Item 1: Leaving Iraq Loved, Hated, or Held in Contempt. George F. Will mocks "sending Frisbees to combat zones", part of one American approach to making peace in Iraq. He simultaneously draws attention to Daniel Boorstin's observation that "history is 'a cautionary science'" and adds "but only if you know some". How about this history? Triumphant U.S. soldiers stationed in defeated Germany and Japan handed out candy bars to kids. Stupid? Or brilliant?
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How many German and Japanese policymakers today have fond memories of American GIs because of those candy bars? And how many kids given Frisbees and soccer balls by American soldiers who also fix up fields for soccer pitches or softball diamonds will come away from this war with warm feelings for Americans and the civilization that created these great guys?
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Conversely, George Will wants the U.S. not to be "paralyzed by squeamishness about violence and its collateral damage . . . The [Iraqi] population may detest an America that fights its way to control of cities, but the population will have contempt for an America that is unable or, worse, able but unwilling to wrest cities from insurgents." So he's fine with killing innocents and destroying cities to "wrest [them] from insurgents", on the theory that, what?, it is better to be hated than held in contempt? Is there no third option?
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And if in fact there IS no third option, no chance of coming out of this war liked and admired, is that a good outcome? Geroge Will and his ilk want us to control Iraq as Israel controls Palestine: heartlessly, viciously, violently. Israel is hated rather than held in contempt. Is that what Will wants for us? I don't. (Responsive to "Frisbees at War", April 30, 2004)
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Item 2: Our Second Imitation President. The 9/11 Commission interviewed "the President" yesterday, but three people went into the Oval Office to speak to them: Dubya, a lawyer, and Vice President Cheney (whose name, in case you didn't know, is properly pronounced CHEE-nee; he was raised Cheenee but when he came to Washington people started to call him Chaenee, and he let them. He didn't care how people pronounced his name as long as he got power).
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One can understand a President needing a lawyer along to protect him from potential criminal charges and civil lawsuits, and to protect the rights and privileges of the presidency against invasion by other organs of government. But the Vice President?
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Three days ago in this blog I called Dubya our second imitation-President, Ronald Reagan being the first. Some people might have thought that an extravagant claim. Think again.
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In October 1986, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and "President" Reagan met in Reykjavik, Iceland to discuss weapons limitations. Gorbachev, the real President of the Soviet Union, proposed that he and Reagan meet alone, with no advisers, only the two of them and translators. Reagan accepted, and Gorbachev took him to the cleaners. Gorby knew that Reagan wasn't really the President, and that if he could get that puppet into a room alone, he, Gorbachev, could pull his strings. And he did.
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But as soon as Reagan emerged from that private meeting and his handlers/puppeteers saw what he had agreed to, they, the real President, renounced it, and wrote heroic lines for their puppet demanding the Soviet side back down on one key demand or there was no deal. Gorbachev, who had done so nicely pulling Reagan's strings in private, couldn't grab the strings away from Reagan's handlers in public, so lost his bold gambit.
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Still, the lesson was clear to the Republican politburo: NEVER allow an imitation-President to be alone with anyone smarter than he is. In the case of Dubya, that is practically anyone at all. (A "politburo", by the way, is a collective leadership, from "political bureau": "The chief political and executive committee of a Communist party", which controls, collectively, everything the head of the government does.)
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So when the 9/11 Commission asked to speak privately with the President, they got the imitation-President, Dubya, but they also got the real (collective) President's representative, Vice President Cheney, who was trusted to control the situation and keep the puppet, Dubya, on his best behavior by pulling just the right strings at just the right moments. You see, there's only so much "prep" you can give an idiot. In important situations, you cannot let his mouth move. You have to do the talking for him. Thus the otherwise incomprehensible and bizarre double interview, President and Vice President together. Once you understand that Dubya is not really the President but only the single face given to a collective leadership that has many different faces, the incomprehensible becomes comprehensible.
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George W. Bush is President in name only. Cheney alone is not the President either, of course, but he is the part of the team that the rest of the team could trust to say what they want him to say. Dubya can sometimes remember his lines. But then again, sometimes he just screws everything up and jumble-bumbles his lines. And why wouldn't he? He doesn't understand what they've written for him. Intelligent words make no sense to him. It's like trying to remember a long string of phonetic renderings of foreign song lyrics. If you don't know the language, you may not be able to remember the sounds. If you can read them, fine, and Dubya can read. He can do that much. But if he has to memorize intelligent lines, he has problems. Let me make this suggestion to the Republican politburo: Next time, find a smarter puppet.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:08 PM

