Hate-Killings Are Weaned On Hate-Talk: Random Thoughts On The Way The Murders in Chapel Hill Are Playing Out

Count me as one of those who is totally disgusted at how the "parking dispute" angle of the murders of, Deah Barakat, Yusor Mohammad and Razan Abu-Salha, three students who were Muslims, is being played in the media, beginning, as far as I could see, from the confessed killers' wife and immediately picked up and given credibility from such sources as The New York Times, even as the horrific murder of three admirable students in their own home was being soft-peddled in the wider media.

That the killer left a record of anti-religious, anti-Muslim hate on Facebook is certainly more credible in determining his motivations than assertions made by his wife in the wake of his arrest for those murders.  It's not as if she might not have some ulterior motive in trying to make it look like her husband had some "reason" for going into the students' home and shooting them each at closer range in the head, gangster execution style.   Its not dissimilar from the response of the local police and media after the gun-lynching of Trayvon Martin, a way to blame the victim for their own murders.   We have a history of doing that when the victims are not white men of means or influence and the media certainly has a history of it.  I expect to be going over some of that as this case develops.

I started writing about that yesterday but ran up against a wall of exhaustion, and it wasn't all just from shoveling show and dealing with the deluge of winter we've had here and will be getting more, soon.  I'm spiritually exhausted from confronting so much bigotry and hate.  And as soon as I started looking online, the wall of that which you had to get through was pretty high, thick and redolent.

It was tempting to go into the online atheist response to the murders of Muslim students in North Carolina yesterday, considering the automatic atheist "Wurlitzer" of anti-Christian invective that cranks up whenever any violent crime is committed by someone who professes Christianity or who can be imagined to profess Christianity or who can be made up as a Christian.   Aside from the fact that anyone who murders anyone is violating one of the strongest moral prohibitions explicitly and unambiguously set out in the scriptures and in both tradition and law of Christianity, online atheists have tirelessly attributed that kind of violence to some inherent property of Christianity and religion, in general.

In this case, that many of the same people would, in a different context, be slamming Muslims, universally, the hypocrisy is as ubiquitous as it is shameless and unchallenged.  The killer said that his anti-religious fervor was a response to 9-11, citing things that Richard Dawkins had said and, I would imagine, other popular atheist hate talkers, the possible list of Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Bill Maher, and a host of lesser blights were known to him as well.   The ease with which the readers of those guys will go from hating Muslims to loving Muslims, according to the context in which their hate-lurve is expressed, is quite a spectacle to behold.  Salmun Rushdie -> hate Muslims,  Southern Baptist hate talker -> lurve Muslims.   In that it's pretty clear that in the atheist hierarchy of hate, Christians are consistently the group which it is most acceptable to hate on all occasions and about whom any lie is to be encouraged.  It's not much different from how the right-wing media, and even much of the "mainstream" treats "the other" only not generally in such vulgar language.

A few weeks back, in response to a challenge to identify multiple murders committed by atheists, something I did, in even some of the most infamous murders in American history.   I was able to point out, of course, that whereas anyone who murders anyone is violating The Law and the teachings of Jesus and his earliest followers recorded in The Bible, discrediting his sincerity or even honesty in claiming to follow them or even believe in them,  an atheist who murders hundreds of millions of people would not be violating anything that would logically challenge his commitment to atheism.

Well, on some of the comment threads where I followed atheist comment communities blame Christians for murders they not only never had a hand in but condemned,  not infrequently murders committed against Christians (including Dr. Tiller, murdered as he was ushering at his Reformed Lutheran Church, as is asserted in another hate-talk article up on Alternet just now) I found no enthusiasm for owning up to the news that Craig Hicks was a professed atheist and an admirer of Richard Dawkins and an anti-religious hate talker on Facebook.  Typical of what I found were comments like these on the hate-talk webloid, Alternet.

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  Orphic Dragon • 6 hours ago

  
  

  Man they are desperate to make this a hate crime. I don't think it's gunna happen. This is the work of a violent nutbag who happens to dislike religion. It's pretty clear he would have shot atheists over the freaking parking situation just as insanely.

  Kinda sad these 3 rather fine people murdered have been reduced to "Muslim's". The story is outrageous enough, don't add crap. It's just disrespectful.

  
  

  
  
  
  
  
  

   
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  ajaxthegreat • 10 hours ago

  
  

  The thing about this self-proclaimed "New Atheist" is that he, like many "New Atheists", are really not atheists at all, but rather anti-theists. And he was an extremist one at that.

  
  

  
  
  
  
  
  

   
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  Nylene13  ajaxthegreat • 4 hours ago

  
  

  He was a mentally ill nutcase. He had no position worth discussing.
  He belonged in a mental hospital and why he was not is the only discussion worth having about him.
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  SJ Reidhead  Jaime Hunter • 11 hours ago

  
  

  There is a certain group of atheists who are rude, nasty, obnoxious bullies who treat anyone who professes to have a religion like dirt. They attack like a pack of coyotes going after a wounded animal. Like fundamentalist Christians who make all Christians look bad, and murderous Islamic cults who make Muslims look bad, these jerks make atheists look bad. Anyone who says atheism is not a religion is intellectually dishonest. It is.

  
  

  
  
  
  
  
  

   
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  Jaime Hunter  SJ Reidhead • 9 hours ago

  
  

  Have you actually met such a "nasty pack" of atheist bullies, or are you alluding to the so called "New Atheist" leaders (e.g. Richard Dawkins)? I have met a lot of atheists, and though I have met a few I didn't get along with well, I have never encountered or witnessed the likes of a group of atheists as you describe.

  Okay, I'll bite: Atheism is not a religion. The reason I can say that with confidence is that religion requires belief in one or more god(s), and by definition, atheism is the absence of belief (zero) in any gods. (So saying "atheism is a religion" is like saying "zero pounds weighs one or more pounds").

