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#-that fact. your country is responsible for the ongoing genocide of our people maybe just MAYBE you shouldn't be writing and consuming-

celestialmaison · 6 months

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gentle reminder because it’s almost election time in the united states: voting blue is not the end all be all solution to all american issues at home or abroad. a lot of people (including me) voted for a blue president (biden) the last time there was a presidential election and generally vote blue whenever there are “minor” elections because girl have you watched the news lately??? obviously vote blue … but hey let’s not forget that biden has

- pretty much done nothing to resolve student loan debt (or general american debt) issues

- not done anything significant regarding climate change (it’s oct. 2023 when im typing this if im wrong, correct me please)

- not made any effort to, idk, return abortion laws to all americans (“he can only do so much there’s rules” i don’t fucking care, thanks)

- pledged his support to the ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide of palestine. continues to pledge his support to israel as of october 26 2023. is on twitter showing his ass the same way trump does. directly giving a thumbs up to the murder of thousands of thousands of people. doesn’t care that he is using american tax dollars to fund child murder and has in fact doubled down on his pov since this started. doesn’t care in generally apparently i can’t believe i voted for him or believed for a second that things would get better and he would be the one to make it happen.

can we maybe get up and recognize that voting blue is not (and probably has not been for a while if ever) what we and others have prophesied it to be?????? even on this shithole (affectionate) where i generally see some of the best internet etiquette about some of the most difficult topics of our lifetimes, people are saying vote blue no elaboration. just a few weeks ago i reblogged something about voting blue. “it’s better than voting red” “it’s the lesser of two evils” “it’s the best option” are you sure about that. why are two colors as far as we can get with conversations about laws and rights and freedoms that concern the lives of millions of fucking people that we’ve never even met. do we not recall that this country was built on black and indigenous slave labor, white supremacy, and indigenous genocide forced migration and ethnic cleansing, all for some “manifest destiny” bullshit because some dumbass was looking for another land, people, and culture to colonize (asia) and found north america by accident??????????? and that this legacy continues to perpetuate american politics regardless of what a candidates political colors are????????

i don’t know how much more of this shit we need to live through before we realize dividing the country by colors (red and blue) and “perceived values” (conservative and liberal) and leaving the conversation at the classic us vs. them is. fucking. stupid. if we can’t understand now after everything biden has done and will probably continue to do that voting blue is not going to save us, i don’t know what will make us understand. i’m twenty-two, black, queer, etc. and im tired of this fucking bullshit. i don’t know how our parents lived through this. i don’t know how anyone lives through this. but us vs. them is what got us into this, and i doubt it can get us out of it.

so when you go vote, please do your research first. i think i’d rather eat rocks or get thanos snapped than vote red, but like i just said, defaulting is part of the fucking issue, so read a thing or two before you pick your person, please. and take care of yourself and your mind or else (there are no consequences i just know we can’t fight the good fight if we all go insane so pls take care out there)(get a little treat do something silly skip responsibility cuddle something take a nap etc.)

and read about how you can support palestine (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sLUKG5HwKtFZZXaPOT3venMDq9PnJ_NM5dFzAhTRt_Q/edit#heading=h.hg4tp0gpsmmu) and please do something to express your support as well. inform, act, and pass it on.

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theculturedmarxist · 4 years

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ROBERT SCHEER: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case Max Blumenthal, who I must say is one of the gutsiest journalists we have in the United States, and have had for the last five years or so. He’s, in addition to having considerable courage and [going] out on these third-rail issues — like Israel, being one of the more prominent ones — and challenging some of the major conceits of even liberal politics in the United States about our virtue, our constant virtue, he’s done just great journalism. I really loved his book, “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel,” which came out in 2013, because it was based on just good, solid journalism of interviewing people and trying to figure out what’s going on.

I’d done something a half century earlier, or not quite that long ago, during the Six-Day War in Israel, where I went over when I was the editor of Ramparts. And I know how difficult it is to deal with that issue, because I put Ramparts into bankruptcy over the controversy about it. [Laughter] So maybe that’s a good place to begin. You know, you dared touch this issue of Israel, and it didn’t help that you are Jewish. I guess you are Jewish, right? Do you have a background, did you practice any aspect of Judaism? Literature, culture, religion?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: I’m a Jew who had a bar mitzvah, and I even had a bris.

RS: Oh. [Laughs]

MB: And you know, I’ve continued to pop in in synagogues here and there on High Holy Days. I guess you could say, you know, when the rabbi asked, you know, asked me to join the army of God, I tell him I’m in the Secret Service. But I’m definitely Jewish, you know, and it’s a big part of who I am and why I do what I do.

RS: Well, and I thought your writing on that, and your journalism, was informed by that. Because after all, a very important part of the whole experience of Jewish people as victims, as people forced into refugee status, living in the diaspora, was to develop a sense of universal values, and of decency and obligation to the other. And I think your reporting reflected that. However, my goodness, you got a lot of heat over it. And it’s the heat I want to talk about. I want to talk about the difficulty, in this post-Cold War world, of actually writing about the U.S. imperial presence, or writing critically about what our government does, and some of its allies.

And I think Israel is a really good case in point, because we have one narrative that said in the last election we had foreign interference, mostly coming from Russia. And we talk about Russia as if it’s the old communist Soviet Union, with a top-down, big, organized party — forgetting that [Vladimir] Putin actually defeated the Communist Party, and even though he had been in the KGB, and most Russians had been in some kind of official connection with society or another. Nonetheless, Russia really has gotten very little out of whatever interference it did. Israel, that is very rarely talked about, interfered in the election in a very open, blatant way in the presence of Netanyahu, who denounced Barack Obama’s major foreign policy achievement, the deal with Iran, and has focused U.S. policy mostly against the enemy being Iran, and ignoring Saudi Arabia and everything else.

And the interesting thing is that Israel’s interference in the election, and Netanyahu, has been rewarded over and over — the embassy got shifted, the settlers got more validation, now there’s a big peace plan that gives the hawks in Israel everything they want. So why don’t we begin with that, and your own writing about U.S.-Israel relations. It’s kind of odd that there’s — or maybe not odd, maybe it’s just because it is the third rail — that there’s been so little discussion about Donald Trump’s relation to Israel and his payoff to Netanyahu.

MB: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot to chew on there. I would first start with just an observation, because you mentioned that we’re in a post-Cold War world — well, we’re not in a post-Cold War world anymore, we’re in a new Cold War. And for all the attacks I got over Israel, which were absolutely vicious, personalized, you know, framed through emotional blackmail, attacking my identity as a Jew, calling me a Jewish anti-Semite — the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is this right-wing racket over there in L.A., made me the No. 4 anti-Semite of 2015. You know, I was right behind Ayatollah Khomeini. But you know, the worst attacks, the most vicious attacks I’ve received have actually been from centrists and liberal elements over my criticism of the Russiagate narrative that they foisted on the American public starting in 2016, and also on the dirty war that the U.S. has been waging on Syria, and how we at the site that I edit, the Grayzone, started unpacking a lot of the deceptions and lies that were used to try to stimulate support among middle-class liberals in the west for this proxy war on Syria, for regime change in Syria. This was absolutely forbidden, and that attack actually turned out to be more vicious and is ongoing.

With Israel, you have a situation where you have, not maybe a plurality, but maybe a majority of secular Jewish Americans, progressive Jews, who have completely turned their back on the whole Zionist project. And it has a lot to do with Netanyahu. Netanyahu is someone who came out of the American — out of American life. He went to high school in suburban Philadelphia, he went to MIT, he was at Boston Consulting with Mitt Romney. His father ended his life in upstate New York as Jabotinsky’s press secretary, the press secretary for the revisionist wing of the Zionist movement that inspired the Likud party. So Netanyahu is really kind of an American figure, number one; number two, he’s a Republican figure. He’s like a card-carrying neoconservative Republican.

So a lot of Jews who’ve historically aligned themselves with the Democratic Party, who see being a Democrat as almost synonymous with being Jewish in American life, just absolutely revile Netanyahu. And here he is, basically the longest-serving prime minister in Israel; he’s completely redefined the face of Israel and what it is. And he’s provoked — I wouldn’t say provoked, but he’s accelerated the civil war in American Jewish life over Zionism. And what I did was come in at a time when it wasn’t entirely popular, to not just challenge Israel as a kind of occupying entity, but to actually challenge it at its core, to challenge the entire philosophy of Zionism, and to analyze the Israeli occupation as the byproduct of a system of apartheid which has been in place from the beginning, since 1948, which was a product of a settler colonial movement.

That really upset a lot of people who kind of reflect the same elements that I’m getting, who are attacking me on Syria or Russia. People like Eric Alterman at The Nation. He wrote 11 very personal attack pieces on me when my book “Goliath” came out in 2013. Truthdig, you, Chris Hedges, it was a great source of support. And you, you know, you opened up the debate at Truthdig, you allowed people to come in and criticize the book, but kind of in a principled, constructive way. Whereas Eric Alterman was demanding that The Nation censor me, blacklist me, ban me for life, and was comparing me to a neo-Nazi by the end, and claiming I was secretly in league with David Duke. And that was because he had simply no response to my reporting and my analysis of the kind of, the inner contradictions of Zionism.

And so to me, it was really a sign of the success of the book, that someone like Alterman was sort of dispatched, or took it upon himself to wage this really self-destructive attack. And in the end, he really had nothing to show for himself; he wasn’t arguing on the merits. And that’s just what I find time and again with my reporting is, you know, you get these personal attacks and people try to dissuade you from going and touching these third-rail issues, but ultimately there’s no substance to the attacks. I mean, if they really wanted to nail me and take me down, they would address the facts, and they really haven’t been able to do that.

RS: Right. But Max, if I can, let’s focus on the power of your analysis in that book, which is that it is a settler colonialism. And Netanyahu actually is — we can talk about the old labor Zionists, you know, and what was meant by progressive Zionism and so forth. Even at the time of the Six-Day War when I interviewed people like Moshe Dayan and Ya’alon and these people, they all were against a full occupation of the West Bank. They didn’t act on that, unfortunately. But they were aware of the dangers of a colonial model. But right now you have a figure in Israel in Netanyahu, who is, very clearly embodies a racialized view, a jingoistic view of the other, which is really, you know, very troubling. And he’s embraced by this troubling American figure.

And so what your book really predicted is that the settler colonialism was a rot at the center of the Israeli enterprise — and historically, one could justify that enterprise. I don’t know if you would agree. But even the old Soviet Union, I think, was the second, if not the first country to recognize Israel. There was vast worldwide support for some sort of refuge for the Jewish people after such horrible, you know, genocidal policies visited upon them. But what we’re really talking about now is something very different. And that is whether political leadership, and interference and so forth comes mainly for Democrats, very often; obviously, for republicans and Bible-belters and all that, who seem to like this image of the end of time coming in Israel. But really what’s happening — and it’s not discussed in this election, except to attack Bernie Sanders, who dared make some criticisms of Israel in some of these debates — you have a very weird notion of the Jewish experience, as identified with a very hardline, as you say, sort of South African settler colonialist mentality.

And so I want to ask you the question as someone–and we’ll get to it later — you grew up sort of within the Democratic liberal establishment in Washington. Your parents both worked for the Clinton administration, were close to it. How do you explain this blind eye toward Trump’s relationship to Netanyahu? And ironically, for all the Russia-bashing, Netanyahu and Putin seem to get along splendidly, you know. And that doesn’t bother people as far as criticizing Netanyahu. So why don’t we visit that a little bit, and forget about Eric Alterman for a while.

MB: [Laughs] Well, he’s already forgotten, so we don’t have much work to do there. But there’s a lot, again, a lot to chew on, a lot of questions packed into that. You know, just starting with your mention of Moshe Dayan — who is a seminal figure in the Nakba, the initial ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population in 1948 to establish Israel — he was the southern commander of the Israeli military. And he later kind of became a kind of schizophrenic figure in Israeli politics; he would sometimes offer some kind of left-wing opinions, and then be extremely militaristic. But you know, when it came down to it, Moshe Dayan — like every other member of the Israeli Labor Party — was absolutely opposed to a viable Palestinian state. He even said that we cannot have a Palestinian state because it will connect psychologically, in the minds of the Palestinian public who are citizens of Israel — that 20% of Israel who are indigenous Palestinians — it will connect them to Nablus in the West Bank, and it will provide them with a basis for rebelling against the Israeli state to expand the Palestinian state.

