One man's "crank" is another man's exemplar.

Tolstoy and Vidal: A Follow-Up

WRITTEN BY CHRIS FLOYD

FRIDAY, 03 AUGUST 2012 12:52

A passage from my piece on Gore Vidal yesterday ("As with Tolstoy, Vidal's fiction -- the insight that it showed into the complexities of human nature and human society, and the accomplishment and subtlety with which this was put across -- deepened and enriched his political and literary essays, gave them more credibility") brought this response from a reader: The comparison with Tolstoy fails completely, to the detriment of Gore Vidal. In his thought Tolstoy was a religious crank  who thought in crude black and white. None of the genius he brought to his fiction carried across to his later religious and moralistic writings. The plain fact is, having read both some of Gore Vidal's  fiction and heard him speak on video etc, he is more consistent than Tolstoy and thus immeasurably superior. To which, this brief reply: Opinions on these matters are all subjective, of course; one man's "crank" (an epithet applied not infrequently to Vidal himself by those eager to dismiss his discomforting views) is another man's exemplar. But, with respect, I must say I find it hard to believe that you have actually read any of Tolstoy's non-fiction writings on politics and power and war (as opposed to any of the "religious crankery" you might have run across.) And I seriously doubt that Vidal would have shared your opinion of these anti-war, anti-elite, anti-establishment pieces. (Such as those collected in Letters From Tula, for example.) Certainly Vidal would have found much of Tolstoy's religious writings to be risible -- though I doubt he would have found them 'crude,' as he would have recognized the complex learning that lay behind them, and their logical, iconoclastic rigour (while, again, rejecting their religious premises). But beyond Tolstoy's typically 19th century hang-ups about sex, his "religious crankery" focused mainly on ending war, ending coercion and corruption by powerful elites and institutions (including all religions), and establishing social, political and economic justice. There's very little there that Vidal would have found entirely uncongenial, I think. He might also have delighted in the fact that Tolstoy's religious beliefs shook one of the world's most powerful and repressive religious institutions  -- the Russian Orthodox Church -- to its foundations, and led multitudes of people out of its stultifying grip. At the core of Tolstoy's beliefs was a fierce commitment to intellectual liberty, to freedom of thought and conscience, even for those who disagreed with whatever particular notion he happened to hold at any particular time. And I imagine Vidal might well have enjoyed Tolstoy's "inconsistency" -- especially the randy Russian's inability to quell his rampant sexuality. After all, 'consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds,' and Vidal probably would have admired the restlessness of Tolstoy's rather large mind, as it groped through the darkness that surrounds us all, chasing flickers of light here and there, never quite satisfied with any final conclusion, but pushed always by doubt, by inner turmoil, and by the desire to know more. No one would argue that Tolstoy's non-fiction has the power and genius of his greatest novels and stories. That was my point: that the true greatness of both writers lay in their artisticachievement, which lent greater depth and credibility to their non-fiction -- whether or not one agrees with every single judgment or opinion they rendered.

