censorship on some official channels, but it was mostly hopeless.

So, say that something like the Holocaust was starting in the USA. The official communications are all tightly controlled. We have things like blogs, but bloggers mostly get their news from official sources and then discuss it.

So, like, we find out we’re putting illegal immigrants in camps while they wait to be deported. Nothing special there, right? We do that.

And say we find out that death rates in the camps are higher than you’d expect. That’s old news too. Well, we aren’t putting them up at the Ritz. They shouldn’t have come here.

And say we find out that advocates for illegal immigrants are getting thrown into the camps with the IIs. Hey, it isn’t strictly legal but it’s what they deserve. I haven’t seen this in the news. Maybe it won’t happen.

And by the time rumors about what’s actually happening in the camps leak out, would maybe a lot of americans approve? We’ve had such a series of wishy-washy PC administrations that haven’t actually gotten anything done. At last a US government that means business. And as the rumors persist, there’s just that little bit of fear — if you stand out in your disapproval it could happen to you.

Would you organize a sit-down strike? Get a parade permit? Say the police decide the parade is cancelled and tell everybody to go home, and they arrest everybody who doesn’t go home, how many details would get into the news? They call your boss and tell him you couldn’t make bail. They call your family. “We understand that you didn’t know Katherine was a terrorist, or you would have turned her in. None of you are in trouble.”

And if you’re in a camp and your story never got told, what good did your sacrifice do to anybody?

The technology is different. The hypocrisy is different. The responses would have to be different too. But if nobody does anything preventive, then I guess we just have to hope nobody will choose to do the bad stuff.

Beryl 11.27.08 at 10:11 pm
can’t decide between informal or perjorative
And thank you Dr. Freud so very much.

Dan Simon 11.28.08 at 4:41 am:
…they feel perfectly comfortable expressing them here…

Keeping in mind that the strawman, the alternate me these arguments, such as they are, are leveled against, subscribes to, believes in, espouses the “conspiracy theory” that the US is being run by, has been run for some time by, a zionist-occupied-government, or “ZOG” as Dan Simon helpfully reminds us, and keeping in mind that the US is a much less free society now than it was 7 years ago, one in which people can be disappeared, can be tortured if they appear to be a threat to the government or its citizenry, and that the head of the Homeland Security Dept, a government agency with seemingly unlimited power to deny freedom to, to detain and torture anyone they want with impunity, Mr. Chertoff the Homeland Security Secretary is, it is my understanding, a Jew, as is I believe the Attorney General of the United States, Mr. Mukasey, keeping in mind that the strawman holder of those beliefs in ZOG, in Jewish conspiracy, would be expressing those antagonistic beliefs in that perceived as oppressive and dangerous context, then no, not comfortable.
You would not expect comfort to be the experience of those espousing that view and speaking against that ZOG business publicly.
But that’s the strawman me.
The real me sees Jews as as capable of perfidy and iniquity as anyone else, and equally as capable of nobility.
One need go no further than comment 88, 2nd para. closing sentence, to see Edenbaum’s filial piety rise to the level of inspiration.
In fact I thought to not say that here as it may appear to be propititating, which it is not, nor intended to be.
Also I thought to mention that my disappearance from this thread, in the midst of having leveled at me what was, and is, real calumny,
Beryl 11.27.08 at 8:52 pm:
Now that I see what was crawling underneath…
Beryl 11.28.08 at 4:00 pm
The stench from this thread is hard on my breathing…
Dan Simon 11.28.08 at 4:41 am:
…people with odious, despicable views who live in freedom and comfort and even receive completely undeserved respect and deference, but nevertheless imagine themselves to be lonely, oppressed defenders […] Thomas’ and Belmont’s supposed arguments, which consist mostly of hateful ad hominems impugning the motives of their enemies, larded with historical ignorance and ugly stereotyping…
thank you Drs. Freud, Jung, and Adler.
As I say I thought to mention that my absence from the conversation, which was due to purely practical domestic cause as my writing workstation is also the house dining table, which was, in its fashion, yesterday laden with Thanksgiving fare, set to by a merry company til late in the evening, thus occupied, and only now this afternoon returned to its mundane role, as my desk.
And I have photographic evidence to back that claim.
I thought to mention it but then thought “No, it’s no one’s nevermind why. Explanation’s too close to ass-kissing.” Then I thought “Yes, because image is important in this” then “No” then…
I won’t presume to speak for my own efforts, but there is nowhere in JThomas’ writing here the stench of the odious, only the odor of honest sweat figuratively speaking earned in service to the truth as he sees it, sincerely delivered against dishonest and unhealthy attempts to silence, not him, or me, but the truth itself, of which neither of us nor any other can claim to have the whole part, but that we both in our own way have tried to reach through conscientious application of an individual open mind to the task at hand, explicated with an open heart, J Thomas far more eloquently than I, who spend far too much effort on self-amusement in these things than I should.