The other labor leaders spoke in terms of the kind of, with the racist language of the demographic time bomb that, you know, we need to give Palestinians a state, otherwise we will be overwhelmed demographically. And so the state that they were proposed was what Yitzhak Rabin, in his final address before the Israeli Knesset, the Israeli parliament, called “less than a state.” He promised Israel that at Oslo, he would deliver the Palestinians less than a state. And if you look at the actual plan that the Palestinians were handed at Oslo — which Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Authority chairman, didn’t even review before signing — the map was not that different from the map that Donald Trump has offered with the “ultimate deal.” And they’d say, oh, you get 97% of what was, you know, offered in U.N. Resolution 242 in 1967. But it really just isn’t the case when you get down to the details. What the strategy has been with the Labor Party, and with successive Israeli administrations — and with Netanyahu until he got Trump in — was to kind of kick the can down the road with the so-called peace process, so that Israel could keep putting more facts on the ground.

So it was actually Ehud Barak of the Labor Party, Yitzhak Rabin’s successor, who moved more settlers into the West Bank, by a landslide, than Netanyahu did. Ehud Barak actually campaigned on his connection to the settlers. And then Netanyahu capitalizes on the strength of the settlement movement to build this kind of Titanic rock of a right-wing coalition that’s kept him in power for so long. And if you look at who the leading figures are in Israeli life — Naftali Bennett, who was from the Jewish Home Party, he comes out of the Likud party and he’s someone who was an assistant to Netanyahu. Avigdor Lieberman, who was for a long time the leader of the Russian Party. Yisrael Beiteinu, this is someone who came out of the Likud Party, who helped Netanyahu rustle up Russian votes. It’s a Likud one-party state — but then you have, culturally, a dynamic where starting with 1967, the public just becomes more infused with religious Messianism.

The West Bank is the site of the real, emotionally potent Jewish historical sites, particularly in a city like Hebron. And the public becomes attached to it and attains its dynamism through this expansionist project, and the public changes. A lot of people from the kind of liberal labor wing became religious Messianists, started wearing kippot, wearing yarmulkes, the kind of cloth yarmulkes that the modern orthodox settlers where.

RS: OK, but —

MB: Today you not only have that, you have a new movement called the temple movement, which aims to actually replace Jewish prayer at the Western Wall with animal sacrifice, as Jews supposedly practiced thousands of years ago, and to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque, and practice Jewish prayer there. This is not just a messianic movement, but an apocalyptic movement that is actually gaining strength in the Likud party. So when you mentioned Donald Trump’s “ultimate deal,” there’s one detail that everyone seems to have missed there, which is prayer for all at the Dome of the Rock, at Al-Aqsa. That means there will be Jewish prayer there, officially, that Palestinians must be forced to accept that and destroy the status quo, which has prevailed since 1967.

RS: I know, but Max, before I lose this whole interview here — because I think that’s all really interesting; people should read your book, “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.” That’s not the focus of this discussion I want to have with you.

MB: OK.

RS: And I want to discuss, in this aspect, the whole idea of Israel as a third-rail issue for American politics.

MB: Yeah.

RS: American politics. And the reason I want to do that is there’s obviously a contradiction in the Jewish experience, because Jews — as much or more so than any other group of people in the world — understand what settler colonialism does. They understand what oppression does, they’ve been under the thumb of oppressors. And so I would argue the major part of the Jewish experience was one of revolt against oppression, and recognition of the danger of unbridled power. And that represents a very important force in liberal politics in the United States: a fear of coercive power, a desire for tolerance, and so forth. And we know that Jews have, in the United States and elsewhere in the world, been a source of concern for the other, and tolerance, and criticism of power.

And the reason I’m bringing that up is it seems to me it’s a real contradiction for the Democratic Party, which you know quite a bit about. And in this Democratic Party, there’s this great loathsome feeling about Donald Trump. And many of these people don’t really like Netanyahu. You know, the polling data shows that Jews are, you know, just about as open to the concern for the Palestinians as any other group. And Bernie Sanders, the one Jewish candidate, is the one who dared to bring up the Palestinians — that they have rights also, that they’re human beings. He’s being attacked for it as, like you, a self-hating Jew. And so I want to get at that contradiction. And, you know, full confession, as a Jewish person I believe it’s an honorable tradition of dissent, and concern for the others, and respect for individual freedom. And I think it’s sullied by the identification of the Jewish experience with a colonialist experience. It is a reality that we have to deal with, but that’s not the whole tradition. And I daresay your own family, whatever your contradiction — and I should mention here your father and mother both were quite active in the Clinton administration, right.

And your father, a well-known journalist, Sidney Blumenthal, and your mother, Jacqueline Blumenthal, was I think a White House fellow or something in the Clinton administration? I forget what her job was, but has been active. And they certainly come out of a more liberal Jewish experience, as do most well-known Jewish writers and journalists in the United States. That’s the contradiction that I don’t see being dealt with here. Because after all, it’s easy to blast Putin and his interference, but as I say, Netanyahu interfered very openly, but in a really unseemly way, in the American election by attacking a sitting American president in an appearance before the Congress, and attacking his major foreign-policy initiative. And there’s hardly a word ever said about it. It doesn’t come up in the democratic debates. You know, and the — as I say, there was this incredible moment where Netanyahu, after coming over here and praising Trump for his peace deal, as did his opponent, then he goes off and meets with Putin. And so suddenly it’s OK, and yet the Democrats who want to blast Putin don’t mention Netanyahu, and they don’t mention his relation to Trump.

MB: Well, yeah, I was trying to illustrate kind of the reality of Israel, which just, it’s gotten so extreme that it repels people who even come out of the kind of Democratic Party mainstream. And the Democratic Party was the original bastion in the U.S. for supporting Israel. So my father actually held a book party for my book, “Goliath,” back in 2013. It’s the kind of thing that, you know, a parent who had been a journalist would do for a son or daughter who’s a journalist. And he was harshly attacked when word got out that he had held that party in a neoconservative publication called the Free Beacon, which is kind of part of Netanyahu’s PR operation in D.C. You know, it was like my father had supported, provided material support for terrorism by having a book party for his son.

But the interesting part about that party was who showed up. I didn’t actually know what it was going to be like, and it was absolutely packed. I mean, they live in a pretty small townhouse in D.C, and there just was nowhere to walk, there was nowhere to move. And I found myself in the corner of their dining room shouting through the house to kind of explain what my book was about and answer questions. And a lot of the people there were people who were in or around Hillary’s State Department, people who worked for kind of Democratic Party-linked organizations — just a lot of mainstream Democrat people. And they were giving me a wink and a nod, shaking my hand, giving me a pat on the back, and saying thank you, thank God you did this. Because they cannot stand the Israel lobby, they despise Netanyahu, and they’re disgusted with what Israel’s become.

And we had reached a point by 2013 where it was pretty obvious there was not going to be a two-state solution, and that whole project, the liberal Zionist project, wasn’t going to work out. You know, and the fact that they just could give me a wink and a nod shows also how cowardly a lot of people are in Washington. They weren’t even stepping up to the level my father had, where when his emails with Hillary Clinton were exposed, it became clear that he was sending her my work. And he was actually trying to move people within the State Department toward a more, maybe you could say a more humanistic view, but also a more realistic view of Israel, Palestine and the Netanyahu operation in Washington. Working through [Sheldon] Adelson, using this fraud hack of a rabbi, Shmuley Boteach, has kind of their front man. They ran like a full-page ad in the New York Times painting me and my father as Hillary Clinton’s secret Middle East advisers.

And then one day in the middle of the campaign, Elie Wiesel died. You know, someone who is supposed to be this patron saint of Judaism and the kind of secular theology of Auschwitz, who had spent the last years of his life as part of Sheldon Adelson’s political network. Basically, he had lost all his money to Bernie Madoff, and so he was getting paid off by Adelson. He got half a million dollars from this Christian Zionist, apocalyptic, rapture-ready fanatic, Pastor John Hagee. He was going around with Ted Cruz giving talks. And so when he died, I went on Twitter and tweeted a few photos of Elie Wiesel with these extremist characters.

And I said, you know, here are photos of Elie Wiesel palling around with fascists. And the kind of Netanyahu-Adelson network activated to attack me. And ultimately it led — I actually, within a matter of a few days, it led to Hillary Clinton’s campaign officially denouncing me and demanding that I cease and desist. And so, you know, I looked at the debate on Twitter, and a lot of people were actually supporting me. And it was clear Elie Wiesel, this person who was supposed to be a saint, was actually no longer seen as stainless, that the whole debate had been opened up by 2016.

And now when we look at the Democratic Party and we look at the Democratic field, you know, Bernie Sanders — he’s better than most of the other candidates, or the other candidates, on this issue. After we put a lot of pressure on him in the left wing-grassroots — I mean, I personally protested him at a 2016 event for his position on Palestinians, and we shamed him until he took at least a slightly better position, where you acknowledge the humanity of Palestinians. But what we’re hearing, even from Bernie Sanders, doesn’t even reflect where the grassroots of the Democratic Party — particularly all those young people who are coming out and delivering him a landslide victory tonight in Iowa — are. The Democratic Party is not democratic on Israel, but it’s no longer a third-rail issue. You can talk about it, and the only way that you can be stopped is through legislation, like the legislation we see in statehouses to actually outlaw people who support the Palestinian boycott of Israel. So we’re just in an amazing time where all of the contradictions are completely out in the open.

RS: OK, let me just take a quick break so public radio stations like KCRW that make this available can stick in some advertisements for themselves, which is a good cause. And we’ll be right back with Max Blumenthal. Back with Max Blumenthal, who has written — I mean, I only mentioned one of his books. He wrote a very important book on the right wing in America that was a bestseller; he has been honored in many ways, and yet is a source of great controversy. And I must say, I respect your ability to create this controversy, because it’s controversy about issues people don’t want to deal with. You know, they want to deal with them in sort of feel-good slogans, and it doesn’t work, because people get hurt. And including Jewish people, in the case of Israel. If you develop a settler, colonialist society, and that stands for the Jewish position, and you’re oppressing large numbers of people, be they Palestinian or others, that’s hardly an advertisement for what has been really great about the Jewish experience, which I will argue until my death.

It was represented by people like my mother, who were in the Jewish socialist bund, and two of her sisters were killed by the Czar’s police in Russia. And they believed in Universalist values, an idea of being Jewish as standing for the values of the oppressed, and concern for the oppressed. And most of their experience in the shtetls, and out there in the diaspora, had been being oppressed.

And so I don’t want to lose that there. But I wanted to get now to the last part of this, to what I think is the hypocrisy of the liberal wing of American politics, or so-called. And now they call themselves more progressive. And it really kind of centers around Hillary Clinton. And whatever you want to say about Bernie Sanders — you know, Hillary Clinton’s recent attack on Bernie Sanders, that no one likes him and he stands for nothing and he gets nothing done. And I think this is a, you know, a person that I thought, you know, at one point — despite her starting out as a Goldwater girl and being quite conservative — I thought was, you know, somewhat decent.

And I’m going to make this personal now. I was brought to a more favorable view of Bill and Hillary Clinton, in considerable measure, by your father, as a journalist at the Washington Post, and then working in the administration. And I respect your father and mother, you know, and Sidney Blumenthal and Jacqueline Blumenthal, I think are intelligent people. And I once, you know, went through a White House dinner; I think I only got in because your father put me on the list, and Hillary Clinton said I was her favorite columnist in America — no, the whole world — and it was very flattering. But I look back on it now — Hillary Clinton has really represented a kind of loathsome, interventionist, aggressive, America-first politics that in some ways is even more offensive than Trump. When Trump said he’s going to make America great again, Hillary Clinton said, America’s always been great. What?

MB: Yeah.

RS: What? Slavery, segregation, killing the Native Americans — always been great? You grew up with these people, right? You were in that world. What — so yes, they can come up to you at a book party and say, yes, it’s about time somebody said that. But what are they really about? That they — you know, you mentioned Syria. You know, their great achievement, they created a mess of that society. And she’s the one who went to, said about Libya, oh, we came, we saw, and he’s dead. You know, sodomized to death. So take me into the heart of the so-called liberal experience.

MB: Well, first of all, since you invoke Sidney Blumenthal so frequently, he has a — I think his fourth book in a five-part series on Abraham Lincoln out. And you know, these books address Lincoln almost as if he were a contemporary politician. It’s a completely new contribution to the history of Lincoln, and if you invite him on, be sure —

RS: I’m familiar with it, and I’ll endorse it —

MB: If you invite him on, you can ask him, I would love to hear that debate —

RS: I certainly would, and I have — as I said, I have a lot of respect for your father and mother. I’m asking a different question. Why do good people look the other way? Or how does it work? Just, you know, to the degree you can, take me inside that Washington culture. And where there’s a certain arrogance in it, that they are always, even when they do the wrong things, they’re just always accidents. They’re always mistakes. You know, it never comes out of their ideology, their aggression. So I want to know more about that.

MB: I mean, I saw all these — so many different sides of Washington. And so — and I was always supported by my parents, no matter what view I took. So I don’t feel like I have to live in my father’s shadow or something like that. They remain really supportive of me. I have a new book out — it’s not really new, it came out last April. It’s called “The Management of Savagery,” and it deals substantially with my view of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, but particularly the Hillary State Department, the Obama foreign policy team, and the destruction they wrought in Libya and Syria. So, you know, I put everything I knew about Washington and foreign policy into that book. And so I really would recommend that as well.

