Later this month in Geneva, the United Nations will be holding what it calls the Durban Review Conference (a.k.a. “Durban II”) to “evaluate progress towards the goals set by the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa, in 2001.” Part of the agenda at Durban II will be the recently passed resolution entitled “Combating Defamation of Religions.” The resolution, among other things, “[s]tresses the need to effectively combat defamation of all religions and incitement to religious hatred, against Islam and Muslims in particular.” In practical terms, it calls upon Western countries to pass laws prohibiting ‘insults’ to Islam (and other religions, theoretically) as part of a larger struggle against racism. But hardly anyone in the West seems to think this is a good idea. The opposition to the resolution is making some strange bedfellows, uniting opposition from Christian activists to secular humanists, from Lou Dobbs to the Obama administration.

Every year or so, a resolution Combating Defamation of Religion is floated by a member of the OIC; the first incarnation was Pakistan’s “Defamation of Islam” draft resolution in 1999, which passed through the Commission of Human Rights. Since 2005, the resolution has been passed by the general assembly three times, and each time, the language becomes a little more inclusive. But the goal remains the same—to pressure Western governments to pass the kind of blasphemy laws which would outlaw insults to Islam typified by the Danish Muhammad cartoons or the Islamophobia of the right-wing media. In this sense, it’s not surprising that free-speech advocates are against this alongside reactionary elements who claim that this resolution is the beginning of a Muslim conspiracy to impose sharia law in the United States.

The latest draft resolution, which is non-binding (not that the more hysterical Westerners care), is the culmination of a two-decade campaign by a group of majority-Muslim governments called the Organization of the Islamic Conference, founded in 1969 in Morocco. The OIC is a permanent observer at the UN and has a parallel structure to the UN itself; the OIC has a secretary-general and forms committees and programs to foster ties and development among its memeber states. But the most striking parallel to the UN is that the OIC has issued its own universal declaration of human rights—the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI), intended as a response to the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). As one might expect, Cairo outlines a different spin on which human rights are actually universal from those liberal internationalists who founded the United Nations.

Right off the bat, the differences between the two human rights declarations become clear. THE UNDHR’s first article says, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” The CDHRI’s first article says, “All human beings form one family whose members are united by their subordination to Allah and descent from Adam. All men are equal in terms of basic human dignity and basic obligations and responsibilities, without any discrimination on the basis of race, colour, language, belief, sex, religion, political affiliation, social status or other considerations. The true religion is the guarantee for enhancing such dignity along the path to human integrity.” It goes on to say, “All human beings are Allah’s subjects… no one has superiority over another except on the basis of piety and good deeds.”

There is a direct line between the CDHRI and the resolutions Combating Religious Defamation (CDoR). After the OIC and the UN’s Commission on Human Rights organized a seminar entitled “Enriching the Universality of Human Rights: Islamic Perspectives on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” in 1998, the first CDoR was passed in the Commission without a vote. (This first resolution also celebrates, with tragic irony, “the year 2001 as the United Nations Year of Dialogue among Civilizations.”)

The problem with the UDHR is that it posits that individuals have civil liberties, but it doesn’t explain why we should. Similarly, the US Declaration of Independence says it holds truths to be self-evident and that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, which has the effect of rooting those rights in theology. Likewise, the Cairo declaration says, “fundamental rights and freedoms according to Islam are an integral part of the Islamic religion and that no one shall have the right as a matter of principle to abolish them either in whole or in part or to violate or ignore them in as much as they are binding divine commands.” If we base our liberties on our religious tradition, it seems hypocritical for us not to let others base their liberties on theirs.

In truth, most Westerners don’t have a fully realized conception of why we have civil liberties in the first place, save that it’s the law. I know I didn’t until I got to college and read the works of John Stuart Mill. Mill, who wrote in mid-nineteenth century England, recognized that merely having a democracy was no guarantee of freedom, particularly for minorities. As the saying goes, democracy is three wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner. Mill’s writings on civil liberties have everything to do with the protection of minorities and the preservation of the right to express unpopular or even blasphemous opinions. In fact, Mill (who was deeply religious) spends a good deal of his argument for civil liberties arguing that even atheists, who could not be more opposed to his conception of the ‘Truth’, deserved freedom from prosecution. And the reason was not that God granted them the liberty to speak—rather, the whole point of free discourse is to allow Truth to be tested and proven. He brings up the example of the 1857 jailing of a professed atheist as an example of the failings of the government to protect both liberty and free discourse.

The impulse that declares an idea needs more protection than a human being lays bare the implicit weakness of that idea. The tragedy of this is that the preamble to the CDoR is absolutely correct; there is a growing wave of Islamophobia in the West that is intimately connected to racism and xenophobia. The rising fear and intolerance of Muslim minorities in non-Muslim countries and the invasions and occupations of several Islamic lands such as Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Kashmir, and Chechnya by non-Muslim powers all contribute to a sort of siege mentality evidenced not only by the resolutions sponsored by the OIC but in their citizenry. Although the original resolution Combating Defamation of Religions was proposed in 1999, the rise in discrimination and general Islamophobia after 9/11 lent a certain creedence to the OIC’s claims of a worldwide hostility towards Islam. The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten’s 2005 printing of a collection of cartoons featuring Islam’s holiest figure beside Allah himself, the prophet Muhammad, seemed to be a breaking point on the Arab street. Worldwide riots erupted—dozens of people were killed, embassies were burned to the ground, and Denmark lost 30% of its export market to a boycott of its products in the Muslim world.

One of the problems with blasphemy laws is that they don’t work in multicultural democracies, because the optimal government structure for enforcing these laws is a hegemonic theocracy. How does a government draws the line between criticism and defamation of a religion without becoming a religious authority itself? More importantly, how can exclusive religions coexist in a legal framework that outlaws blasphemy? All the inclusive, liberal-style language of the CDoR could become awfully dangerous in the hands of lawyers. I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that any Muslim ought to be charged with defamation having published or publicly affirmed that there is no god but Allah. Similarly, denying the divinity or even the trinity of the Christian god was an eminently punishable offense during the Inquisition, as the descendants of Spanish Jews and Muslims well recall. As author Ethan David Miller once said, “once you stop the inquiry, you start the Inquisition.”

Western liberal democracies say they hold freedom of expression sacrosanct, but our history of free speech is rather complex. To begin with, the idea that people should not be randomly murdered or otherwise punished for blaspheming is ahistorical at best. Massachussetts, home of the Salem witch trials, famously keeps its anti-blasphemy law on the books. It wasn’t until 1952 that the Supreme Court declared New York’s blasphemy laws unconstitutional in Joseph Burstyn, Inc v. Wilson, which concerned the censorship of a Roberto Rosselini film on the grounds that it was sacreligious. There are still plenty of Americans who believe that flag desecration should be made illegal—including New York’s former Senator Hillary Clinton, who made a point of co-sponsoring such legislation 53 years after her adpoted state’s blasphemy laws were struck down. Denamrk, home of the Muhammad cartoon controversy, investigated the offending newspaper under its own laws prohibiting the defamation of religion (no charges were brought). America doesn’t have a state religion like Saudi Arabia or Egypt, but when it comes to the secular religion of patriotism, the flag evidently arouses the same passions as the prophet Muhammad does for Muslims. (That’s why the word ‘desecration’ is used.) Hillary Clinton’s Senate bill sought the protection of Old Glory from anti-American demonstrators in the same way the OIC seeks to protect Muhammad from cartoonists. Now that’s she’s the Secretary of State, you’d think she’d be able to identify some common ground with the OIC here, but the US is boycotting the Durban II Conference until the CDoR and the general anti-Israel tone of the proceedings is eliminated.

So, what should the role of the United States be? After all, we withdrew even from observer status on the Commission on Human Rights. We are boycotting the upcoming Durban II conference. No one know how the conference will turn out without the United States, but we do know what happened in Durban in the summer of 2001. The conference focused its attention almost exclusively on the military actions of Israel in the Occupied Territories, in the words of former Canadian Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier, “degenerated into open and divisive expressions of intolerance,” which included several participating organizations selling copies of “Mein Kampf” and “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” outside the convention halls. The OIC operates as a bloc intent on castigating Israel (whose record on human rights during the occupation is certainly deplorable) to the exclusion of any other human rights agenda. Though Israel’s occupation may be brutal, the nations of the OIC have successfully evaded discussion of racism or religious intolerance within their own borders. Amnesty International and other human rights groups have extensive documentation of the imprisonment and/or execution of a great many citizens whose actions were judged an insult to Islam in almost every OIC member state. Many human rights activists feel that the ultimate purpose of the CDoR is not to impose restrictions on free speech in the West (it seems virtually impossible for the Security Council to pass a binding resolution along those lines) but to provide cover for the blasphemy laws and prosecutions within OIC countries.

With all this in mind, there is a certain hope that Muslim nations have begun a long journey towards a more liberal democracy, the same way America did. First you recognize some very difficult principles to live up to (like mandating equality while condoning slavery) and then you work on fulfilling those great promises over the course of generations. The fact that the Cairo Declaration condemns torture is of as little comfort to today’s generation of prisoners as the promises of the Declaration of Independence were to Thomas Jefferson’s slaves. The democracies of revolutionary France and America, for all their present glory, weren’t that much better than the Revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran today when they were that age.

But the attendees of the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance won’t be hearing any of that from us. Instead, they will likely be focusing on a narrow agenda that has increasingly less to do with actual human rights and more to do with institutionalized intolerance and politically-minded finger-pointing. By giving up our voice, even in the face of all the procedural and structural flaws in the system, we give up the means to make any of this better. The latest resolution passed in the General Assembly by 86-53, with 42 abstentions. It was literally the inaction of those abstaining UN members that allowed this resolution to continue on the path to being a binding resolution, which is the stated goal of the OIC. Our opposition may be strong (no binding resolution can pass without the support of the U.S. in the Security Council) but it’s intellectually toothless. The fact that we refuse to engage in the process is, in a certain sense, undemocratic. If the history of democracy shows us anything, it’s that only through participation in dialogue is there any hope for making democracy safe for minorities in particular, or the world a better place in general.

In 1517, a young monk named Martin Luther, began a new era in Christianity by declaring his independence from what he saw as the excesses and iniquities of the Roman Catholic Church. Having kicked off the Reformation by nailing an itemized list of complaints to a church door, Luther challenged not only the orthodoxy of the Church but the political structures of Christian Europe.

In the early years of Luther’s new religion—Protestantism—he became known as a defender of the Jews, whose treatment at the hands of Catholics horrified him. “If I had been a Jew and had seen such dolts and blockheads govern and teach the Christian faith, I would sooner have become a hog than a Christian,” he once wrote. As his theological revolution had purged what he saw as the impurities of Catholic dogma, Luther thought that now the Jews would finally be able to be converted to Christ.

Of course, the problem Jews had with Christianity wasn’t with the selling of indulgences, but with the divinity of Christ. When Europe’s Jews failed to join Luther’s new church, he turned on them most viciously. By 1536, he presaged the Final Solution in his book, “Of The Jews And Their Lies,” calling for Jews to be put into bondage, killed, or expelled from Europe if they did not convert to the gentle message of the Gospels (he put his money where his mouth was by driving them out of many a German principality.) In the introduction to this seminal work of anti-Semitism, Luther writes,

“I have received a treatise in which a Jew engages in dialog with a Christian. He dares to pervert the scriptural passages which we cite in testimony to our faith, concerning our Lord Christ and Mary his mother, and to interpret them quite differently. With this argument he thinks he can destroy the basis of our faith.”

Chris Hedges, author, journalist, and himself a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and son of a Protestant minister, has written his own 21st-century version of “Of The Jews And Their Lies,” entitled I Don’t Believe in Atheists. Anti-Semitism is a bit passe for today’s Christians (a bit tacky after Hitler, wouldn’t you say?), but bigotry against the godless remains relatively safe to express in public. Many a reviewer and interviewer have called the title “cute” (cuter than Von Der Juden und Ihren Lugen?), and Hedges’ bigorty seems to be getting a pass from folks on the left for who probably would have reacted differently had it been anyone else writing the same words.

I feel the same about Hedges as I do about Christopher Hitchens, after he came out so forcefully behind the Bush’s invasion of Iraq; a deep admiration now gone sour. Hedges says the book was born of his debates with what he calls ‘the new atheists,’ writers such as Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and E. O. Wilson. He calls today’s atheist writers religious fundamentalists, assigning them to “the cult of science” and decrying their intolerance and bigotry while doling out plenty of his own.

In foreign policy terms, an atheist like myself has much more in common with Hedges—we both oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (unlike Hitchens and Harris). In searching for a larger framework to contest what he sees as Hitchens’ and Harris’ support of imperialist war, however, he decides to tar even war opponents like Dawkins and Dennett with guilt by association and lumps us all together as evil and a danger to the Republic. But while atheism might be said to have a political philosophy (the separation of church and state), it certainly doesn’t have a foreign policy.

Within the 224 pages of I Don’t Believe in Atheists, Hedges winds his way through a dense thicket of strawmen. Not only has Hedges created a new Christianity for himself (one without heaven, hell, religious institutions, or an interventionalist god), but he’s created another one for his enemies. “To turn away from God is harmless,” Hedges grants, magnanimously, but “to turn away from sin is catastrophic.” You can have your Model-T in any color you want, as long as it’s black as religiously-defined sin.

Works like I Don’t Believe in Atheists reinforce the fact that nonbelievers are one of the most hated minorities in America. Hedges’ liberal bigotry is writ small, at least in the physical sense—the book is a pocket-friendly 5″ by 7″. The sprawling (and often repetitive) critique of today’s out-of-the-closet atheists finds Hedges equating us with Nazis, all the while calling on the reader to heed the wisdom of, say, Christian Realist theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who helped shore up support for the atomic bomb and is considered by many to the first neoconservative. Niebuhr’s “just war” theory is often invoked by Iraq war supporters, because it frames mass murder as the necessity to confront evil.

I Don’t Believe In Atheists is a gentle, liberal incitement to an American pogrom against nonbelievers, based on his very own version of a blood libel:

“while the new atheists do not have the power of the Christian Right and are not a threat to the democratic state as the Christian Right is, they do engage in the same chauvinism and call for the same violent utopianism. They sell this under secular banners. They believe, like the Christian Right, that we are moving forward to a paradise, a state of human perfection, this time made possible by science and reason.”

Do atheists believe in a ‘state of perfection?’ Do atheists belong to what Hedges calls the ‘cult of science?’ Must we all have gods, as Martin Luther once said?

A thoroughly modern believer, Hedges declares he can pick and choose truths and falsehoods from science with the same ease as he does from Bible (parts of which he calls ‘morally indefensible’). As with other intelligent design advocates, a faulty understanding of science buttresses a foregone conclusion—that the divine inhabits the gaps in human scientific understanding and the pursuit of further understanding is hazardous to the soul. Richard Dawkins, a target of Hedges’ self-righteous indignation, calls this belief the ‘god of the gaps,’ and Hedges tries mightily to sacralize the mysteries of the universe in order to warn scientists against the hubris of discovering truths about reality instead of waiting for revelation about the mystic.

Intelligent design, a modern descendant of creationism, is the same impulse which lead ancient mapmakers to draw sea serpents in unexplored parts of the oceans and declare: “thar be monsters.” Hedges’ book amounts to nothing less than the intelligent design argument applied beyond biology to all realms of human endeavor, from physics to philosophy. And the monsters are the so-called “new atheists.”

“Religious thought is a guide to morality. It points humans toward inquiry,” announces Hedges, but his dogma leads him toward an inquisition instead. The main thrust of the book is the idea that today’s atheists are trying to ‘perfect’ humanity, which is at the top of Hedges’ list of cardinal sins:

“[t]he belief in human perfection, that we can advance morally, is itself an evil. It provides cover for criminality and abuse, a justification for murder. It sanctifies war, murder, and torture, for an unattainable purpose. It denies our own moral pollution.”

One could substitute “the divine” for “human perfection” in the above sentence, but that’s the easy way out. Even if the new atheist authors really believe in human perfection, is that the same thing as a belief in moral progress? “There is nothing in human nature or in human history that points to the idea that we are moving anywhere,” protests Hedges. Well, it all depends on your metric for progress, of course—not to mention your definitions of ‘moving’ and ‘anywhere.’ If nothing in nature or history supported the idea of progress, Hedges’ wouldn’t have to repeatedly and weakly dismiss the notion. For Hedges, the fact that there is still murder and hatred and all manner of iniquity and inequality proves that there is no progress ever past or present, QED.

But really, is there anything in human nature to say we, as a species, I suppose, are moving anywhere? There’s a whole science of genetics which is helping to explain how we got here in the way we did, from helping us trace the movement of early humans out of Africa to developing cures for birth defects which were never possible before. Did morality work differently for our pre-human ancestors as it does for homo sapiens? Does the evolution of and within hominid society qualify as moral progress? I would venture to say so, if only because I don’t think animals are capable of the kind of abstract reasoning ethics require. Evolutionary biology shows us that change is slow, and its smallest increment is generational.

Hedges’ idea that naturalists believe we are the culmination of a process leading towards perfection shows the limits of his understanding. “The belief in human perfectibility, in history as a march toward a glorious culmination, is malformed theology.” Actually, it’s malformed science; biologists understand that evolution is a continuing phenomenon, and we are not the end of it. Only under the weight of eschatology (the study of the end of time) does evolution have an ‘end.’ For scientists, Darwin only described a ‘means.’ What Darwin showed was that evolution was random, as opposed to competing evolutionary scientists of his day—like Lamarck, who theorized that giraffes grew long necks in order to feed from tall trees.

Hedges is just getting started mischaracterizing science for his own ends: “[p]luralism has no place in science. Neither does the principle (so familiar from the arts, humanities and human sciences) of competing truths. Scientific ideas, because they an be demonstrated or disproved, are embraced or rejected on the basis of quantifiable evidence.”

Pluralism certainly has a place in science, and it’s called the cutting edge, where such ideas are called theorems. (Just look at the panoply of string theories, which are themselves intended to resolve the competition between quantum field and general relativity theories.) Hedges’ rants remind me of an English major drunkenly explaining that Science majors have no soul. And not only that, adds Hedges, but neuroscientist Sam Harris “does not engage in the laborious work of acquiring knowledge and understanding… He has no interest in debate, dialogue or scholarship.” (One presumes Hedges had compelled Harris to debate him against his will in San Francisco in 2007). Or, “[Sam Harris'] assertion that Muslim parents welcome the death of children as suicide bombers could only have been written by someone who never sat in the home of a grieving mother and father in Gaza who have just lost their child.” Now, I have never been to Gaza, but one such parent, known as ‘Umm Nidal‘ (who famously encouraged her sons to become martyrs and handed out chocolate and halvah upon hearing her son was killed attacking an Israeli settlement) was, in fact, elected to Palestinian parliament on the Hamas ticket in 2006. Similarly, Hedges protests that somehow religion had nothing to do with the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Christians. The book is full of such hollow falsehoods, Jesuit-level equivocations and semantic boondoggles.

The tone of the book is reminiscient of a sermon—long, tedious, repetitive, and full of earnestly resolute pomposity:

“The question is not whether God exists. It is whether we contemplate or are utterly indifferent to the transcendent, that which cannot be measured or quantified, that which lies beyond the reach of rational deduction. [...] God—and different cultures have given God many names and many attributes—is that which works upon us and through us to find meaning and relevance in a morally neutral universe. [...] God is, as Thomas Aquinas argues, the power that allows us to be ourselves. God is a search, a way to frame the questions. God is a call to reverence.”

Reverence of what, exactly? It isn’t clear, but it seems that if anything should be exalted, it is human limitation and our irredeemable shortcomings, whatever those might be. Hedges not only constructs a strawman (the belief that atheists and scientists are trying to perfect humanity) but a new religion—the worship of human flaws. There is no greater sin for Hedges than to turn away from the concept of Sin, and those who do are embracing an evil so profound that Hedges’ doesn’t talk about much else. Hedges’ speaks of the “wisdom of original Sin” and exalts, at length, human evil:

“Human evil is not a problem. It is a mystery. It cannot be solved. It is a bitter, constant paradox that is part of human nature.”

Hedges goes on to accuse the new atheists of ‘externalizing evil’ — but the truth is that Hedges is guilty of internalizing ‘good.’ English doesn’t have a distinction between religious and secular definitions of ‘good’ the way it separates ‘evil’ from ‘bad,’ so let me clarify that as an atheist, I believe in ‘bad’ but not ‘evil.’ Because contrary to what religion wants you to think, the relevant parties to telling right from wrong are your fellow beings, rather than any imaginary ones. Yes, there is bad and good, but we must always ask—bad for whom? Good for what?

In a summary of his book published by the Free Press, Hedges writes,

“Religious institutions, however, should be separated from the religious values imparted to me by religious figures, including my father [who was a liberal minister]. Most of these men and women frequently ran afoul of their own religious authorities. Religion, real religion, was about fighting for justice, standing up for the voiceless and the weak, reaching out in acts of kindness and compassion to the stranger and the outcast, living a life of simplicity, finding empathy and defying the powerful.”

Leaving aside for the moment the question of how Hedges gets to cleave ‘real religion’ from the kind most people practice, we must ask—what exactly are religious values? Are there such things regardless of the religion in question?

The truth is, there’s only one universal religious value: orthodoxy in the service of power. The world’s faiths share a vast-ranging disagreement on everything else, even the number of gods to be worshiped—from zero in Theravada Buddhism to the Trinity of Catholicism to the countless loa of Voodoo. Everything about the temporal world is up for spiritual grabs, from the threshold for justifiable homicide to the divinely inspired way to wipe your ass.

Much as science is morally neutral, religion is merely a tool for the powerful to control the masses. And yet, there is a process by which religions themselves evolve. Within my own lifetime, for example, Bob Jones University, which went from defending their ban on interracial dating and marriage on God’s ipse dixit 1983 before the Supreme Court to revoking the policy in 2000—not because George W. Bush was about to make a speech there and they didn’t want to offend the heathens for political purposes, but because the sacred words of God must have changed, mysteriously acquiring a new meaning.

Whether there’s a text or an oral tradition, every religious person picks and chooses, interprets and reinterprets the tenets of their faith and applies them to the real world. Those choices are temporal, secular—because religion is all in your head. Interaction with your fellow humans is real, and therefore will never live up to Hedges’ idealized ‘good.’

Morals are personal, ethics are interpersonal. The zeitgeist (as described by Dawkins) describes the movement of social mores—the definitions not only of evil, but of ‘good’ as well.

When Hedges admits that some parts of the Bible are ‘morally indefensible,’ it is the reader’s duty to ask how they got that way. So when Hedges writes, “All ethics begin with religion. We must determine what moral laws to accept or reject. We must distinguish between real and false prophets,” while enjoining us from using reason and science to do so, on what basis does Hedges make these distinctions? It would appear that there is no rational distinction between true and false prophets.

The truth is that all of us, Hedges included, create a personal moral code using real-life, secular ethics—the realm of human interaction which Hedges finds so spiritually devoid: “Those who focus only on human communication, who are unable to step out of the realm of prosaic knowledge, sever themselves from the sacred. They remain trapped in a deadening self-awareness. They lose the capacity to honor and protect that which makes life possible.”

A band of prophets known as the Firesign Theatre once said, “when you clock the human race with the stopwatch of history, it’s a new record every time.” Things we view as “evil” or immoral by today’s standards were moral yesterday, and we gauge our progress by comparing these standards. For example: would Jesus buy an SUV? Has burning gasoline always been sin, or just bad for the environment? And how could we possibly answer such a question (much less ask it) without the advances of science? Moral ‘progress’ is inevitable, if only because morality has to address new problems every day.

Hedges goes on at length about how the new atheists want to ‘perfect’ humanity, but suspiciously, he doesn’t use any direct quotes. So, I decided to read Harris and Dawkins in search of this ideology of perfection, but I couldn’t find any. Dawkins definitely speaks of the Zeitgeist and of “evolving complexity,” but nowhere does he say that ‘perfection’ (whatever that is) is attainable or that he has set his sights upon it. Harris hardly speaks in absolutes, and certainly doesn’t say that atheists seek to achieve perfection. So, where is this murderous ideology of perfection?

Seek and ye shall find, says the Bible, and Hedges’ uses his denseness as his guide: “Wilson and Dawkins build their vision of human perfectibility out of the legitimately scientific theory that human beings are shaped by the laws of heredity and natural selection. They depart from this position when they assert that we can leave determinism behind. There is nothing in science that implies our genetic makeup allows us to perfect ourselves. Those who, in the name of science, claim that we can overcome our imperfect human nature create a belief system that functions like religion… there is nothing, when you cut through their scientific jargon, to support their absurd proposition.”

Leaving aside whether Hedges is truly capable of understanding scientific jargon—as opposed to simply cutting through it—you have to wonder (as with his claim that “Dawkins, like Christian zealots, reduces the world to a binary formula of good and evil”) where he’s getting this stuff. As Hedges writes, “these are not questions atheists answer. They attack a religious belief of their own creation.” Atheists don’t believe in eschatology, and neither do we seek to negate ourselves by becoming gods. Atheism merely seeks to turn the pyramid scheme of religion upside-down.

“Because there is no clear, objective definition of God,” writes Hedges, “the new atheists must choose what God it is that they attack.” Actually, that’s not true, but like all good debaters, Hedges needs to reframe the debate on his terms in order to claim rhetorical victory. What Hedges fails to understand is that atheism is a rejection of the whole notion of a top-down universe, no matter whom your particular creation myth places at the top. A universe without gods is one which is eternal and works from the bottom up, without meaning or intent. Hedges characterizes the universe as “morally neutral,” but at the same time posits an objective ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and that God is the good in each of us. One wonders why, if there is only one god, why it can’t be the morally neutral in each of us? If animals have a moral value, what is it, and do they share the same god as humanity or the rest of the universe?

For most of the book, Hedges’ seems hell-bent on conflating atheists with Raëlians, an extropian UFO cult who send out press releases claiming to have cloned a human being every so often. For all his Western-centric chauvinism, Hedges’ concept of the universe, with its personally uninvolved deity in an amoral universe who works through us, sounds a lot more like some Yoruba-derived syncretic religion, such as Candomblé or Santería: Oludumare, the creator, doesn’t deal with people, and so requests are made of orishas (‘the owners of heads’) who possess and work through their followers. But Hedges’ Christian prejudices against atheism and polytheism are merely precursors to the real weakness in his arguments.

When Hedges writes, for example, that “[w]e progress technologically and scientifically, but not morally. We use the newest instruments of technological and scientific progress to create more efficient forms of killing, repression and economic exploitation, and to accelerate environmental degradation,” is he saying that the pursuit of any scientific knowledge (for example, genetics, which can certainly be said to “change human nature”) is an evil because it attempts to improve the human condition? And if some science is OK, where is the boundary between good and evil science, the border line where Hedges and the Unabomber stand, wagging their fingers at humanity?

“There is a good and a bad side to human progress. We are not moving towards a glorious utopia. We are not moving anywhere,” he proclaims. It seems by definition that if there there is human progress that we are moving somewhere (if not towards some glorious utopia). Hedges lives in a world of absolutes, as much as he protests otherwise; since the imaginary end (utopia) is deemed impossible, he seems to say there cannot be any movement altogether, failing to make the distinction between ‘perfect’ as a verb and as an adjective. When, for example, America’s founding Deists employed the phrase ‘a more perfect Union,’ it didn’t suggest (to me, anyway) that they thought there was going to be a perfectly perfect Union.

I Don’t Believe In Atheists plumbs the depths of Hedges’ unwillingness to engage with atheism, or atheists—encapsulated by the way he laughs off Christopher Hitchens’ lack of theological training with regard to his question of who created the Creator:

“This is the declaration of an illiterate. Aquinas, along with many other theologians, addressed at length the issue of who created the creator. God, Aquinas argues, is not an entity. God is not a thing or a being. Creation is an act of handicraft. Creation is the condition of there being something rather than nothing. Creation didn’t happen long ago. Creation is a constant in human existence. It is part of life.”

This is what’s known as “conversion by definition” (or “the bear hug”) where extremely lazy evangelists posit that the fact one is alive is proof that at least one god exists. (For the sun, or your electronic devices, which operate on the principle that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, it’s a different story.) “God is a human concept,” admits Hedges, but that’s about as far as he’s willing to go in understanding the subjects of his monograph. Because Hedges’ doesn’t understand atheism, his critique is understandably flawed. Worse still, he is unwilling to subject himself to his own critique:

“They see the “other” as equal only when the other is identical to themselves. They project their own values on the rest of the human race. …Those who are different do not need to be investigated, understood or tolerated, for they are intellectually and morally inferior. Those who are different are imperfect versions of themselves.”



Dear readers, exciting things are happening. Here’s a quick review of the past few months.

That Book I’m Always Talking About

For the last two years, I’ve been writing a non-fiction book—it’s what I’m doing when I’m not posting here. When people ask me what the book is about, I usualy say something like, “it’s about killer robots and globalization.” While this is true in some sense, the book is actually about a lot more than just those things, but when you work on something for two years (or longer) the ability to faithfully summarize it kind of falls away.