Bonfire of the Vanities: Robert Parry and the Red Mist of Partisanship

Bonfire of the Vanities: Robert Parry and the Red Mist of Partisanship

WRITTEN BY CHRIS FLOYD

TUESDAY, 07 AUGUST 2012 01:38

Over the decades, Robert Parry has done yeoman service in exposing the vast criminality of the American state. From the foul bloodwork of American power in Central America to the treasonous machinations of the Iran-Contra scheme to the long, corrupt, murderous history of the Bush crime family, Parry has broken many important stories and brought much "lost history" -- the title of his best book -- to light. I have drawn on his work frequently, and learned a great deal from it. Therefore it is extremely dispiriting to read his recent bitter blasts (here and here) at any and all of those "on the left" who might even contemplate refusing to support Barack Obama for re-election. Such people, he tells us, are vain, preening perfectionists who care more for their own self-righteousness than the fate of the world. Indeed, "leftists" who have refused to support the Democratic candidate -- no matter who he is, no matter what he has done -- are complicit, we’re told, in all the atrocities perpetrated by Republican presidents since 1968.  (Apparently, no Democratic president has ever perpetrated any atrocities; they are just "imperfect" politicians who might sometimes "do some rotten things" but always "fewer rotten things than the other guy.") Parry believes he is preaching a tough, gritty doctrine of "moral ambiguity." What he is in fact advocating is the bleakest moral nihilism. To Parry, the structure of American power -- the corrupt, corporatized, militarized system built and sustained by both major parties -- cannot be challenged. Not even passively, not even internally, for Parry scorns those who simply refuse to vote almost as harshly as those who commit the unpardonable sin: voting for a third party. No, if you do not take an active role in supporting this brutal engine of war and injustice by voting for a Democrat, then it is you who are immoral.  You must support this system. It is the only moral choice. What’s more, to be truly moral, to acquit yourself of the charge of vanity and frivolity, to escape complicity in government crimes, you must support the Democrat. If the Democratic president orders the "extrajudicial" murder of American citizens, you must support him. If he chairs death squad meetings in the White House every week, checking off names of men to be murdered without charge or trial, you must support him. If he commits mass murder with robot drones on defenseless villages around the world, you must support him. If he imprisons and prosecutes whistleblowers and investigative journalists more than any other president in history, you must support him. If he cages and abuses and tortures a young soldier who sought only to stop atrocities and save the nation’s honor, you must support him. If he "surges" a pointless war of aggression and occupation in a ravaged land and expands that war into the territory of a supposed ally, you must support him. If he sends troops and special ops and drones and assassins into country after country, fomenting wars, bankrolling militias, and engineering coups, you must support him. If he throws open the nation's coastal waters to rampant drilling by the profiteers who are devouring and despoiling the earth, you must support him. If he declares his eagerness to do what no Republican president has ever dared to do -- slash Social Security and Medicare -- you must support him.  For Robert Parry, blinded by the red mist of partisanship, there is literally nothing -- nothing -- that a Democratic candidate can do to forfeit the support of "the left." He can even kill a 16-year-old American boy -- kill him, rip him to shreds with a missile fired by a coddled coward thousands of miles away -- and you must support him. And, again, if you do not support him, if you do not support all this, then you are the problem. You are enabling evil. Given this wildly askew moral compass, what would Parry make of that great American refusenik, Henry David Thoreau, who went to jail rather than pay taxes to support a deadly militarist adventure in Mexico and the government-sanctioned system of slavery, and whose thoughts on civil disobedience and disengagement with evil inspired Tolstoy and Gandhi? Thoreau said: “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”  What would Parry say to that? “Enough of your vain moral posturing, Thoreau. Forget the Mexican War; get out there and support James K. Polk. He’s a Democrat, for god’s sake! Do you want someone worse to get in there? It’s a disgrace not to associate yourself with this government!” II. Parry’s “logic” is breathtakingly, heartbreakingly faulty. Perhaps that’s not surprising; after all, partisanship is the sworn enemy of logic, of objective reasoning, of clear thinking. But what issurprising, given Parry’s decades of deep-delving in the mines of politics and history, is how wrong he is on the “savvy” realpolitik he espouses, and his wanton misreading of history.  Parry rails against the “left” for not giving enough support to the Democrats in elections of 1968, 1980 and 2000. If these fastidious perfectionists hadn’t tried to “punish” the “imperfect” Democratic candidates in the those crucial years, the nation and the world would have been spared much suffering, we are told. Well, maybe so, maybe not. This kind of ahistorical speculation is pointless in the extreme. If Hitler had been run over by a Vienna streetcar in 1919, then perhaps the world would have been a better place; or perhaps someone even worse would have come along.  You can’t unring the bell of historical events – or tell what other tunes might have chimed in their place. But even on a surface level, Parry’s analysis fails. He seems to think that the “left’s” desertion of the Democrats in 1968 gave the presidency to Richard Nixon and prolonged the Vietnam War. It was not the “left” that abandoned the Democrats that year; it was the millions of ordinary Americans who had only four years before given Lyndon Johnson the biggest electoral mandate in history up to that time. If every leftist in the country had stayed home (and of course the overwhelming majority of them did not, and almost all of them voted for Hubert H. Humphrey), the Democrats still would have lost. Parry, astonishingly, forgets the presence of George Wallace in the race (and race is the operative word here). Wallace’s pro-segregation campaign took five states from the Democrats’ formerly “solid South” and won 10 million votes, almost all of them from Democratic constituencies.  Even if every “leftist” had been burning with fervor for HHH, no Democrat could have survived such a blow to the party’s base. What’s more, the real abandonment of the party that year came not from disaffected leftists, but from the Democrat’s own leader: LBJ, who simply dumped the party, and the presidency, out of hurt feelings at being challenged in the primaries. He didn’t stand up and fight for his social programs and Civil Rights measures, he didn’t end the war (which Parry tells us he was “seriously” contemplating – and which he could have done with a snap of his fingers). Nor did he give more than the most tepid support to Humphrey until the very end of the campaign, when he knew it was too late. He just quit and walked away, with the nation reeling in turmoil from the war he had escalated, and from the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. If any one person could be said to have given us Richard Nixon, it was LBJ.  Parry also seems to think that if Jimmy Carter had not been “abandoned” by “leftists" in 1980, in his second term he would have not kept supporting the Afghan religious extremists he himself had loosed on the Soviets (to the world’s everlasting betterment, as we see each day around us). Or that Carter would not have continued supporting murderous Latin American dictatorships and surrogate wars in Africa as he had done throughout his term. Or that he wouldn’t have continued the massive arms build-up he had launched, or continued saber-rattling at the Soviets, or proclaiming the American right to launch pre-emptive war if anyone threatened the vicious tyrants in the Middle East who supplied us with oil. And so on and on. (For more, see here.) But neither was Carter abandoned by ‘leftists’ to any significant degree. He too lost the votes of millions of ordinary Americans who had supported him four years previously. The third-party “spoiler,” Republican-turned-Independent John Anderson, ended up with less than 7 percent of the vote, with polls showing his meager numbers of supporters split equally between Democrats and Republicans.  