But, you know, how does it work with the Clintons? They were — they set up a machine that was really a juggernaut with all this corporate money they brought in through the DLC, the Democratic Leadership Committee. It was a very different structure than we’d seen with previous Democratic candidates who built — who relied heavily on unions and, you know, the civil rights coalition. And that machine never went away. It kept growing like this — kind of like this amoeba that began to engulf the party and politics itself. So that when Bill Clinton was out of power, the machine was passed to Hillary Clinton, and the machine followed her into the Senate. And the machine grew into the Clinton Global Initiative, which was this giant influence-peddling scam that just cashed in on disasters in Haiti, brought in tons of money, tens of millions of dollars from Gulf monarchies, and big oil and the arms industry — everything that funds all the repulsive think tanks on K Street through the Clinton Foundation.

And everyone who was trying to get close to the Clinton Foundation, whether they were in Clinton’s inner circle or not, was just trying to gather influence. That’s why you saw at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, behind her, Ghislaine Maxwell, who was basically Jeffrey Epstein’s personal child sex trafficker, just trying to cultivate influence with people who have this gigantic political machine.

So that’s why so many people, I think, have stayed loyal to this odious project, and have looked the other way as entire countries were destroyed under the direct watch of Hillary Clinton. Libya today — where Hillary Clinton took personal credit for destroying this country, which was at the time before its destruction, I think the wealthiest African nation with the highest quality of life — is now in, still in civil war. We’ve seen footage of open-air slave auctions taking place, and large parts of the country for years were occupied by affiliates of Al Qaeda or ISIS, including Muammar Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte. It was immediately transformed into a haven for the Islamic State.

This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton. There would have been no Benghazi scandal if she hadn’t gone into Libya to come, see, and kill, as she bragged that she did. And in Syria, she attempted the same thing; fortunately failed, thanks to assistance from Iran and Russia. But this was, it consisted of a billion dollars, multibillion-dollar operation to arm and equip some of the most dangerous, psychotic fanatics on the face of the planet in Al Qaeda and 31 flavors of Salafi jihadi. Hillary Clinton said we can’t be negotiating with the Syrian government; the hard men with guns will solve this problem. She said that in an interview, and that’s her legacy.

Beyond that, you know, I in Washington grew up in a very complex situation. I don’t know what view people have of me, but I grew up in what was – D.C. when D.C. was known as C.C., or Chocolate City. It was a mostly black city, run by a local black power structure with a strong black middle class, and I grew up in a black neighborhood. And I kind of saw apartheid firsthand, where I saw how a small white minority actually controlled the city from behind the scenes. And then, you know, and I saw that reality, and then I went to school across town in the one white ward to a private school, and I got to know some of the children of the kind of mostly Democratic Party elite. And so I saw both sides of the city. And it was through that other side, and also my parents’ connection to the Clintons, that I — I mean, I barely interacted with the Clintons. I’ve had very minimal interaction with them ever.

But I did get to meet Chelsea Clinton once. And you know, for all my reservations about the Clintons or what they were, I thought you know, she was kind of an admirable figure at that time. She was a — she was a kid, she was an adolescent who was being mocked on “Saturday Night Live” because she was going through an awkward phase. She went to school down the street at Sidwell Friends, and I met her at a White House Christmas party; she was really friendly and personable. And you know, since then, I’ve watched her grow into adulthood and become a complete kind of replication of the monstrous political apparatus that her family has set up, without really charting her own path. She just basically inherited the reign of the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative. She does paid talks for Israel. Her husband Marc Mezvinsky, he gambled on Greece’s debt along with Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. You know, the squid fish. I mean, there’s just — I mean, as a young person, seeing someone of my generation grow up and follow that path, do nothing to carve out her own space — it just absolutely disgusts me.

And now Hillary Clinton is still there! She won’t go away! She’s not only helped fuel this Russiagate hysteria that’s plunged us into a new Cold War, but she’s trying to destroy the hopes and dreams of millions of young people who are saddled with endless debt by destroying Bernie Sanders. And it’s because she sees her own legacy being smashed to pieces, not by any right-wing, vast conspiracy, but by the electorate, the new electorate of the Democratic Party. And I absolutely welcome that. I think, you know, tonight in Iowa, a landslide Bernie victory, one of the takeaways is this will be the end of Clintonism. It’s time to move on and hand things over to a new generation. They had their chance, and they not only failed, they caused disasters across the world.

RS: So this is — we’re going to wind this up, but I think we’ve hit a really important subject. And I want to take a little bit more time on it. And I thought you expressed it quite powerfully. But the error, if you’ll permit me, is to center it on the personality, or the family. And I don’t think Clintonism is going to go away. Because what it represents — and I know you —

MB: It could be become Bloombergism, you know?

RS: Well, that’s where I’m going. I think what Clintonism represents is this triangulation, this new Democrat. And I interviewed him when he was governor, just when he was campaigning. And I did a lot of writing on the Financial Services Modernization Act and on welfare reform, and all of these ingredients of this policy. And what it really represents — no wonder they’re rewarded by the super wealthy. But the Democratic Party lost its organizational base with the destruction of the labor movement and weakening of other sources of progressive class-based politics, concern about working people and ordinary people.

And what Clinton did is he came along, and he had a sort of variation of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, how he got the Republicans to be so important in the South. And it was this new politics, this redefinition. And it’s not going away, because it’s the cover for Wall Street. It’s the cover for exploitation. And the main thing that happened from when you were young — or born, actually; you’re 42 years — it’s 42 years of, since Clinton really, and you can blame Reagan, you can blame the first President Bush, you can blame other people, and certainly blame the whole bloody Republican Party. I’m not going to give them a pass.

But the fact is, what the Clinton revolution did was it made class warfare for the rich fashionable, in a way that no one else was able to do it, no other movement. And it said these thieves on Wall Street, these people who are going to rip you off 20 different ways to Sunday — they’re good people, and they support good causes. And you mentioned Lloyd Blankfein, you know; “government” Goldman Sachs, you know. Robert Rubin came from Goldman Sachs; he was Clinton’s treasury secretary. And the whole thing of unleashing Wall Street and getting, destroying the New Deal — that was a serious program to basically betray the average American and betray their interest. And that’s why we’ve had this growing income inequality since that time. That’s the Clinton legacy in this world, really, is the billionaire coup, the billionaire culture.

MB: Yep, the oligarchy was put on fast-forward by the new politics of the Clintons. What they promised wasn’t, you know, a break from Reaganism, although there was certainly a cultural difference. They promised continuity, and that’s what we saw through the Obama administration. Obama presided over the biggest decline in black home ownership in the United States since, I think, prior to World War II. You mentioned Glass-Steagall; this set the stage for the financial crisis; NAFTA, destroyed the unions, shipped American jobs first to Mexico and then to China, and destabilized northern Mexico along with the drug war that Clinton put on overdrive, creating the immigration crisis that helped fuel the rise of Donald Trump.

Welfare reform — all of these policies were just, were odious to me and so many people at the time, but there was just this desire to just beat the Republicans and out-triangulate them. Now that we’ve seen the effects on them and so many people have felt the effects, you have an entire generation that sees no future, that realizes they’re living in an oligarchy, realizes that the alternative to Bernie Sanders is a literal oligarch, this miniature Scrooge McDuck in Mike Bloomberg, and they’re just not having it.

I don’t know if Hillary Clinton understands this history; I don’t think she sees it in context. She just blames Russian boogeyman and fake news for everything. But the rest of us who’ve lived through it really do, and it’s the continuity that is so dangerous, especially on foreign policy. I mean, the Libya proxy war and the Syria proxy war, the stage was set in Yugoslavia with NATO’s war that destroyed a socialist country and unleashed hell on a large part of its population. And we still don’t debate that war. The stage for the Iraq invasion was set in 1998 with Bill Clinton passing the Iraqi Liberation Act, which sent $90 million into the pocket of the con-man Ahmed Chalabi and made regime change the official policy of the United States.

It’s tragic that Bernie Sanders voted for that. But we have to see the cause and the effect to understand why so many people are in open revolt against that legacy. And you’re right, it goes well beyond the Clintons. It’s a program that markets right-wing economics and a right-wing foreign policy in a sort of progressive bottle. Now what they’re trying to do with the label on that progressive bottle, the way they’re trying to preserve it — we see it a lot through the [Elizabeth] Warren campaign — is through a kind of neoliberal identity politics that divorces class from race and gender, and attempts to basically distract people with needless arguments about Bernie Sanders saying a woman couldn’t have gotten elected in a private conversation that only Elizabeth Warren was party to.

So I’m really encouraged, I guess, by the results that we’re seeing. We’re talking tonight on the eve of the Iowa caucus. I’m encouraged by those results, just because I see them as a repudiation of the politics that have just dominated my life as a 42-year-old, and just been so absolutely cynical and destructive at their core. But I would just remind anyone who is supporting Bernie Sanders and listening to this — he’s not just running for president. He’s running for the next target of a deep state coup, and the deep state exists, and will respond with more force and viciousness than it did to Donald Trump, who actually has much more in common with them than Bernie Sanders.

RS: I didn’t quite get the grammar of that last paragraph, not any fault of yours. You said he’s not just running — can you —

MB: He’s running for the next target of a deep state coup, the forces of Wall Street. You know, the —

RS: Oh, you mean he will be the target.

MB: He will be the target.

RS: Yeah, you know, it’s — you just said something really — OK, I know we have to wrap this up, but it’s actually just getting interesting for me. [Laughs]

MB: Sorry about that.

RS: No, no, no, come on, come on. [Laughter] What I mean is, I do these things because I learn, and I think, and you know, my selfish interests. And really the question right now, I did a wonderful interview with Chomsky on this podcast, and he took me to school for not appreciating the importance of the lesser evil. And I’ve lost sleep over it since. You know, well — and we always fall for that, you know. On the other hand, some of the things you’ve been talking about, you know — and this is going to get me in big trouble — but you know, Trump is so blatant. He’s so out there in favor of greed and corruption.

He’s so obnoxious. And actually, in terms of his policy impact — not his rhetoric, but his policy impact — is he really that much worse? Well, for instance, you mentioned NAFTA. The rewrite of NAFTA, even before, you know, some progressives got involved in it, it was a substantially better trade agreement than the first NAFTA. You know, he hasn’t gotten us into Syria-type, Iraq-type wars.

He actually — so I’m not — you know, yes, I consider him a neofascist; rhetoric can be very dangerous. He’s obviously spread very evil, poisonous ideas about immigrants and what have you, you know, I can go down the list. But the people that you’ve been talking about, that–you know, and I voted for all of them, and I’ve supported them — are they really the lesser evil? You know, or are they a more effective form of evil?

MB: I mean, to understand Trump, we just have to see him as the apotheosis of an oligarchy. In its most unsheathed, unvarnished form, he’s just lifted the mask off the corruption, the legal corruption that’s prevailed, and been completely unabashed about it. Donald Trump was targeted with this kind of Russiagate campaign, which was partly run by Clintonite dead-enders who wanted to blame Russia for her loss, and to attack Donald Trump with this kind of McCarthyite rhetoric. But it was also being influenced by the intelligence services — figures like John Brennan and James Comey, and neoconservative hardliners who could easily jump back into the Democratic Party. And they were just seeking a new Cold War, to justify the budgets of the intelligence services, and the defense budget and so on.

But at his core, Donald Trump, what he’s actually done, especially domestically, I think outside of the immigration stuff, is he’s been kind of a traditional Republican. And he won a lot of consent from Republicans in Congress when he passed a trillion-dollar tax cut. He’s given corporate America everything he wanted after kind of campaigning with this populist, Bannonite tone. So in a lot of ways, Donald Trump does share more in common with the Democratic Party elite — with a lot of the figures who’ve been nominated to serve on the DNC platform committee, who are just from the Beltway blob and the Beltway bandits — than they do with Bernie Sanders.

And I think that if Bernie Sanders gets the nomination, there will be an effort to McGovern him. To just kind of turn him — turn this whole process into McGovern ’72, hope that Bernie Sanders gets destroyed by Donald Trump, and then wag their fingers at the left for the next 20 years until they get another Bill Clinton. I think that they don’t know how to stop him at this point, but they’re willing to let him be the nominee and go down to Donald Trump, because Bernie Sanders threatens their interests, and the movement behind him particularly, more than Donald Trump does.

RS: You know, they will stop Bernie Sanders, and they will do it by the argument of lesser evilism. And you see the line developing —

MB: But who is the lesser evil, Bob? I mean, Joe Biden is like this doddering wreck. There is no other candidate who seems even remotely viable against Trump.