This book, entitled Why Can’t Money Grow On Trees?, is about the open-source movement, the global economy, and the connection between, for example, Adam Smith, Jean-Pierre Proudhon, Howard Scott, and the Unabomber. It is subtitled “A Practical Guide to Building Your Own Utopia.”

Now, because the book is about open source and contains a lengthy section about how lethal intellectual property rights can be, I decided to make the book into a wiki. This way, you can actually watch me write the thing in real time (at this stage it is a lengthy proposal and not too much more) in a format meant for your computer monitor, unlike the 50+ page PDF file I have been sending people.

If you are confused about all this, just go visit whycant.org and you will probably become slightly more or less clear about what I’m trying to say.

Catch me on Sirius Satellite Radio’s Indie Talk March 13th at 5pm EST

I’ve had this blog for almost five years now, and sometimes I wonder if anyone is even listening anymore. But occasionally, I will get some random confirmation that I have, in some small way, had an impact in the media universe. Sometimes, I’ll get questions from college students asking me to elucidate a point they’re writing a paper on; sometimes publishers offer to send me advance copies of suitably “progressive” books to review. Sadly, I no longer get hate mail, which I used to enjoy immensely.

But I found something even more fun than hate mail—free media ops! Sirius, which just launched their new “Indie Talk” channel, asked me to come down to “The Blog Bunker” this Thursday and chat about politics for half-an-hour, after which I will spend the rest of the week trying to figure out how I can leverage this appearance into one on the O’Reilly Factor.

But D. J., I hear you cry, “I don’t have Sirius Satellite Radio!” Don’t worry. You can sign up for a free 3-day Internet radio trial on their web site. It’ll be just like when the whole family used to gather around their gigantic vacuum-tube powered radio cabinet after dinner to listen to Fibber McGee & Molly or Suspense!, only without the family, or the radio.

Free Xenu! Shirts!

The other way I found out that people actually do read this blog is that someone ordered a “Free Xenu” T-shirt from my lonely and neglected T-shirt shop. So I actually had to make one, and now that I spent all the revenue on the first shirt, I implore you, dear readers, to buy one, too.

For those of you who don’t know the story, Xenu is the deposed alien overlord who is currently being held in intergalactic superjail by the Church of Scientology, according to court documents. As far as I can tell, Xenu is being held without bail or formal charges, with no method of redress or habeas corpus. I don’t even think there was a trial. If any of you give a damn about civil rights, I implore you to wear this shirt so that the CoS knows you will no longer abide by their illegal detainment of what, for all we know, is just a sweet, harmless, 75 million year-old man.

It’s Her Party, She’ll Cry If She Wants To

I’m less of a Barack Obama supporter than an ABC voter—anybody but Hillary. What’s my beef with Hillary, you ask?

Is it that she’s a carpetbagger? I do resent the fact that my state is apparently so welcoming we’ll let anybody in the President’s family who wants to run for the White House represent us. Tempting, but not sufficient.

Is it because she’s a hawk? Her stance on Iran is basically the same as McCain’s, which is that they would really rather prefer to go to war Iran than not. Both of them have been agitating for this for years, although Hillary’s anti-Iran record is long and storied and includes her potential running mate, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana. As a matter of fact, Hillary’s foreign policy is remarkably similar to McCain’s in many respects. That’s getting closer to why I can’t stand her, but there’s more.

Perhaps it’s Hillary’s right-wing pandering like her clearly unconstitutional throw-flag-burners-in-Federal prison law, which was fortunately rejected; perhaps its her authoritarian top-down style, presaged by her Wellesely senior thesis dismissing the whole idea of bottom-up community organizing.

Yes, these were all fine reasons to dislike Hillary, and I have made full use of them in the past. But what burns me about Hillary the most right now is her gargantuan sense of entitlement, a thing so huge it was pretty much her platform—before that young upstart upstaged her “get-out-of-my-way” campaign style with—you guessed it—bottom up grassroots organizing.

Barack Obama may be well-spoken (somebody check Lexis-Nexis to see if Hillary’s camp has ever slipped up and said it in those terms), but he clearly hasn’t suffered enough to win the 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Medal for overcoming adversity. As Aristotle said in Poetics, tragedy works best when the sufferers fall from privilege and fortune, and Hillary’s story is characterized by the most fortunate of circumstances.

As I’ve said before (maybe not in these exact words), when you challenge white people’s privilege, watch the fuck out. Hillary’s whiteness isn’t her sole privilege, but it’s clearly working to her advantage. For example—let’s look at Ohio, the “firewall” which helped Clinton turn her campaign around:

Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International— respected polling firms — surveyed 1,612 Democratic primary voters in 40 precincts across Ohio on Tuesday. Among other things, the pollsters asked if the race of the candidate was important to them. Twenty percent of those surveyed said yes, and three out of five of those voters said they cast ballots for Clinton.

As a pundit once said on CNN a while ago, this is the first time identity politics-based attacks have been trained on the identity groups themselves as opposed to, shall we say, hegemonic power. And it’s threatening to rend the Democratic party.

It is in this light that we must examine the comments of Geraldine Ferraro, Clinton supporter and former VP candidate:

When the subject turned to Obama, Clinton’s rival for the Democratic Party nomination, Ferraro’s comments took on a decidedly bitter edge. “I think what America feels about a woman becoming president takes a very secondary place to Obama’s campaign – to a kind of campaign that it would be hard for anyone to run against,” she said. “For one thing, you have the press, which has been uniquely hard on her. It’s been a very sexist media. Some just don’t like her. The others have gotten caught up in the Obama campaign.

“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” she continued. “And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.” Ferraro does not buy the notion of Obama as the great reconciler.

How refreshingly reprehensible! It always strikes me, whenever this meme is floated, that the name “Carol Moseley-Braun” seldom crosses the lips of these Clinton supporters. Moseley-Braun, whose Senate seat was won by Obama when she stepped down, ran for president in 2004, the second black woman to do so after my old Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm.

While Moseley-Braun did receive a modicum of support from NOW and some other feminist groups, I guess it wasn’t too important, because seldom did you see a Gloria Steinem-penned op-ed calling women gender traitors if they didn’t support a female candidate based purely on chauvinism.

The forgotten campaign of Moseley-Braun, who dropped out just before the Iowa caucuses, is an embarrassment to the Clinton campaign, and that’s why she never talks about it.

When I meet people who hand me that ‘if Barack was a woman line,” I always counter with, “If Barack Obama was a woman, he’d be Carol Moseley-Braun. And do you know who she was married to?” I ask.

“No…” they say.

“Who the fuck cares?” I reply. (Of course, the answer is “Mr. Braun.” They are now divorced, and she founded Ambassador Organics) And that’s really the crux of the issue—the only reason Barack Obama is black is because the laws in this country won’t let him marry Bill Clinton. Hillary’s only doing this well because she is now the most corrupt woman in America. Don’t think for a minute that her experience as intern to a few Senate subcommittees was what propelled her to the Senate seat of a state she in which had never resided. It was because she was so inside the Democratic machine, she was married to the president, and so the DLC told all other Dem Senate contenders to get out of her way.

And yet, if this is anyone’s party, it’s Hillary’s party. She is the most invested in the machine, the backroom deals, the money-fueled corruption, the chickenhawk foreign policy. Not only does the Democratic party owe her the nomination, but the audacity of Obama’s candidacy is inappropriately inopportune. That’s why she’s intent on destroying the party.

Take a look at CNN’s delegate counter. After one of the dirtiest primary challenege the party has seen in decades, she managed to work her way up to ‘spoiler’ in the delegate count, but there is no way she will be able to catch up with her opponent without a significant helping hand from the superdelegates. But now, neither will Obama, unless the party spends even more of their war chest redoing the Michigan and Florida primaries.

Is it because, as she has implied on the campaign trail, she’d rather have McCain in office than Obama? The scorched earth, kitchen sink approach Hillary has adopted constitutes a pyrrhic victory, but what does she care? It’s this supreme arrogance, the way she offers Obama a VP slot shen she’s trailing in delegates, the way she pretends that sleeping in the White House is a qualification for being commander-in-chief, the indignance at being challenged for what she seems to believe is some kind of birthright—that’s why I’m an anybody but Clinton voter. Because a victory for Clinton has become, through her machinations and speechifying, a victory for corruption and against hope.

More on this in a few days.

Welcome to another edition of actual casual asides, seasoned as usual with gotchas and I-told-you-sos.

Ask Not For Whom The Bell Tolls…

The United States and our allies have no rational interest in disclosing how many people we’ve killed in Iraq and Afghanistan if that number is inclusive of civilians. “We don’t do body counts,” said General Franks. We may publish figures of enemy killed and captured (we actually don’t take prisoners anymore for the most part), in order to show how effective and accurate our troops are in combat.

But every once in a while, some secondary evidence turns up. According to the latest reports from all around the country:

Troops training for and fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are firing more than 1 billion bullets a year, contributing to ammunition shortages at police departments nationwide and preventing some officers from training with the weapons they carry on patrol.

More than 1,000,000,000 bullets a year, to the point where it literally puts the squeeze on so-called “homeland security.”

How many people can you kill with a billion bullets a year? Let’s run some projections:

The Jack Bauer all-time low (2.57 shots per death): 389 million (more than the populations of the U.S. and Canada combined)

The Amadou Diallo standard (41 shots per death): 24.4 million (comparable to the whole Iraqi population)

The A-Team standard (infinite shots fired with no casualties): 0 deaths, billions of fools pitied.

The practical upshot of all this analysis is that B. A. Baracus may well have been the latest incarnation of the Buddha.

Who Would Jesus Go Down On?

The essential friction of theocracy is that nobody can live up to all that bullshit all the time. Theocracies are, in fact, the ultimate expression of religion’s desire to normalize its social conventions and taboos. We’d like tot hink that there are some concepts which are universal, but in reality, each religion and ideology merely has different standards for who is allowed to break that taboo and when.

Murder is taboo unless you’re killing an unbeliever or for revenge; homosexuality is inexcusable for laity but tolerated among priests; it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eyes of a needle than for a rich man to pass through the gates of heaven, unless that man is a televangelist.

So another bunch of Christian Patriots are caught same-sex canoodling, which isn’t so shocking, but in these two cases, the public found out because Florida GOP congressman Bob Allen and Indiana Young Republican Glenn Murphy managed to involve the police in the debacle.

Bob Allen’s arrest for solicitation is one thing, because it allegedly involved what he thought were two consenting adults… and a $20 payment from Allen so that he might perform oral sex on an undercover cop. But Glenn Murphy allegedly raped a guy in his sleep after a YR party where the victim’s sister bade the Murphy to stay over after drinking too much.

The best part of these scandals is the inevitable excuse proffered by the newly fallen Republican angels:

Allen: Those strapping buck negroes made me do it out of fear!
Glenn Murphy: It was totally consensual. The dude begged me to suck his dick in his sleep!
Pastor Ted Haggard: I like meth, massages, and male prostitutes, but not gay sex with male prostitutes on meth after massages!
Paul Barnes: I prayed to God to cure me and he never answered my prayers!
Mark Foley: I was molested by a priest! Years later, I got drunk!
Ed Schrock: I work out religiously, can assure you. I’m just looking to get together with a guy, we could play with one another, go down on one another, just to have some fun with, nothing hardcore.
Abraham Lincoln: I’m dead and you’ll never prove a thing!

Now Karl Rove resigns ‘to spend more time with his family.’ The whole country is wondering why he’s leaving now, and nobody can figure it out… or can we?

The Fighting 69th

The ever-despicable Mark Noonan of Blogs for Bush on gay pride marches:

Proud of being gay? Am I supposed to have a Guys Under 5’8″ Pride Parade? How can one be proud of one’s genetics? We’re firmly assured that gay people are born that way – being proud of it is as silly as being proud of your hair color. So, what gives? What, exactly, are they being proud of? Their ability to engage in lewd behaviour without being arrested? Their ability to strong arm the political establishment into helping them seem mainstream? Pride goeth before the fall, good people – you might want to think on that a bit between now and the next pride parade – especially as things like this are going to turn more and more people hostile to public displays of homosexuality.

I submitted the following comment under the pseudonym “Martin Luther” which I was surprised to see approved by the blog’s moderator:

Exactly! It's like those damn Irish with their so-called St. Patrick's Day Parades. You didn't choose to be Irish, so stop blocking traffic! Who do they think they are? Honestly, the Irish weren't even considered 'white' until a few dozen years ago. These palefaced Papists' pathetic attempt to convince mainstream Protestant America that they're the same as everybody else is so transparent it makes me want to vomit green.

Have you seen these parades? I've seen them in New York and Boston. Talk about lewd displays of public indecency! Drunkenness, lasciviousness, brawling, and public urination! And the worst part is, since the Irish seem to have infiltrated the police and firehouses, they just stand idly by while Europe's red-headed step-children run amok!

Selfless Act of the Year

When it comes to Darfur, I don’t think any American can top this. I hope we try, though.

US actress Mia Farrow has offered her freedom in exchange for that of a respected rebel figure in Sudan. Suleiman Jamous, a co-ordinator for Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA), has been confined to a UN peacekeeping base near Darfur for more than 13 months.

Although he needs urgent surgery, the 62-year-old faces arrest if he leaves.

In a letter to Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Ms Farrow has offered to take his place, saying his continued absence was an “impediment” to peace.

“Before his seizure, Mr Jamous played a crucial role in bringing the SLA to the negotiating table and in seeking reconciliation between its divided rival factions,” she said.

“I am therefore offering to take Mr Jamous’s place, to exchange my freedom for his in the knowledge of his importance to the civilians of Darfur and in the conviction that he will apply his energies toward creating the just and lasting peace.”

War is a game cowards play with other people’s lives. Making peace is truly courageous.

Sometimes I wonder how many times I can restate essentially the same points about Iraq. I’ve been doing it for over four years now. I suppose I should derive some satisfaction from the fact that the majority of Americans are now against the war. Unfortunately, that’s like the majority of Americans being against the Big Bang—which they are. It’s way, way too late. All we can do now is try for a strategic withdrawal and hope the last helicopter out of Baghdad gets out safely.

Since I’ve started this Vietnam analogy, let’s keep going, shall we? And all the while, we must ask: does Bush really see the “War on Terror” as the new Cold War?

The Reverse Domino Effect

The second law of thermodynamics tell us that chaos spreads more easily than order. During the Cold War, we were afraid that relatively disordered states would reorganize under Communism because of influence by their neighbors, the so-called Domino theory.

We all know, however, that disorder and destabilization, or in other words, societal breakdowns, are easier to export than political reorganizations, or construction. Consider the problem of refugee camps—millions of people living in poverty, much of it somewhat abruptly imposed. Refugee camps are natural hotbeds of foment, be it criminal, political, or both.