Carter lost primarily because of a poor economy (not helped by his avowedly conservative economic policies), his own tepid ineptitude, and because of the Iran hostage crisis -- which occurred after his boneheaded mismanagement of the American reaction to the Iranian revolution, including his decision to allow the ousted Shah into the United States, and other measures which aided the revolution’s most radical elements and undercut the secular moderates at every turn. (A practice that has been faithfully followed by every American president since.) As for 2000, Gore actually won that election, of course, which moots Parry’s point about leftist lethargy robbing worthy Dems of the big brass ring. Of course, the corrupt system that Parry urges us to preserve by continuing to legitimize its perpetrators with our votes did take the presidency away from Gore – or rather, Gore meekly allowed them to take it without pursuing the constitutional challenge he could have made in Congress. And even though my family’s tenuous connection to Gore goes back a long way – I first met him when my father introduced the young Congressional candidate around our town during his first run for elective office, and my cousin once worked as his press aide – I have to say that Gore, as Bill Clinton’s very active vice president, had his hand in a number of activities that might conceivably make even the most acquiescent “leftist” hesitate just a teeny bit. But let’s let his distant cousin, Gore Vidal, tell it (from The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2001): “In order to be re-elected in 1996, the Clinton-Gore administration adopted a series of right-wing Republican, even protofascist, programs, with lots more prisons, death penalties, harassment of the poor, cries of terrorism, and implicitly, control by government over the citizenry.” Gore’s tenure at the top also saw the stripping of the financial controls on high finance – a surrender of Democratic (not to mention democratic) principles that ushered in the casino royale that led to the current – and increasingly permanent – economic crisis. And there was also the little matter of the deaths of at least 500,000 children from the US-UK sanctions on Iraq. (And half a million – a vast mountain of child corpses – is just what the Clinton-Gore administration were happy to admit to on national television, to show how tough and savvy they were. The real figure is certainly much higher.) Would Gore, who didn’t flinch at amassing that mountain of corpses, have launched a war against Iraq, as Bush – who, again, was given the presidency not by “leftists” but by a corrupt Supreme Court rife with partisan (and financial) conflicts of interest – did? Who knows? But we do know that it was the Clinton-Gore administration that signed bills formally committing the United States to “regime change” in Iraq. And Gore did pick the fanatical neo-con warmonger Joe Lieberman as his VP nominee. Gore had always aligned himself with the “Scoop Jackson” militarist wing of the party, unlike this father, Sen. Albert Gore Sr., who sacrificed his political career by publicly opposing the Vietnam War. Vidal again: Alone, I believe, among the usually war-minded Southern legislators, Albert Sr. spoke out against the long idiocy of the Vietnam War. Essentially, populists don’t like foreign wars, particularly in lands that they know nothing of and for no demonstrable goals. For exercising good judgment, Albert Sr. was defeated in 1970 by an opponent who used the familiar line that he was ‘out of touch with the voters of Tennessee. If this was true, the voters, supremely misled by three administrations, were seriously out of touch with reality. …. The classic Gores are against foreign military adventures. It was here that Al Jr. broke with tradition when he was one of only ten Democratic senators to support George [H.W.] Bush’s Persian Gulf caper [in 1991]; before that, he had approved Reagan’s Grenada invasion and Libyan strikes. Gore also went to the Vietnam War his father had opposed – albeit just for a short resume-building, non-combat tour as a military journalist. None of this is to exonerate the Republicans of the monstrous crimes they have most assuredly committed –and/or continued – during their turns at the top of the bipartisan helter-skelter. It is simply to note what the historical record clearly shows: first, that lack of ‘leftist’ support did not cost the Democrats the presidency in any of these years. And second, that the Democrats’ own crimes and atrocities and follies are part and parcel of a system of corporatist/militarist rule that has become so abominable that no one can without disgrace be associated with it. To see this clearly and say it plainly is not “vanity” or “perfectionism.” It is reality. And to deny this, distort it, and denounce those who no longer wish to legitimize it with their votes is not a courageous grappling with “moral ambiguity;” it is a self-infliction of moral blindness. III. And I think this is Parry’s main problem: he still doesn’t see – or can’t quite believe – what is going on right in front of his eyes. He thinks we have some kind of normal politics in some kind of normal nation. He can’t seem to grasp that a bipartisan system that has wrought the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children and a million more Iraqis in a war of aggression; that has killed countless thousands of Afghans in a pointless, atrocity-ridden, deeply corrupt occupation;  that operates a global death squad – out of the White House, directed by the president himself;  that kidnaps and tortures innocent people and then protects the torturers; that prosecutes truth-tellers and investigative reporters – like Robert Parry – who expose state crimes; that gorges its wealthy, greedy, above-the-law elites with tax cuts and bailouts and war profits and privileges without end while sharpening its bipartisan knives to gut the last, frayed remnants of the social safety net, is a system that has gone far beyond “moral ambiguity” and “imperfection” and “lesser evilism.” It is itself a product and producer of evil. Parry says there are no viable alternative parties to this double-headed beast. And he is right. He says there are no popular movements out there right now “that can significantly alter government policies strictly through civil disobedience or via protests in the streets.” And he is right. Therefore what is left to us, at the present moment, in this election, but the power of refusal? (Whether this is exercised by “throwing your vote away” on a third party or absenting yourself entirely from the legitimization and normalization of imperial monstrosity.)  Where is the dishonor, the vanity in such a stance, in refusing to accept and affirm mass murder, repression, corruption and injustice in an implacable system that offers no other choices?  Would Parry have told Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Boris Pasternak or Josef Brodsky or other Soviet dissidents that they should not have disassociated themselves from the implacable system they confronted? “You should join the Party, Aleksandr, you must work within the system. That’s the only way we’ll see real change.” Perhaps Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst  of the White Rose should have stifled their concerns about the “imperfections” of the German government and sought the path of “lesser evilism” instead, working to advance, say, Albert Speer or Herman Goring or some other figure who might have “done some rotten things” but “fewer rotten things than the other guy.”  Yes, I know the United States in 2012 is not the USSR or Hitler’s Germany. And Parry would doubtless say, “Of course they were right to disassociate themselves from such monstrous systems.” But where do you draw the line? How much evil is acceptable?  Is there a certain number of victims that a system must reach before one is allowed to disengage from it honorably and morally?  To murder six million in death camps or millions in purges is obviously unacceptable; but to kill 500,000 children – is that OK? A million innocent people in a war of aggression – is that beyond the pale? Or can you work with that, can you accommodate that, should you swallow these mountains of dead, washing them down with a big swig of moral ambiguity? Romney might well prove to be a “worse” president than Obama. (Although Parry does not address the realpolitik argument that a Romney victory would likely wake the ‘left’ from its slumber and cause it to oppose heinous crimes and vicious policies – aggressive war, murder programs, safety net slashing – that it is now happily supporting because a Democrat is doing them.) But that is not the issue. The issue is whether or not one gives legitimacy and justification to a brutal and unjust system by actively supporting and empowering it – and thus perpetuating its bipartisan evils far into the future. Robert Parry says we should do this. He says: if you don’t support one murderer, the other murderer (or rather, would-be murderer, since Obama has actually directed death squads and drone attacks that have killed hundreds of innocent people, including American children, while Romney is still just hoping to do so) might be worse. To choose one murderer over another murderer is the only moral choice open to us, Parry says.  To refuse to cooperate with evil – as Tolstoy did, as Solzhenitsyn did, as Sophie Scholl, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King did – is pointless, perfectionist, vain. That’s what Robert Parry evidently believes. But with all due respect to Parry and his valuable body of work, I disagree. On this, I will take my stand with Thoreau. I refuse to give this evil my assent.

