Peace, Freedom, and Justice Redux

When a nation goes to war, the first casualty is, of course, Peace. The second is the Freedom of its citizens. And the third is Justice. Peace, Freedom, and Justice are so dear to us that I wonder why we give them up in order to make war. ~ The Rev. Nicholas L. Temple, sermon of March 10th, 2002

In the weeks and months following the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, my critical (suspicious? paranoid?) mind went into high gear. In other words, I was thunkin'. My primary question was:

What is the truth about and Who benefits (cui bono ) from the 9/11 attacks, the War on Terrorism, and The Patriot Act?

My answers, of course, led to more questions, the majority of which have not and may never be answered.

• The most frightening of these was a recognition was that the only ones who really benefited from the 9/11 attacks are the extreme right-wing proponents of a powerful, autocratic government in the United States.
• The War on Terrorism has engaged the United States in a war that probably cannot be won and will last not years, but generations.
• The Patriot Act provided the right wing with almost all of the police powers limiting personal freedom and civil liberties that they have been seeking for many years.

For a long time I believe that I was alone in asking these questions. The citizens of the United States, baited by the fear mongering of the Bush/Chaney administration, seemed to frightened to ask probing questions. It has only been in recent months that I have realized that others have been asking the same questions and reaching similar conclusions:

Many adherents of the 9/11 Truth movement suspect that United States government insiders played a part in the attacks, or at the very least knew they were coming and let them occur anyway.

Those within the movement who argue that insiders within the United States government were directly responsible for the September 11 attacks, often allege that the attacks were planned and executed in order to provide the U.S. with a pretext for going to war in the Middle East and, by extension, as a means of consolidating and extending the power of the Bush Administration. According to these allegations, this would have given the Bush administration the justification to clamp down on civil liberties and invade Afghanistan and Iraq to ensure future supplies of oil. In some cases, hawks in the White House, especially former Vice President Dick Cheney , and members of the PNAMC, a neoconservative think tank, have been accused of involvement in or awareness of the alleged plot. ~ Wikipedia, 9/11 Truth movement

We may never truly know what was behind the 9/11 attacks. Perhaps Attorney General Eric Holder 's decision to bring Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other accused terrorists to justice in a New York federal court rather than behind closed doors of a military tribunal may give us some insights into the truth. Perhaps that's why the right-wing is so opposed to a public trial. I don't know.

I do know that history attests that Peace, Freedom and Justice have always been casualties of the War. History also teaches that once a people have surrendered to the state, it is very difficult win them back. 

Please

In Memoriam: Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela

July 18, 1018 - December 5, 2013

Rest in Peace,

Honorable Sir

There Has Got to Be A Revolution!

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,--That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness...

Impeach them, recall them, arrest them 

& charge them with treason.

Just

GET THEM OUT OF CONGRESS!

I shall publish lots more graphics on this subject in a few days.

A Fundamentalist Danger to Modernity

I first published a version of this post almost eight years under the title A Fundamentalist is a Fundamentalist. It's time to share it again.

Karen Armstrong

If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology. ~ Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness 

Several years ago I received an email that included a photograph of a sign that was, I believe, in front of a church. The sign made some rather nasty comments about The Qur’ān (Quran, Quraan, Koran, Koraan, Qoraan, Qoran or however you want to transliterate the Arabic), the Holy Book of Islam. I can only assume that whoever put that sign up had never read The Qur’ān—or if they had, they read those selected excerpts that I have seen distributed to “prove” something negative about Islam.

I also suspect that the one who created that sign was a Christian fundamentalist. Only a religious fundamentalist could feel so threatened by a faith different from their own. Of course, where fundamentalists are concerned, they feel most threatened by those followers of their own faith who are not threatened by the present age.