RS: No, no, no — I understand that. I’m telling you what — well, it seems to me there’s — you know, you want to talk about fake news, the, misreporting of Bernie Sanders — in fact, the misreporting of what democratic socialism is. I mean, he’s now branded in the mainstream media as some hopeless fanatic because he dared to defend democratic socialism. Democratic socialism has been the norm for the most successful economies in the world, even to a degree when we’ve been successful. That was the legacy of Roosevelt, after all, is to try to save capitalism from itself. That’s why you had some enlightened government programs, you know, right down the list, and that’s what saved Germany after the war, and that’s what France and England and so forth, that’s why they have health care systems.

But the mainstream media has actually taken a very moderate figure, Bernie Sanders, and demonized him as some kind of hopeless ideologue, right? And as you point out, Bernie Sanders is hardly a radical thinker on issues — particularly, as you mentioned, about the Mideast and so forth. What he is, is somebody who actually is honoring the best side of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: you can’t let these greed merchants control everything, you have to worry about some compensation for ordinary people. That’s what Bernie Sanders is all about. And it should be an argument that has great appeal to people of power, otherwise they’re going to come after you with the pitchforks. Instead the mainstream media, in its hysteria, you know, has taken this word “democratic socialist” and used it to vilify him.

But the point that I want — and we will end on this, but I’d like to get your reaction — that came up in my discussion with Chomsky, who I have great admiration for. But it is this lesser evilism. And I think while, yes, people in their vote can think about that, they can vote that way — I’ve done it much of my life; I’ve voted for all sorts of evil people because they were lesser. But as a journalist — and I want to end about your journalism — as a journalist, I think we have to get that idea out of our head. And it means being able to be objective about a Donald Trump when he comes up with his NAFTA rewrite, and say hey, there are some good things in it, including the fact that you have to pay $16 an hour to people in Mexico who are working on cars that are going to be sold in the United States, OK. And what the liberal community has been able to do in the mainstream media, MSNBC, is Trumpwash everything.

Which brings us back to your critique. They’ve been able to say — they’ve made warmongering liberal and fashionable. They’ve taken the — they’ve made the CIA now a wonderful institution, the FBI a wonderful institution, [John] Bolton a wonderful hero. And I want to take my hat off to your journalism, because you have — and I do recommend that people go to your website, the Grayzone. Because you have had the courage to say, wait a minute, what’s called a lesser evil can’t be given a pass. Because in fact, maybe in some ways, or in many ways, it’s a more effective evil. We know what Trump is; he stands exposed every hour of every day.

But you know, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton — and I’m not trying to pick on them, but you know, they represented this embrace of the Wall Street center — they were much more effective in redistributing income to the rich. You know, you can talk about Trump’s tax break, but the real redistribution came with letting Wall Street do its collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps that caused the destruction of 70% of black wealth in America, 60% of brown wealth in America, according to the Federal Reserve. So really, in this election, people have to think — you know, yes, I’ll hold my nose and I’ll vote for the lesser evil. But what’s that going to get us? Does it get us a more effective evil, a better-packaged evil? Last word from you?

MB: Well, I mean, one of the things that we do at the Grayzone.com, our mission is to oppose this policy of regime change that the U.S. imposes across the world against any state that seeks some independence from the U.S. sphere of influence that wants to craft its own economic policies in a socialist way, like Venezuela, Nicaragua. We, you know, we exposed a lot of the deceptions that were trying to stimulate public support for regime change in Syria, that would have been absolutely disastrous. And in all of these situations, we don’t stand alone, but we stand among a really, really small group of alternative outlets who don’t play the lesser-evil game on regime change.

Where we say, well, this leader or that leader are horrible, and they are evil dictators, but we should also be kind of suspicious of the, you know, of the war that the U.S. might wage. Or we should be critical of these brutal economic sanctions that have killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans through excess deaths. We say — we actually look at the alternative to the current government and show that there actually isn’t the lesser evil, that the alternative is far worse. In Syria it was Al Qaeda and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood; in Venezuela it’s Juan Guaidó’s right-wing, white collar mafia, which is a front for Exxon Mobil. Same thing in Nicaragua.

And you know, as much as I respect and I’ve learned from Noam Chomsky, he plays that lesser-evil game on regime change. He’s trashed all of the, all of these governments. He celebrated the collapse of the Soviet Union, and we saw what happened to Russia after that. So it’s important to look at lesser evilism through a historical context, and then we can apply it to the United States as well. Look at who’s been sold to us as the lesser evil that we had to support. Well, we’ve been talking about them, Bob, for the last half hour, and they’ve subjected Americans to the same evil the Republican Party has, for the most part. Maybe they’ve limited it to some degree. But now there’s actually an option for something that I’d say is moderate in the United States.

You’re right — Bernie Sanders does nothing, and proposes nothing, outside the framework of the New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. I don’t even think he’s a democratic socialist. I don’t know what that term really means. He’s a social democrat. And he is someone who at least offers a change from the consensus where the government actually starts to intervene to prevent people from dying excess deaths across the country, from the opioid crisis, from poverty, from homelessness. Eighty percent of new homes that have been built in the U.S. in the past two years are luxury housing. And you know who else is supporting Bernie Sanders besides all these debt-saddled youth? Active duty U.S. military veterans who are sick of permanent war. $160,000 in campaign contributions have been given to Bernie by active duty vets. That’s something like eight times more than have gone to Joe Biden, who is involved at the forefront of almost every American war since Gulf War I.

And we’re really capitalizing on that at the Grayzone. We understand the American public and the western public are sick of being lied into war, and they’re sick of being pushed into lesser evilism, whether it’s abroad in countries that are targeted by the U.S., or at home. And so we’re just there providing balance and exposing whatever the lie is of the day.

RS: Let me, as an older person, end with a little editorial about what — and I agree with the thrust of what you’ve been saying — but why I think this word “democratic socialism” is important, not just social democrat. Because it acknowledges the vast harm that has been done by the left in human history. It’s not just the right, it’s not just the corporate elite, and it’s not just the oligarchs. That people got hold of a message of concern for the ordinary person. It happened in religion too, after all, you know; structures were developed, people who claimed they were following the message of Christ, and they ended up building edifices to the exploitation of ordinary people.

I think what Bernie Sanders represents — and I’ll ask your response, but what I think he represents, the reason he’s so authentic — he actually believes in the grassroots. He actually believes that an ordinary person in Vermont can make intelligent decisions about the human condition, and about justice and freedom. And I think the reason Bernie Sanders can survive the rhetorical assaults on his leftism or his socialism, is that what people of power in the capitalist world have managed to do is identify this cause of social justice, a notion of democratic socialism with totalitarianism, with elitism. And Bernie Sanders — and this is a good night to celebrate Bernie Sanders, if it’s true; I hadn’t caught up with the news, but if he’s really doing that well in Iowa. Because I thought he would get 1% of the vote four years ago when he started; I never thought this would happen.

I think what makes Bernie Sanders authentic is his respect for the ordinary person. He is the opposite of that leftist elitist–and you have them as well as rightist elitists — who thinks they have to distort history to protect the average person from reality. And Bernie Sanders is — he speaks truth about what’s going on. And at a time when people on the right and the left have nothing but contempt for most of the politicians, and journalistic leaders and everything else, for having betrayed them. So I think Bernie Sanders is a ray of hope. I wish he would be around a lot longer, but then again, I wish I’d be around a lot longer. But it’s nice to run into Max Blumenthal, who’s half my age and has all of that spirit that I’d like to see in journalism. So thanks, Max, for doing this.

MB: Thank you, Bob. It’s a real honor.

RS: And by the way, I ignored that last book of yours. Could you give the title again and how people get it?

MB: It’s called “The Management of Savagery.” And let me pull it off the shelf so I can actually read the subheader. You can edit this. It’s called “The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump.” And it’s really kind of my look at the, sort of how the politics of my lifetime and my generation has been shaped by foreign policy disasters that an unelected foreign-policy establishment has subjected us to.

RS: Full disclosure, I actually have not read it, and I will get it as soon as I can.

MB: I’ll send you a copy —

RS: No, no, no, you got — it’s hard enough to make a living as a writer. I don’t think you should give these things away for nothing. I’ll get myself a copy. And I want to thank you again. I’ve been talking to Max Blumenthal, check out his work, check out the Grayzone. These podcasts are done basically for KCRW, the public radio station in Santa Monica, where Christopher Ho is the engineer who gets it up on the air.

At Truthdig, Natasha Hakimi Zapata writes the brilliant intros and overview of these things and posts them up there. Here at USC, Sebastian Grubaugh, the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, really gets the whole thing going and hooks up everyone, thanks to him. And finally, there’d be no “Scheer Intelligence” without the main Scheer, Joshua Scheer, who’s the show’s producer. And we’ll see you next week with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence.”

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vladtheunfollower · 5 years

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Barbecues, fireworks, lots of beer and red and white all over the city. That’s what I see on Canada Day. Even when I’m not looking, I can hear the “Oh, Canada” chants from a kilometre away. But what are you really celebrating? Reflect on that for a minute. Patriotism? Pride? Freedom? Or maybe you just like a good party. I, however, cannot find a reason to celebrate alongside you. In my opinion Canada Day is a hypocritical joke and no reason for fireworks, given its dark and fragmented history. I choose to not celebrate because of its colonial history and the untold human suffering it revels in. As an indigenous woman, I see Canada through a cracked, bloody lens, not through the rose coloured maple leaf-shaped glasses this country provides. I know there are indigenous and non-indigenous allies that share this sentiment, so I know I’m not alone. Every day, we are forced to live with the continued theft of our land and resources—the broken treaties, the staggering number of missing and murdered sisters, the genocide of our peoples and the refusal to recognize our place in this nation. But on Canada Day, it hurts me to see people celebrating this country so blindly and forgetting the atrocities and lifetime of oppression that they’re praising. We know this country was founded on corruption, lies and the dispossession of my ancestors, but still today it is not easy growing up indigenous. Why would I celebrate a country that is OK with the fact that I am three times more likely to go missing than a non-indigenous woman? Or that I am five times more likely to die a violent death? We live in a country that believes that proper housing, water, food and schooling are a privilege for a few and not a RIGHT for ALL. In a country where one in three people aren’t aware of the attempts made to exterminate our identity through the Indian Residential School system, where the political design was to assimilate us (along with the ongoing trauma and legacy it has left). If what I’ve written comes off as a false representation of Canada Day, then I ask you to take a look at your way of life, your access to opportunities and your privilege. If you have benefitted from colonialism in one way or another, than those responsibilities are yours to own. (To new citizens:, I encourage you to immerse yourself in learning about the history of this country and its indigenous peoples) Ideally, for me, Canada Day would encompass everything it pretends to be: freedom, sharing, unity, prosperity and a healthy nation-to-nation relationship. But the relationship between Canada and its indigenous peoples today remains broken with an urgent need to be repaired. Still, if you must celebrate Canada Day, make it a day to commemorate the lives lost as a result of this colonial system. Make it a point to learn about our history and its continued effects. But don’t be proud of it. Reflect on what this day means to the indigenous people on the land you are living on that has given you so much. Lastly, don’t forget to ask yourself, “How am I contributing to the nation-to-nation relationship?” and how we can work together to remedy the colonial legacy of this country so that one day it can be a place worth celebrating for us all.

Killa Atencio is an indigenous activist, entrepreneur and writing living in K’jipuktuk, originally from Listuguj First Nation in Quebec. Visit her online at moonlightworks.ca

#canada #canada day

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armeniaitn · 3 years

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World War III is on its way in the form of hybrid warfare – Armenian PM

New Post has been published on https://armenia.in-the.news/politics/world-war-iii-is-on-its-way-in-the-form-of-hybrid-warfare-armenian-pm-64739-07-11-2020/

World War III is on its way in the form of hybrid warfare – Armenian PM

World War III is on its way in the form of hybrid warfare that is spreading in all directions, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said in an interview with German ARD TV.

He said “this war is equally directed against Christians, against Muslims, against Jews.”

The full text of the interview is provided below:

Question: I would like to start from 2018, when the tide of democratic protest resulted in a peaceful change of government in Armenia. Did you think that a war would break out two years later?

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan – In fact, as I was still a member of parliament, I do not remember whether it was in 2015, 2016, or maybe in 2017, I predicted that the war was inevitable. Why, because war has always been Azerbaijan’s goal. And why was the war sought by Azerbaijan, because it was not prepared for finding a compromise-based solution to the Karabakh issue. Because compromise means you have to step back from your maximalist objectives.

Azerbaijan’s not being ready to compromise was vividly evidenced in 2011. I mean the Kazan process, when in fact a document was tabled by which the Armenian side agreed to hand over 5 regions in exchange for Nagorno-Karabakh receiving an interim status, which might be determined later through a referendum or a plebiscite.

And this was a significant concession from the Armenian side, because it contained some uncertainty for the security of the Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh. But the Armenian side took that step, the document had already been negotiated, and it was ready for signing, but at the last moment Azerbaijan refused to sign the document.

And this is not just a separate episode, but a methodology, a modus operandi for Azerbaijan, because what appears to be acceptable for Armenia and Karabakh following the logic of compromise turns out to be unacceptable for Azerbaijan, which toughens its position. This has always been the case with Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan has always been prepared to resolve the Karabakh issue through military means.

A provocation took place on the Armenia-Azerbaijan border in July, 2020, which led Azerbaijan to realize that its armed forces were incapable of resolving the Karabakh issue, and consequently it had to turn to mercenaries and terrorists for assistance.

And what happened next? In August, mercenaries, terrorists, a large number of Turkish military equipment, specialists and soldiers moved from the Syrian territories under Turkish control to Azerbaijan, where they launched a joint offensive on Nagorno-Karabakh.

Question: What did you mean by saying “Karabakh is Armenia” during a visit to Nagorno-Karabakh as it was seen as a provocation by Azerbaijan?

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan – You see, it has to do with the background of the Karabakh issue. Unfortunately, at some point the international community lost track of the Karabakh issue. Meanwhile, at the time when the Karabakh issue emerged, it was seen as a manifestation of Soviet Union’s democratization in Europe and around the world, which ultimately lead to the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

The Karabakh issue arose in 1988, when Gorbachev undertook to rebuild and democratize the Soviet Union. And the Armenians of Karabakh, who have always been more than 80% of the population in Nagorno-Karabakh, decided to benefit from the opportunity provided by the ongoing democratization process to restore their violated rights through a completely peaceful political struggle.

What rights do I mean? In the 1920s, with an 80 percent of Armenian population, Nagorno-Karabakh was handed over to Soviet Azerbaijan instead of Soviet Armenia. In 1988, the Supreme Council of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region decided to reunite with Soviet Armenia, which was its legitimate right. A similar decision was adopted by the Supreme Council of Armenia. The Soviet Union and Azerbaijan responded with violence to these absolutely peaceful political decisions, first by organizing massacres of Armenians in Sumgait and then in Baku.

Now about whether Nagorno-Karabakh is Armenia. Armenia means a country where Armenians live, a country of Armenians. Those who have ever been to Nagorno-Karabakh have seen Armenian churches dating back to the 5th century and later. The first Armenian school was opened in Nagorno-Karabakh; 80% of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh has always been Armenian. You say “provocation…,” but the point is that Azerbaijan has always considered a “provocation” the fact there are Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh, which made it resort to aggressive actions, shell civilian settlements. In fact, they are fighting against that “provocation.”

In general, let me tell you that the existence of Armenians itself is considered a “provocation” by some countries, including Turkey where – in the Ottoman Empire – the Armenian Genocide was perpetrated in 1915 and vast areas were evicted of Armenians through genocide.

My assessment is that Turkey has returned to the South Caucasus 100 years later to complete that criminal plan. I do not consider it a manifestation of anti-Armenian sentiments; it is just the continuation of Turkey’s expansionary, imperialistic policy, because the Armenians in the South Caucasus are the last obstacle on their way to expanding towards the north, to the east, and to the south-east.

I see this in the context of the policy that Turkey is pursuing in the Mediterranean, in Syria, Iraq, Greece and Cyprus, as well as in the context of those Turkey-backed acts of terrorism we can today witness in Europe.

Question: When you stood in opposition some years ago you were against Armenia’s membership in the Eurasian Union and you were ready to protest against it. After becoming Prime Minister you started working closely with Moscow. After all, are you pro-European or pro-Russian?

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan – Yes, I voted against Armenia’s accession to the Eurasian Economic Union, but first there was an episode in my parliamentary activity when I also voted against the process of Armenia’s withdrawal from the Eurasian Economic Union. And assuming the post of Prime Minister, I decided with our people that there will be no geopolitical upheavals after the revolution.

In fact, it was a collective decision. Let me state that U-turns in foreign policy can often be very dangerous. And yes, today we are a member of the Eurasian Economic Union; last year Armenia was the presiding nation, and I personally chaired the Eurasian Economic Union, the presidency of the Eurasian Economic Union was quite effective, because we signed a number of new agreements. But we are cooperating with the European Union as well, since our democratic agenda has not changed at all.

Question: You are in regular contact with Putin. What specific support do you expect from Russia?

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan – We are actually getting the assistance we expected from Russia; we do not have any reservations as to Russia’s compliance with its security-related commitments to Armenia.

But on the other hand, we understand that Russia is first of all an OSCE Minsk Group co-chairing nation, and therefore is supposed to maintain a neutral position on the Nagorno Karabakh issue. Russia has good relations with Azerbaijan. Of course, this is not a simple situation, but we are satisfied with the quality of Russia’s fulfillment of its obligations to Armenia.

Question: What about Russian peacekeepers in Kharabakh?

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan – This is a key issue. I said that the deployment of Russian peacekeepers is acceptable for us. The issue here is not so much political, but practical, because we should bear in mind that Russia is closer to and present in our region. I mean that peacekeeping implies operative response.

Russia is present in the region, Russia knows the region, I can even talk about language-related communication bottlenecks assuming that with peacekeepers coming from other countries there would be communication-related problems, problems arising from the nuances of knowing the region and mentality. We do believe that Russian peacekeepers will be the most effective in this regard.

Question: Azerbaijan suggests deploying Turkish peacekeepers.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan – I have already said that Turkey is a country that brings terrorists and mercenaries into the region; it is difficult to conceive that it can promote any peaceful or peacekeeping process in the region.

Question: How do you explain the shelling of Ganja and other cities, as well as the use of cluster bombs against peaceful settlements in Azerbaijan?

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan – First of all, I wish to highlight the fact that when there is any minor explosion in an Azerbaijani town, the Government of Azerbaijan takes the locally accredited ambassadors and journalists to the scene and shows them the aftermath. But no diplomatic representative has ever been to Stepanakert, Martakert, Martuni, or Askeran. Note that I am talking about the cities and not about villages in Karabakh.

International journalists had a hard time visiting there, but today those cities are actually half-ruined. As for the Azerbaijani cities, I would like to state that first of all the continued shelling and bombing of cities in Nagorno-Karabakh has not received any international response. In other words, no one even tried to stop it, while the Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army, having legitimate military targets in some settlements or neighborhoods, launched retaliatory strikes.

Question: What would you say about the civilians killed in Azerbaijan, the cluster bombs used over there as evidenced by the human rights watch in Barda?

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan – Let us see whether those killed in Stepanakert were civilians or not. In other words, we just need an explanation as to why civilians are perishing in general. If you were satisfied with what I said about civilians being killed in Stepanakert, Martakert, Martuni, then the same can be said in answering your question, as it does not matter at all where civilians are being killed. If the explanation regarding Stepanakert satisfies you, then it should suffice to have a formula for civilian casualties suffered in any city around the world. Please note that I am not satisfied with such interpretation.

Question: But … it was immediately announced on both sides that civilians were being killed.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan – I have no objections to that? Nobody argues with that, at least in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia. But let us look at the statistics; let us look at the chronology.

Question: Last time when you met with Mr. Aliyev was in Munich during the Security Conference in February. What are your conditions for holding substantive talks with Azerbaijan?

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan – It is normal to talk about negotiations during the war, but it is not realistic. In fact, the terms of the talks were discussed and agreed upon in the October 10 statement adopted in Moscow, which was later reaffirmed.

The Moscow statement was adopted through the mediation of the Russian President. Then, with the mediation of the presidents of France and the United States, it was reaffirmed, and in fact, mutually agreed.

I mean, if there are agreed points, what is the point of setting conditions for each other, because in the end it was accepted jointly? In other words, there is no need to set other conditions. The conditions are set therein and we consider those conditions acceptable.

Question: Do you think that the OSCE Minsk group is the right format to find a solution?

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan – Yes, of course. We think that this is the only format where this issue can be discussed and decided. This does not mean at all that the international community should not support the Minsk Group co-chairs’ efforts. The international community should support the Minsk Group, which is currently the only internationally accepted framework.

Question: Do you wish to have more involvement on the part of the European Union? For instance, bringing in peacekeepers from the EU?

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan – I have already answered the question about peacekeepers, because we must also take into account the positions of other countries in the region. We need to make sure that peacekeepers actually bring stability to the region, instead of instability and upheavals.

I think Russian peacekeepers are the most suitable and the right players in this process. As for the European Union, I have repeatedly noticed in my interviews that the European Union, yes, can support the process by clearly stating who initiated the war; who brought mercenaries into the region.

By the way, we already have two mercenaries captured by the Karabakh Defense Army; they comprehensively described the foregoing developments in their testimonies. This is a very important detail.

For example, one of the mercenaries has a fourth-grade education, the other mercenary is not literate at all; that is, he can neither read nor write. These people were brought in from Syrian territories under Turkish control. This fact alone points to breaches of educational censorship, since people who do not even know the alphabet have been fed up with unholy values, inspired that there are enemies living here…

At the same time, we all want to make it clear that Turkey has recruited these people in the regions under its control in Syria, moved them to Turkey and then to Azerbaijan, after which it transported them to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone for a monthly pay of 2,000 U.S. dollars. There is a USD 100 reward set for those who would behead the “unfaithful.”

Do you not see any resemblance to other events taking place elsewhere? This is why I believe that World War III is on its way in the form of hybrid warfare that is spreading in all directions. This war is equally directed against Christians, against Muslims, against Jews.

I want to explain why I feel that it is directed against Muslims as well, firstly because the wrong image of Muslims is being shaped all over the world. Secondly, illiterate and, let me say, narrow-minded people are being used for specific political objectives, and we just know who does it.

We see the same phenomenon in Nagorno-Karabakh, we see the manifestation of the same phenomenon in Vienna, Canada, France, and we see it in Russia with slightly different manifestations. Over the past one month, we have seen several reports of terrorist groups operating in the North Caucasus that have been effectively destroyed by Russia’s law enforcement agencies.

By the way, this proves that this war is equally directed against the Muslims as we see quite a valuable reaction coming from Arab countries, we can see a valuable reaction coming from the Islamic Republic of Iran, because the presence of such individuals in our region is considered as a threat to national security by the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as by many Arab countries.

Question: How do you see Iran’s role in helping to end this war?

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan – You know that Iran is our neighbor and is naturally worried about the regional developments. I noticed above that our position is that the OSCE Minsk Group is the format in which the Karabakh issue should be discussed, but this does not mean that the international community should not support the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs.

Question: And my last question: your government promised democratic reforms and a fight against corruption. Do you think it is still possible?

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan – There is increasingly greater demand for reforms and anticorruption efforts. You may wonder whether I am satisfied with the results we have achieved in the fight against corruption? No, I am not satisfied, but I know why we have not been effective enough, because, in fact, the systems and mechanisms that have been entrenched in the corrupt reality for more than 20 years were conceived to safeguard corruption.

We have witnessed during all this time that the structures that exist prevent us from fighting corruption effectively and achieve a satisfactory level of return of embezzled funds. But all the same, we decided that we should not deviate from the law, we would go the way of improving institutions, legislation, which will obviously prolong the process.

I think the fight against corruption has taken shape and matured in the Armenian society, since people see that many issues have not been addressed for years due to corruption.

Armenia has no alternative, yes we must fight corruption, we must build democracy, but today the number one issue on our agenda is the ongoing aggression against Nagorno-Karabakh, which of course has a national security component, but as I said there is also an international security component, because Russia, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Arab countries, the European Union and the United States see a security threat in it.

The aforementioned countries have many differences in their mutual relations, but at least in the current situation, the involvement of Turkey-backed mercenaries and terrorists is equally deplored by everyone. This is a matter of international security. Of course, we are doing everything possible to ensure that democracy is not impaired, but I do not think martial law is the best environment for democracy. Therefore, we must do everything to get out of the state of martial law as son as possible and return to normal life. Unfortunately, it does not depend solely on our efforts, but at least we will do our best for it.

Read original article here.

#Armenia #Armenians #Caucasus #Karabakh #Politics

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crookedmediatranscripts · 7 years

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Pod Save the World

2017.09.20

Crisis in Burma

“Tommy talks with New York Times columnist Nick Kristof and Nexus Fund Executive Director Sally Smith about the ongoing ethnic cleansing happening right now in Burma.”

[MUSIC]

0:00:01

Tommy Vietor: Pod Save the World is brought to you by The Great Courses Plus.

Jon Lovett: The Great Courses Plus. You know, Tommy, we made a joke about The Great Courses when we were talking about the fact that Donald Trump is basically in school at UNGA learning about foreign policy.

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[Laughter]

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JL: Life lesson.