How interesting, while the Dutch debate whether or not a mentally disabled man ought to be allowed to hold public office, Texas prepares to execute a disabled man! In Texas, those classified as “mildly retarded” may be executed. In the novel, the mentally disabled Lennie Small is executed by a friend after accidentally killing a woman on the farm where he works. Texas claims that anyone less impaired than the fictional Lennie should receive no constitutional protection from execution by the state.

Texas set to execute mentally disabled prisoner

Published: 6 August, 2012, 23:47

Edited: 7 August, 2012, 00:19

 

A medically diagnosed “mentally retarded” prisoner will be executed by lethal injection in Texas on Tuesday, even though it violates the US Constitution.

Texas rejects scientific consensus and uses its own definition of learning disabilities – based on Lennie Small, a central character in John Steinbeck’s classic novel, Of Mice and Men. In Texas, those classified as “mildly retarded” may be executed. In the novel, the mentally disabled Lennie Small is executed by a friend after accidentally killing a woman on the farm where he works. Texas claims that anyone less impaired than the fictional Lennie should receive no constitutional protection from execution by the state.

But Marvin Wilson, a 54-year old man awaiting execution for the 1992 murder of a police drug informant, has been diagnosed as “mentally retarded” by the state’s own courts. In addition to a number of tests carried out by a neuropsychologist, Wilson underwent an eight-hour interview that contributed to the diagnosis. His school records show that he reads and writes on the level of a seven-year old, and was kept in special education classes.Wilson struggled with simple tasks throughout his life. Being unable to manage his own money, cut the grass, dress himself properly or use a ladder, neuropsychologists determined his IQ was in the lowest percentile of the population. But the state of Texas, applying its Lennie Small criteria, did not carry out any cognitive assessments of the prisoner, and requested no testimony.

Many details in addition to the state’s disregard of Wilson’s mental disability leave questions unanswered. Wilson was one of two perpetrators in the murder, and his mental illness likely left him more vulnerable than his accomplice. The main witness against him was the accomplice's wife, who in trying to save her husband, claims Wilson pulled the trigger. Still, Wilson is due to be executed by lethal injection on Tuesday.

“If Wilson is executed on Tuesday, Texas will be rendering the US Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment prohibition on the execution of mentally retarded prisoners a prohibition in name only,” said the defendant’s lawyer.

In 2011, Texas executed 13 prisoners. Almost every year, Texas tops the list as the state with the most executions. It is also among the states with the largest population of inmates on death row, according to data from the Bureau of Justice. Wilson’s lawyer is petitioning the Supreme Court today for a stay of execution to provide additional time to prove the man’s disability.

If his petition is rejected, Wilson will be put to death in a country where the 49 other states would have let him live.

Obama threatens Senate with cybersecurity executive order

Obama threatens Senate with 

cybersecurity executive order

Published: 6 August, 2012, 22:35

Edited: 6 August, 2012, 22:38

 

Although the Senate voted against cybersecurity legislation demanding new regulations in cyberspace, President Obama may issue an executive order to have the bill implemented without the approval of Congress.

Regardless of Congressional rejection, Obama claims “we can’t wait,” and may issue an executive order forcing companies to implement new cybersecurity standards.

Opponents of the bill have already accused the president of making illegal power grabs with some of his previous executive actions. To date, he has issued more than 130.

“Moving forward, the President is determined to do absolutely everything we can to better protect our nation against today’s cyber threats and we will do that,” said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney in an e-mail to Washington newspaper The Hill.

The bill Senate voted down would require private companies and the government to share information regarding cybersecurity threats. It would also require better protection of critical pieces of infrastructure, like water filtration facilities and the power grid, and would give the Department of Homeland Security the authority to lead the cybersecurity team.

President Obama has long been urging Congress to pass the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, which was introduced by Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Susan Collins (R-ME). Last year, the White House proposed its own cybersecurity legislation, presenting more than 100 briefings on the issue and testifying at 17 Congressional hearings.

Last month, an Obama op-ed in the Wall Street Journal emphasized the need for greater cybersecurity legislation. The president painted a picture of how America's enemies could cause widespread destruction without setting foot in the US. (Be AFRAID, America, be very afraid!) All it takes, Obama said, is hackers who can break through private companies’ online security.

“In a future conflict, an adversary unable to match (translation: all countries of the world with the exception of Israel) our military supremacy on the battlefield might seek to exploit our computer vulnerabilities at home,” he wrote. “Taking down vital banking systems could trigger a financial crisis. The lack of clean water or functioning hospitals could spark a public health emergency. And as we’ve seen in past blackouts, the loss of electricity can bring businesses, cities and entire regions to a standstill.”

But those who voted against the bill said the legislation would burden businesses with unnecessary and ineffective regulations.

Only 52 Senators voted for the bill. 

And rather than wait for Congress to come to an agreement on cybersecurity, Obama could make a move that would enrage the bill’s opponents, bypassing the Senate’s decision and implementing the new laws without approval. Even Senator Collins, one of the bill’s creators, who has been fiercely lobbying for its support, is against the principle of forcefully implementing it.

“I’m not for doing by executive order what should be done by legislation,” she said.

On Monday, a senior law enforcement official speaking on condition of anonymity told the Los Angeles Times that Page had been “looked at” by federal investigators for several years but did not provide further information about what agency was interested. -- But, since he didn't peacefully picket military camps protesting US war efforts, he was deemed to be not of immediate and present danger, no doubt, I assume.