  I think we would agree that there are rude persons representative of varying religions, and of non-religion (i.e. atheists).

  
  

  
  
  

" Have you actually met such a "nasty pack" of atheist bullies." Can you believe someone could ask that with a straight face on Alternet, one of the premier hate-talk venues on the alleged left?   And, if their sidebar of their top stories is accurate, such hate fests are some of their biggest attractions.   If "Jamie Hunter" wanted to find it, other than in the comment thread he was part of, he could look at several comment threads at Alternet or at Salon, on the "Freethought" blogs, many of the "Scienceblogs" the James Randi "Educational" Foundation,  CFI, Pandagon, Raw Story, etc. etc. etc. and find that anti-Christian and anti-religious hate talk by atheists is as pungent in its stench as that aimed from the official right wing at any focus of its hatred.  In fact, at times, you will find a considerable overlap, even at times in some rather putrid antisemitic content which, if it were not said by an atheist would probably not be allowed to pass without the most severe condemnation.  Even that most consistently observed taboo in hate talk is acceptably violated among today's atheists.

The violence that comes as a direct result of the proliferation of hate-talk is something that is seldom gone into in the media.  But the fact is that all hate-crime is preceded by hate talk, hate talk heard and imbibed, feeding hate felt and which is eventually expressed in hateful violence and murder.   From these three killings to the greatest mass slaughters based on identity in our history, they are all fed by words of hate, words which the internet have protected with anonymity and made easier to say and more readily available to those who will gorge on the intellectual junk food that they are, eventually to be vomited up in violence, illicit and, with not to much help, in laws.  The fact is that hate-words are the seed of that violence and the undermining of equality and the civil order that is essential for the exercise of that equality and the pseudo-left is no better than the worst of the far right in spreading those hate-words that it figures is in its interest to spread, some of the most allegedly respectable organs of our media as willing to spread them as Stormfront or the Phelps cult.

I will have more to say about this next week.

So Many of the Great Ones Had an Interest in Continuing the Oppression, That Nothing Was Done: De Las Casas As Read By Anthony Benezet

Bartolome de las Casas is one of the great figures in the literature of abolitionism and human rights, one of the earliest campaigners for the rights of the people who lived in the Western hemisphere even as the economic interests of Europe were first enslaving and murdering them in the most massive and sustained program of genocide ever undertaken.  His criticisms of the Europeans, many of them Catholics, like himself, were so honest and unbiased that his book, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, was used both by his enemies, all of them with corrupt economic interests and by anti-Catholic British propagandists who published it as an attack citing, "Butcheries, and all manner of Cruelties, that Hell and Malice could invent, committed by the Popish Spanish Party on the inhabitants of West-India."  Considering the author was a Dominican who remained a faithful Catholic till his death, that's quite an odd use of him.

Quite another sort of British-American reader of de las Casas was the great and early Quaker abolitionist, Anthony Benezet in his book, Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants.  As is usually the case with the Quaker literature on the topic, it is refreshingly liberal, honest and charitable.  And, since you will read the opposite repeated all over the place, notice how forceful their criticism of the christianity of those who enslaved and oppressed people is, remembering that these were both highly committed Christians, one a bishop in the very establishment he's criticizing.

After the settlement of America, those devastations, and the captivating the miserable Africans, greatly increased.

Anderson, in his history of trade and commerce, at page 336, speaking of what passed in the year 1508, writes, "That the Spaniards had by this time found that the miserable Indian natives, whom they had made to work in their mines and fields, were not so robust and proper for those purposes as Negroes brought from Africa; wherefore they, about that time, began to import Negroes for that end into Hispaniola, from the Portugueze settlements on the Guinea coasts; and also afterwards for their sugar works." This oppression of the Indians had, even before this time, rouzed the zeal, as well as it did the compassion, of some of the truly pious of that day; particularly that of Bartholomew De las Casas, bishop of Chapia; whom a desire of being instrumental towards the conversion of the Indians, had invited into America. It is generally agreed by the writers of that age, that he was a man of perfect disinterestedness, and ardent charity; being affected with this sad spectacle, he returned to the court of Spain, and there made a true report of the matter; but not without being strongly opposed by those mercenary wretches, who had enslaved the Indians; yet being strong and indefatigable, he went to and fro between Europe and America, firmly determined not to give over his pursuit but with his life. After long solicitation, and innumerable repulses, he obtained leave to lay the matter before the Emperor Charles the Fifth, then King of Spain. As the contents of the speech he made before the King in council, are very applicable to the case of the enslaved Africans, and a lively evidence that the spirit of true piety speaks the same language in the hearts of faithful men in all ages, for the relief of their fellow creatures from oppression of every kind, I think it may not be improper here to transcribe the most interesting parts of it. 

"I was," says this pious bishop, "one of the first who went to America; neither curiosity nor interest prompted me to undertake so long and dangerous a voyage; the saving the souls of the heathen was my sole object. Why was I not permitted, even at the expence of my blood, to ransom so many thousand souls, who fell unhappy victims to avarice or lust? I have been an eye witness to such cruel treatment of the Indians, as is too horrid to be mentioned at this time.—It is said that barbarous executions were necessary to punish or check the rebellion of the Americans;—but to whom was this owing? Did not those people receive the Spaniards, who first came amongst them, with gentleness and humanity? Did they not shew more joy, in proportion, in lavishing treasure upon them, than the Spaniards did greediness in receiving it?—But our avarice was not yet satisfied;—tho' they gave up to us their land and their riches, we would tear from them their wives, their children and their liberties.—To blacken these unhappy people, their enemies assert, that they are scarce human creatures?—but it is we that ought to blush, for having been less men, and more barbarous, than they.—What right have we to enslave a people who are born free, and whom we disturbed, tho' they never offended us?—They are represented as a stupid people, addicted to vice?—but have they not contracted most of their vices from the example of the christians? And as to those vices peculiar to themselves, have not the christians quickly exceeded them therein? Nevertheless it must be granted, that the Indians still remain untainted with many vices usual amongst the Europeans; such as ambition, blasphemy, treachery, and many like monsters, which have not yet took place with them; they have scarce an idea of them; so that in effect, all the advantage we can claim, is to have more elevated notions of things, and our natural faculties more unfolded and more cultivated than theirs.—Do not let us flatter our corruptions, nor voluntarily blind ourselves; all nations are equally free; one nation has no right to infringe upon the freedom of any other; let us do towards these people as we would have them to have done towards us, if they had landed upon our shore, with the same superiority of strength. And indeed, why should not things be equal on both sides? How long has the right of the strongest been allowed to be the balance of justice? What part of the gospel gives a sanction to such a doctrine? In what part of the whole earth did the apostles and the first promulgators of the gospel ever claim a right over the lives, the freedom, or the substance of the Gentiles? What a strange method this is of propagating the gospel, that holy law of grace, which, from being, slaves to Satan, initiates us into the freedom of the children of God!—Will it be possible for us to inspire them with a love to its dictates, while they are so exasperated at being dispossessed of that invaluable blessing, Liberty? The apostles submitted to chains themselves, but loaded no man with them. Christ came to free, not to enslave us.—Submission to the faith he left us, ought to be a voluntary act, and should be propagated by persuasion, gentleness, and reason."

"At my first arrival in Hispaniola, (added the bishop) it contained a million of inhabitants; and now (viz. in the space of about twenty years) there remains scarce the hundredth part of them; thousands have perished thro' want, fatigue, merciless punishment, cruelty, and barbarity. If the blood of one man unjustly shed, calls loudly for vengeance; how strong must be the cry of that of so many unhappy creatures which is shedding daily?"—The good bishop concluded his speech, with imploring the King's clemency for subjects so unjustly oppressed; and bravely declared, that heaven would one day call him to an account, for the numberless acts of cruelty which he might have prevented. The King applauded the bishop's zeal; promised to second it; but so many of the great ones had an interest in continuing the oppression, that nothing was done; so that all the Indians in Hispaniola, except a few who had hid themselves in the most inaccessible mountains, were destroyed.

Fats Navarro And His Thin Men 1947 - Ice Freezes Red

Recorded: New York City, NY January 29, 1947

Fats Navarro - Trumpet
Leo Parker - Baritone Sax
Tadd Dameron - Piano
Gene Ramey - Bass
Denzil Best - Drums


For some reason, while I was looking at another video of this I noticed the date given for its recording and realized it was thirty years after what is commonly believed to be the first recording of jazz,  by "The Original Dixieland Jass Band." Looking that up I read that though that recording of Livery Stable Blues was recorded February 26th, 1917, the contract for them to record was signed on  January 29, 1917 and there was a trial recording date two days later, from which nothing was released.  So it was about 30 years to the day between Fats Navarro's great recording and the first jazz recording contract was signed.

Considering the first thirty years of rock and roll, well, there's no comparison in which one developed.   And, yes, that was meant as a provocative statement.  I missed making one on Tuesday.

Update:  Fats Navarro's least recording is greater than the best of those guys you mention and unlike theirs, his was a live recording.   There's no comparison.

A Resolution Broken For A Good Reason

I have broken my resolution to never post a comment from Steve Simels on this blog again because he made a stupid remark on my morning post that is a good illustration of what I mean.  Clearly, it is important for some people to use Poles as a focus of hate and resentment even as the fact that Poles have one of the best records of protecting Jews in defiance of the Nazis.   Especially, I strongly suspect, in the United States,  from people who never experienced any danger such as those Poles who risked and lost their lives in those efforts did.   While there must be a lot of reasons for that, I can't think of any good reason to falsify history.

On Defaming The Poles

One of the really stupid things that the contemporary idea of a genius, Stephen Fry, got into hot water for saying really stuck in my mind all of yesterday because it is grotesquely unjust, a total distortion of the history it mangles, clearly based on an ideological hatred of Catholics and a disdain for an ethnic group and promotes lies about them by people who have a lot more to be ashamed of than they do.   I'm hardly an expert on the incredibly complicated and contested history it involves but I know that Fry's idiocy is not a one off but is widely shared even among those who are considered educated people in the United States.  I've encountered it online even, or perhaps, especially on pseudo-leftist websites.  Considering who that idiocy forgets and who it defames, that is especially disturbing.

That was but a blip on the Richter scale of Fry’s brainless banter when compared with his comments on the Poles. “Let’s face it,” he announced in an interview with Channel 4 news in 2009, “there has been a history in Poland of Right-wing Catholicism, which has been deeply disturbing for those of us who know a little history, and remember which side of the border Auschwitz was on.”

Even Fry had to admit that was a bit much, apologising a week and a half later. His words were “as idiotic, ignorant and offensive as you could imagine… I mean, what was I thinking? Well, as I say, I wasn’t. The words just formed themselves in a line in my head, as words will, and marched out of the mouth. I offer no excuse.”

Apparently his geniuship didn't realize who built and operated Auschwitz and that many of the people murdered there were Poles, including many of the Jews who were murdered there.   Nor that it was the Nazis stated intention to obliterate the Polish population, both Hitler and Himmler stated in unambiguous words that as the ultimate goal of the invasion of Poland, to replace them with Germans, with orders to kill as many Poles as possible, regardless of gender or age.