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0:01:31

[MUSIC]

0:01:33

TV: Welcome back to Pod Save the World. Today’s episode is about the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar. Some people call it Burma, the names are gonna be used interchangeably throughout the interview. The Rohingya are a Muslim minority group that practices Islam in the Rakhine State, which is one of Myanmar’s poorer states. They have their own languages, they have their own cultural practices, and unfortunately are the victims of some of the worst discrimination you can imagine. This discrimination comes in a number of ways. The Rohingya are attacked and oppressed by the Buddhist majority for being Muslim, based on their religion. They’re also being falsely accused of not being from Myanmar. It is a truly vicious version of the familiar nationalism that’s turned deadly in so many different countries. Samantha Power, who was Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations and wrote a Pulitzer prize winning book about mass atrocities and genocide, told me that this was a degree of prejudice that she had rarely seen in all of her travels. In recent weeks, this situation has exploded. And to be honest, I didn’t have any idea how bad it had gotten until I started researching for this episode. My experience working on Myanmar had been very different. I visited the country with President Obama back in 2012. He was the first sitting U.S. President ever to visit the country. I was there when he met with Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who was considered by many to be the Nelson Mandela of Myanmar. We were at her lakeside villa where she had been kept under house arrest for many years. The day he met with activists, organizers, dissidents, he gave a speech at the University of Yangon, it felt like the opening of a new era for the country and the people of Myanmar and it truly felt historic. It still may turn out to be a historic opening and visit. But the situation today is far from hopeful. It is in fact horrific. The military is driving hundreds of thousands of innocent Rohingya men, women, and children from their homes. They’re burning down their villages, they’re indiscriminately slaughtering them along the way. It is undoubtedly ethnic cleansing and some are calling this a modern genocide. So today’s episode is based on interviews with two experts who helped me understand the situation on the ground. We recorded the interviews separately, but edited them together to give you multiple perspectives on the situation. You’ll hear from Sally Smith, the executive director of the Nexus Fund which is a non-profit organization Sally founded to prevent mass atrocities, and Nick Kristoff, a Pulitzer prize winning for the New York Times who has spent his career documenting human rights abuses and injustices around the world. It’s not easy to read or hear about some of the things that are happening. It’s not easy to hear this episode. But the violence is happening right now. And there’s still time and there’s still a chance for the international community to put pressure on the government of Myanmar and force them to stop. And there’s time to raise money to get aid to people who are suffering and who desperately need our help. For more information about the situation and how to help, go to the Pod Save The World Facebook page or go to the Nexus Fund website at www.nexus-fund.org to donate. Thanks for listening, we start with Nick Kristoff.

0:04:23

TV: I’m familiar with the Rohingya, they are a Muslim minority group who lives in Burma, or Myanmar. I was aware of the history of discrimination they faced and some of the awful treatment. But it wasn’t until I read a piece you wrote, a couple weeks ago now, about just how bad things have gotten, that I truly understood the degree to which they were suffering and being driven out of their country. Can you talk a little bit about what has happened recently that has gotten this crisis to such an acute level?

Nick Kristof: Sure. So the Rohingya have been persecuted for years and years and years. And disenfranchised and this gradually radicalized them. And so an armed group appeared among them with a somewhat crazy idea that they were going to find back against the Myanmar government. And so a year ago, half-heartedly, and then in August, more vigorously, they attacked Myanmar government institutions – police stations and an army base. And it wasn’t effective at all as an insurrection. But it did lead Myanmar to mount a brutal scorched-earth attack on ordinary Rohingya civilians. And the upshot is that 400 thousand of the Rohingya have been driven out of Myanmar across the border into Bangladesh. Countless homes have been burned and villages destroyed. The, I believe, that the Myanmar government itself said that 60% of the Rohingya villages have now been abandoned. And many, many, many people – we don’t have a good count – have been killed in the scorched-earth operation. And women raped, accounts of infants being flung into lakes to drown, this kind of thing. It is about as brutal as an ethnic cleansing can get.

TV: When you read about these atrocities, the military beheading 6-year-old children, it is -- I think for a lot of people -- incomprehensible. The idea that a military force, human beings, could do this to another. But, I mean, how do you think this happens? Like why do you think that they go to these extreme lengths to terrorize a group of children?

Sally Smith: Because they- there’s a few reasons. They don’t see them as human. You know, in every mass atrocity situation you have an escalating level of dehumanization by the perpetrators. And so they start using the words like, they’re cockroaches and rats. We’ve seen this in the holocaust, in Darfur, in Rwanda. And, when you start doing that and you start saying that and you start thinking about people that way, it means that it’s time to exterminate them and that, again, you’re doing a good thing by killing them. Now to kill a child, obviously, it is incomprehensible, but it does happen because they don’t want them to grow up into the Muslims that they fear today. So, you know, this is nothing new in human history. It’s not like, let’s be so shocked. It’s horrendous, but I think that what happens when you’re shocked or it seems incomprehensible is that you become paralyzed and then you don’t take action. And right now, what they need more than anything is for the rest of the world to take action.

TV: Do you think this was the Myanmar government or military waiting for an opportunity to take actions against a minority group they have long despised? Or was this actually in response to this insurgent activity?

NK: I think that, to some degree, it probably was in response to this insurgency which, of course, they had helped create with their earlier repression. There have been these periods of brutal repression of the Rohingya and then, then there tends to be an outcry, the government tends to back off a little bit, allow a little more outside humanitarian help. And then there is some other episode that sets them off. But, you know, one of the really troubling things, I think is the way democratic politics have affected this. And -- obviously, I’m in favor of democracy, obviously you are -- but one of the- the challenges in Myanmar has been that as it has become more democratic, one of the rallying cries to win votes has been, “How much do we hate Muslim minorities?” And, “How much do we want to drive out the Rohingya?” So, democracy in effect has created, not a break in this kind of repression, but rather perhaps a spur to it.

TV: Do you think it was a mistake by the Obama administration to restore relations with Burma too soon? And relatedly, do you think the world made a mistake by putting too much hope on one person, Aung San Suu Kyi?

NK: So, I think that engagement is almost always worth it, and so I think that the Obama administration was right to engage with Burma, to make those trips. I do think that the Obama administration then got into the position where it was regarding Myanmar as one of its great successes at a time when it was under a lot of criticism for problems in the Middle East and elsewhere. And that, perhaps that made it too reluctant to speak out about what was going on with the Rohingya. And in any case, I think it- I don’t fault the engagement with Myanmar. I do fault, I mean the administration, they did speak out but I think they could’ve spoke out more forcefully and made it clear to the government that if, if they did the kind of things they’re doing now, that there would be a real price to pay for that. And indeed, yeah, I think we were all a little bit too starry eyed about Aung San Suu Kyi. She was an amazing fighter against the military regime and we all celebrated when she won the Nobel Peace prize. We were inspired by her words. But, you know, it turned out that she meant to apply those words and those aspirations largely to the Buddhist ethnic majority in Myanmar and does not seem to think that those words apply equally to the Rohingya minority.

TV: Yeah. Nearly 400 thousand people, as you reported, have fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh in just a few weeks. That’s like moving the city of Cleveland or the city of New Orleans to another country in a matter of days. Is there any sense that Bangladesh is ready to support that massive flow of refugees?

NK: So, historically Bangladesh has done a pretty poor job of accommodating the Rohingya and there, there have been huge flows of Rohingya in the past and Bangladesh has put them up in camps, offered them few education or job opportunities. In general, I’d say, has not handled them very well. One thing that is a little bit different is that today the expulsion of the Rohingya, the repression of the Rohingya, has attracted a huge amount of attention in the Muslim world all around the globe, including the Arab countries. And so, I think that there may be somewhat greater flows of money to help Rohingya refugees than there have been in the past. I think that Bangladesh, there may be more attention and publicity in ways that will lead Bangladesh to do a better job. But, unfortunately the other side of the coin is that there is also indication that there will be more foreign fighters, perhaps flowing into Burma, to join these rebel forces in fighting the Myanmar government. And, you know, this is just a prescription for disaster. If there is a civil war there, in Rakhine State, it won’t be good for the government. It also certainly won’t be good for those Rohingya who were left behind there.

TV: Sally, what can people listening do to help?

SS: People really need to get there, and get there now, to help Bangladesh. Because they don’t really have the resources and the infrastructure to handle this amount of people. I mean this is a biblical amount of people that are flooding into this country. And from the estimates of my- our partners, Fortify Rights, who are on the ground and at the border -- they say it could be upwards of a million within a week. They want them to leave, right. They’re doing this on purpose. And they’re shooting at men, women, and children – civilians. Civilians. Shooting at them as they flee into Bangladesh as well. So killing as many as they can, getting rid of the rest.

0:13:05

MUSIC

0:13:11

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[Laughter]

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0:14:33

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0:16:14

[MUSIC]

0:16:18

TV: How concerned are counter-terrorism experts you talked to that the actions of the Myanmar government and military are gonna set the stage for ISIS to come in and really radicalize a generation of Rohingya who are being treated in the worst possible way by their government?

NK: So, I mean, what we don’t know about the Rohingya and Rakhine State could fill volumes. I mean, it’s really- this isn’t an area where we know a lot. It’s been very difficult to get in there and travel around. I managed to make two trips into Rakhine State, but I couldn’t get to large swaths of it, especially in the northern part. And you hear a lot about ISIS and Al Qaeda but I do think that in the past it’s mostly been talk. And in general, I’d say that people have responded to their desperation more by paying human smugglers and trying to leave to go to Thailand or Malaysia to try to start over, rather than to try to fight back. You have the sense that in the last year or so, that is changing and what will really change it is if you end up getting a pipeline of money and guns into Rakhine State. And there are some indications that is now happening. And people are just so outraged, you know, I mean they- they’ve seen family members raped, they’ve seen children drowned, they’ve seen these villages burned. And the refugees on the Bangladesh side, they can look across and they see smoke filling the skies as their- their villages -- and these huts all have thatch roofs so they burn very easily -- they see these fires from their own villages and of course they’re furious about it. And a lot of them wanna fight.

TV: It’s probably not great to speculate if ISIS might come in. What we do know is that the worst things imaginable happen to people in the most desperate situations and you see human trafficking and all sorts of assorted horrors come along with situations like this. Are there aid organizations that are providing relief or support to refugees that you think Americans listening should support today to try to do something?

NK: Yeah, so there are a lot of aid groups that are on the Bangladesh side of the border -- International Rescue Committee, the- you know the whole lot of them are there. And they- and because the issue is getting a lot of attention so they’re active there. The real problem is for the 600 thousand or so Rohingya who are left on the Myanmar side. And they’re not getting help. There are a little more than 100 thousand who are in effectively in a concentration camp in the city of Sittwe. They’re locked up there. They’re not allowed to go to schools, they’re not allowed to get easy medical care. On my- on one of my visits there was a woman who was in obstructed labor, she desperately needed a C-section to save her life and the life of her baby and, you know, she could not get it. The only medical support she had was from a pharmacist and, so those folks- they get a little bit of help from- those folks who are in this concentration camp, they do get some visits by some aid groups, including International Rescue Committee. But outside of Sittwe, and especially in the northern part of Rakhine State, aid groups just are not allowed to move. There is no humanitarian access whatsoever. And I think that has to be one of, you know, one of the first things we have to do -- to pressure the Myanmar government to provide that access. And so- and I’d say that in general when people ask me today, what they can do to help. I would put less emphasis on the need for provision of services and more for advocacy because- there are groups like Fortify Rights that are focused on advocacy for the Rohingya because what we need is to get that access by aid groups to get into rural parts of Rakhine State so they can begin to provide services.

TV: Sally, what is your nonprofit, the Nexus Fund, do?

SS: So the Nexus Fund is dedicated to preventing mass atrocities around the world, which includes genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity. And our model is actually based on, you know I came out of the Obama campaign ’07, ‘08 and I really believe in empowering locals. And I think what we’ve been doing in aid is going into other countries and telling them- basically putting a project on top of their lives and saying, you know “here’s a bunch of money for this project that we’ve decided because I went to Brown and I got my masters, you know, and I’ve read about you.” And you know what I figured out over the last 10 years or so is that, that doesn’t work, right? And I think the aid community is actually coming to that conclusion as well. So our model is really about going in, finding the locals, talking to them about who is addressing the risk factors for genocide and mass atrocities in their communities. And then supporting them. So whatever that means. Whether that’s through, you know, funding resources or training or connecting them with other people in the world who have already been through what they’re going through, so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. For anything that I care about, I have four words that I always keep in mind: knowledge, social, time, and money. So knowledge is, you’ve done it. Pat yourself on the back. You’re listening to this podcast. You’re learning about the Rohingya. Social is share with people, you know like, in person when you see people, bring it up on your Facebook and Twitter. Like, please talk about it. The more it actually gets talked about, that is important. And then time and money is, you know I would say normally it’s like volunteer time but we’re not gonna fly everybody over to Burma. What we really need is your donations. And I know Save the Children could use your donations, so I’m not just here to pitch my own organization. But this is- what’s crazy to me, Tommy, is this is an orphan cause. There are zero donors working on this cause. At a full time. There are donors that give a little bit here and there. The pie isn’t big enough. You know there’s not enough money to go around. People’s resources are stretch really thin. And I’m not saying that to say that, you know, everybody’s just swimming in a pool of their money. There’s a desperate need and we really need the pie to get bigger, so one of the things I’m really trying to do is bring more funders into this field and into this issue in particular. Cause I think there’s an assumption that people are funding efforts that need to be done and helping, and they’re not.