Sikh temple shooter hoped to inspire 

a wave of hate crimes

Published: 7 August, 2012, 21:22

Edited: 7 August, 2012, 21:22

 

Investigators say that the man responsible for the massacre at a Sikh temple outside of Milwaukee this weekend urged other white supremacists to take action in lieu of a more passive approach in regards to advancing their ideologies.

Before Wade Michael Page opened fire at an Oak Creek, Wisconsin Sikh temple on Sunday, authorities say he was active in online communities frequented by other alleged white supremacists and members of the Hammerskins Nation faction. In the communication he had with other like-minded individuals over the Web, authorities say Page made a point of telling others to aggressively advance their cause.

"If you are wanting to meet people, get involved and become active," the Associated Press reports Page wrote on the Web last year. "Stop hiding behind the computer or making excuses."

At one point a member of two metal bands considered part of the “hatecore” movement, Page implored his peers, "Stand and fight, don't run," in another post.

"Passive submission is indirect support to the oppressors. Stand up for yourself and live the 14 words,” Page wrote elsewhere, referring to a slogan adopted by other white supremacists and white nationalists first popularized by David Lane, a founding member of a separation hate faction called The Order. In full, the 14 words reads, "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

In an interview with GQ from 2001, a former bandmate of Page is quoted as calling the child he and his partner were expecting as “a little Adolf junior.” The band, Definite Hate, preached pro-white anthems that included lyrics such as “Our heritage is growing / Our people fighting back,” which they emphasized refrains of “Sieg heil!”

Two days after Page’s rampage left seven worshipers dead, investigators say they have yet to turn up any manifesto or other materials that would outline exactly why he targeted a Sikh temple but have uncovered a plethora of online correspondence that introduces them into his world of Internet hate chats.

"We have a lot of information to decipher, to put it all together before we can positively tell you what that motive is — if we can determine that," Oak Creek Police Chief John Edwards tells the press.

On Monday, a senior law enforcement official speaking on condition of anonymity told the Los Angeles Times that Page had been “looked at” by federal investigators for several years but did not provide further information about what agency was interested.

I think it a fairly safe assumption that ALL politicians are mentally disabled to one degree or another - that anyone would want to run for and continue to hold office in the present day ought to indict them as being not of sound mind. Well, no, that's cynical. But try to convince me that the ones who run in order to make money or wield power are NOT mentally DEFECTIVE for the job of serving their constituencies.

Statement or stunt? Ghent voters divided over mentally disabled candidate

Published: 7 August, 2012, 12:24

Edited: 7 August, 2012, 21:49

 

A mentally disabled man running for a seat in Ghent's City Council has split public opinion in the Belgian city. Some say all people are equal, while skeptics say the story puts political correctness and tolerance in the city on a search for limits.

Candidate Didier Peleman, 41, admits he has difficulties in speaking and writing, but says his condition should be no obstacle to a political career. Adopted by the Flemish Christian Democrats Party, he is hoping to get the desired seat.

“I've been active in community work for 11 years. Our party's slogan is “Everyone is included” so I want to be given the chance to be councilor, to express myself and help people with disabilities,” Didier Peleman told RT's Tesa Arcila.

He says he wants to encourage voluntary social work and make the city more “accessible” to people with handicaps by promoting the use of “simple language”.

The political party he represents makes no bones about their candidate, now well-known by the electorate.

The city of Ghent in Flanders is known for its tranquility and pretty medieval town center. But the story of the unlikely newcomer politician has made it into the headlines, stirring up the community.

“This is just a signal to the people in Ghent: also people with disabilities can run for elections,” insists the Head of the Flemish Christian Democrats Party Veli Yuksel. “They are in our community, they are here in Ghent. We cannot ignore them.”

It would be hard to find someone in Belgium who would say that people with mental challenges are not part of society. But some see the Christian Democrats Party’s move as inappropriate, raising questions on whether politicians have pushed the envelope too far this time.

“If he's physically disabled it's not ridiculous, but he has mental disabilities so that's another question, he may have problems with reasoning,” one Ghent resident told RT.

“I think he's not capable of making decisions for other people. I do voluntary work myself with mentally disabled people. I've got a lot of respect for them, but they have to realize themselves that they are not able to do everything,” another shared.

Other Ghent residents consider it nothing more than a publicity stunt.

“I know it's difficult when you criticize such a nice and good guy, but I don't want to criticize him as a person, I want to criticize his party for using him as a kind of political tool to get media attention at a time when we are close to the municipal election,” Ghent citizen Frederic Ranson argues.

Didier is well aware of the criticism, but he believes the energetic campaign he has spent leaves it for the voters to decide whether he is capable of governing people who are a little different from himself.

Some people here who present themselves as fighters for democracy have no idea of what democracy really is.

Inside Pussy Riot trial: Tweeting, doodling and depression (Op-Ed)

Published: 7 August, 2012, 15:24

Edited: 7 August, 2012, 16:35

 

Lawyers for plaintiffs were tweeting, defense lawyers were doodling, a police dog guarding the defendants was sleeping peacefully. The gallery was bored to the extent that it started watching the bailiffs staring at their beautifully manicured nails.

“Come in, but keep in mind you have a limit today: you can only enter five times,” said the bailiff standing at the entrance of Khamovnichesky Court.

“Why is that?”

“Um. You coming in and out and that distracts my subordinates from doing their work. How’s that for a reason?” he smiled smugly.

“Not good enough. In our country there are no limits on the number of times people can enter courts,” I replied and headed to the staircase where reporters spend hours waiting between the Pussy Riot case hearings.

The morning was quite entertaining. A strange man came in and started to sing a song he wrote about Pussy Riot:

“Pussy Riot, Pussy Riot called on Virgin Mary

Scared both the head priest and the Kremlin eagle.”