Our strength is our quickness and our brutality. Genghis Khan had millions of women and children hunted down and killed, deliberately and with a gay heart. History sees in him only the great founder of States. What the weak Western European civilization alleges about me, does not matter. I have given the order – and will have everyone shot who utters but one word of criticism – that the aim of this war does not consist in reaching certain designated [geographical] lines, but in the enemies' physical elimination. Thus, for the time being only in the east, I put ready my Death's Head units, with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of the Polish race or language. Only thus will we gain the living space that we need.

Hitler in a speech he gave August 22, 1939 to officers who would be in charge of the invasion of Poland the next week.

While the plans of the Nazis were to murder all of the Jews, in their Generalplan Ost, their intention was to murder up to 85% of the Polish population which they decided were not sufficiently Aryan and could not be "Germanized" over a period of a couple of decades, beginning with the invasion.  Given that the murders committed under that plan, of Poles and other Slavic people have been exhaustively documented and successfully prosecuted* it amazing that Fry could have made such a stupid statement without being called on it more definitively

I think before I went online I would have thought everyone who had graduated from college had learned that much about the Nazis but I have the feeling since going online that isn't something you should depend on even from a graduate of the most elite of universities in the English speaking world.  I learned as much in history classes in high school and in college, and I wasn't a history major.   I know Fry is a bit younger than I am but he must have been raised by people who were around in the late 30s and 40s.

More importantly, the ass, as so many others I've heard snarking about Poles in regard to these matters is totally ignorant of the actual history of Poles hiding and rescuing Jews from the Nazis, even as they, themselves risked being killed for it.
Despite he harshest penalties for aiding and assisting Jews of those imposed by the Nazis, murdering entire families if one member of the family was accused of helping Jews, Poles make up the largest number, by nationality, of those named Righteous Among The Nations at Yad Vashem, 6,394 is the latest number, I've seen.  I'm apparently assuming a lot by assuming that Stephen Fry has ever heard of Yad Vashem, not to mention others who share his bigotry.  I've gotten some pretty angry reactions online to pointing that out.  There are those who love to hate on the Poles as Fry did.

Neither, obviously,  do they know about the organized efforts by Poles, many of them Catholics to save Jews, even as they, themselves were marked for murder.  The Zegota, the Polish Council To Aid Jews, under The Polish Government in Exile, was one of the largest and most successful of those efforts, believed to have saved almost a half a million Jews.  It was only one of those organized efforts, not to mention the large number of individuals and families who hid or shielded Jews, even as they were under threat of genocide, themselves and as they knew their efforts would get them certain death if they were discovered.   I would expect few of the people who babble like that online know anything about any of it.  For some reason the enormous resistance in Poland is to count for nothing as the far less widespread resistance in France and Holland are exaggerated in size.  I say size because anyone who resisted the Nazis, who aided Jews and other people marked for death to live deserves to be remembered and held up as an example of heroism and morality to be emulated.

Consider that it was due to the incredibly heroic Polish resistance fighter, Witold Pilecki, who volunteered to go undercover into Auschwitz as a prisoner, who provided the most detailed early intelligence about its being a death camp, for Fry to have said what he did is especially repulsive.  It was certainly not the Poles who are to blame for Auschwitz operating as long as it did, they were begging the allies to intervene to end it for years during the war.**

The issues of Polish resistance and collaboration in that period in which Poland was being fought over and occupied by both the Soviet and Nazi governments has become thoroughly politicized, it being in the interest of many people to reduce an extremely complex and fraught situation into black and white based on ethnic or other identities and pretending that everyone who can be categorized as a member of that group was either a victim or a perpetrator, a resister or a collaborator, an angel or a genocidalist.  And, to suit some ideological or political interest, today, almost eighty years later, the actual facts of even the most heroic of resistance is discounted in favor of the use to which ethnic classification can be made.   In Fry's case, clearly he wanted to slam Catholics, other people have other agendas.  This exchange in the New York Review of Books shows another popular facet of that.  Unfortunately, the original review under discussion is mostly behind a pay-wall.   Poland is still an ideological football, only the players fighting over it have changed.

The massive vulgarity of discounting the attempted genocide against one group or another, the ideological desire to hold up the Soviet or some other side, comparing one invasion of Poland over another, the incredibly complex issues of various people and groups in Poland as it was being fought over, and dozens of other issues can't be allowed to discount the incredibly heroic sacrifices of the Polish resistance.   The denial of history is clearly useful to people who want to oppress other people.  In some accounts of that speech by Hitler, he ended with the line

Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?

I think it's probable that line was in the speech, though there are various versions of the speech, some without that line.  If Hitler said it on that occasion is a matter of dispute, academic, but also in the attempt by the Turkish government, today, to deny that there was a mass slaughter, an attempt at genocide, committed against the Armenian people after the First World War.   That, alone, shows how important it is to tell history accurately, non-ideologically and without self-interested distortions and fabrications.

*  The Ninth charge on which Eichmann was convicted in Israel was:

Crime against humanity, an offenceagainst Section 1(a)(2) of the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law 5710-1950 and Section 23 of theCriminal Law Ordinance, 1936.

Particulars of the Offence

The Accused, between the years 1940 and 1942 committed acts in Poland, which at that time was occupied by Germany, which are to be defined as crimes against humanity when, together with others, he caused the deportation of more than half a million Polish civilians from their places of residence, with the intention of settling German families in those places. The displaced Poles were transferred, some to Germany and the territories occupied by her for the purpose of employing them and holding them under conditions of servitude, coercion and terror; some were abandoned in other regions of Poland and the German areas of occupation in the East; some were concentrated in labour camps organized by the SS under inhumane conditions; and some were transferred to Germany and were destined for the purpose of Rückverdeutschung ("Germanization"). The Accused committed these acts of his by virtue of a special appointment in the month of December 1939, according to which he was empowered by the Chief of the Security Police in Berlin to act as the person responsible for the "evacuation" of the civilian Population.