Damascus now has an Iraqi quarter, and Iraqi refugees have also started taking up residence in the Palestinian refugee camps. Why is this important? Because in May, a harbinger event occurred in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli. A new terrorist group calling itself Fatah-al-Islam (variously spelled ‘Fateh-el-Islam”) or “Army of Islam,” got into a major firefight with Lebanese military forces, after police tried to apprehend a gang of bank robbers who turned out to be ‘terrorists’ retreated to the Palestinian refugee camps, where Lebanese armed forces are prohibited from entering.

Now, what’s significant about Fatah-al-Islam isn’t that they’ve turned to bank robbing; terrorist groups have been financing their activities by robbing banks for a very long time. What’s significant is that Fatah-al-Islam is robbing Lebanese banks in 2007. I predict that this is the beginning of a bold new age of free-for-all terrorism reminiscent of the 1970s, when you had what Wallerstein would call “anti-systemic” gangs—Baader-Meinhof, the Red Brigades, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Palestine Liberation Organization. The days when someone like Carlos the Jackal might have had contacts with Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna and the Front de Libération du Québec and the Irish Republican Army. Back when people thought terrorism was sexy. (By the way, is anyone else upset those Matt Damon adaptations of Robert Ludlum’s Bourne series have nothing to do with Carlos or Vietnam?)

If you haven’t seen the amazing documentary The Weather Underground, you never got to hear actual former members explain why white middle-class kids turned to terrorism in the 1960s (the same way middle-class Arabs turned to terrorism in the last few years). Brian Flanagan, former Weatherman, said something like (I’m quoting from memory) “The only way I can explain it is that the Vietnam war made us crazy… When you feel you have right on your side, you can do some horrific things.”

What Bush II has done, as I have been warning since the invasion of Afghanistan, is to reboot the cycle of displacement, violence and frustration which transformed the Mekhtab-e-Khidamat (a support organization for mujahideen from around the world who wanted to fight in Afghanistan) into Al-Qaeda.

I’ve written before about the tragic stupidity of the ‘flypaper’ theory, where war-mongers informed us that the war in Iraq was actually making America safer by drawing the world’s jihadists to Iraq instead of the United States. I countered that we were running the world’s largest, most advanced terrorist training camp, the way the Soviets had ‘trained’ the ‘Afghan Arabs’ like Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri who would eventually become the first generation of global jihadists.

Al-Qaeda started with the private contributions of middle- and upper-class Muslims, buttressed by what was essentially protection money from the Saudi royal family. But as all terrorist groups did, they migrated to more conventional crime (drug smuggling, kidnapping, and financial fraud).

But bank robbery just isn’t Al-Qaeda’s modus operandi; outright armed theft is a bit harder to reconcile with sharia than declaring it OK to sell intoxicants (like heroin) exclusively to infidels, which is how they managed the opium problem in Afghanistan. Bin Laden may be a lot of things, but he used to carry himself a bit differently.

The ranks of terrorist organizations are more likely full of ordinary street criminals than ideologues. At this point, though, there’s a more serious problem: Gangs of criminals are being given ideological ‘cover’ by the rising sentiment of ‘al-Qaedaism,’ or at least that incredible decrease in America’s standing across the globe.

And how lucky for these glorified thugs that the Bush administration is now tarring all opposition to our armed forces as ‘al-Qaeda,’ because now a whole new class of criminals have been given a political agenda, at least in public. Now there is a whole new generation of ‘Afghan Arabs,’ young men who feel like now is the time to take up arms in defense of Islam and/or to do some killing, looting, raping, what-have-you.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how the U.S. occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan are ‘force multipliers’ for terrorists in a literal, rather than figurative sense. The flypaper theory turned out to have caught more flies with vinegar than with honey—and they’re breeding.

So, who is behind this new wave of terrorism? Let’s look at the history of Fatah al-Islam. From a profile in a Turkish paper:

Fatah al-Islam announced its creation last November after breaking away from Fatah Al-Intifada, a splinter group of the mainstream Fatah movement. In its foundation statement, it introduced itself as an Islamic group seeking to liberate Palestine and restore Muslim sanctities captured by Israel. …Experts believe the group is ideologically but not operationally linked to Al-Qaeda and is played by Lebanese and Arab parties to achieve political gains.

Its leader Shaker Abssi, a Palestinian born in Areha in 1955, is a former colonel pilot.

Syrian authorities arrested Abssi in 2000 and sentenced him to three years in prison on charges of smuggling weapons, ammunition to Jordan and vice versa. No sooner had he been released than he went to Iraq following the US-led invasion. In Iraq, Abssi fought along with groups loyal to Al-Qaeda and made friends with a number of Al-Qaeda leaders there.

…Abssi went to Lebanon in 2005 with a group of youths he met in Iraq and stayed there around a year before getting into trouble with the Lebanese army in May 2006.

There is speculation that various governments (Lebanon, syria, Iran, Israel, the United States) are supporting or otherwise manipulating Fatah al-Islam because it represents a counter-balance to the now more mainstream groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. (Hamas itself was started with support from Golda Meir’s Israeli government who thought that its radical Islamism would be a good counterbalance to the secular PLO.)

Hamastan and Fatahstan

Divide and conquer—it’s the foundation of many a colonial empire. It isn’t even 20th-century thinking, it’s more like 19th-century thinking. The British were masters of this craft; consider Iraq, which is a fairly good (if late) example. By using the minority Sunnis the brokers between the two larger ethnic groups (Kurdish and Shiite) and forcing Iraq to accept the Hashemite (a Sunni) as its new King, they were able to ‘balance out’ factional movements.

I’ve been writing here that Americans really need to wise up about he fact that we’ve been trying to provoke a Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq since the invasion of Kuwait, and that we really have to stop acting so surprised that it finally happened.

Well, not only have we achieved our goal, but our cup runneth over; the huge Iraqi refugee population and our strengthening of Iran have paid off in spades, recently in a set of violent incidents around the Middle East.

Now we have Hamastan and Fatahstan, Hamas taking over the Gaza strip and the successor to the PLO, Fatah, taking the West Bank. The civil wars we have been trying to provoke for decades are just getting started. Sunni vs. Shia, Religious vs. Secular, Old Guard vs. Young Turks.

Now, even for those who are s cynical as to belive that the inevitable deaths of civilians in the crossfire is a good thing, why don’t we rework the equation in our favor by depriving these groups of a common enemy to unite against? when Israel bombed Hezbollah-controlled southern Lebanon, they got even the Sunni and Christian Arabs, their traditional enemies, to start chanting ‘we are all Hezbollah” in the streets all over the world.

Again, what America needs is strategic withdrawal. we are way , way overcommitted here, and our obnoxious presence is just about the only bargaining chip we have left. (Elephant once said we’re just going to end up trading Israel for Taiwan as part of a global retreat over the next century.)

The Dark Side of the Net

I was looking through my stats today, and I noticed that someone had come here from the United Kingdom looking for the phrase “fuck the soldiers.” Now, I knew I’d never written those words in that sequence, so I was curious enough to do the same search myself. It turned out I had written “fuck with the soldiers” at some point, which got me in the top ten results.

The other results had to do mostly with the petition by MySpace users to have the group “Fuck the soldiers” removed from the social networking site.

But there was one item which caught my eye, entitled “SOLDIER IN IRAQ FINDS POT PLANT, GRACES COVER OF HIGH TIMES’ GROW AMERICA.

JUNE 2, 2004 – Specialist Carlos Arellano was on patrol in Baghdad’s Green Zone on April 23 when he discovered a pot plant growing innocently on the street. He asked one of his fellow soldiers to snap a photo of him kneeling next to the plant. The photo was forwarded to High Times’ Grow America by a friend of Arellano’s via email. … Bloom quickly learned that Arellano was not only a soldier, but he was also a rapper named “Singe,” who’s first CD, The Epidemic, was released on StashBox Records several months before Arellano, in the Army Reserves, was called up to active duty and sent to Iraq. “Coded in the photo was a message that we couldn’t ignore,” Bloom says. “While Carlos is a hero defending his country in Iraq, when he comes home and smokes a joint, he’ll be a criminal.”

Whenever I see a story about a soldier that’s more than a month old, I immediately check to see if that soldier had been killed in action.

Robert Arellano said Wednesday his brother Carlos may have known he wouldn’t return home from Iraq. Carlos Arellano, a Marine corporal, had survived two previous tours of duty in Iraq, although he was wounded on the second. But Carlos seemed different before he left his family’s Rosemead home for his third tour, his brother said. “I think Carlos knew he was going to die this time,” said Robert Arellano, 27, a Marine of nine years.

Cpl. Carlos Arellano died Friday when a suicide bomber in a car set off a blast in Haqlaniyah, Iraq, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. Also killed in the blast was Lance Cpl. Brandon Dewey, 20, of San Joaquin.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the people dying on both sides are my generation, and that people in the military aren’t politically or ideologically or culturally homogeneous. If you get a chance to see Soundtrack To War, the 2005 documentary about the music soldiers listen to in Iraq, you should. they run it on VH1 every once in a while.

Anyway, while I was searching for Carlos Arellano, I found his MySpace page. Someday, it will be in a museum, and I don’t mean that facetiously at all. It’s a perfectly preserved artifact, a life frozen in time.

www.myspace.com/singeofdankmobb

UPDATES:

A $282 million bank heist in Baghdad carried out by the bank’s guards:

Guards staged one of the largest bank robberies in Iraqi history, making off with a stunning $282 million dollars in cash from a private bank in central Baghdad, Aswat al-Iraq reports in Arabic. Speaking on condition of anonymity, an Interior Ministry source told Aswat al-Iraq that, “Three guards working for the Dar al-Salam Bank located on Sa’adoun Street in central Baghdad were able to attack the bank . . . stealing a sum of up to $282 million dollars, and fled in an unknown direction after implementing the operation.”

…The New York Times confirms that the stolen money was denomiated in US dollars, not Iraqi dinars.

…and speculated that the perpetrators of the robbery may have been linked to militias, citing the ease of the getaway in a city thick with checkpoints.

While the sum of $282 million is massive, especially by Iraqi standards, it would fund less than one day of US expenses for operations in Iraq.

And it looks like the fighting between the Lebanese military and Fatah al-Islam has just started up again:

Four Lebanese soldiers have been killed after the army resumed heavy shelling of a Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli where fighters from the Fatah al-Islam group have been holed up for weeks. The bombardment on Thursday came a day after more than 150 people left the Nahr al-Bared camp amid fears that the army was preparing an assault.

“Today’s bombardment is a first step in the final battle against the terrorist group whose fighters have refused to surrender to the army,” an army officer told the AFP news agency.

But a military statement denied that the bombardment was part of a final assault on the camp.



Since my last post, the Middle East broke out into yet another war between right-wing militarists and Islamist militias, and President Bush went on a rhetorical offensive to shore up support for the war in Iraq (he hardly seems to mention Afghanistan anymore).

Even though I haven’t posted on my blog for a while, I did manage to get into a political debate over the Heeb message boards to get my political argument fix for the month. You can read the thread in its entirety if you wish (I stopped responding when I got bored of repeating myself), but I’m going to excerpt a particularly important bit, in an exchange with board member “Hesed”:

Hesed:
Do I believe that Israel can do anything about Hezbollah’s presence in Lebanon militarily…hell no! D.J.:
So, would you agree that the IDF’s stated objective is a sham?

Hesed:
But maybe if they pound the sh!t out of Lebanon for long enough it may bring enough attention to Hezbollahs unlawful agression to force them to start acting like the political party they profess to be.

D.J.:
Isn’t that the same line of reasoning Hizbollah is using to get the Israelis out of Shebaa Farms? I suppose if I pounded the sh!t out of your neighbors long enough I could get you to admit that pounding the sh!t out of someone could constitute lawful agression.

Niether side can reasonably expect the destruction of the other party, which are their stated aims. Instead, Israel played right into Hizbollah’s hands, increasing support their support even among their traditional enemies, the Maronite Christians. Few Lebanese would have endorsed an ‘open war’ against Israel before the bombing, but now Hizbollah is enjoyed unprecedentedly broad support among Lebanese civilians.

I know, I know, it doesn’t make any sense–Israelis turned against their government’s illegal warmongering en masse when they got the [Censored] pounded out of them by terrorist bombs, right? I mean, if Iraqis bombed Washington to make a point about the illegal occupation of Iraq, the hawks in Congress would have to pull their troops out of Baghdad, according to your logic. Maybe I’m crazy, but bombing people invariably turns them against you and drives them into the arms of your enemies.

Those of you who have read this blog over the past few years probably recognize my argument; military actions like the invasions of Iraq or Lebanon are based on the faulty logic of neoconservative military aggression. And speaking of neocons, Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker wrote a story published on August 21st, detailing the American involvement in the IDF’s planning for the war with Lebanon; according to Hersh, the war was kind of a ‘wet run’ for a ground invasion of Iran by the U.S. armed forces. If I had read the story before I posted on the Heeb boards, I would have worked it in to my ramblings, but I was too busy defending myself from logically faulty arguments, such as:

DJ:
Now, Hesed, your strawmen are multiplying way beyond necessity. Calling Israel’s self-stated objectives “unattainable” does not mean I am saying there are no objectives. (or not). Hesed:
Then why did you not volunteer that to begin with?

Hey, when you make the statement: Quote: Given that the objectives of the IDF are unattainable

and….

Quote: So, would you agree that the IDF’s stated objective is a sham?

without yourself volunteering the idea that there is indeed another legitimate objective, then by omission you ARE saying that you don’t believe that there is any objective at all, which infers that you believe (and want the rest of us to believe) that Israels actions are just pointless, indiscriminate slaughter.

Often I get into arguments with people who have trouble reading what I write because they aren’t used to what I will call, for lack of a better word, precision. By saying that a certain objective is unrealistic, there is neither need for me to supply a “legitimate” objective nor for readers to infer anything “by omission,” a setup for a strawman if I ever heard one.

At any rate, Hesed soon declared that semantic arguments are just pissing matches and I didn’t feel like giving a Logic 101 seminar, so I dropped it (unless you count this post as not dropping it, to which I suppose I would have to cop). Nonetheless, the point about legitimate objectives got me thinking about the recent wars in the Middle East in terms of the gulf between expectations and reality; that is to say, the objectives versus the objective facts.