0:22:57

[MUSIC]

0:23:03

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0:24:59

[MUSIC]

0:25:02

TV: So, the UN general assembly is this week. Aung San Suu Kyi was supposed to come to New York but now is not gonna come. Do you have any sense that there will be efforts to take some sort of meaningful collective action to either highlight the treatment of the Rohingya or put pressure on the government to, you know, allow access like you said or stop with this horrific ethnic cleansing?

NK: So, there certainly will be more attention on it, and the Muslim world is very concerned about this. It’s getting a lot of attention in the Arab press and Indonesia and so on. I don’t think that there is likely to be effective UN action. Partly because in the Security Council, China is going to protect Burma. I think China to some degree sees this and an opportunity to peel Burma away from U.S. orbit and into its own orbit. And there’s been some competition over the last 20 years between China and the U.S. over who will be Burma’s protector down the road. In the past the U.S. had been winning that and this may be an opportunity for China to make strides, in the most cynical way. So I don’t think the Security Council has a very tool box given China’s resistance. And the UN agencies haven’t been terribly effective. Partly because they tend to work in a fairly collegial way and they’re…not good -- except for the High Commissioner on Human Rights-- about standing up and using the bully pulpit.

TV: You know you sort of have a choice, you can look away say there’s nothing we can do and throw your hands up. Or you can decide to raise awareness, to call members of Congress, to support aid groups doing great work, and support journalists who are covering these stories. So, thank you for what you’re doing to bring the world’s attention here.

NK: Yeah, let me mention a couple of things that are- you know- you mentioned Congress, so there is a Senate resolution that is in the works, sponsored by Senator Durbin and Senator McCain that indeed does call on Aung San Suu Kyi to try to live up to her values on the Rohingya. It’s a way of applying a little bit more pressure. Similar pressure led Senator McCain to take a measure out of a bill and thus make it more difficult for weapons to flow to the Myanmar military, which I think is a useful signal to them. And I’m glad you mentioned journalists because, you know, this- this to me is just a- a great example of why we need people out in the field including, maybe above all, photographers and video journalists documenting this kind of thing because once it’s projected into our living rooms and on to our laptops, it’s really hard to turn away. And I think it’s those images that are gonna galvanize us and, I hope, lead to some kind of improvement in the situation.

TV: Sally, how can people encourage the United States government to put pressure on Myanmar to stop this ethnic cleansing?

SS: International political pressure is…so paramount right now. So please do pick up the phone and call your member of Congress and tell them- just say, “I care about the issue of the Rohingya, what are you gonna do about it?”

0:28:17

[MUSIC]

0:28:19

TV: Thank you for listening to Pod Save the World and for caring about this issue. Again, if you want more information, go to the Pod Save the World Facebook page. We’ll have links for all the places you can donate and all the groups that are helping. You can also go to the Nexus Fund website at www.nexus-fund.org to donate and to sign up to help out Sally’s cause. So, thank you again.

[MUSIC]

0:29:02

#podsa #September 2017 #pstw transcripts #pstw

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eitherandor-blog · 7 years

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Weary

Tongue tied.

It’s hard to articulate the words- and the actions and decisions made- to recap the past few months. Particularly, the recent political happenings in the US. I will always remember where I was on November 8th, 2016. Now, I don’t need to relive the specifics of that night, or the morning after. However, I can say that in the immediate aftermath, I was in a daze. That stupor lingered, for quite a while.

When I came back to earth, or resurfaced, or came to face reality, Donald F. Trump was the new President (Note: The “F” is intentional). In some respects, this is completely baffling to me. Like one of those moments in a movie or TV show, where everything seems to be horribly awry (or positively, unrealistically perfect) but then the protagonist wakes up. It was all a farce...If only.

Now it’s not hard to fathom that in a country of 330+ million, we would not all think the same. And that’s good (mostly). I relearned that last November. Frankly, it’s an essential reminder that the self-selective bubble that I- and I know many others- have created is just that: a bubble. A limited, insulated fragment of a larger, fuller reality. Sometimes my social world- and definitely the one I’ve created over social media (perhaps some readers are unfriending me as they read..)- is not exhaustive nor inclusive of all viewpoints. The world is much bigger than any one person’s bubble. I learned that in a YUGE way..

I also know that while I certainly was disappointed, there were millions of people who were applauding this (somewhat) unexpected victory. That does not necessarily make them evil, awful, Satan worshipers. It does not mean that they support everything that Donald F. Trump says or stands for. Maybe they don’t support the extra curriculars, as Aziz Ansari laid out on Saturday Night Live.

However, it also meant that among several multiple choice options on election day (vote for a third party candidate, vote for Clinton, don’t vote, or E, hope for Armageddon), they thought that A: vote for Trump, was their best selection. “Best” may be up for debate, but they undeniably chose him as a presidential candidate.

These are maybe not the people you see, the people you know, or interact with on a daily basis. In the school district where I work, students were polled and given the option to cast a ballot, as a way to learn the voting process and participate in the monumental November day. We know that for some students, they may vote, and think politically, similar to the views they are surrounded by (family, teachers and community). In this mock election, 82.7% of the 2,146 students surveyed voted for Hillary Clinton, 4.2% for Donald Trump.

What does that mean? Well, obviously for many of these students, there was a clear favored choice. There were also students who even in what is presumed to be a progressive, equitable community, voted for Trump (as well as alternate candidates). We also know that even if these votes were to be counted, with little more than two thousand, they make little impact in the larger whole. The story they tell is infinitesimal in comparison the larger, national picture. However, in this bubble, everyone seemingly thinks the same. How comfortable that can be- as well as misleading.

What I also saw- and what I know has been true for many young people- is how damaging this election result felt, how personal and how confusing. For some students, the principles of kindness and respect (and frankly, humanity) are instilled and at times, reinforced, in formative years. These are ideals we implore our young people to uphold, even if we lose our way abiding them ourselves. We try, though we often cannot control, to keep our young people safe. With the result of this election, and the campaign that preceded it, the lessons learned communicated some different takeaways for students. I can only speak for my school.

In the immediate aftermath, my school of students were perplexed. I never could have imagined that this group (at a K-8 school, to be clear) were so aware and consumed with the election results. Furthermore, there were many who were scared or sad, uncertain what this meant for the future. In the weeks that have followed, there have been an abundance- and according to staff, more than usual- of student conflict and bullying. This summary overlooks the ongoing division between staff and students; we are still navigating this as we go. To sum up, it’s been an unsettling time for our young people. As an adult, I hate that there is little direction to give.

...

I was not bewildered to see many people, in the days, weeks, even years leading up to the election, proclaim that they would not, could not vote for Hillary Clinton. Some of them were staunch Republicans, others were Berning reallll hard. Some wanted to deviate from the career politician in Clinton, while others still could not overlook some of her past actions, inactions, and decisions of consequence. Then there are the ‘handful’ who- despite her credentials and pantsuits- who because she is a woman, would not, could not bring themselves to vote for a woman as leader of the “free world” (what a tease we are, ‘land of the free’).

Many could have predicted this is where we/the US were headed. Tensions flared in Obama’s final term, even down to Congress’ proclamation that it would not consider any nominees to the Supreme Court’s vacant seat.

LIKE SERIOUSLY?!

So here we are now, stuck with Donald F. Trump. We’ve got a racist, xenophobic, sexist, perpetrator, ableist (that can’t be all, right?) with the gall to spend his Black History Month remarks discussing polling and his diverse voter turnout, rating Fox better than CNN news, and big league Ben Carson. Seriously, THIS GUY??

Now we are left with a byproduct of our storied, troubled past as a country. Today, many white people can reside to the comforts and cushiness of their privilege. In the midst of a changing country, a politician tapped into that fear- which Trump so creatively reverberated- led him all the way to the White House.

Somehow, in 2017, we have the most discriminatory politician most anyone can recall. We have an entire regime that seems to make up and rewrite the news ad nauseam. Be it alternative facts about the ills committed by immigrants in this country, molding statistics and numbers to fit an agenda (such as a report on Chicago violence), or simply mocking, threatening, and offending virtually every minority group one can think of- it’s okay white men, you’re safe (for now)- this, this is your president.

I could go on, truly, on the appalling man we have elected and enabled to become president. But it doesn’t stop there! There are a laundry list of folks who (to generalize) are significantly under qualified for their positions and responsibilities. From the well-documented, questionable (or racist) history of Jeff Sessions in Coretta Scott King’s letter- and nearly read by Senator Elizabeth Warren- to the inconceivably unqualified Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary, we are truly being led by band of misfits.

While we are left to stomach the disheartening cabinet appointments, we have to (somehow) digest executive orders that run rampant to undo our democracy. Attacks waged (commonly over Twitter) that permeate every sector: to department stores, the environment, the media, and many, many immigrants. In particular, the ‘Muslim Ban’ stands out as one of (because there are multiple, even after 3 weeks in office) divisive, misguided, and ass-backwards acts under the 45th.

And while I wholeheartedly disavow this has any legal or moral founding, no one can say they are surprised. We should have seen this coming with Trump. When people have voiced displeasure and protested, one of the resounding arguments has been that we, the United States of America, are a nation of immigrants. Though I know the intent of this argument, and know that I find myself on this side of the debate, I could not disagree with these people more on their point.

The USA was founded under the guise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, some Disney fable of the American Dream. In actuality, the leader of the free world was made on the backs of the transatlantic slave trade, on the land of American Indians, and furthered by systematic and intentional dehumanization, internment camps, and genocide foreign and domestic. Do not pretend that things were utopian from the start for this country nor in its more recent history. Our hands are blood-stained and our pages littered with lies to help people in power sleep at night.

While I am so shattered by the position we find ourselves in, Trump is a President elected by (some) of the people for all of the people (theoretically). The US deserves such a candidate, born and raised, until we acknowledge the pedestal we declare our birthright. By the looks of it, Trump appears happy on a throne. What did you expect?

(My latest installment, entitled “Weary” is after one of the hits of Solange’s album from the fall, A Seat at the Table. I encourage you to listen to the full album; you can get a taste with the title track of this post here.)

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thesnhuup · 5 years

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Confronting Racism, Past and Present

Our Board of Trustees meets in mid-winter for what we have called a “learning retreat,” going with my leadership team to a place where we can expand our thinking, to learn from some other area of work or industry, and to engage with thinkers and doers in other fields. One year it was Washington, D.C., where we did a deep dive into policy. Another year it was Silicon Valley to engage with new technology. Last year it was LA, where we visited SpaceX, heard from experts in entertainment, and met with Mayor Eric Garcetti. This past week we went to Alabama, to the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement in Montgomery and Birmingham, a fitting place to think hard about diversity, inclusivity, and equity. For most of us, maybe for all of us, it was the single most powerful experience of our time at SNHU.

I’m still processing why it was so. Almost everything we learned we knew at some level, intellectually, but this felt more visceral, often like a punch to the gut and a clasping of the heart. We know that the gun violence of a place like Chicago is out of control and exacting a terrible toll on the children and young people who live in what is effectively a war zone on American soil, but then Arne Duncan joined us with a group of the young men from his Chicago CRED program and we heard the reality of their lives. One had been shot ten times. Billy, the learning coach, had served twenty years for the murder of one of Arne’s best friends and the basketball hope of the neighborhood (a story told in ESPN’s 30-for-30 episode “Benji,” in which Billy appears). The story of the dinner he then had with the victim’s family was a knee buckling story of redemption and forgiveness – not a Hallmark version, but raw and true and ongoing. It’s a story I’ll never forget and one I really can’t recount here – I’m not good enough a writer to do it justice.

Arne shared that in the elementary school classrooms he can ask kids to raise their hands if they know someone who was shot and every hand goes up. He asks them to keep their hands raised if they know five people who were shot — all hands remain up. Ten people? Most hands. Fifteen people? More than half the hands. Twenty people? Half the hands. Think about it – these are little children in an American city. If they were white children, we would have a massive government effort to address the problem. This was a gut punch moment.

We spent time with our colleagues in Birmingham, one of our first urban eco-system learning pilot sites, and had a panel with the amazingly talented team Mayor Woodfin has assembled to address Birmingham’s challenges, including a similar wave of gun violence in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

Not coincidentally, these are the same neighborhoods that were “redlined,” set aside for Blacks, as official city planning policy.