** What Fry said is certainly worse than what Brian Williams so stupidly claimed about himself.  Apparently exaggerating a war story will get someone like Williams a forced retirement, whereas Fry saying far more outrageously false and clearly bigoted crap is still held up as being some kind of genius and a hero.  The least he should get for that kind of thing is for people to stop calling him a genius.

The McGhee - Navarro Boptett - Double Talk

Fats Navarro, Howard McGhee-trp; Ernie Henry-as; Milt Jackson-p; Curley Russell-b; Kenny Clarke-d.
October 11 1948.

Fats Navarro Quintet 1947 ~ Bebop Romp

Fats Navarro - Trumpet
Charlie Rouse - Tenor Sax
Tadd Dameron - Piano
Nelson Boyd - Bass

Art Blakey - Drums

Charlie Parker Quintet with Fats Navarro and Bud Powell - Move

Charlie Parker - Alto Sax
Fats Navarro - Trumpet
Bud Powell - Piano
Curly Russell - Bass
Art Blakey - Drums

Unbelievable playing.   I've been binge listening to Fats Navarro and will be posting more of his playing.  This was recorded weeks before he died of a combination of tuberculosis, heart problems and heroin addiction, probably other things too.   It's even more incredible when you read contemporary descriptions of his tragic and horrible physical condition in that period.  This was physical transcendence and transcendence of personal circumstances,  I'd say it was miraculous.

Is It In Fry's Contract That People Have To Pretend He's Brilliant?

Having just heard a bit out of the Bafta awards in Britain from the other night.  I'm not going to see any of the movies and didn't go looking for it, I just happened across it and saw that Stephen Fry was involved so I clicked on expecting to see a train wreck.  And with Stephen Fry there's always some really stupid gaff, revealing something rather unappealing beneath the smarmy Brit show-biz patina.  

It makes it all the more bizarre that someone there, I don't know who, made some remark about Stephen Hawking being the only man smarter than the demonstrably stupid Stephen Fry.   Is it in his contract that someone has to pretend to think that Fry is smart?   I've heard him debate and the guy is a stream of conventional Brit-atheist slogans and phonied up assertions of history with nothing else behind it except some really hammy Brit style acting conventions. But, then, what else have they got but that, in the end?   And from other news from the Baftas, it wasn't the only faux pas he made.    I'm sure there must have been some writers in the room who are smarter than Fry, not to mention actors, directors, producers, ushers, go-fors, etc.  As someone else said on another occasion , and just one of many, that he said something really stupid, Fry is one of those people who are a stupid man's idea of what a smart man is. 

When I'm Not Nice

More than a foot of snow to move from everything this morning.  I think we've had about six feet in the last two weeks, literally.   I tell myself that if this keeps up I'll rejuvenate myself with all the shoveling.   Then when I'm half way through it I think I'll die before the end of the day.

For the morning, at least, I'm going to just point out that I think it's wrong to limit what I talk about on the basis of things being pleasant or fitting into some sense of what is permitted or what fits into some scheme of propriety.   I deal with a lot of serious, violent, vicious practices and economic crimes and the hypocrisy that allows those practices to flourish and be mistaken for something good and, in the worst cases, politically, at least, an expression of liberalism.

There's no pleasant or nice way to effectively confront those kinds of things, suppressing the reality of what is being done or advocated through a conventional bowdlerization of it enables the hypocrisy and, also, the continuation of that practice.  And the only reason to write a blog is to try to have some effect.    I did that last night on another of my blogs in a way that has made some people really angry and outraged.  Considering what the porn industry includes as its standard work requirements, I don't have any qualms about bringing it back up close, personal and involving them and their family members to people who advocate for the porn industry.   They always think it's OK for other people but not for them and theirs.  Well, I'm in the economic class that doesn't have the luxury of considering it from that intellectual remove.  I have a relatively close relative who became addicted to drugs and was sucked into that line of "work".   I have other loved ones who live on the edge who could be forced into it.  When you advocate porn-prostitution, you've volunteering members of my family to serve in your pseudo-liberal fantasy sex industry, which is far too real for the people who are used by it.

If I could, I would require anyone who advocates the commodification, use, harm and destruction of other people, in almost ever case poor people, people without power, people who are vulnerable and desperate, be required to be subjected to the actual conditions which they advocate for those other people.   When it's something like porn or prostitution or mining, or back breaking, dangerous and dirty work of any kind there is no nice way to say it to nice, clean people who never dirty their nails or high market clothing in a day.  To paraphrase the line from Bob Dylan, their souls are dirty though their hands are clean.   The stink of it is something you can't smell with your nose but it's there and pervasive and it spreads over the entire world, choking out anything good. I'm not going to spray a bit of perfume and ignore that it's poisonous.

Hate Mail

or make that Hate Mail Maybe

No, I'm not worried about "splitting the left".  Not for a second.   "The left" as it's presently understood is broken and doesn't work, whole or split.  It hasn't worked in almost half a century.  History isn't going to retrieve any old coalition of the left that seemed to work at the time when it lost its ability to do things.  We have to look at how and why that coalition failed if anything like a left that works is going to succeed.  I think for a lot of people, the perceived and real need to avoid a nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States was what didn't cause that split to happen in a period when it might have worked.  The need to get the United States out of the Vietnam War, as well.  But, once there, that thing you don't want split off dominated and destroyed the political effectiveness of the real left.  Even the anti-war movement would have been better off without them, they probably inhibited the growth of the anti-war movement, they, themselves, never being large enough in numbers to have tipped the support for the war into opposition in the early months and years of that effort.

A "left" such as the one emerging on blogs and webloids in the past decade based on the sure fire strategy of insulting most of the people in the country, not to mention the world, on behalf of a tiny fraction of snobs motivated by ideological hatred of most people is what you seem to think can remain together with those of us whose goal is to make change.