The bored reporters began to write down the lyrics. “Ah, if we only sang this song all together, with the tune played on balalaika,” the songwriter, who asked not to be named, sighed. No one spoke in favor of the idea, so he went away disappointed.

The time spent on the staircase in front of the courtroom seems to last forever. Not all reporters will be able to enter, so it’s very crowded. Everyone is doing something: one is reading a novel, another is softly humming a tune, someone else is making very talented caricatures. Some are making bets on whether there will be a motion to recuse Judge Syrova today.

Maria Alyokhina (RIA Novosti / Vitaliy Belousov)

At the beginning of the hearing a lawyer for the prosecution, Taratukhin, surprised everyone by starting to complain about Pussy Riot supporters’ unacceptable behavior. He said that after the Friday hearing they surrounded him and started shouting “Shame on you, executioners!”

“It seems that Pussy Riot supporters, who declare themselves democracy advocates, have absolutely no idea about democracy,” he said. “It seems that they divide everyone into two groups – people who have the right to freedom of conscience and religion and the ones that don’t.”

Considering the majority of those present in the courtroom (apart from the reporters) were Pussy Riot supporters, needless to say the only person this speech could have impressed was the judge. Judge Syrova, also a target of severe criticism, nodded and sympathized, but the respite didn’t last long.

Defense Lawyer Volkova had prepared yet another motion. It was quite a speech. First of all, Volkova decided to completely discredit the results of the expertise that stated which religious norms Pussy Riot had violated. The expert had made references to the Council in Trullo Canons, some of which the lawyer decided to cite as well.

“Actually, our Patriarch has breached those canons as well. For example, the 9th Canon of the Council in Trullo forbids the ordination priests before they reach the age of 30, and Patriarch Kirill became one at 23. Would you say he needs to be tried for that? And the 11th Canon forbids talking to Jews and washing in the same bathhouses as them. Why does the expert quote the Council in Trullo Canons and not other historical religious doctrines? For example, the Code of Hammurabi or the Sobornoye Ulozheniye [a Moscow State code of laws dating back to 1649]?”

The lawyer then went on to analyze the semantics of the words “shit” and “bitch”, which the expert called “the lexis of rectal semantics.”

Judge Syrova: “I call a break so that the lawyer can put her thoughts in order and put the motion forward in a brief manner without digressing.”

Volkova: “I don’t need a break!”

The judge stood up and left. That meant a break.

I called my mother right away and asked her, as a specialist in philology, to tell me about the lexis of rectal semantics that she had kept from me all these years. My mom couldn’t help laughing.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (RIA Novosti / Vitaliy Belousov)

After the break the atmosphere turned boring and depressing. Volkova kept putting forward motions, of which she seemed to have an endless number.

The lawyers’ speeches were passionate and very long. I was looking at the two female guards. They were standing next to me and staring at their manicured nails intently. One had a French manicure; the other’s nails were painted red and had rhinestones on them. Embarrassed, I hid my own nails. Where do they find time to do all this? These formidable women stayed by the defendants’ side all the time and were alert, content and had manicured nails. It was especially noticeable in contrast with the pale and tired Pussy Riot girls. At that moment I noticed that I wasn’t the only one watching the convoy guards staring at their nails. Yes, it was that boring.

“I want to put forward a motion!” Volkova said in her authoritative voice.

“Another one?” someone behind my back asked incredulously.

Volkova put forward motions to subpoena the experts responsible for the expert conclusion used in the case and other experts, and, again, a motion to recuse the judge. The seventh one. It was clear that neither would be approved.

Amid the intense discussions the judge, apparently, lost her balance for a moment and uttered a swear word. The prosecution called the defense incompetent, rhetorically asking “Is it normal for a lawyer to be 20 minutes late for the hearing because he’s busy giving an interview? And [defense] Counselor Feigin should get his Criminal Code articles straight.”

Defendant Tolokonnikova said from the dock, “I’m treated like a dumb animal, I’m just the body that gets delivered to the courtroom. The court does not respect our rights! It ignores us!”

It is impossible to tell how many motions were put forward today.

During one of the breaks a reporter came up to Feigin and asked for an interview. “Just tell them it’s a shitstorm,” his colleague said.

Of course, almost all the motions were declined and the court had only one thing to do: question the defendants.

Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich all said the same thing. They told the court how Pussy Riot was created and why they performed their song in Christ the Savior Cathedral.

Yekaterina Samutsevich: “On September 24th Dmitry Medvedev announced that Vladimir Putin was going to run for president, which would result in 12 more years of what they understand as stability. This stability looks more like seizing power, and this triggered the creation of Pussy Riot. We performed illegally because opposing the authorities and asking them for a permission to do so would just be weird.”

Maria Alyokhina: “Any type of expression has a form. The very definition of a punk group implies unexpected performances. Our lyrics are not slogans, they’re a form of expression, and the baseness of the language is an experiment, a satire of sorts. We like absurd notions, Your Honor, even in terms of this trial. The prosecution alleges that we were motivated by hatred. But where is this hatred? We can admit we’ve made a mistake and apologize, but you walk all over our apologies. We don’t feel any hatred, our motivation was and is pure.”

Yekaterina Samutsevich (RIA Novosti / Vitaliy Belousov)

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova: “I was outraged at the Patriarch saying that ‘Putin has fixed the crookedness of history.’ The phrase resembles what [Deputy PM Vladislav] Surkov or [Chechen leader Ramzan] Kadyrov said about Putin’s power being God-given. I maintain that our motivation was political. The prosecution and the court ignore it, trying to interpret our actions as motivated by religious hatred and hostility. We haven’t done anything aggressive or violent, and we haven’t insulted either God or religion. The phrase ‘holy shit’ means that there is something very unpleasant happening, which is how we feel about what’s going on in our country.”