I had always heard the expression and assumed it was a tacit understanding. It was instead official policy, planned, and its effects are still being felt decades later. Arne’s program in Chicago aims to give young men an alternative to the violence, through work pathways. In Birmingham, we are working to create educational pathways to work through LRNG, our newly acquired community impact group. Billy made a simple and yet deep insight: if you live in a war zone and fear for your life, you carry a gun. If your little sister is going hungry and there is no work, you do whatever it takes to get money to buy food. If you live with incessant fear and hopelessness, you self-medicate through drugs or alcohol. These are rational choices when seen through that lens. Arne and others doing the hardest work imaginable in the hardest places in our country are trying to create hope and a different set of rational choices. I hope that our work with the city of Birmingham will provide a pathway to education, and connect talent with opportunity.

While in Birmingham, we visited the sacred ground that is the 16th Street Baptist Church, where in 1963 white supremacists planted a bomb that killed four little girls.

This storied church is where the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement met, and often preached, including Dr. Martin Luther King, the resolute Fred Shuttlesworth, an amazing man who is not as widely known as he should be, and Ralph David Abernathy, and where the 1963 Children’s Crusade was organized.

We have all read about the heroic struggle for equal rights, but there was something about being in the place that was incredibly powerful. One feels a kind of gravity, the weight of a history that suddenly feels less distant or abstract. It was a feeling I’ve had on the battlefields of the Somme or in the Killing Fields of Cambodia — the presence of those who haunt these places. It was true of Kelly Ingram Park, right across the street from the church and the site of the demonstrations where Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor had dogs released and fire hoses used on marchers.

The images from the church bombing and the brutal repression of the marchers made headlines worldwide, sparking outrage across the U.S., and led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Voter suppression and an ongoing attempt to undercut the act, including demonstrably false charges of widespread voter fraud, are stark reminders that the most basic civil rights remain under threat even after all these years.

If there was any doubt of that fact, it was shattered by our visit to the newly created National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a stunning memorial to all those killed by racial terror, including thousands of lynchings, in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is the first time I’ve seen in the U.S. a formal coming to grips with the racial hatred of our past in the way one sees in Berlin, which lays bare its guilt around the Holocaust.

Every metal piece, reminiscent of tombstones, represents a county and the names of those murdered there. While they are mostly from the southern states that enslaved people, New York, Oregon, California, and Illinois are among the northern states also represented. Racism knows no boundaries in America then or now.

The “crimes” for which people were murdered are shocking.

Lynchings were not rare. The Memorial is stunning in visually and physically capturing the scope of the multi-decade domestic terrorism that created a mass migration north, ethnic cleansing in today’s parlance.

Lest we take some comfort in the notion that these were the acts of some small, psychotic group of terrorists, the nearby Legacy Museum reminds us that thousands of people would turn out to see the violence, bringing children and whole families. Postcards were made and sold. As Bryan Stevenson would remind us, the perpetrators of this systemic terror were not just the uneducated and backward. Complicit were the best educated politicians, business people, clergymen, and yes, academics. And that history is not so distant, extending into my lifetime.

The Memorial and the Legacy Museum were the brainchild of the aforementioned Bryan Stevenson, the crusading lawyer and author of Just Mercy. Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Bryan has fought against the death penalty (which overwhelmingly reflects racial bias in its application) and mass incarceration. The Museum draws a clear and unequivocal line from slavery to racial terror to mass incarceration and a deeply racist criminal justice system. Later that evening Alabama put another Black man to death, a jarring and vivid reminder that the injustice remains that close.

Bryan met with us and gave a talk that was at once enraged and inspired. The MacArthur Prize winner was an inspiration, a master storyteller, and reminded us that however hard the challenges are today, they pale in comparison to the fights and the suffering that was endured by those who came before and that it is to them that we have a responsibility to continue the struggle for civil and human rights.

It’s how we honor their sacrifice.

How elevated and inspiring the fight can be was made clear to all of us when we spent over an hour with fabled Judge Myron H. Thompson, the first Black federal judge in Alabama. We sat in his courtroom, the courtroom where Judge Frank Johnson ruled in key civil rights cases, including the Rosa Parks case that struck down segregation in public transportation and the ruling that allowed the march from Selma. Judge Thompson, who has also ruled in famous cases, including Roy Moore’s Ten Commandments case and Planned Parenthood vs. Bentley, reminded us that in this melting pot of a country (some would say “salad”), it is the Law that acts as the pot, that keeps it all together. He reminded us that we were sitting in seats once occupied by Rosa Parks and Dr. King. It was absolutely inspiring and that old beautiful 1930s courtroom, witness to so much history, seemed like church.

As we walked back to our hotel, one member of my team, with tears still in her eyes, said, “I thought I knew. This was like a 2×4 to the side of the head.” At dinner, someone else said, “I’ve never cried so many times in one day, both out of sadness and inspiration.” It was against the background of these remarkable three days that the Board of Trustees unanimously approved our new Strategic Plan for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity, which we will release in the coming weeks. They did so because it is a superb plan. They also did it with a deep and abiding resolve that SNHU should play its part in countering this country’s long and ongoing racism and genocidal origins. The Legacy Museum begins with American Indians, the far too often neglected origin story steeped in bloody genocide against a whole people, acknowledging that we have so far to go as an institution and as a country.

On our evening news, the embarrassment that is Virginia politics right now, and in the chants of “Don’t shoot” that ring throughout American cities, we have stark reminders that before we can have reconciliation, we need truth. The truth about America’s ongoing racism is hard to bear, as all who were with us this week would attest, but it did not feel defeating. It felt freeing and empowering and humbling. As it does in so much of its work, SNHU will now put its resources into doing its part. At a time when American higher education is seen as part of the problem, we have to be part of the solution. Access is a starting point and we’ve worked hard on that part of the calculus of hope. With purpose and determination, we will focus on equity, diversity, and inclusivity.

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sincerelyajar · 7 years

Text

The Atheist Perspective:

Introduction: Discussion and open dialogue are a wonderful aspect of a free society. To that end, a friend and I have gotten together to address the topic of worldview. Two worldviews will be examined, the Atheist perspective and the Christian perspective. What makes up a worldview? The prompt I suggested was on four central topics, the four qualifiers of a worldview made popular by Dr. Ravi Zacharias, a Christian philosopher and writer. The four areas were: Origin - How does your worldview explain the origins of humanity? Meaning - How is meaning described within your worldview? Morality - What is the moral basis of your worldview? Destiny - What is the future of your worldview? A good friend of mine by the name of Jennifer Sternitzky was kind and gracious enough to step out and explain her worldview by these qualifiers, upon my request. Jennifer is a graduate of the University of Green Bay, with two degrees in Psychology and English. Jennifer is a feminist and a well read atheist. We've been friends for several years. We decided upon approximately 750 words, one page, to describe the four points of worldview in a concise, direct manner. Enjoy.

The Atheist Perspective:

Jennifer Sternitzky, University of Green Bay

Origin:

I believe in evolution, human and social. I believe humans evolved from apes, and apes evolved from…whatever they evolved from. I don’t pretend to understand everything in science or how evolution works, but I don’t believe there is a God (Christian or otherwise) or in any higher power. I believe we are the product of a series of mutations, enabling the ‘fittest’ to survive, though I do not believe humans are the ultimate beings. I believe we are part of a larger ecosystem and no living creature is above the other, though people certainly act like humans are the dominant creature. I suspect that somewhere along the way we’ll find a way to destroy ourselves—maybe even our planet. If we destroy ourselves, I suspect vegetation and animal life will repopulate the earth; whether humans ever re-emerge again, who knows.

Meaning:

Plenty of people tell me that without God there is no meaning to life, and I disagree. Humanity is special, not because God created us all with a special purpose, but because we didn’t have to be. Through a series of mutations, humans evolved into what we are today, proving that we were better fit to navigate the world than previous humanlike primates. Still others ask if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys. And those people clearly don’t know how evolution works. It happens over millions of years, very slowly, mutating and branching off into new species. Other primates were equally good at surviving and so their species was sustained. The same with humans. But I digress. I believe humanity is special because we are sort of ‘happy accidents’; mortality makes it special too. We’re born with a certain, undesignated, amount of time to live and to create our own meaning. We find what means the most to us and strive to create a life around it. Most humans want to help others in some way—be it art, science, philosophy, psychology, civil service, etc. I believe humanity’s purpose is to look out for each other and to love each other and ensure the species’ survival. In the evolutionary sense at least. We find our own reasons to live and to make our difference in the world.

Morality:

I’ve also been told that without God there can be no morals, or that, as an atheist, I must have no morals. And I again disagree. I believe in love, hope, honor, loyalty, honesty, trust, respect, etc. Those things don’t come from God. They come from within and from human interaction. They are not imposed on us by some invisible spirit. To me, if you need God to tell you what’s wrong or right, and you can’t figure it out on your own, then you may be part of the problem. Also, I find that excessively religious people try to pass off their own opinions of morality as God’s will or God’s word or God speaking through them. It seems as if they’re trying to justify their own hatefulness. Also, basing morality off of an ancient text written by superstitious people who had vastly different values (slavery, women as reproductive beings only, myths about how crops appeared or weather changed, etc) seems absurd, as does picking and choosing the parts we agree with and want to practice. Do we still follow the Malleus Maleficarum? Of course not. Because that’s of a time when people believed different things, superstitious, irrational things. They condemned things out of fear, because they didn’t understand it. I’m a firm believer in “Just because you can’t explain it, doesn’t mean God did it.”

Destiny:

To be honest, I don’t know that I believe in destiny. It’s a nice thought to believe that everything happens for a reason and we all have some special purpose, but that also defeats the idea of free will. It may be comforting to believe that there’s a special plan for each of us, but it’s illogical and superstitious, and doesn’t allow for people to take responsibility for their own lives.

The Christian Perspective:

Justin Steckbauer, Liberty University

Origin:

The question of origin has puzzled man kind for centuries. How did we get here? Where did we come from? How did life come to be? For the Christian, the action and the process by which life came about, the length of years it took, the exact biological functions that brought about the complex human life form are less important than the first cause. Micro evolution, small changes in species that provide for adaptation, is beyond dispute. That is something science can measure and observe. In fact, I love science. However, macro evolution seems highly speculative, and the processes by which a puddle of amino acids could become a highly complex life form like a human are not observable. Given chance, matter, and time, a puddle of amino acids will never, ever become a human being. It is simply impossible, statistically. For the atheist, the first cause is a vacuum, an unanswered question: Where did energy come from? For the Christian, the first cause is a loving architect of the universe, a necessary first cause who over 10,000 years or 7 billion years, crafted the universe into existence.

Meaning:

The question of meaning in Christianity is simple: We are children of the loving biologist, chemist, artist, writer, and architect, the designer of the human soul, who we call Father God. In that context, every human being has value, incredible value, so much that God would come, Jesus Christ, to offer himself as a path of redemption for his wayward people. In addition meaning, for the Christian, is a stark reality: The Earth is a very troubled place, and the problem is not outside ourselves, but within ourselves, and the only treatment is the indwelling presence of Jesus. In the context of meaning, we find a treasure trove in the Bible of meaning, and inherent worth.

Morality:

What is the perfect moral code? Who had it? What does each moral code look like when put it into practical application? For atheism, we see Nazi Germany, with Nietzsche's idea of the superman put into practice. Genocide. Again in Russia, Stalin a former seminary student turned atheist, what do we find? The writing of Karl Marx used for the purpose of subjugation. Genocide. And what about the Christian worldview? The most prosperous countries on planet Earth, in contrast: Europe, and the United States. Now we see in the 21st century as Europe and the United States drift into post-modernism and naturalism, corruption begins to grow like a cancer.

The teaching of Jesus Christ is the perfection of morality described in powerfully simple terms: Love God and love others, as you love yourself. Jesus Christ provides the model for a life of humble service to others, that will always bring about the most peaceable and prosperous paradise, when practiced in truth.

Destiny:

What future does an atheist have, after 100 years have passed? After 1000 years have gone by? The atheist passes out of existence into the natural and biological cycles of the environment. What future does the Christian have? Unending life, in community with a loving God and fellow believers who have chosen to fly in the face of everything the world says, and do it the way God says. Jesus Christ provides the way, he is the road, a personal savior present, willing to show you the hard truth about yourself, and offer a way of total redemption and a future unimaginably wonderful.

Conclusion: Thank you for reading. An open and respectful dialogue is vital to the ongoing discussions and debates between Christians and atheists as we attempt to navigate and make sense of things in a difficult world. Respect, love, and mutual admiration can go a long way to healing wounds and bringing otherwise diverse groups into reasonable social harmony. Take care and God bless.

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