The sure fired result of that left is that most people either reject it, outright, over those insults or due to the fact that it is insanely unrealistic and, in fact, is no part of any real left that will ever do anything positive.  Its only success has been in discrediting the real left.  If I didn't know better I'd think it was the invention of the oligarchs and fascists who have been its greatest beneficiaries.

I am hoping to be part of the "third option" that Marilynne Robinson advocated in her great, suppressed essay Mother Country, one based on the most idealistic values of traditional American liberalism, most idealistic in no small part because it is also the one proven to be most practical.   The entire mass of theoretical leftist pie-in-the-sky that has never and will never come to pass in real life is nothing as compared to the most modest of laws passed which have made equality and justice real in the lives of the least among us.

The Person Who Reveals in Public the Injustice He Committed In Contracts

As I read and reread this sermon from the fourth century, the more impressively relevant it is becomes apparent.  Consider this passage remembering that its economic crimes and sins are to be taken in relation to actual, chattel slavery which he presented earlier in it.  This was a sermon which he read out in Church, to a congregation, during an actual service, as a whole and not as I'm presenting it in parts.  And remember that there is a good deal of evidence that he may have read it on Easter, the highest day in the Christian calendar even as it was developing.   It is as fresh today as the news of banking crimes, the massive criminality of the lending industry and other forms of theft allowed under contracts.


Only animate beings have the distinction between male and female. God the Creator said "Increase and multiply" [Gen 1.28] that one generation might give birth to a succeeding one. But from what kind of marriage does the birth [tokos] of gold derive? What sort of conception brings it to fruition? I am aware of the pains belonging to such a birth from the prophet's words, "Behold, he has travailed with unrighteousness, has conceived trouble and has brought forth iniquity" [Ps 7.14]. Such is that birth which avarice yields [J.345], iniquity begets and hate delivers. When urgently pressed, the person who always conceals abundance swears not to be pregnant with a purse and begets usury [tokos] out of desire for gain. He assumes the ambition of a money-lender devoted to material gain in the same way a person extinguishes a flame with oil. The calamity of a loan has no remedy; instead, it becomes worse. Just as arable land becomes dry and automatically produces thorns, so do the usuries [M.673] of the arrogant abound. A person extends his hand with money in the same way a fishing line conceals a hook with bait; similarly, a wretched person eager for wealth is drawn by a concealed hook. Such are the benefits of usury. Anyone who forcefully takes or steals provisions is a violent and rapacious person, but the person who reveals in public the injustice he committed in contracts and so bears bitter witness to the distress it caused and who acknowledges his [J.346] transgression is loving, kind, a guardian and the like. Gain which results from stealing is called theft, a euphemism for the bitter deprivation of a debtor. Such miserable persons are indeed despicable: "I collected for myself both silver and gold" [2.8], but a wise person learns from what Ecclesiastes has listed and enumerated. In this way we may learn from his experience of the need to guard against evil before its assault and not to be associated with thieves and harmful beasts by taking heed of such dangers before they occur. 

"The calamity of a loan has no remedy; instead, it becomes worse."  That is the common experience of anyone who has the burden of student loans imposed on them whereas in the past the cost of public universities and even private ones was largely lifted through laws and programs which have been purposely destroyed in the past fifty-years.   Note the continuation of that phrase I took as a title,  "Anyone who forcefully takes or steals provisions is a violent and rapacious person, but the person who reveals in public the injustice he committed in contracts and so bears bitter witness to the distress it caused and who acknowledges his transgression is loving, kind, a guardian and the like. Gain which results from stealing is called theft, a euphemism for the bitter deprivation of a debtor."   Consider that no one above the lowest levels has been jailed for the part their crimes in the loan driven economic crisis in 2008, let off by the Ivy Leaguers in charge of regulatory and legal departments of the governments, the friends and colleagues of the crooks, who are also friends and colleagues with the media.  

The more I read of Gregory of Nyssa, the more obviously relevant it is in our lives today, the more the connection between slavery and more petty expressions of the same crime against morality and humanity become obvious.

Why Do You Bring Up That Old Shit?

How the idea that slavery was wrong came about and how it became politically effective are hardly trivial.  The evil of forcing other people into misery so that the product of their labor can be stolen from them, without legal risk is one of the greater themes of evil in human history.  It always advantages those with more power to compel that theft and the establishments raised with the wealth accumulated and the social habits instilled have made those forms of theft customary and resistance to them a conventional wrong.   Considering the persistence of de facto slavery, which I see becoming more acceptable even here in the United States than it was even forty years ago, that's an important question.  It is related to how egalitarian democracy came about, hardly a trivial matter.  I think the casual acceptance trade agreements that lead to a wage slavery and the importation of things made by slave labor and the use of prison labor here make those things entirely relevant and important.   Slavery is here and now, it it wasn't in the remote past.

The key issue for me is how ideas that were such a disadvantage to those with power gained enough influence and force to force legal changes in the status of slavery are more important than the merely abstract, academic treatment of them and I think that it was clearly because people were convinced that it was a requirement of living according to the teachings of Jesus and the prophets in the Jewish tradition.  I doubt that without that level of of inhibition, being convinced that it is against the commandments of how we are supposed to live our lives, that doing the right thing will overcome the pervasive selfishness and other corruptions that are the motives for oppressing other people as it is possible for some people to do.

That's as true today as it was in the fourth century, the fifteenth, sixteenth or nineteenth centuries.   The forms of enslavement and oppression might change to skirt any laws that might exist, judges and governments will find ways to enable those legal fictions as easily as our present Supreme Court does, law schools and their fellow lawyers and scholars will give them the words to cover that up with as it did the courts in the time of the Dred Scott decision during slavery, the Plessy v. Ferguson court did, continuing de facto slavery after abolition and the present day court dismantling the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts passed in the mid 1960s.  Only a morally convinced population will resist that and it has to be an effective majority of that population.  I doubt that mere secularism will do that.  I don't believe a secular society will, actually, retain the strength of belief that will make that possible.