 
GEORGE F. Will says that "in Iraq, civil war might be preferable to today's combination of disintegration tempered by violent Sunni-Shiite collaboration against U.S. supervision". How very revealing: it is better that Iraqis kill each other than that they join to fight off a foreign invader, as long as the foreign invader is us.
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Will says some other revealing things. First, the U.S. will not be able to 'transfer sovereignty' to Iraq, because "There will be nothing to receive real sovereignty, and the United States, whose writ does not run throughout Iraq, does not yet possess real sovereignty to give away." The U.S. NEVER possessed sovereignty over Iraq. Sovereignty and foreign control are opposites. Sovereignty resides in the people of a nation; independence and control of their own affairs are intrinsic to sovereignty. Foreign occupation is, at best, colonialism, the thing we established the United States to fight against.
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And, like every other Zionist, Will denounces the UN's envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, for saying that Israel complicates everything in the Middle East, even tho it is obvious to the entire world that that is true. Will challenges, "calm would come to Iraq if Israel returned to the 1949 armistice lines?" He just doesn't get it: Israel should never have been established, within any lines. Palestine must be reunited under a secular, multiethnic government devoted to peaceful coexistence and cultural synergy in a religiously pluralist society, not carved out into separate 'turfs' for separate gangs, each of which wants the whole thing.
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Zionists did not arrive in Palestine as pious religious immigrants intent on living in peace with their fellow citizens in an exciting, multireligious community. They came as invaders and thieves intent on stealing an entire country out from under the people who lived there.
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It's appalling that we, as a nation of immigrants, don't identify with the Palestinians. It is as tho Mexicans, Guatemalans, and other Latin American immigrants who arrived here took up arms against us, created a Spanish-speaking country out of most of the United States, imposed a military dictatorship over the rest, and when our kids demanded that they leave our neighborhoods, the Hispanics shot them dead and bulldozed their parents' houses. Would we settle for sovereignty over PART of the United States, and be content to leave the bulk of it in Hispanic hands, speaking Spanish and inflicting inequality upon English-speaking Americans throughout the permanently stolen areas? Or would we do everything we could, including endless guerrilla war ("terrorism"), to retake our stolen land?
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George Will does understand one principle of democracy, that the majority that rules should be as diverse as possible, comprising constantly shifting coalitions of minorities that cannot co-conspire to oppress the minority. I suggest that Iraq is ideally constituted ethnically and religiously to achieve such protection of the minority, and, ultimately, that tiniest of minorities, the individual. But only if it remains united.
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Will even makes tiny noises about the possibility of federalism in Iraq, a surer guarantee of effective majority rule with protection of minorities than any unitary state would provide. But he is 'will'ing to see democracy fail in Iraq, and views the creation of "a stable, perhaps illiberal, even authoritarian Iraq which cooperates in the war against terrorism" as an acceptable outcome to the Bush family's adventure in interventionism.
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Will concedes that this would abandon the ex post facto justification of a "war originally justified primarily by the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction" — none of which has ever been found. But that "exit strategy", leaving Iraq a ruin in the hands of an authoritarian government, would be an acceptable outcome for him.
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I thought Iraq had an authoritarian government under Saddam, but that was NOT acceptable, even tho Saddam was never a sponsor of terrorism against us. Oh, that's right: Saddam favored nonconventional war ("terrorism") against ISRAEL. That's why he had to go. WMD was just an excuse, and when they weren't found, a new "justification" was put forward, of creating a democracy to inspire the entire Middle East.
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Now we are to abandon even that sham and be content if all we have done, at the cost of uncounted thousands of Iraqi dead, the destruction of infrastructure across an entire country, the death of hundreds of American youths, the waste of over 100 billion American taxpayer dollars, and a huge national loss of face in the international community, is an authoritarian government that cooperates in the war on terror.
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But once we withdraw, leaving such a government in power, what is to keep it from withdrawing from such an imposed alliance and falling into the hands of extremists who are even more militantly anti-Israel than Saddam was? The people of Iraq hate Israel and the international Zionist conspiracy that sustains it with vast inpourings of money, military assistance, and excuse-making for endless violence against Arabs. Any government that is truly representative of the Iraqi people will be anti-Zionist. So either we stay in perpetual occupation; or we threaten a new war if Iraq turns against Israel; or we went to war for nothing. (Responsive to "Get to Elections - Fast", April 29, 2004)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:59 PM

 
HOW very curious. The Post, sworn enemy of "activist judges" who overrule elected officials, is actively hoping a court will overrule the New York State Legislature to bar its handling of a public debt. Shouldn't conservatives be denouncing attempts by Alan Hevesi and others to replace the judgment of a large body of elected officials with that of a small number of activist judges? It seems the Post's "principles" vary depending on whose ox is being gored.
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It is NEVER right to encourage judges to overrule elected officials. Instead, responsible public commentary encourages elected officials to behave responsibly, according to the law and relevant constitution (federal or state), as to keep judges from interfering with the proper dynamics of democracy, in which elected people make the decisions. When we consent to have elected officials overruled by unelected judges, and the judgment of the few substituted for the judgment of the many, we are making a choice for dictatorship over democracy. We must not make that choice. (Responsive to editorial "Keeping Abe Beame's Debt Alive", April 28, 2004)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:51 AM