Well, all the witnesses have been called, the defendants made their statements. What remain are arguments in court, the verdict and any subsequent sentence.

The defense lawyers coming out of the Khamovnichesky Court were greeted with applause. It’s not surprising since there are always Pussy Riot supporters in front of the court, and today just one sad man was standing several paces away, holding a poster that showed he was against Pussy Riot.

PS A police officer caught up with me unexpectedly and asked, “Listen, why are your colleagues, and others who run around tweeting things, such jerks? Why do they always yell? They applaud these defense lawyers but scream terrible things at others, yell at us, why?”

I said: “Listen, you cannot be serious. Journalists are all different. You guys, Special Forces I mean, are different also, right? Policemen are all different, as well as doctors, teachers, priests… we are all different. You kicked someone downstairs yesterday… So don’t tell me…”

I left and then remembered how on Friday one liberal young woman yelled at one of the officers, maybe even this one:“You listen to me, listen to us – highly-educated, smart people who make good money…”

The officer quietly replied, “Well, educated people don’t behave this way.”

Later another “fighter against the bloody regime” acted like a jerk in court, when they refused to let him into the hearing. He was then removed from the building rather roughly and the internet went berserk about the police abuse in the court building. And nobody bothered to mention that the man was saying rude things, and that he had already been removed from the courtroom before for blatantly taking pictures, which is not allowed. That’s why they wouldn’t let him in.

I felt a little embarrassed when I remembered that. Apparently Counselor Taratukhin was right when he said this morning,“Some people here who present themselves as fighters for democracy have no idea of what democracy really is.”

I guess that’s why the bailiffs in the courtroom started taking pictures of how journalists entered the courtroom and how they behaved in the hallways.

Outside the court building I saw a policeman sitting on the curb and discussing with some pro-Pussy Riot protesters what an outrage our court system is.

And don’t tell me that this is not surreal.

Lidia Vasilevskaya for RT

The ensuing 67 years since the atomic bombings of HIsoshima and Nagasaki have seen U.S. stewardship of its nuclear policy and weaponry nudged to the brink of catastrophe by ignorance, arrogance, and mechanical malfunction.

Six Decades of Miscalculations and Ethical Lapses

After Hiroshima: Lessons Learned?

by LEE GAILLARD

Warning signs appeared from the start. The world’s first nuclear explosion on July 16, 1945, saw the prototype of the Fat Man plutonium bomb that would pulverize Nagasaki detonate with a violence four times the Los Alamos Lab’s estimates. The Little Boy uranium bomb soon to be dropped on Hiroshima? Never tested.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the worst U.S. air attacks on Japan during World War II. The March 9-10, 1945, B-29 firebombing raid on Tokyo incinerated over 100,000 victims—more than died immediately following either nuclear attack. But not until Aug. 6 and 9, when they saw two entire cities destroyed by a single atomic bomb apiece, would Emperor Hirohito and his military leaders finally consider surrender.

Military analysts say nuclear weapons shortened the Pacific war by at least two years, preserved half a million American lives that would have been lost invading the Japanese home islands, and saved more than four million Japanese soldiers and civilians from death in battle or by starvation.

Nevertheless, the ensuing 67 years have seen U.S. stewardship of its nuclear policy and weaponry nudged to the brink of catastrophe by ignorance, arrogance, and mechanical malfunction.

Take the March 1, 1954, Bravo test shot of the first dry-fuel hydrogen bomb, its fusion reactions stoked by powdered lithium deuteride. At 15 megatons (a megaton = a million tons of TNT), it remains the largest explosion triggered by the United States—a blast exceeding 1,000 times the power of the uranium bomb that had leveled Hiroshima.

But at three times its projected yield, this Pacific test triggered frightening unintended consequences. With an initial fireball four miles wide, its roiling radioactive cloud eventually reached 130,000 feet and a breadth of 66 miles. It damaged a massive RB-36D reconnaissance bomber flying at 40,000 feet 15 miles from ground zero. Twenty miles away, radioactive fallout trapped the firing team in its concrete bunker. And 82 miles away, additional fallout contaminated a Japanese fishing boat, hospitalizing its crew—one of whom died. Radiation sickness then forced the evacuation of 264 U.S. personnel and nearby islanders. Three additional blasts in this Operation Castle test series also vastly exceeded predictions.

In the first B-52 airdrop of a 3.8 MT hydrogen bomb in 1956, the pilot missed his target island by four miles. In 1971 beneath the Aleutian island of Amchitka, the Cannikan test of the Spartan ABM warhead set off an underground blast of five megatons in one of the planet’s most seismically sensitive fault zones. The resulting tremblor of 7.0 on the Richter scale could have triggered a massive regional earthquake and tsunami.

The list goes on.

And what happens when presidential advisors and military leaders lose clarity of judgment and moral focus? At least three times from 1953 through the Berlin Wall Crisis of 1961, Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy were urged to launch preemptive nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union—by such civilian and military leaders as Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze, Strategic Air Command’s  Gen. Thomas Power, and retired Air Force Gen. James Doolittle. Then, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, two senators along with presidential advisor McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff pressured Kennedy to order preemptive strikes against Cuba, followed by an invasion.

Fortunately Kennedy said no, for optimistic intelligence estimates were soon proven wrong. Russian crews were poised to prepare SS-4 missiles for launch against Washington, D.C., and southeastern U.S. cities, their megaton warheads having arrived in Cuba on Oct. 4. Moreover, nine Russian tactical nuclear missiles were unexpectedly available to cover approaches to potential invasion beaches.

“Never before or since,” writes historian Donald Kagan, “has the world been brought so close to nuclear war.”