That it convinced Quakers, Presbyterians and others to free slaves they held even as such gods of secular enlightenment babblers about liberty as Jefferson, Madison  held people in slavery tells us a lot about the difference between mere words and actually living according to them.   

Another ornament of the secular enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin, held two people in slavery and ran ads for the slave trade in his newspaper.  Some of the things I've read attribute his conversion to abolitionism to his experience of British oppression.  Who can know?   I can point out that  when he, eventually, was convinced of the wrongness of slavery  and he freed them,  it was a group begun by and largely consisting of Quakers, the Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, that he joined up with.  By that time the great and early abolitionist John Woolman had already convinced most if not all of the Quakers he had contact with to forbid owning slaves.  He had died on an anti-slavery mission to Britain thirteen years before Franklin's conversion.  He'd published his first major anti-slavery essay,  "Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes",  decades earlier.  I would be surprised if either that or his other anti-slavery writings and efforts were unknown to Franklin.  As I have been showing, the condemnation of slavery on the grounds that it was incompatible with The Bible goes back much farther and it seems to come up even among people who were unaware of those earlier documents as they read those scriptures and take commandments such as "The Golden Rule" seriously.   Those commandments go right back to the earliest books in the tradition.  I don't think anyone would take those seriously if they didn't really believe they were divine commands as to how we were to lead our lives.

That slave labor in the past century and today was found at its most official and in the largest numbers has been in states which also suppress religion has also forced me to think hard about the left and its relationship with those states.

If atheists had not lied about the origins of abolitionism and so many other things, lies that are obvious to anyone who reads the primary literature, if they had not attacked the status of human beings as the possessors of rights and moral obligations with the ability to think freely I'd probably not have taken these matters up.   As it is every single time I have looked into things which atheists have successfully inserted into the common received wisdom that we depend on as opposed to actually reading and studying such things, I've found out that they are largely false or distorted.  The history of abolitionism, the nature and history of Darwinism, the Galileo legend,  the motives that led to the establishment of egalitarian democracy, the nature and history of of the Marxist left (I will note that it was something Marx, himself seems to have rejected when he declared he wasn't a Marxist).   In each of those and others, I've found that the things I'd been taught from secondary and tertiary sources on those are mostly fabrications with a clear ideological motive behind them.  That, frankly, makes me angry, to have found out that we've been lied to.   The alternative is to be found in the actual liberal tradition which, in each and every case I've found, was either motivated by real, believing religious people or which had their effective force from religious people.   That is a genuine leftist tradition which will have to be uncovered and promoted, its genuine character borne out in its being able to convince people and actually do things.

I have seen the rise of a mostly secular "left," frankly motivated primarily by a hatred of religion,  in the United States over the past half century and with the shoving aside of the religious left and defections from it.   I've seen the left go from being able to pass those great Civil Rights laws to utter and total impotence in that time.  I think that lack of religious conviction mixed with idiotically buying the false myths of Marxists, anarchists, etc. was virtual suicide for the left.   Any left that could tolerate and retain the Stalinists even as the mass murders and show trials and oppression of workers and others were common knowledge entirely discredited itself.  Now, looking with a clearer eye at the Western left of that period, those people are as repulsive to me as the right who supported Hitler and Mussolini.  Those who supported Mao and Maoist terrorists in other countries are as bad, though, as far as we know, they weren't in the actual pay of Mao as some in the Communist Party were from the Soviet government.

I think finding out that the Rosenbergs depite what I'd been told since the 1950s, were, in fact, involved with nuclear espionage was also a watershed event in my evolution from a conventional, pseudo-leftist to a real leftist.   I am still dealing with the scandal of even some of my great heroes of the left making idiotic statements about attacks on the Pol Pot regime as being Western imperialism, painful as it is to consider what that really meant and means.  This has been a painful evolution but a necessary one.   I'm morally obligated to tell the truth about what I find, I believe that because I believe God wants people to tell the truth, I believe I'm required to. 

Abolitionism In The Real World As Opposed To The Confines of The Mind

One of the things I looked at, again, in this series on the literature of abolitionism was what the often besainted Spinoza had to say on the subject and found a grand total of nothing.   His few mentions of slavery are so abstract and so general as to mean nothing about the rapidly developing chattel slavery in which his beloved Holland was a major player.   Considering his fame as a prophet of secular democracy and freedom and considering the developing religious literature opposing slavery during his lifetime, his silence on the issue is an indictment of a kind generally reserved for religious figures.

But Spinoza is a figure I've never warmed up to at all.  His saintliness seems, to me, to consist of merely his not being interested in personal luxury or fame.     His making his living grinding lenses seems to me to be a lot less productive than Hillel's chopping wood.   Hillel contributed a lot more to the real world in his ethical teaching than Spinoza, whose bizarre mathematical expositions are more admired in the realm of the mind than having any practical application in real lives.  I'd like to know of any real political reforms that freed people which are directly ascribable to them.   The citation of the story of the freeing of the Children of Israel from Egyptian slavery as a justification of slaves freeing themselves and agitating for the abolition of slavery is such an enormous part of that story as to make anything Spinoza, the debunker of the Mosaic tradition, said about freedom and slavery of negligible importance.