 
JOHN Podhoretz predicts that Dubya will win a "substantial" victory in November because John Kerry is "a terrible, terrible, terrible candidate". Predicting the future is risky business, and weather forecasters can't seem to get three days in a row right. But Podhoretz apparently hopes for a "self-fulfilling prophecy", that is, that by making a prediction, he and the other right-wingers who utter that prediction will influence voters by making them believe that Kerry will lose, so they should not join the losing side but stay home or vote for Nader.
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Will it work? Who knows. Kerry IS an extremely bad candidate, but, mirabile dictu, he kept winning primaries anyway. Dubya, by contrast, is a fair to middling candidate, which is why he was chosen by the Republican power elite to be their poster boy in the first place. Let's be clear here: George W. Bush, like Ronald Reagan before him, is President in name only. He controls nothing but is controlled by a collective leadership, a right-wing cabal that needed a pretty face to front for its ugly policies.
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Dubya is pretty - as all major candidates must be pretty in a country where more women than men vote. And because that's true, Kerry is also pretty, in a craggy sort of way. This is, then, a beauty contest, in which the candidate who makes more women's hearts go pit-a-pat will win, unless Kerry gets tough on the one issue people care about more than any other. He could simply reassert the 1992 Clinton maxim: "It's the economy, stupid", because the economy is, once again, a mess, thanks to the total economic mismanagement the Republicans are notorious for.
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Or he could go riskier, but even closer to the truth: "It's economic fairness, stupid." He could point out that since the Plutocratic Revolution of 1986, fronted for by the imitation-President Ronald Reagan but really run by many of the same people who now run the imitation-presidency of George Dubya Bush, there has been a stark reconcentration of obscene wealth in fewer and fewer hands, while the middle class and poor have lost ground. Kerry could talk about the crushing, life-draining burden of debt in people's lives, not just the burden to future generations of the national debt that the Reaganites and Bush the Elder quadrupled (!) and Bush the Younger threatens to double again (so that it would be 8 TIMES what it started as in 1980, before Reagan) -- whereas the Democrats under Clinton produced a massive surplus that could have paid down the national debt, maybe even paid it off entirely.
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No, Kerry needs to talk about personal debt and the hopelessness of tens or scores of millions of Americans trying to cope with usurious interest rates charged by the obscenely rich that make it impossible for ordinary people to get out of debt. He needs to focus on "default rates" of 27%, and about late fees, overlimit fees, ATM fees that raise the effective rate of interest even higher -- and which are treated as loans on which even more interest is charged!
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He needs to say he will restore the tax-deductibility of consumer interest, so that the little guy can write off the hundreds and hundreds or even thousands of dollars in interest he pays each and every year to the rich who own credit-card and loan companies. Such interest used to be tax-deductible, until Ronald Reagan, the smiling face of evil, got Congress to take away the deductibility of the interest the little guy pays, while preserving the deductibility of the interest the rich pay, mortgage interest on up to two "homes", one of which can be a sleepover yacht!
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But, as I say, this course is risky, because Kerry's own family is very rich. He has millions, and his wife has hundreds of millions of dollars. But John F. Kennedy was very rich too. He 'betrayed his class' by proposing fairness and opportunity for the little guy, and was loved by the Nation - tho hated intensely by the retrograde few. John F. Kerry is proud that his own initials match those of Kennedy. But does he have the stuff that Kennedy had? Time will tell.
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Miserable a candidate tho he be, I have to vote for Kerry, as tens of millions of other Americans have to vote for him, and forget a protest vote for the best man in the contest, Ralph Nader. Because it is urgently important to get rid of George W. Bush, the man who gave us 9/11, an illegal and ever-costlier Iraq war, an economy where the best jobs are being sent to India, and a national debt that is rising at the rate of $500 billion a year for programs that are doing nothing to bring the economy out of depression. (Responsive to "John Kerry's Quiet Collapse", April 27, 2004)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:37 AM