Click to Enlarge

When it comes to religious fundamentalism, I firmly believe that a fundamentalist is a fundamentalist is a fundamentalist! It doesn’t matter whether the fundamentalist is a Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu, or a Christian. The basic driving consideration of all fundamentalist is a fear of modernity—a fear that their beliefs are threatened, that their lifestyle may be obliterated.

a fundamentalist is a fundamentalist is a fundamentalist

I first came to this understanding when I read Karen Armstrong’s insightful book, The Battle for God. I think I have probably recommended Armstrong’s book to more people than any other book I have read, except for certain books of the Bible, such as the Gospel According to St. John. I’ve recommended The Battle for God to so many people because in it Armstrong discusses one of the most powerful and potentially destructive forces in our world today: religious fundamentalism.

She points out that fundamentalism has risen in every faith movement for the same reason: a fear of modernity. These fundamentalists perceive their way of life as being threatened—and often for compelling, historic reasons. Their “enemies” are not usually the practitioners of other faiths, but their co-religionists who they perceive as having been co-opted into the ways of the modern world. Like most conservatives, they long to return to what they believe was a simpler and less complicated time, that probably never existed outside their fantasy. As June Reizner’s song, Barry’s Boys, proclaimed:

Back to when the poor were poor and rich were rich, And you felt so damn secure just knowing which were which.

In an interview published on Powells.com, Karen Armstrong discusses how all fundamentalists are alarmed by their perception that their way of life is being annihilated:

Dave: But in regards to fundamentalism, as differently as it may have manifested in each religion, something all fundamentalists share is the fear of annihilation, the fear that their way of life will not survive. And it's a legitimate fear.

Armstrong: It's true. In the Muslim countries, that has been immensely true. In Judaism, fundamentalism took major leaps forward, first just after the Holocaust, then again after the 1973 war when Israel suddenly felt vulnerable again and felt its isolation in the Middle East. Then look at Muslims whose modernizers were aggressive and mowed you down in a mosque if you didn't wear modern dress; or took women's veils off in the street and ripped them to pieces in front of them with a bayonet; tortured mullahs; abolished Sufi orders and forced them underground This is experienced by the ordinary Muslim in the street as an assault against religion, and yet what are these modernizers supposed to do? They've got to modernize fast. They've got to secularize. Somehow we've got to see that this has been counterproductive.

What we know from the past is that when fundamentalists are attacked, whether they're Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, they become more extreme. Certainly that happened in this country at the time of the Scopes trial. The ridicule they faced at the hands of the secular press led fundamentalists to go from the left of the political spectrum to the right, where they've remained.

And so I feel comfortable in saying that a fundamentalist is a fundamentalist is a fundamentalist! And to deal with the fundamentalist forces behind what is being called “the War of Terrorism,” we had better be aware of the dynamics of fundamentalism or we shall certainly pay a very heavy price! And I commend to you The Battle for God; it is well worth the time you will spend reading it.

For further reading, I suggest:

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Greedy Gus or Greedy Old Politician

I am tried of referring to U.S. right-wing politicians as lackeys of fascist capitalism and Servants of the One per Cent and like terms. Thus, I have created my own euphemisms for them:

Maybe Greedy Gus or perhaps Greedy Old Politician.  Whatever, the operative term is 

GREEDY

Would Modern U.S. Right-Wingers Have Signed the Declaration of Independence?

Would Modern U.S. right-wingers have signed the Declaration of Independence? 


I doubt it. Without me taking time to write the details here, I refer you to these articles:


Declaration of Independence


compared with the following:

• Political Views of the Left-wing and Right-wing
• Right-wing politics
• Christian fundamentalism
• Social stratification
• Social Darwinism
• The International Monarchist League
• Patriarchy
• Social interventionism
• The consequences of the politics of selfishness
• Fascism
• Fascism U.S.A.

If you aren't into (serious) reading on this 4th of July holiday, please consider the following:

Enjoy this Independence Day!

If the Right-Wing has its way,

we may have very few left to celebrate.

For further reading on this subject, Sometimes Saintly Nick recommends: