HAPPY ZOMBIE JEBUS DAY!: “This is Ishtar”
1
Category Archives: History
REASON: “History Channel’s ‘The Bible’ in Under Ten Minutes” / Dusty Smith
ENLIGHTENMENT: “Better Read Than Dead” / Mr Fish
h/t: Truthdig.com
BOOK REVIEW: “Macro Cultural Psychology: A Political Philosophy of Mind” / Carl Ratner
Society—especially capitalist societies, but also some earlier types such as feudalism—is divided by class, with a minority constituting a ruling class that lives by exploiting the direct producers. Thus, the majority is exploited and hence oppressed.
[…]
. . . [O]ne of capitalists’ favorite ideological ploys: individualism. We are the masters of our own fate, not society and its culture. If we fail, it is our own fault. We simply did not try hard enough or follow the right path. Individualism favors self-blame and a refusal even to look for social causes.
[…]
Enforced subordination calls forth coping reactions and leads to identities grounded in how well we manage to cope.
Examples of this kind of coping include what can be called “the good soldier” and “the sexy woman.” In the former, a person prides him or herself on the ability to demonstrate undying loyalty to a superior. In the latter, a woman prides herself on her ability to manipulate men in a world where men are dominant.
Related articles
- I’m not proud of ‘my’ country – it isn’t mine (morningstaronline.co.uk)
- Be ruthlessly free of society psychologically (teachingsofmasters.wordpress.com)
HISTORICAL REVISIONISM: Chris Hedges / “White Power to the Rescue”
[…]
Memphis, on the eve of the Civil War, was one of the biggest slave markets in the South. After the war the city was an epicenter for Ku Klux Klan terror that included lynching, the nighttime burning of black churches and schools and the killing of black leaders and their white supporters, atrocities that continued into the 20th century. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.
[…]
[Black journalist Ida B. Wells] investigations revealed that lynching was fundamentally a mechanism to rid white businessmen of black competitors. . . . [T]he lynching[s], she wrote, was “[a]n excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the nigger down.’”
[…]
The steady rise of ethnic nationalism over the past decade, the replacing of history with mendacious and sanitized versions of lost glory, is part of the moral decay that infects a dying culture. It is a frightening attempt, by those who are desperate and trapped, to escape through invented history their despair, impoverishment and hopelessness. It breeds intolerance and eventually violence. Violence becomes in this perverted belief system a cleansing agent, a way to restore a lost world. There are ample historical records that disprove the myths espoused by the neo-Confederates, who insist the Civil War was not about slavery but states’ rights and the protection of traditional Christianity.
OP-ED: Thom Hartmann and Sam Sacks / “The Founding Fathers Versus The Gun Nuts”
Sorry, gun nuts, you’re on the wrong side of our Founding Fathers.
For example, in a tirade against CNN’s Piers Morgan, Alex Jones argued, “The Second Amendment isn’t there for duck hunting. It’s there to protect us from tyrannical government.”
It’s an argument that’s often echoed by gun nuts – as though their fully-loaded AR-15 with 100-bullet drum will keep them safe from Predator drones and cruise missiles. If indeed this is the true intent of the 2nd Amendment, protection from the government, then here’s the newsflash: you guys are woefully outgunned. And the 2nd Amendment would have allowed you to own a cannon and a warship, so America today would look more like Somalia today with well-armed warlords running their own little fiefdoms in defiance of the federal government.
But luckily, this was never the intent of the 2nd Amendment. Our Founding Fathers never imagined a well-armed citizenry to keep the American government itself in check. It was all about protecting the American government from both foreign and domestic threats.
Poring over the first-hand documents from 1789 that detailed the Fist Congress’ debate on arms and militia, you’ll see a constant theme: the 2nd Amendment was created to protect the American government.
GREEN PARTY: Chris Hedges / “Why I’m Voting Green”
The November election is not a battle between Republicans and Democrats. It is not a battle between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. It is a battle between the corporate state and us. . . .
[…]
All the major correctives to American democracy have come through movements and third parties that have operated outside the mainstream. Few achieved formal positions of power. These movements built enough momentum and popular support, always in the face of fierce opposition, to force the power elite to respond to their concerns. Such developments, along with the courage to defy the political charade in the voting booth, offer the only hope of saving us from Wall Street predators, the assault on the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, the rise of the security and surveillance state and the dramatic erosion of our civil liberties.
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any,” Alice Walker writes.
It was the Liberty Party that first fought slavery. It was the Prohibition and Socialist parties, along with the Suffragists, that began the fight for the vote for women and made possible the 19th Amendment. It was the Socialist Party, along with radical labor unions, that first battled against child labor and made possible the 40-hour workweek. It was the organizing of the Populist Party that gave us the Immigration Act of 1924 along with a “progressive” tax system. And it was the Socialists who battled for unemployment benefits, leading the way to the Social Security Act of 1935. No one in the ruling elite, including Franklin Roosevelt, would have passed this legislation without pressure from the outside.
Related articles
- What’s wrong with lesser evilism (dandelionsalad.wordpress.com)
HISTORY: Chris Rodda / “FYI Republicans: Tocqueville Was Actually Insulting America When He Referred to it Being “Exceptional””
If a drinking game had been made out of Republicans calling America “exceptional” at the RNC, the hospitals would have been full of people with alcohol poisoning this week. Unfortunately, and a bit embarrassingly, what these exceptional Americans don’t seem to realize is that the term “American exceptionalism” actually comes from an insult to America, not a compliment.
IN REMEMBRANCE: Anthony Arnove / “Howard Zinn Turns 90: The Great Legacy of the People’s Historian”
Howard Zinn would have turned 90 this Friday if his seemingly boundless energy and youthfulness had not been cut short in January 2010.
[…]
It’s worth remembering that A People’s History of the United States first came out in 1980 as a tide of reaction was seeking to bury the social movements that inspired Howard’s book and which he saw as the hope for the future.
[…]
Howard challenged these ideas in a terrific speech he gave in 1970: “If you don’t think, if you just listen to TV and read scholarly things, you actually begin to think that things are not so bad, or that just little things are wrong. But you have to get a little detached, and then come back and look at the world, and you are horrified. So we have to start from that supposition—that things are really topsy-turvy.”
Howard had that rare ability to step back and help us understand our topsy-turvy world primarily because he approached politics and history from the standpoint of someone who thought it was possible to turn our world right side up — to put people before profit, the environment before the interests of mining companies.
¡Howard Zinn presente!
Related articles
- Lies the Debunkers Told Me: How Bad History Books Win Us Over (theatlantic.com)
EXPOSITORY ESSAY: John Kelly / “Robert Ingersoll, the ‘Great Agnostic’”
Photo credit: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Robert G. Ingersoll, shown between 1865 and 1880.
What was Robert Ingersoll’s address? Answer Man is confident many readers are wondering, “Who the heck was Robert Ingersoll?”
Well, he is the most famous American you never heard of.
Col. Ingersoll — he fought for the Union in the Civil War after raising a cavalry regiment from Illinois — was a lawyer who counted the wealthy and powerful among his clients. He was a committed Republican who stumped for GOP candidates. He was a silver-tongued orator whose lectures drew thousands — and earned him thousands of dollars a pop. He was also, by all accounts, a really nice guy.
And Ingersoll accomplished all of this without believing in God.
Ingersoll’s disbelief was the quality that most fascinated the 19th-century audiences that packed theaters to hear him speak. He was known as the Great Agnostic. Some called him blasphemer or infidel.
Always Question Authority 