So, for example, in the case of the Israeli-Lebanese war, the (stated) objective of the military operation was to drive Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon and to secure the release of the two kidnapped soldiers. The consensus of the Heeb message board was that the secondary objectives were to weaken Hezbollah both militarily and politically, through the use of force. As we are all aware, none of these objectives were achieved. Hezbollah have become heroes even in the Sunni quaters of the Arab world, and their military capacity (as measured by the number of rockets launched at Israeli civilians in Israel) was undiminished up until the ceasefire. Not only that, but instead of cleaving the Lebanese elite from Hezbollah as a result of the collective punishment of the IDF, Lebanon has become cleaved to Hezbollah. (So much for the Cedar Revolution.)

As I mentioned at the top of this post, Bush is out on the road right now trying to drum up support for the war in Iraq, which has now been going on for over three years and does not show any signs of abating, no matter what you hear on Fox News. As Bush’s offensive is rhetorical, it got me thinking about the way rhetoric is being used to defend what the majority of the country (if polls are to be believed) is indefensible, i.e., “staying the course” in Iraq.

As we recall from the 2000 election, Bush was supposed to be our first “CEO-in-chief.” The man has a degree from the Harvard School of Business, after all. And the mark of every efficient manager is the implementation of goals and the definition of metrics to monitor the progress of those goals–setting objectives and then finding ways to measure the success or failure of the plans to implement them.

And this got me thinking that if I was ever allowed into the White House press room, I would have to ask the following question of the Administration:

“How will we know if we have failed in Iraq? What are the metrics we’re using to guage our success or failure?”

Now, in a certain sense this isn’t a fair question to Bush & Co., because defining a standard for failure would leave precious little wiggle room to justify a continued presence in Iraq if such a standard were met. If Bush or his proxies were game, of course, there would be many metrics to chose from, ranging from quality of life indicators to measures of political stability to geopolitical strategic goals.

As we see from both Israel and Hezbollah’s declaration of victory, in the world of asymmetrical warfare, the definition of victory becomes subjective, and likewise the definition of failure.

Bush’s speechwriters, by the way, are masters of rhetoric. What they’ve done is to redefine victory and defeat in the most politically advantageous terms regardless of the situation on the ground, which is what you have to do when you’re fighting a losing war.

The president has repeatedly stated that “failure is not an option” in Iraq–talk about a logical fallacy! And how does he justify this? Simple: as long as we still have troops in Iraq, we can’t lose. The only way we can lose is by withdrawing. QED.

Te problem is that this hyper-simplification puts the cart before the horse. To illustrate this point, let’s look at the speech the President gave to the American Legion National Convention on August 31st:

Still, there are some in our country who insist that the best option in Iraq is to pull out, regardless of the situation on the ground. Many of these folks are sincere and they’re patriotic, but they could be — they could not be more wrong. If America were to pull out before Iraq can defend itself, the consequences would be absolutely predictable — and absolutely disastrous. We would be handing Iraq over to our worst enemies — Saddam’s former henchmen, armed groups with ties to Iran, and al Qaeda terrorists from all over the world who would suddenly have a base of operations far more valuable than Afghanistan under the Taliban. They would have a new sanctuary to recruit and train terrorists at the heart of the Middle East, with huge oil riches to fund their ambitions. And we know exactly where those ambitions lead. If we give up the fight in the streets of Baghdad, we will face the terrorists in the streets of our own cities.

Notice the construction of this paragraph; if we were to pull out, says the president, the following bad things would happen. But then, all of these things have and are happening. Given that the worst case scenario stated by the President has already been achieved, it’s little wonder that Bush must redefine defeat as withdrawal, instead of saying that defeat would have to be followed by withdrawal. It’s the recipe for an unending occupation, because we can neither recognize defeat nor realisitically expect victory.

Now, even as Bush contradicts the recent Pentagon report saying Iraq is “on the brink” of civil war, even some of the war’s staunchest previous supporters are realizing that this war is not winnable. Viz, Thomas Friedman, one of the last prophets of neoliberalism, who finally admitted in his August 4th column:

It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are baby-sitting a civil war.

Bush supporters would reasonably object that we aren’t finished in Iraq and that it takes time to acheive objectives; until the tide turns, any project might be deemed a failure if you judge it before it’s completed. If you were to look at World War II and judge the success of our objectives in the spring of 1942, for example, you’d be hard pressed to say things were going well for the Allies. But then, the war in Iraq has already lasted longer than World War II, and things keep deteriorating. So, the question isn’t really whether or not we’ve acheived victory in Iraq (because everyone admits we haven’t), but whether we can reasonably expect to reverse the course towards failure that Bush has pretty much admitted we have been charting so far. So much for “staying the course.”

Even though there’s a constitution and a parliament, by almost any non-political metric, things are steadily worsening for Iraqis since the bad old days of the massively corrupt Oil-for-Food program. From violent deaths per day to access to health care to women’s rights and freedom of movement, the effect of our involvement in Iraq is clear. And every poll of Iraqis shows that Iraqis themselves recognize that the American presence is only destabilizing the country as opposed to preserving or working towards peace.

What Bush has done is to place our troops in the middle of the civil war. And it is a civil war, make no mistake. You can call it “high sectarian violence” or “anarchy,” but everyone still calls it “the war in Iraq” and if you don’t believe coalition troops are in the thick of it, you don’t really understand the scope of the situation.

Of course, Bush isn’t responsible to the Iraqi people; he’s supposedly responsible to the American people. And here’s where he clearly lays out the true measure of success or failure in our little Iraq adventure during the American Legion speech:

You also know what it takes to win. For all that is new about this war, one thing has not changed: Victory still depends on the courage and the patience and the resolve of the American people.

As the latest polls (and hopefully the mid-term Congressional elections) demonstrate, the American people have run out of patience. In this war of convenience, that’s really the only metric that can really be applied.

As the Senate geared up to vote on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage last week, derisive howls were heard throughout the country when Senate Majority Leader Frist declared it a legislative priority. Though it’s clear that this ultimately doomed gesture was nothing but the purest pandering to cultural conservatives, there is a hidden truth to Frist’s point. The issue underlying the gay marriage debate is of paramount importance to America.

As I’ve said before, gay marriage is a civil rights issue; specifically, an issue of religious rights. Now, the religious Right’s concept of religious rights is the polar opposite of everyone else’s. No wonder; evangelical Christians supposedly make up a full half of the American populace, and the fundamental concept of civil rights is the protection of minorities from what John Stuart Mill (and others) called “the Tyranny of the Majority.”

This is the primary fault line in the kulturkampf of American politics: there is a fundamental disagreement on what ‘civil rights’ are. Nowhere was this better demonstrated than the following exchange between a reporter and our new Press Secretary, conservative former columnist and radio host Tony Snow:

WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY TONY SNOW: Whether it passes or not, as you know, Terry, there have been a number of cases where civil rights matters have risen on a number of occasions, and they’ve been brought up for repeated consideration by the United States Senate and other legislative bodies. …

Q: You mentioned civil rights. Are you comparing this to various civil rights measures which have come to the Congress over the years?

MR. SNOW: Not — well, these — it —

Q: Is this a civil right?

MR. SNOW: Marriage? It actually — what we’re really talking about here is an attempt to try to maintain the traditional meaning of an institution that has maintained one meeting for — meaning for a period of centuries. And furthermore —

Q: And you would equate that with civil rights?

MR. SNOW: No, I’m just saying that I think — well, I don’t know. How do you define civil rights?

Q: It’s not up to me. Up to you.

MR. SNOW: Okay. Well, no, it’s your question. So I — if I —

Q: (Chuckles.)

MR. SNOW: I need to get a more precise definition.

So does the rest of your party, apparently. Quoth Merriam-Wester: “the nonpolitical rights of a citizen; especially : the rights of personal liberty guaranteed to U.S. citizens by the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution and by acts of Congress.” Then there’s the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which states, in part, “All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.”

Though the Civil Rights Act doesn’t explicitly mention sexual orientation, it does mention religion as an axis of discrimination, which is what’s at stake here. But in the view of the religious majority, the concepts of freedom of religion and civil rights become flipped on their head. The idea of personal freedom of conscience becomes a question of public morality. The freedom to practice becomes the liberty to subject others to personal beliefs, or in other words, to exact binding judgment upon others. Thus, for example individual prayer becomes supplanted with mandated group prayer, whose only purpose is to coerce non-believers. The impunity with which Christians expect to coopt public institutions such as school and government becomes a religious liberty.

In this way, civil rights, which meant freedom from discrimination, suddenly become the freedom to discriminate for this Christian movement.

This inversion of values is nothing new. My theory about the transformation of Christianity from a subversive proto-hippie sect into the weapon of the Crusaders and Inquisitors is that Europeans never completely let go of their warlike paganism, but that’s neither here nor there.

In the upside-down world of the religious majority, the freedom to practice one’s own religion is now somehow impinged by other people’s freedom to practice theirs. One wonders how far the principle extends; should Christians have to ‘recognize’ marriages officiated by a shaman or a justice of the peace? Should racists have to ‘recognize’ interracial marriages? And what exactly does ‘recognize’ mean, anyway?

Some clues lie in a recent New York Times article entitled, “Will Same-Sex Marriage Collide With Religious Liberty?” The article quotes to some of the lawyers who attended the Becket Fund symposium on the legal challenges posed by gay marriage (the link is to the infamous Maggie Gallagher’s story in the Weekly Standard about the conference). It explains some of the potential conflicts between having the government legalize gay marriage and those religious institutions which claim that discrimination based on orientation is literally their god-given mandate. It mentions, for example, that Boston’s Catholic Charities gave up its adoption license because it feared it would have to consider same-sex couples on the same basis as heterosexual couples in their adoption services, even though it was revealed that Catholic Charities had, in fact, given children to same sex couples before their decision to close down.

In all of these conflicts listed, one can’t help but draw parallels (as Gallagher does in the Weekly Standard) to cases like Bob Jones University v. United States, where the school famously lost its tax-exempt status for claiming that its ban on interracial dating was Scripturally mandated. The school only dropped the prohibition in 2000 after Bush’s campaign appearance there, presumably because the actual words of the Bible had changed in the intervening 16 years. Then, as now, conservatives behind the cultural curve of tolerance for various minority groups claimed that Jesus told them to discriminate against Jews, or blacks, or gays, or whomever.

Need I remind Christians that Jesus himself told them to “judge not, lest ye be judged?” One wonders why homosexuality gets this special designation as an abomination not to be tolerated among their fellow citizens, as opposed to coveting thine neighbor’s oxen or keeping the Sabbath day (watch out, NASCAR fans!). All an anti-discrimination statute requires is judging not, but still, the heathens persist.

Somehow I don’t think Jesus would have looked too kindly on all of this reactionary mishegas. Back when school prayer was still being practiced, kids used to have to recite the Lord’s Prayer. But curiously, they never had to recite the preceding paragraph from Matthew 6:6-7, which goes something like,

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Daddy, who is invisible. Then your Daddy, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

Now, I hear you complain, “D. J., you’re an atheist—who are you to dictate to Christians what Jesus said?” I claim the same amount of authority over Jesus’ words as the people who mandate that I live by them. If our government’s policy is going to be dictated by “Judeo-Christian values” or similar phrases, then the interpretation ceases to be a theological matter and becomes political discourse. But really, enough about Christian theology. The state is secular, and our law is based on secular codes, not the Bible. Whenever I hear some Christian Patriot babble on about how X goes against the will of God and ought, therefore, be illegal, I always wish I could ask them: “ought it be legal, in America, to reject Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour?” To me, that’s always the issue. Religious laws are always voluntarily self-imposed. Truly religious people don’t need to be coerced into living according to their religion’s precepts.

I exhort you, faithful readers, to vote for my blog in the Best Writing category of the Koufax Awards. I have this fantasy of winning out over 126 contenders. As the Mets say, You Gotta Believe.

Please, vote here (it says the voting hasn’t opened yet, but it has):

Wampum’s Koufax Award for Best Writing 2005

My votes, incidentally:

Dada Head for Best New Blog.

Dada Head for Most Deserving of Wider Recognition.

As Dada says, Dada is the egg. Dada is the Police of the Police.

My own manifestoes are somewhat less overtly political.

UPDATE:

To quote Wampum:

“Thus, polls will close Sunday night, March 12th, at 11:59 pm. Dwight and I will sit down and start counting votes, hopefully having the results in a few days. Then onto the final round. Finally, please consider contributing to Wampum’s Koufax Awards operations fund to defray the not insignificant cost of running these awards.”

The Auto, The Hurricane, and the Ice Floe

Since the beginning of America, you can always find one Christian group who was preaching that the country was going to hell for any number of national sins: slavery; abolitionists; homosexuals; Communists and so forth. It appropriates a familiar narrative from the Old Testament, and no wonder–it was written in the same vein as the preachers who use it today. And it’s the same all over the world, on both sides of the Huntingtonian divide.

I wonder whether there ought be, or already exsts, a Christian narrative which looks upon what I call “Nature” as “God”, and has a story for the punishment of environmental sins as the reason for natural catastrophes, if our offense toward Nature could be explained in plain meterological terms. Perhaps it might be easier to construct a narrative of the President’s bearing of false witness as the reason for the deaths and maimings of American soldiers in Iraq. Lord knows Reverend Phelps blames “don’t ask don’t tell” and so forth, you could do worse in terms of biblically-correct reasons for the casualties of war.

The Catholic Church has already accepted Darwinism, and even intelligent design advocates believe in “micro-evolution,” that is to say, individuation within species (e.g., dog breeds) in caveat to science. Surely there is enough room in religious worldviews for acknowledgement of global warming as the result of human misdeeds.

Another Great New TV Show Idea

You know what would really make political television more interesting? If, instead of having captions like “Senator Joseph Biden, Jr, (D-DE)” we could have a list of their major campaign contributors instead of part affiliation: “Senator Biden, (Credit Card Industry-DE).” Wouldn’t that go a long ways toward giving the viewers an informed debate?

How about we go a step further? I bring you POP-UP-CSPAN!

On digital cable, users will be able to hit a button and scroll through a short summary of legislative records and donors. The technology exists today!

It’s a busy week; there hasn’t been much time for blogging lately. I was considering posting something about it that read, “light posting ahead, sorry folks.” Then I remembered I don’t post that often in the first place, so I won’t be making any apologies. Ha! There’s a quality/quantity tradeoff, especially when it comes to unpaid blogging. For a while I was working on a post about the standards for treason, but Glenn Greenwald has basically covered it too well for me to have much to say that would add to it. Suffice it to say that the constitution says “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.”

Why They Fight

Lots of people have been talking about the Zogby poll of U.S. troops in Iraq. Mostly, the buzz is about the 72% of troops who thin we should leave Iraq within the next year:

The poll, conducted in conjunction with Le Moyne College’s Center for Peace and Global Studies, showed that 29% of the respondents, serving in various branches of the armed forces, said the U.S. should leave Iraq “immediately,” while another 22% said they should leave in the next six months. Another 21% said troops should be out between six and 12 months, while 23% said they should stay “as long as they are needed.”