It is that mathematical form that I think led to me concluding that there wasn't anything there when I was young.  The form of geometrical argument he used was sufficient to make conclusions about simple forms in an imaginary Flatland or simple solids but trying to fit morality or politics into it was bound to come up with something that could be logically consistent but which wouldn't have much if anything to do with real life exigencies as it has to be lived by real people with more complex lives than an aesthetic bachelor - lens grinder who lived mostly in his mind was likely to encounter.   I have yet to encounter anything in the literature of abolitionism or civil rights that made recourse to Benedict de Spinoza.   If I ever came across that in the past, it wasn't sufficiently important or striking enough to make me remember it.   I do think that Spinoza's thinking is most useful for showing how mere logical coherence can be deceptive in assigning importance to something that is of such demonstrable unimportance in the world. About the time Spinoza was seven, Pope Urban VIII in 1639 issued Commissum Nobis, reaffirming the encylicals of Paul III and explicitly threatening to excommunicate people who enslaved other people.  He was responding to the pleas of Jesuits in Paraguay who were in the process of trying to establish the little mentioned attempt to set up free soil on South America, the Reductions of Paraguay.

As I recall, one of the arguments Spinoza made for rejecting The Law of Moses was that it was outmoded due to its antiquity and it couldn't be relevant for his time.  The same can be said of his philosophy and any philosophy from his time, if you take his argument to its logical conclusion.  I think there is a real difference between words that aspire to mere logical coherence as opposed to freeing the captive.  While mere words might fail to free the captive, their aspiration starts out to be higher since they deal with real lives of real people in the real world.

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Here is an even earlier example, an even earlier Papal Bull. Sicut Dudum issued by Eugene IV on January 13, 1435.

 Eugene, Bishop, Servant of the Servants of God,

To our venerable brothers, peace and apostolic benediction, etcetera. 

1. Not long ago, we learned from our brother Ferdinand, bishop at Rubicon and representative of the faithful who are residents of the Canary Islands, and from messengers sent by them to the Apostolic See, and from other trustworthy informers, the following facts: in the said islands—some called Lanzarote—and other nearby islands, the inhabitants, imitating the natural law alone, and not having known previously any sect of apostates or heretics, have a short time since been led into the Orthodox Catholic Faith with the aid of God’s mercy. Nevertheless, with the passage of time, it has happened that in some of the said islands, because of a lack of suitable governors and defenders to direct those who live there to a proper observance of the Faith in things spiritual and temporal, and to protect valiantly their property and goods, some Christians (we speak of this with sorrow), with fictitious reasoning and seizing and opportunity, have approached said islands by ship, and with armed forces taken captive and even carried off to lands overseas very many persons of both sexes, taking advantage of their simplicity. 

2. Some of these people were already baptized; others were even at times tricked and deceived by the promise of Baptism, having been made a promise of safety that was not kept. They have deprived the natives of the property, or turned it to their own use, and have subjected some of the inhabitants of said islands to perpetual slavery, sold them to other persons, and committed other various illicit and evil deeds against them, because of which very many of those remaining on said islands, and condemning such slavery, have remained involved in their former errors, having drawn back their intention to receive Baptism, thus offending the majesty of God, putting their souls in danger, and causing no little harm to the Christian religion 

3. Therefore, We, to whom it pertains, especially in respect to the aforesaid matters, to rebuke each sinner about his sin, and not wishing to pass by dissimulating, and desiring—as is expected from the pastoral office we hold—as far as possible, to provide salutarily, with a holy and fatherly concern, for the sufferings of the inhabitants, beseech the Lord, and exhort, through the sprinkling of the Blood of Jesus Christ shed for their sins, one and all, temporal princes, lords, captains, armed men, barons, soldiers, nobles, communities, and all others of every kind among the Christian faithful of whatever state, grade, or condition, that they themselves desist from the aforementioned deeds, cause those subject to them to desist from them, and restrain them rigorously. 

4. And no less do We order and command all and each of the faithful of each sex, within the space of fifteen days of the publication of these letters in the place where they live, that they restore to their earlier liberty all and each person of either sex who were once residents of said Canary Islands, and made captives since the time of their capture, and who have been made subject to slavery. These people are to be totally and perpetually free, and are to be let go without the exaction or reception of money. If this is not done when the fifteen days have passed, they incur the sentence of excommunication by the act itself, from which they cannot be absolved, except at the point of death, even by the Holy See, or by any Spanish bishop, or by the aforementioned Ferdinand, unless they have first given freedom to these captive persons and restored their goods. We will that like sentence of excommunication be incurred by one and all who attempt to capture, sell, or subject to slavery, baptized residents of the Canary Islands, or those who are freely seeking Baptism, from which excommunication cannot be absolved except as was stated above. 

5. Those who humbly and efficaciously obey these, our exhortations and commands deserve, in addition to our favor, and that of the Apostolic See, and the blessings which follow there from, but are to be possessors of eternal happiness and to be placed at the right hand of God, etcetera 

Given at Florence, January 13th, in the Year of Our Lord, 1435

That's fifty-seven years before Columbus began the invasion of the Western Hemisphere.   Also that Eugene IV noted that those who enslaved and oppressed people alienated them from Christianity, something I've found was noted over and over again, up through the entire period of abolitionism and on till today.  More about that this week.

Also, I  have to acknowledge that his successor, Nicholas V, undid a lot of what was done in that encyclical, one in a series of popes that could be said of.  The popes are no more consistent in their virtue than any other line of human beings in any area of life.  In any institution that goes on for well over a millennium you're bound to get some real sleeveens, dupes of kings, especially those of Portugal and Spain (which sometimes held the papacy hostage) not to mention France (the Avignon papacies, for example)  and other quite temporal despots.   The supreme power of popes is largely a myth, mostly anti-Catholic but also among some Catholics.  Popes have rarely been as powerful or influential among world rulers as they're alleged to have been.  Which is why the encyclicals condemning slavery were about as effective as those Constitutional amendments grating equal rights to freed slaves were in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  It wasn't long after those were passed that the Supreme Court began to undo them in even a merely official manner.   Even today that work isn't done, here and certainly not elsewhere where people are held in virtual and miserable slavery under American and international trade laws despite official, legal prohibitions on slavery.