And now to the bend in the actual thread, concerning Gandhi and his urging of the Jews toward self-immolation, and his chastising of them for not.
There’s a place in Korea called Nakhwaam, the Rock of Falling Flowers.
3000 women of the Paekche court threw themselves from the top of it, 500 hundred feet straight down into the Baekma River and death, rather than surrender to the invading Silla and subsequent ill use at their hands.
Romantic tragedy versus squalor and a fate worse than death.
With your shield or on it.
One thing’s sure, those women are remembered far more distinctly in Korea and have been for much longer than others who, faced with that awful circumstance, didn’t take the immediate and final path, but chose to follow the dictates of fate, and live as long as possible.
Making judgments about the judgment of people in the midst of such circumstance when far from it oneself seems bizarre and uncalled for to me, and I sure am not going to do so.
But it’s good to remember there are alternatives, to obedience, to submission, especially obedience and submission to a power that despises you for simply being what you are, and promises to abuse and degrade you, and worse.
Also there’s a triangular pink marble block set into the pavement in Amsterdam, some blocks from the Anne Frank house. It commemorates the gays who were shipped off to extinction as the Nazis attempted to purify the blood of northern Europe.
You’d think there’d be a monument somewhere to the Roma, whose numbers were reduced greatly in that same heartless campaign. Possibly there is, but I’ve never heard of one.
There’s a lot of semi-underground semi-not bigotry against gays right now still which could easily turn toxic and overt with only a little turn in the wheel. And the Roma are hurting now, right now, from racist bigotry and its attendant cruelties, in Italy and Albania and Greece and Romania, and other places where they can still be found.
How inspiring to see the official champions of Jewish suffering and victimhood open their arms to these their still suffering brothers and sisters, should it happen.
The same selflessness that informs Jewish insistence on the recognition of Palestinian suffering as first cause, and first step toward cure.
Katherine seems to see Gandhi’s solution to the Final Solution as grotesque and unthinkable, but I don’t. More like his delivery and timing were insensitive, off, and borne of an incomplete understanding.
I can’t help but think that at least some of what’s at work there is a refusal to see the call for what it is.
The “Live Free or Die”, the “Liberty or Death” call. That one, that makes lots of us uncomfortable when we hear it.

And guaranteed that if such a thing had happened – 100 thousand Jews had metaphorically thrown themselves on their swords and this averted the Holocaust (although I’m not clear on the mechanics of how this would have worked – what, it would have motivated the Allies to win the war faster somehow?), someone would be saying: “those silly Jews, why did they have to throw themselves on their swords? It was only labour camps after all. If only they’d had the imagination to realise that a few years of backbreaking work is worth it to save themselves, they’d have come out the other end alive.”

Katherine – I’m way overburdened with post-holiday cleaning to develop it at the moment, but there’s a resonant congruity or something from Rosa Luxemburg et al. naming their valiant little coterie the “Spartacus League”. Having to do with futility and overwhelming odds and going on anyway.
There’s this pervading sense now, of pragmatic survivalism being the only virture, and I heard it a lot in the early rah-rah days of the Iraq so-called war. Where soldiers were defending indefensible acts, and their defenders at home doing the same, saying they had to, or thought they had to, because their lives were threatened.
This from and in r.e. soldiers, so imagine how these same minds confront threats to their own mortalities outside the field of war.
The idea being that even the most craven acts are justified if there’s nothing else to be done but throw yourself on your sword, over the cliff, into the cauldron etc.
That that kind of self-sacrifice is unthinkable and even slightly ludicrous, idealistic and childish, ineffective.
Which has a kind of logic to it, if you think about the ones who would do that actually doing it, then ipso facto they’re not here anymore, and over time…
What are the lessons of Rosa Luxemburg’s life?
Back to the vacuum and sponge for me.

According to the military, the driver of the car ignored signals and commands to stop, so troops fired shots to disable the vehicle.
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The United States military is investigating an incident in which U.S. soldiers shot dead at least seven women and children in a car at a checkpoint in central Iraq.
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And, with its hinkiness index considerably higher:
As soon as news broke on March 4 about U.S. troops firing on reporter Giuliana Sgrena’s Baghdad airport-bound car and killing Italian intelligence officer Nicola Calipari in the process, the clash of accounts began almost immediately. The Americans put the blame squarely on the Italians for driving too fast and not heeding supposed warnings; Sgrena and the surviving Italian intelligence officials, however, said the car was going at a reasonable speed, and that no warnings were given.
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The deadly shooting of an Italian intelligence officer by U.S. troops at a checkpoint near Baghdad on Friday was one of many incidents in which civilians have been killed by mistake at checkpoints in Iraq, including local police officers, women and children, according to military records, U.S. officials and human rights groups.
U.S. soldiers have fired on the occupants of many cars approaching their positions over the past year and a half, only to discover that the people they killed were not suicide bombers or attackers but Iraqi civilians. They did so while operating under rules of engagement that the military has classified and under a legal doctrine that grants U.S. troops immunity from civil liability for misjudgment.
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Possibly Virgil, your contention is with “indefensible”, which ends up being sort of pretty much subjective. Which was the point of the original statement.
What should be morally indefensible is shifting over to the defensible by virtue of being a response to threat.
This is neither a marginal nor unique to me view. The entire so-called War on Terror comes right out of that mind-set, or rather support for it from the little people does.
And calling Abu Ghraib “singular” is perp-talk.
We know about Abu Ghraib, therefore it’s all there is to know about. Not itself a defensible position.

Let’s try this one:
Actually one group who came in for abuse in Israel after it’s founding were German Jewish survivors who were seen as passive in the face of their own destruction. The myth and cult of the Strong Jew came about, was fostered, as a result of what is seen as that failure.

I brought up Gaza because of what’s happening there. In the context of this discussion the silence is fully deserving of mockery.
delete this comment too.