These are people who are on the ground and know (far better than the stateside pundits) what the effect of their presence is on the Iraqi civilians. Interestingly, a large majority of the troops agreed that we would need to double the number of soldiers and bombing raids in Iraq to be able to ‘control the insurgency;’ failing that, they seem to be saying (and we all know we don’t have the resources to commit), we should get out of the whole thing ASAP.

There are lots of interesting tidbits in the study (you should go read Zogby’s press relelase for yourself), but I think the most important one (and I see Bob Harris agrees) is that 90% of the troops believe they are there to retaliate against Saddam for his role in the 9/11 attacks. That’s an incredible coincidence, woudln’t you think? A percentage that high doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. How does something like that happen? Did the military censor the news reports of our government’s admission that Saddam didn’t have a hand in Al-Qaeda’s terrorism? Are they privy to some secret intelligence the White House doesn’t claim to have? Do their drill sergeants recite the false testimony of al-Libi during basic training? Or is there just something in the MRE’s? It’s bad enough that 42% of the troops claim their mission in Iraq is unclear; it seems the other 58% don’t quite understand it, either. It’s as if 90% of the armed forces are trapped in 2002 amber, nevermind that no serious political analyst who knew the Middle East could have vetted this outrageous claim.

There’s a lot more to this study, and I’m sure I’ll be quoting it again soon.

Nazis, Nazis, Everywhere

From Prussian Blue to David Irving, Nazi sympathizers are all over the news lately. But what about actual Nazis? You know, the ones who didn’t wear the uniform as some vaguely ironic countercultural statement?

Over at Majikthise, I responded to a post about the excitement over the arrival of Trader Joe’s to New York. While most commenters where gushing about the chain, I wondered,

Doesn’t it bother anyone here that Trader Joe’s is owned by the 20th richest person in the world (and a former soldier in the Nazi army), Theo Albrecht?

To which someone replied:

Um, there were quite a few of those. They were — what’s the word? — ‘Germans’.

Which is true; lots of Germans were in the Third Reich’s army. But you have to wonder (speaking of soldiers), if you were willing to take up arms, not to mention possibly giving your life in defense of Nazi Germany, wouldn’t you then be just as capable of taking up arms against Nazi Germany? (In a related note, Sophie Scholl – Die Letzten Tage is up for an Oscar Sunday night.)

Whether you felt “coerced,” or genuinely believed in Nazi ideology, joining the Nazi army is, in my view, unforgivable. The Holocaust would not have been possible but for the participation or indifference of the ordinary citizens. Now, I have no way of knowing exactly what the Albrechts, or any other soldiers actually did as part of Hitler’s army, but if they committed some real atrocities, you can pretty much assume they won’t be forthcoming about it–and why would they be?

It is true that standing up to Hitler, as an Aryan citizen, would have required courage and a real sense of morality. An awful lot of it, manifestly more than most people have. I mean, you’d have to be some kind of saint, or maybe the Pope… oh, wait. Scratch that last example.

Speaking of “mild fascists,” I think there’s a delicious irony in David Irving’s imprisonment by Austria, of all places, for Holocaust denial, even after he publically recanted his revisionism. There’s a lot of injustice in the world, but somehow this example bothers me less than others.

Some of you may be thinking, “D. J., you’re too harsh on Nazis.” If you’re one of those people, I just hope that someday, somewhere, in the name of peace and tolerance and understanding, storm troopers kill your whole family.

Snowbunnies and Catcalls

Speaking of racism, I have a funny story to tell you. Iwas walking down the street in Fort Greene tonight, minding my own business, and up the block I hear two young gangsta-wannabes shouting, “Hey snowbunny, hey snowflake” at a white woman who was passing by. I have a friend who used to live in the neighborhood who had to endure this often–sexual harrassment flavored with racism, wrapped in a crunchy taco shell of proffered rape.

Anyway, as I was walking towards these guys on the opposite side of the street I heard,

“Hey snowbu–”

I looked around and saw I was alone on my side of the block. I mean, my hair’s getting kind of long in the back, but then again, I have a beard.

One of the guys quickly recovered, “Uh, uh, snowboy… snowboy’s like, a homosexual.”

I started laughing as I walked up the block. I was reminded of the Bush administration more than anything else.

Since my internet connection went down earlier this week, I’ve been sitting and stewing about various things:

No Blogging on Yom Kippur

A few days ago, I was lamenting the fact that my traffic had been flagging lately. It’s not like I don’t know why; I don’t post every day, like most blogs do. These posts (usually) take time to write and research, and I don’t make any money off this page.

That being said, I was pleasantly surprised to hear I was nominated for a Koufax Award for Best Writing. Named for the famous southpaw pitcher and administered by Wampum, the Koufaxes are handed out to the best of the left-of-center blogosphere. Congrats to my fellow nominees:

Adventus: Robert Jeffers , Alas, A Blog: Ampersand , Alicublog: Roy Edroso , All Facts and Opinions: Natalie Davis , AmericaBlog: John Aravosis , Anonymoses , Attytood: Will Bunch , Baghdad Burning: Riverbend , Bitch Ph.D. , Blood & Treasure: Jamie Kenny , Bob Harris , Body and Soul: Jeanne d’Arc , Booman Tribune: SusanHu , Booman Tribune: Blksista , Booman/European Tribune: Oui , Bootstrap Analysis: Nuthatch , Bouphonia , Bradblog , Busy, Busy, Busy , By Neddie Jingo , The Cassandra Pages , Casual Asides: DJ Waletzky , The Carpetbagger Report , Cool Beans: Bean , The Countess: Trish Wilson , Courting Destiny , Creek Running North: Chris Clarke , Daily Kos: Hunter , Daily Kos: Armando , Daily Kos: Devilstower , Daily Kos: Georgia10 , Daily Kos: Grand Moff Texan , DC Media Girl , The Democracy Cell Project: Casey Morris , Driftglass , Echnide of the Snakes , Effwit , Enemy of the State , Eschaton: Atrios , European Tribune: Jerome a Paris , Ezra Klein , The Fat Lady Sings , Feministe: Jill , Feministe: Lauren , Firedoglake: ReddHedd , First Draft: Athenae , Frogs and Ravens , From Pine View Farm: Frank , From the Rooftops , Girl Scientist , The Green Knight , The Heretik , How to Save the World , Hullabaloo: Digby , Hullabaloo: Tristero , I Blame the Patriarchy: Twisty Faster , Informed Comment: Juan Cole , James Wolcott , Jeremy Blachman , Kid Oakland , King of Zembla: Simbaud , Lance Mannion , Legal Fiction: Publius , Lawyers, Guns and Money: Scott Lemieux , The Left Coaster: Paradox , Left I on the News: Eli Stephens , Liberal Street Fighter: Madman in the Marketplace , The (liberal) Girl Next Door , Liberty Street , Looking for Someone to Lie To Me: Michael Roston , Mad As Hell , Mahablog: Barbara O’Brien , Majikthise: Lindsay Beyerstein , Making Light: Jim Macdonald , Making Light: Teresa Nielsen Hayden , The Marj Memoirs , Matt Yglesias , Michael Bérubé Online , The Moquol , MyKeru , My Left Wing: Gottlieb , My Left Wing: Shanikka , My Left Wing: Maryscott O’Connor , My Left Wing: Caliberal , My Left Wing: Weeping for Brunnhilde , Neil Shakespeare , The Next Hurrah: Meteor Blades , Norbizness , Obsidian Wings: Hilzoy , Old Fashioned Patriot , Once Upon a Time: Arthur Silber , One Good Thing , The Opinion Mill , Orcinus: David Neiwert , Pandagon: Amanda Marcotte , PastPeak , The Poor Man: The Editors , Random Thoughts: Unfair and Unbalanced: Susan Nunes , Red Tory , Respectful Insolence , The Reaction: Michael J.W. Stickings , Rigorous Intuition , Rittenhouse Review: Jim Capazzola , Rox Populi , The Rude Pundit , Sadly, No!: , Saint Nate’s Blog , Set Free , Shakespeare’s Sister: Melissa McEwan , Suburban Guerrilla: Susie Madrak , Sufficient Scruples , Sisyphus Shrugged: Julia , Talking Points Memo: Josh Marshall , The Tattered Coat , Timothy Burke , Thou Shall Not Suck: Unholy Moses , TomDispatch , Washington Note: Steve Clemons , Unclaimed Territory: Glenn Greenwald , Unqualified Offerings: Jim Henley , Washington Monthly/Political Animal: Kevin Drum , WhirledView: Patricia Lee Sharpe , Whiskey Bar: Billmon , Winding Road in Urban Area: Jaye Ramsey Sutter , Working for Change: David Sirota , Yep,Another Goddamn Blog: Jurassic Pork

I’m still working on reading all of those links. I can safely say that the odds of any one of us winning are 126 to one against, so good luck to all!

Seriously, thanks to “Jason” for nominating me; and to my loyal readers. I’ll be alerting you when voting opens next week.

Also, if any of the aformentioned blogs want to trade links, I would be honored. (Thanks to M. J. W. Stickings of The Reaction for leading the way on that one.)

The Cult of Strength

Speaking of fellow Best Writing nominees, the lefty blogs have been talking a lot about Glenn Greenwald’s excellent post about “conservatism” being redefined as the cult of George Bush. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently–is Bush really a conservative?

Just because he has introduced recrod spending doesn’t mean he isn’t ultimately serving the interests of “limited government” as envisioned by the likes of Grover Norquist. Remember, the increase in spending is mostly due (I mean, apart from the disastrous Medicare Part D) to the increased expenditures on ‘defense,’ either for the military or the Department of Homeland Security. When it comes to the kind of spending that drives conservatives crazy–i.e., programs that are actually aimed at helping people–Bush has been ruthlessly slashing program budgets, from NASA to Medicare to education (hint to federal employees: if the President mentions your department in the State of the Union and you’re not wearing a uniform, consider yourself screwed). In fact, my personal opinion is that Bush is running up a huge deficit in order to make those cuts permanent, well beyond his eight-year tenure; the massive deficit will put subsequent Administrations in the position of having to raise taxes or keep defunding services. Just as if he were running one of his ruinous business ventures, Bush is projecting his incompetence into the future. And people say he doesn’t see things in the long term.

At any rate, I’m not here to defend Bush to conservatives. I actually want to offer a small defense of “conservative” Bush cultists today, and to do that I need to talk about reflexive defensiveness. Bush-worshippers are defending Bush the same way Democrats defended Clinton, nothing more or less. Even if you think Bush has sold his base out on any number of conservative principles, the simple fact remains that Bush drives liberals even crazier than Clinton drove conservatives. People love a strong leader, and two-termers have proven that essential quality associated with strength in a democracy, electability. (Sidebar: I have resisted saying this for a year and a half, but I am now of the opinion that Bush stole the 2004 election, particularly in the case of widespread fraud in Ohio. Not that this matters in practical terms, but there, I said it.)

In a first-past-the-post, two-party political landscape, you’re either with the party or you’re against it. Sure, ‘conservatives’ who decry GOP dissenters from the cult of Bush as liberals lack sophistication, but so does our electoral system. Bush is about as far from his libertarian supporters as Clinton was from his leftist supporters. (From my vantage point to the extreme left of both politicians, I have no problem pointing this out).

Back to reflexive defensiveness: as Der Spiegel wrote about the cartoon controversy in France:

One paper quoted a young man named Said from Nice. He said he considered himself to be an atheist, but “when the mayor rejects the building of a mosque, I suddenly become a Muslim.”

When the other guys attack our guy, we rush to our guy’s defense, no matter how indefensible. Maybe we should call the Bush supporters ‘knee-jerk conservatives.’

While we’re talking about Clinton, let’s talk about impeachment. Those who admit Bush has done wrong in some sense but balk at actually impeaching him will often ask, “does this mean that every President will get impeached from now on?”

The question is really, “has every single President committed an impeachable offense?” The answer, more than likely, is “yes.”

Evolving Creationism

There’s been a lot of coverage lately of grassroots creationism lately. Take, for example, the L. A. Times coverage of Ken Ham’s creationist seminars for schoolchildren:

“Boys and girls,” Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, “you put your hand up and you say, ‘Excuse me, were you there?’ Can you remember that?” The children roared their assent.

“Sometimes people will answer, ‘No, but you weren’t there either,’ ” Ham told them. “Then you say, ‘No, I wasn’t, but I know someone who was, and I have his book about the history of the world.’ ” He waved his Bible in the air.

…

He urges students to offer creationist critiques of their textbooks, parents to take on science museum docents, professionals to raise the subject with colleagues. If Ham has done his job well, his acolytes will ask enough pointed questions — and set forth enough persuasive arguments — to shake the doctrine of Darwin.

“We’re going to arm you with Christian Patriot missiles,” Ham, 54, recently told the 1,200 adults gathered at Calvary Temple here in northern New Jersey. It was a Friday night, the kickoff of a heavily advertised weekend conference sponsored by Ham’s ministry, Answers in Genesis.

The Christian Know-Nothing movement is trying to engender nothing short of a childrens’ crusade against evolution. So, kids, here are some questions to pose to your fellow students when they start spouting this kind of crap:

• Which did God create first, man or animals? (hint: check Genesis chapters 1 and 2 for the two contradictory accounts.)
• In scientific terms, how did God create trees before the sun?
• If there’s no such thing as evolution, should you need a different flu shot every year?
• If the problem with science’s explanations for the universe is that it doesn’t explain how all the stuff in the universe got here, what is the Bible’s explanation for how God got here?

Fortunately, I have the answer to all of these questions. That’s right, I’ve finally found religion. And it tasted good.

Since I seem to be contenting myself with rehashing old themes lately, let’s go with the only one that people consistently seem to enjoy, i.e., actual casual asides.

The Bush-NSA Spying Scandal

Let us consider, for a moment, the depths of what has been revealed here. To begin with, I entered the words “warrant courts wiretap” in to the search engine at whitehouse.org, and you’ll notice a certain tone to the stuff the Bush Administration had been putting out before December 2005.

April 19, 2004

The USA PATRIOT Act uses proven law enforcement methods in new ways to reflect new technologies and new threats. The Act brought the law up-to-date with the new technologies actually used by terrorists, so America no longer has to fight a digital-age battle with outdated legal authorities.

• Roving wiretaps – in which a wiretap authorization attaches to a particular suspect, rather than a particular communication device – have been used by law enforcement for years to investigate ordinary crimes including drug offenses and racketeering. The USA PATRIOT Act authorized the same techniques in national-security investigations. This provision has enhanced the government’s authority to monitor sophisticated international terrorists and intelligence officers, who are trained to thwart surveillance, such as by rapidly changing cell phones, just before important meetings or communications.
• Before September 11, law enforcement could more easily obtain the business and financial records of white-collar criminals than of suspected terrorists.