Then, in 2002, President George W. Bush withdrew the United States from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with Russia after releasing a Nuclear Posture Review that considered preemptive nuclear strikes and potential development of new ‘mininukes’ for use against deeply buried bunkers—despite U.S. endorsement of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty…

Today seven other nations possess nuclear weapons. North Korea has announced it also has them, with Iran moving toward their development. Given this burgeoning availability of nuclear weaponry, responsible global nuclear stewardship is needed now more than ever. If other governments look to the world’s only remaining superpower for leadership in this endeavor, careful examination reveals that more than six decades of miscalculations and ethical lapses suggest that the United States is, at best, a dubious role model.

Lee Gaillard, A resident of Saranac Lake NY,  writes frequently on defense issues and military technology; he has written on nuclear stewardship for The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and the Center for Defense Information. His background includes experience in publishing, education, and industry; his book reviews and articles have appeared in The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Times, U.S. Naval Institute PROCEEDINGS, The Marine Corps Times, Naval History, Defense News, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Submarine Review, and other newspapers and magazines across the U.S.

Sources

Cowley, Robert (ed.). What If? 2: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001.

Gribkov, Anatoli I. Operation ANADYR: U.S. and Soviet Generals Recount the Cuban Missile Crisis. Chicago: Edition Q, 1994.

Hansen, Chuck. U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History. New York: Aerofax, a division of Crown Publishers, 1988.

Kagan, Donald. On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

Kaplan, Fred. “JFK’s First Strike Plan.” Atlantic Monthly Oct. 2001: 81-86.

Light, Michael. 100 Suns: 1945-1962. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Miller, Pam. Nuclear Flashback: Report of a Greenpeace Scientific Expedition to Amchitka Island,

Rhodes, Richard. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

— The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Touchstone, a division of Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Truman, Harry S. Memoirs by Harry S. Truman (vol. 1). Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1955.

Disarmament Protests and Massacres

Why Won’t the Media Criticize Harsh Treatment of Pacifists?

by JOHN LaFORGE

“How brave it is to believe that in today’s world, reasoned, nonviolent protest will register, will matter. But will it?… The threshold of horror has been ratcheted up so high that nothing short of genocide or the prospect of nuclear war merits mention. Peaceful resistance is treated with contempt. Terrorism’s the real thing.” …

— Arundhati Roy

Initial court appearances, known and unknown

James Holmes was in court Mon., July 30, in Aurora, Colorado, charged with 142 counts of murder, etc. The whole world knows of this initial hearing for the alleged murderer/terrorist because every detail of Holmes’ life is now regularly put at the top of TV and radio news shows and above the fold in every newspaper. Someone kills a lot of people and the media swarms.

Not so if your action was a peaceful attempt to prevent massacres.

On exactly the same day, the first court appearance took place in Knoxville, Tenn. for disarmament activists Michael Walli, 63, of Washington, DC, Megan Rice, 82, of New York City, and Greg Boertje-Obed, 57, of Duluth, Minn. (Greg is a married father of one and a former ROTC medical clerk trainee.)

You won’t have heard or read a word of these pacifists because their action was free of violence and mayhem. On the contrary, their protest was against nuclear madness and the continuing waste of hundreds of billions of dollars on nuclear warhead production, and it involved hoisting a banner and issuing an indictment against illegal U.S. weapons.

Early on July 28, the three walked into one of the country’s “most militarily secure” sites — the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. — and conducted a bold protest against the government’s plans to spent $80 billion on upgrading the nuclear weapons production complex.

Unarmed activists walk around nuclear “security”: Facing 1 year in prison and $100,000 fine for protest

According to statements released by the three and phone calls from Blount County jail in Tenn. where they are being held, they entered Y-12 before dawn, passed through four fences and entered the maximum security “Use of deadly force authorized” area, where they hoisted banners, spray painted messages and poured their blood (drawn by a nurse) on the Highly Enriched (weapon-grade) Uranium Materials Facility.

Appearing before federal magistrate Bruce Guyton, the three face one charge of federal trespass which carries a max of one year in prison and/or a $100,000 fine. Felony charges may be pending.

The indictment of nuclear weapons production delivered by Rice, Walli and Boertje-Obed cites U.S. Constitutional and Humanitarian Treaty Law, as well as the Nuremberg Principles. It says in part, “The ongoing building and maintenance at Y-12 constitutes war crimes that can and should be investigated and prosecuted by judicial authorities. We are required by International Law to denounce and resist known crimes.”

The action, which they called “Transform Now Plowshares,” is one of a long tradition of Plowshares actions in the U.S. and around the world which challenge or interfere with war plans and weapons of mass destruction, and which often take inspiration from the Old Testament prophesy to “turn swords into plowshares and study war no more.

At Y-12, construction is under way to replace facilities for producing “enriched uranium” for H-bombs. It is budgeted to cost over $6.5 billion. Stealing these funds from hungry and impoverished people forces them to starve, hence the protesters’ use of blood to “name” Y12.

Anniversary of U.S. Massacres at Hiroshima & Nagasaki

You may have thought that the nuclear war budget was shrinking and that the President honestly meant something when he spoke of “a world without nuclear weapons,” but you’d be mistaken.

The President and Congress have funded new construction of a pair of projects at Y-12 — one of which was reached by the protesters — for producing uranium for new U.S. H-bombs.

One of the laws mentioned by the activists, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968, obliges the U.S. to undertake complete nuclear disarmament. Y12 openly contravenes this law. 

While the world notes the anniversary of the U.S. atomic bomb massacres at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Greg, Megan and Michael wait in jail to endure the wrath of an embarrassed nuclear weapons establishment.

Prosecutors who will advance the federal case against them may not want to call their government work “protection of the Bomb” — especially in the face of international law requiring its abolition — but that’s what it is.

Still, the media won’t criticize harsh treatment of the pacifists. While the press over-kills the multiple murder story in Colorado, our TV nation seems to agree with George Carlin: The United States isn’t warlike, it just likes war.

John LaForge is on the staff of Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog and environmental justice group in Wisconsin.