[ed. note—does anyone else here detect a certain shrill bitterness here on the part of the Administration? Oh, the injustice of making it easy to get the "business and financial records" of business and financial criminals. And really, it begs the question—should we be wiretapping Ken Lay's cell phone in the name of national security?]

…

• The USA PATRIOT Act gives investigators the tools, such as roving wiretaps and delayed-notification search warrants, which are needed to stop terrorists before they strike, fulfilling America’s duty to win the War on Terror and never forget the lessons of September 11, 2001. The USA PATRIOT Act has not diminished our liberty – it has defended our liberty and made America more secure. Congress must renew the USA PATRIOT Act and take further steps to improve our ability to fight terror within the United States.

By the way, it has always bothered me that the guy who just got an failing report card from the actual government task force assigned to strategizing and reshaping our “War on Terror,” i.e., the 9/11 Commission, said, on Decmeber 19th,

And as the 9/11 Commission pointed out, to prevent this from happening again, we need to connect the dots before the enemy attacks, not after. And we need to recognize that dealing with al Qaeda is not simply a matter of law enforcement; it requires defending the country against an enemy that declared war against the United States of America. As President and Commander-in-Chief, I have the constitutional responsibility and the constitutional authority to protect our country. Article II of the Constitution gives me that responsibility and the authority necessary to fulfill it. And after September the 11th, the United States Congress also granted me additional authority to use military force against al Qaeda.

and then turned around in the same speech and said,

My personal opinion is it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy,

all within the context of asking Congress to renew a law he just admits he broke and doesn’t deem necessary or sufficient for national security. His own government has held his administration responsible (or irresponsible, as the case may be) for making the country less safe than before 9/11, but disclosing an illegal seizure of power by the President is the most destructive act. And by the way, nice tie in to the Commission, I’m sure they appreciate a patronizing aside much more than steps towards making the country ‘safer,’ legally.

By the way, the reason I’m hapring on the 9/11 Commission recomendations is that they institue systemic upgrades to security rather than target a particular religious group, which is the key to stopping terrorism, not just “Al Qaeda,” whatever that may be. The part that Bush would rather seize on, because it provides a venue for the expansion of executive power (Nixon-style) is the wiretap stuff:

June 9th, 2005

Roving Wiretaps Are Essential In Investigating International Terrorists. The Patriot Act extended the use of roving wiretaps, which were already permitted against drug kingpins and mob bosses, to international terrorism investigations. They must be approved by a judge. …

Many Safeguards Exist To Ensure The Patriot Act Is Applied Responsibly.

• Judicial Oversight Protects The Privacy Of Americans. Wiretaps and search warrants require a high level of proof and permission from a judge. The tools in the Patriot Act are fully consistent with the U.S. Constitution. As Senator Diane Feinstein said, “I have no reported abuses.”
• Congress Also Has Oversight Responsibilities. Congress created a Civil Liberties Board to ensure the Patriot Act and other laws uphold civil liberties. The Patriot Act protects America and defends American liberties.

And, of course, there’s still the July 14th, 2004 “Q and A” session, which include such gems as,

Let me answer some questions, and then we’re going to get back on the bus and take it up the highway. Who has got a question? Yes, sir. Yell it — oh, there’s a mike. Q The Patriot Act —

THE PRESIDENT: Patriot Act.

Q The Patriot Act is due to expire —

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

Q — coming next year. And I find that an important tool for protecting America. And in Wisconsin here, we have Senator Russ Feingold, as you’re aware, the only Senator to vote against the Patriot Act. Wondering if you can tell us all here the importance of the Patriot Act and what we can do to help get that renewed.

THE PRESIDENT: Let me — that’s a great question. A couple of things that are very important for you to understand about the Patriot Act. First of all, any action that takes place by law enforcement requires a court order. In other words, the government can’t move on wiretaps or roving wiretaps without getting a court order.

and again in the infamous speech on April 20th, 2004 in Buffalo:

Incredibly enough, because of — which Larry and others will discuss — see, I’m not a lawyer, so it’s kind of hard for me to kind of get bogged down in the law.

Don’t you mean bogged down with the law?

(Applause.) I’m not going to play like one, either. (Laughter.)

Oh, that’s real fuckin’ funny.

…So the first thing I want you to think about is, when you hear Patriot Act, is that we changed the law and the bureaucratic mind-set to allow for the sharing of information. It’s vital. And others will describe what that means. Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.

When asked about this recently, Bush was a bit flummoxed, according to the New York Times:

As Mr. Bush continued to defend the program in San Antonio, he was asked about a remark he made in Buffalo in 2004 at an appearance in support of the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act, where he discussed government wiretaps. “Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap,” Mr. Bush said in Buffalo, “a wiretap requires a court order.”

He added: “Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.”

Democrats have seized on the remark, made more than two years after Mr. Bush authorized the N.S.A. to conduct wiretaps without warrants, in charging that the president had misled the public.

Asked about that charge on Sunday, Mr. Bush said: “I was talking about roving wiretaps, I believe, involved in the Patriot Act. This is different from the N.S.A. program.

“The N.S.A. program is a necessary program. I was elected to protect the American people from harm. And on Sept. 11, 2001, our nation was attacked. And after that day, I vowed to use all the resources at my disposal, within the law, to protect the American people, which is what I have been doing and will continue to do.”

The guy doesn’t even run out of resources at his disposal within the law before the goes for a secret program, but don’t let that bother you. After being caught in a lie, he assures us that the program was “limited in scope.” I’m not usually one to say “falsus in unum, falsus in omnes,” but to hear him tell it, the disclosure of any facts about the program basically amounts to treason. So we’ll understand if he lies to us again.

Most people have figured out that there are several possibilities:

1. The Bush adminstration believes that FISA has been compromised by bin Laden and is not secure for submitting requests for otherwise legal wiretaps of the utmost secrecy.
2. The targets of this program met with the requirements of FISA, which the Administration does consult from time to time. Why, according to ever faithful Atty. General Gonzalez,
   

   Another very important point to remember is that we have to have a reasonable basis to conclude that one party to the communication is a member of al Qaeda, affiliated with al Qaeda, or a member of an organization affiliated with al Qaeda, or working in support of al Qaeda. We view these authorities as authorities to confront the enemy in which the United States is at war with — and that is al Qaeda and those who are supporting or affiliated with al Qaeda.

   The Bush administration did not seek approval in violation of the law for absolutely no reason except they felt entitled by the authorization of force in 2001;

3. The targets of this program did not meet the requirements of FISA because they were illegally identified through domestic spying such as Echelon or some other unauthorized search(es);
4. The targets of this program were rejected by FISA for wiretaps and the executive decided to overrule them in clear violation of statute;
5. The targets of this program did not meet FISA requirements because they are not connected with Al Qaeda. We know that Bush’s political enemies list has been shared with the FBI, how about with the NSA? What about all that Pentagon secrect spy group, CIFA, who target anti-war protestors? Is that what we’re talking about? Are our tax dollars going toward secretly wiretapping Kos or Michael Moore? By the way, I’m drafting a letter to be signed and passed around asking for the release of the enemies list via FOIA request.

At any rate, the real question is this: why would the Bush administration recklessly endanger the convictions of suspected terrorists by gathering evidence illegally?

More on this later. As well as a more in-depth analysis of Republican Fascism-lite^TM.

The War on Christmas

Now that the War on Christmas is over (and Christmas won, of course), let’s take a minute to examine what was really being argued on the part of Christian soldiers such as Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson (lovefest excerpted verbatim)

O’REILLY: With us now, Fox News anchor John Gibson, the author of the book The War on Christmas: Why It’s Worse Than You Thought. This is so incredibly stupid I can’t believe it. All you need to do is use all the phrases: “Merry Christmas,” “Happy Holidays,” “Happy Hanukah.” Plenty of advertising space, plenty of room for banners in your store. Why do you think they’re this dumb in excluding “Merry Christmas”? GIBSON: In the book, I talk about this going on in schools and libraries and public parks all over the country. And the only thing I can think about these retailers is they tend to worry about 100 percent of the customers. And if 85 percent of the country is Christian and 90 some percent celebrate Christmas, there’s that little extra percentage that may not.

O’REILLY: Yeah, but surely they understand, because they do understand. We called Toys “R” Us. They knew right away —

GIBSON: Right.

O’REILLY: — OK, that they’re in waters they don’t want to be in. So surely, they understand the anger that’s going to be engendered by millions of Americans who believe that their cherished holiday is being denigrated, disrespected.

GIBSON: Yes, it indicates hostility and —

O’REILLY: By not using the word.

GIBSON: — by refusing to say the word “Christmas.” And what I’ve noticed is the way this appears in schools, for instance, is we now don’t call it the Christmas break. It’s the winter break, as if people worship winter. And there wouldn’t be a winter break if there wasn’t Christmas at that time of year. So once you call it — change the name. You won’t use the word “Christmas,” then you go to “winter,” you can sort of push the Christmas thing out of public view.

O’REILLY: See, I think it’s all part of the secular progressive agenda —

GIBSON: Absolutely.

O’REILLY: — to get Christianity and spirituality and Judaism out of the public square. Because if you look at what happened in Western Europe and Canada, if you can get religion out, then you can pass secular progressive programs like legalization of narcotics, euthanasia, abortion at will, gay marriage, because the objection to those things is religious- based, usually.

GIBSON: You have France or you have — or you have Holland, you have legalized prostitution, you have drugs. All those things come in which religious organizations tend to oppose. Once you start taking out even the secular symbols of religious holidays — Christmas trees, Santas, so forth — refuse to use the word “Christmas,” you can shove this religious stuff indoors, out of sight.

O’REILLY: Yeah, because no kid is going to come home and ask Mom what winter break is.

GIBSON: No.

O’REILLY: But a kid might come home and say, “Hey, what’s this Christmas thing all about? Who is this baby Jesus guy?” You know?

GIBSON: Right.

Now, let’s look at the numbers here. America is actually 75% white and Christian, repsectively, as I have pointed out before. When it comes right down to it, the argument here is that America is, at heart, a Christian nation. It’s the refrain you hear from fundamentalist politicians and think tanks all the time, and it’s based on numerical superiority.

But if you think about it, America would be much more aptly described as being founded as a white country. Not all of the Founding Fathers were Christian—many were Deist—but all of them were white landowning males. See the Treaty of Tripoli for details about our so-called Christian origins. Certainly our legal history bears out this idea. I figure there’s a reason Fox News isn’t more openly pushing the idea of a white America, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why (based on the census and our rich national history, of course).

Now, if you believe that America’s mission statement expanded beyond just providing for white people at some point in the last hundred years, you might be able to recognize the ideas behind civil rights for minorities, the relentless commercialization of a formerly pagan holiday and Emily Post-style common courtesy might lead to a more open and diverse America.

Anyway, what’s so hilarious about the “War on Christmas” is that they keep insisting that Christians have a special right to be offended by inclusive phrases whereas non-Christians have no right to protest exclusive phrases. We can all hope Santa brought Gibson and O’Reilly some moral clarity, but it doesn’t seem likely.

And that’s because Gibson and O’Reilly have it right in one respect: Americans will do whatever retailers tell them to do. If Radio Shack tells you to have a Merry Christmas, you’e going to have a jolly fucking Yuletide, even if you’re goddamn sun-worshipper. And if they tell you to have some “Happy Holidays,” you’re going to put your crucifixes down and drink toasts of babies’ blood to Satan while sodomizing your same-sex secular progressive spouse—and no one will ever know of Christmas or Santa Claus or Irving Berlin ever again.

A New Idea in Campaign Finance Reform

McCain’s curtailments of lobbyists goes in the wrong direction; instead of proposing restrictions on Congress they have no incentive to approve (if you weren’t involved with Abramoff), why not have all lobbyists contribute instead to a slush fund to be equally distributed to all of Congress? You could sell it to lobbyists as a way to increase their lobbying power (while actually diluting/diminishing their ability to lobby particular votes), and then we’d have a record of all contributions. While Vasco v. US remains on the books, bribery is still legal, but by making the money go to a general fund, it would become functionally impossible (and monetarily impractical) to do the kind of influence-peddling deals like Abramoff did. Everybody would be able to see where the money came from and how much there was. If, say, the pharmaceutical industry wants to bribe Congress into favorable legislation, they’re going to have to give each Congressperson the same amount of bribes to do so—maybe a just a bottle of pills apiece. Seems fairer, no?

Note: I’ve been busy and uninspired lately. Actually, I’ve been trying to pitch articles to magazines instead of working like a dog to fact-check stuff for a blog that relatively few people read. The market has wreaked its horrible toll on this blog, I’m afraid.

But don’t despair, I found this draft from a while ago about the Religious Right that I’d been meaning to fully develop at some point. Instead, I’ve just polished up some rough edges and will post a further discussion at some even later point.

Note: this is the continuation of Incredible Values.

Enjoy!

If you were to believe Pat Robertson, James Dobson, or Alan Keyes, Christians and Christianity are under attack from the evil, soulless forces of secular judges and politicians. They’re right, of course; the political power of Christians is always abutting and opposing the political and systematic proponents of secularism, one of which happens to be the U.S. Constitution. Remember, the United States is comprised of roughly three-quarters Christians and Whites respectively, so it might be instructive to think of the political kulturkampf as a parallel to the civil rights movement.

Then, as now, the rights of the minorities were being asserted against the unjust concentration of political power in the hands of the majority. Jim Crow laws were majority enacted and enforced, remember. All the same, the civil rights movements claimed new power at the expense of white power, plain and simple. White people’s monopoly on power was (and is) being diminished, but not unjustly so.

[A side note about white supremacist movements: Of course, the those most likely to suffer from this minor shift of political balance-of-power are the whites at the periphery of power, the working class whites of the type who are drawn to white power movements. These movements seek to regain that colonial advantage which would let their race's weakest to enjoy their previous advantages over other races' strongest.]

Just as the shift towards equilibrium launched by the civil rights movement threatened whites’ privileges more than their freedoms, so to has the parallel secular rights movement diminshed Christians’ political control rather than their ability to practice. The central and most instructive example is the fight over school prayer, which I have summarized previously: as long as there are tests in schools, there will be prayer in schools. But ‘school prayer’ has only one express purpose, which is to get kids who wouldn’t otherwise pray to accept Christian values.

Jesus’ take on politics was “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” but we all know Christianity has come a long way from (and since) the words of Jesus. Much like Islamism, today’s American version of Christian evangelism is a political as well as social movement. The statist aspirations of a Bin Laden and a Ralph Reed are basically similar:

“I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night.” –Ralph Reed, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 9-Nov-1991

Consider the prominent ‘Christian’ political issues–school prayer, which is about non-Christian children; abortion, which is about non-Christian women, gay marriage, which is about non-Christian marriage. Here, I’m using ‘Christian’ as the evangelicals do, to refer to the more conservative theology that dominates the ‘Red’ states and the GOP base. These battles are about preserving a Christian monopoly in the legal arena, to which their superior numbers simply do not entitle them. Ever since the Emperor Constantine, Christianity has been gained a political aspect which, though completely extraneous to the New Testament, is nonetheless an integral part of the religion.

Having established that “values” is a terrible code-word for “Christian,” we could turn to the other politically correct code-word, “family.”

First, let’s dial it back for a moment. The world runs on convenient fictions, thing that we must believe for the sake not only of expediency, but if we didn’t, that which we call ‘the world’ would fall apart. Whether these are religious beliefs we accept on faith, trusts we have in a national currency, or narrow views of history which highlight one set of achievements and tragedies over others, we lean most heavily on these lies’ rhetorical strength when we see their truth being challenged.

Liberals have a real problem understanding why Christians want to outlaw gay marriage when the simple fact is that if you’re opposed, all you have to do is not marry someone of the same gender. Well, nobody’s going to get anywhere until they understand and empathize with the other side. Let’s take a look at, for example, one of James Dobson’s Eleven Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage (Part 1 of 5):

1. The legalization of homosexual marriage will quickly destroy the traditional family. …the introduction of legalized gay marriages will lead inexorably to polygamy and other alternatives to one man/one woman unions.

Isn’t it curious that though homosexuality predates both the Bible, marriage, and the nuclear family, Dobson links gay marriage’s destructive power to its supposed ability to bring back polygamy… like we had back in the Bible!

…After the introduction of marriage between homosexuals, however, it will be supported by nothing more substantial than the opinion of a single judge or by a black-robed panel of justices. After they have reached their dubious decisions, the family will consist of little more than someone’s interpretation of “rights.” Given that unstable legal climate, it is certain that some self-possessed judge, somewhere, will soon rule that three men or three women can marry. …Those who disagree will continue to be seen as hate-mongers and bigots. (Indeed, those charges are already being leveled against Christians who espouse biblical values!)

These Christians conveniently ignore that what they call “the traditional family” (a.k.a., the nuclear family) is an invention of the Industrial Revolution, and that what sociologists refer to as ‘the extended family’ predates even marriage. Early humans lived under arrangements much more like Dobson’s nightmare scenario of ‘group marriages.’ Agricultural societies like those of the bible were frequently polygamous and often polyandrous, and featured high rates of illegitimacy where monogamy was enforced. Extended, intergenerational households were the norm before people moved off the farms to the cities. It’s curious, isn’t it, that those we consider “Christian fundamentalists” have a vision of Christianity that’s so historically divorced from its seminal prophet and text.

The convenient fiction like the ‘traditional family’ dovetails well with the claim that gay marriage will destroy marriage itself. But if you read the critiques from the likes of Dobson (essentially that marriage will become short-lived and arbitrary more than it is already), what they’re really arguing against is the legalization of divorce. The real fear arising from gay marriage is that the Christian monopoly on yet another section of legal mores will disappear. There’s a reason the Bill of Rights is an amendment to the Constitution: the majority cannot be trusted to protect the civil rights of minorities. We realized this relatively early in the democratic experiment we call America.

In today’s evangelical movement, but most particularly in its political wing (which I refer to here as ‘Christian Patriot’) there has been an adoption of free-market capitalist rhetoric. Like the other main GOP client group, business interests, they have no intention of eating their own dog food. Much like American business leaders rail against government regulation while accepting corporate welfare and all of the legal protections and mechanisms devoted to corporate interests (including the very concept of an artificial citizen with “limited liability”), Christian Patriots rhetorically reference freedom of religion, but demand government interference in the same breath.

The Christian complaint is that they are losing their right to control legal mores. Christians, like any majority faced with a similar situation (again, a parallel to the whites of the Civil Rights era), naturally see the progress made by non-Christians not just a challenege to their position in society, but as a challenege to their fundamental democratic rights. As the majority, they feel entitled the dictate the morality of the rest of the country to a certain extent. Because you can’t come right out and say that, however, this reasoning manifests itself in two rhetorical memes:

First, that government acceptance of [insert non-Christian activity here] is the same as government promotion of non-Christian values. Secondly, they fear for their children growing up in a world of moral ambiguity where Christian and non-Christian values are presented as morally equivalent in the eyes of the government, which would lead these children to abandon Christ.

Within the evangelical community, there are two approaches to the problem of urban secularization. Loss of power is traditionally met with retrenchment–those who wish to withdraw from secular culture and society (interesting fact: Harper’s noted in a recent Index that the ratio of gated communities to mobile homes in 1:1). These are the home schoolers, the suburbanites of close-knit Christian tract developments of places like Colorado Springs (or for that matter, Elohim City). These are the people who are content to build themselves the separate nation I spoke of earlier. These people live lives of private virtue, working to fulfill their religious obligations without pushing their religion onto others.

But the political activists who wish to harness even those passive members’ political power are those who are not satisfied to live righteously themselves, but to force virtue onto others. Sometimes, (and the mayor of Spokane, Jim West, who spent 20 years distinguishing himself as the anti-gay pit bull of the state legislature is just the latest and greatest example), Christians have enough trouble living up to their own religious morality that they feel compelled to use state means to harass others who don’t share their Christian values.

These political operatives have appropriated the rhetoric of victimhood to try and rally Christians around the necessity of extending their theocratic control over the laws of this country. Freedom of religion is not enough for evangelicals; which is why they bristle at the logical extension of religious freedom–freedom from religion.

Pat Robertson:

“Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It’s no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history.”

These Christian cries of martyrdom are just detestable. They ought to quit whining about the lack of restrictions on other people and worry about themselves and render unto Caesar already.

You may recall, from last November, the media talking about "values," which is the politically correct word for "Christian." Political correctness, by the way, is just another invention of the market in that political operative have become brand managers–they've carefully chosen the word "values" to mean something very specific. And yet, the word "values" is so broadly common as to make the claim to the word rather audacious.

There's a culture war (some might say 'culture wars') going on at all economic levels and in all corners of the country. It is a battle, literally, for the heart and soul of America, and everybody knows it. Perhaps you think I'm being dramatic, but consider what builds and sustains a nation–any nation. A shared history is one thing, but there are several other pillars involved; namely, a shared culture.

Think about America today–the two camps, which we have seen fit to call 'Red' and 'Blue'–are developing parallel cultural developments. Their own media outlets, movies, music, books and videos, and an array of targeted TV programming, and even a national Christian satelite provider named 'Sky Angel.' Look at the blogosphere: parallel (though sometimes overlapping) hemispheres of left and right.

The chief theorist of nationalism, Benedict Anderson talks about the invention of the printing press (and therefore mass media) as the catalyst for the creation of the democratic nation-state. In order to think of someone you've never met, never heard of, and will never interact with in your entire life as a 'fellow citizen' and pretend to bear them in mind when voting, you have to become part of what Anderson called the "imagined community." What builds the nation? Literature, in the age before television, and then radio, etc., but always, always mass media.

America, by the way, is the only country in the world where the government didn't install television broadcast equipment in order to foster a national culture. This is because some guy working in his garage invented it in Utah, so America being the land of the free and enterprising, we have the world's only private television broadcasting network, which is still regulated (poorly) by the government.

What I'm trying to get at here is that the two Americas are separating and forming their own national identities. We're basically split down the middle, and with the array of consumer choices in the cultural market, nationalism is on sale and you can pick which nation you want to be a part of. Will the Union ultimately survive this growing chasm? Should it? Will one America subsume the other, or can they get along?

Let's get back to values, because that's what this whole thing is about–this essay, this blog, politics, human interaction as a whole, take your pick. What drives me crazy about the appropriation of the word "values" is that everybody has 'values.' This is crucial to understanding the genesis of the two Americas, but more importantly, <b>why people who are just as smart as you are disagree about politics</b>.

Each of us contains within ourselves a base fear for the country and the government. For some people, it's the fear that the government will take their guns away. For some, it's that the government will herd minorities into slave and death camps, or that free speech will be abolished, or the gap between rich and poor will grow unsustainable. For some, it's that lazy indigents will get a free ride on their hard-earned tax dollars, or that millions of unborn babies will be killed yearly. And so forth; each has a nightmare scenario; for some people, they are living that nightmare.

These fears are installed early, and are the post powerful political motivators on the planet. The point about these fears is that they're not really rational, in that they are installed in us psychologically at a young age rather than the result of a bipartisan debate. As the descendent of Holocaust survivors, you can imagine my nightmare scenario for a democratic government–and these fears were practically inborn. Did you know there is an excellent chance that you have the same party affiliation your father had when you were 15? (In a smaller number of cases, your values may be the diametric opposite of those views, which is another version of the above).

The flipside of fears are hopes, and those hopes are called "values." Politically speaking, values are what each person considers inviolable principles. Everything else is a matter of expedience, really. In our two-party system, you vote for the lesser of two evils, so we choose the one who threatens our values the least.

We all have a base set of assumptions, which are rooted in our fears. We build our universes around them. I have long maintained that people are more alike than they are different, but I mean it in this very specific way. In "The Fog of War," McNamara talks about the importance of "empathizing with the enemy." It's a crucial step towards a real understanding of politics. Once you realize your enemy is much like yourself save for a different set of axioms, you can make progress, in either war, or peace. Everybody's built the same, just using different parts.

For example, if you value security (as many suburban GOP voters do), the administration has likely played upon your fears with great success (even while they do everything they can to destabilize the world and our military). Consider the demographic footprint of 'Red' and 'Blue'–note that the greatest targets (i.e., urban areas like New York and DC) for terrorist attacks are always 'Blue', while the least likely targets are mostly 'Red.' What's really interesting is that the same fears which motivated suburbanites and exurbanites or their ancestors to move away from the cities linger on in their consciousnesses. The people who were behind the wars were seldom real targets in their own right (which allowed them to be cavalier about sending troops to fight for our supposed values). We know they're behind the war because they're not in front of it; the war is a policy point that few Republicans outside of PNAC are really wedded to, but can easily support without it costing them anything.

Consider an issue like "states' rights." Unless you're the governor, the words "states' rights" are necessarily a canard, a mask for your real agenda. Notice how when a party is out of power they take up the states' rights banner as quickly as they put it down again when they return to office? It's not an accident. Very few people take the issue seriously, which is why the states' rights agenda is such a useful and flexible tool.

To identify someone's fear (as good political operatives are trained to do) you can use that fear as a fulcrum for your agenda, which in itself is mutable as long as it includes your base fear.

I was watching CNN recently, and a crawl went by that read, "RATZINGER'S PARENTS WERE ANTI-NAZI." That's kind of an odd thing to report, I thought. That was before I found out about his Nazi past, among other things, in this excellent Salon article by Sidney Blumenthal.

The story is that Ratzinger and his brother (now both Church officials) were in Hitler Youth when membership became mandatory and served in the army until Ratzinger defected in 1945.

Now I have to wait more than twenty years to hear them spin this when he gets canonized.

Yesterday, the New York Times Op-Ed page published an unusually long (and very good) retrospective of Einstein's work. It commemmorated the hundredth anniversary of his banner year in physics publishing; not only was this the year of "E=mc<small>²</small>", but of the declaration that though light appears to be a wave, it is actually composed of particles (i.e., photons). The article is a little vague about how, but the remarkable thing about this discovery is that it led to the formulation of quantum physics, a field which Einstein vigorously campaigned against, even though his work was the foundation of it.

Those of you who have known me for over a year have already, in all likelihood, received my lecture about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, but for the rest of you, here's a condensed version:

The significance of light's particular nature (no pun intended) was revealed when Heisenberg was working with the atom in the 1920s. He discovered that in trying to pinpoint the location of an electron, you could either find its velocity or its position, but not both. And why was this? Because in order to "see" the electron, we need to bounce a photon off of it; and the impact of that photon necessarily changes the course of that electron.

Usually, when I tell people about the Uncertainty Principle, it has nothing to do with physics; the everyday lesson of the principle is that <i>observation necessarily changes the observed phenomenon</i>. (Example: at university, on of my roommates' boyfriend was constantly pestering her with hypothetical questions about their future together and so forth. I explained to him that merely asking the question forms a response and an opinion that might be totally different had he not asked the question.)

But today, I want to talk about the larger questions of quantum physics. Einstein was offended at the implications of the theory: "God does not play dice with the universe," he said famously. From the article:
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If, as quantum mechanics asserted, the best you can ever do is predict probabilities, Einstein countered that he'd "rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in a gaming house, than a physicist."

This emphasis, however, partly obscures a larger point. It wasn't the mere reliance on probabilistic predictions that so troubled Einstein. Unlike many of his colleagues, Einstein believed that a fundamental physical theory was much more than the sum total of its predictions – it was a mathematical reflection of an underlying reality. And the reality entailed by quantum mechanics was a reality Einstein couldn't accept.
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Indeed, quantum physics rewrote everything we knew about reality. But the most significant advance of quantum theory for the larger world, in my view, is that it replaces the age-old question of "<b>why</b> things happen the way they do" with "<b>how</b> did things happened the way they did." In the multiverse of quantum physics, you actually split reality in two (or more) parallel universes merely by flipping a coin. I'm not capable of explaining the whole of quantum theory here, so you'll have to consult your local library with questions about how exactly the whole thing works.

Getting back to the article: Einstein was so troubled by quantum physics that he spent a large part of his life seeking a Grand Unified Theory to oppose the probablitistic uncertainties of quanta. But it was too late; the quantum cat was already out of the bag.* Even an intellect as great as Einstein's refused to accept provable facts which would have blown his whole way of thinking apart.

I've been thinking about all this in view of a recent article article on the Revealer about teens' perceptions of god, and the phenomenon they call "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism." You should really read the whole article, but here's a relevant excerpt:
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The authors first identify the social contexts in which adolescents live and believe, starting with a discussion of therapeutic individualism, a set of assumptions and commitments that "powerfully defines everyday moral and relational codes and boundaries in the United States." Personal experience is what shapes our notions of truth, and truth is found nowhere else but in happiness and positive self-esteem. In religious terms, according to teenagers, God cares that each teenager is happy and that each teenager has high self-esteem. Morality has nothing to do with authority, mutual obligations, or sacrifice. In a sense, God wants little more for us than to be good, happy capitalists. Smith and Denton elaborate: "Therapeutic individualism