 
Who Devastated Iraq?? Nicole Gelinas speaks of the murder in Iraq of two American Baptists who went into danger to help Iraqis replace devastated water-treatment plants. She says, "The Elliotts were disaster-recovery experts. And after decades of Saddam's brutality, Iraq was a disaster." Oh, Saddam's brutality made Iraq a disaster? Two wars and a decade and more of stringent sanctions imposed by the United States had nothing to do with Iraq's being a disaster? That is fatuous, evasive, disgraceful, rightwing scapegoating. Worse, she can't even expect anyone to believe it. So why would she say it, and make herself look like a fool and liar? Because, you see, she is duly ashamed of the United States' destructive role in the Middle East, but cannot bring herself to admit it.
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Why is the Radical Right so utterly dishonest about the disaster the U.S. inflicted upon Iraq and, indeed, continues to inflict? Wasn't 'teaching our enemies a lesson' the whole point of this campaign of terror against Iraq? Wasn't proving that we could devastate anyone who would even think of attacking us the very reason for two wars and 12 years of blockade? The Radical Right should be ecstatic in pointing out the nitemare we have made of Iraq, for we can now tell the world, "It doesn't pay to attack or even threaten the United States (or its allies). You see what happened to Iraq? It can happen to you too. Stay in line."
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Indeed, the Radical Right is crediting the campaign against Iraq with moderating the behavior of Muammar Khadaffi. They say that the war against Saddam and the utter devastation it inflicted upon his entire country is what caused the Libyan dictator to give up his ambitions to be the savior of the Arab nation thru nuclear weapons, and turn them over to inspectors. They say as well that the same lesson is being taken in daily by other fanatics and may well produce the end of nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea.
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You can't have it both ways: either the U.S. did devastate Iraq, and other real or potential enemies must understand that we have the power to do the same to them, or Saddam devastated Iraq and no such lesson is to be taken by our 'enemies'. Only an idiot believes that Saddam, who rebuilt Iraq without outside aid after massive destruction from the air in the first Gulf War, caused the disaster that Iraq became after the second Gulf War. The Radical Right ravaged Iraq. If they aren't even proud of that themselves, the rest of us have reason for grievous shame.
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But Nicole Gelinas is right about one thing: "We cannot let Middle East populations fester under brutality. Nihilism becomes the desire to annihilate others: Witness 9/11." Now, if only she could bring herself to say that her pronouncement applies most particularly to Israeli brutality against Palestinians — endlessly defended and assisted by the United States — we might actually make progress in the Middle East. (Responsive to "Faith, Hope & Savagery", April 26)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:25 PM

 
Item 1: Beautiful Downtown Newark. I made no entry into this blog yesterday because I was out exploring Branch Brook Park in a part of my city, Newark, NJ, that I was not familiar with. I had a glorious day in a glorious place, taking over 200 pictures to sort thru later for a photo gallery on my Newark website, “Resurgence City, Newark USA”. Here's one view:


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Branch Brook is an Essex County Park that spans Newark and Belleville, a northern suburb. Each year in mid-April it is the site of a Cherry Blossom Festival, because it contains more flowering cherry trees, of more varieties, than Washington, D.C.’s famed Tidal Basin. I didn’t get there in time this year, but had been in prior years, and a picture of the best area appears as the third photo on the main page of the Resurgence City site.
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Yesterday I wanted to take a picture of the Cathedral from the park. I didn’t know there were not just trees but also a lake to take in. BBPk is the only county park I have yet seen that is well occupied. Yesterday it was much like New York’s Central Park, with people whose ancestors hail from East Asia, South Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe all mingling happily together under a warm sun, amid lush greenery and some late cherry blossoms. People were fishing (the lake is stocked with trout), barbecuing, jogging, playing basketball, roller skating indoors at a crowded public rink. (The comparison to Central Park is particularly apt inasmuch as Branch Brook Park was designed by the son and nephew of Frederick Law Olmsted, co-designer, with Calvert Vaux, of Central Park.)
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Earlier this week my firm (I work as a legal secretary and word processor for a major New Jersey law firm) treated the nonlegal staff to a luncheon at the Newark Club high atop One Newark Center, a building that also houses the Seton Hall Law School. The views are terrific. Here's one:


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These two great days in the new Newark made me think again how badly misperceived Newark is, even by people who should know better, people who work in Newark but spend no leisure time here. Newark had ONE riot, a bad one, but in 1967! In the same year, Los Angeles had the Watts riots. L.A. has also had a minor riot after a basketball game at the Staples Center and a horrible, huge riot after Rodney King’s attackers were acquitted. But people don’t automatically think “riots” when they hear the words “Los Angeles”. Nor should they think “riots” when they hear the word “Newark”. One riot 37 years ago should not still taint the reputation of a splendid American city.
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Most people think Newark is a black city and, so, filled with crime, aggressive panhandling, racial hostility and the panoply of social ills associated with the ghetto. Not so. For one thing, in the 2000 census, only 54% of Newarkers identified themselves as black. The rest, according to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, are: “26.52% White, ... 0.37% Native American, 1.19% Asian, 0.05% Pacific Islander, 14.05% from other races, and 4.36% from two or more races. 29.47% of the population are Hispanic or Latino of any race.”
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Moreover, the races get along fine in Newark. Our mayor, Sharpe James, is black, competent and (apparently) honest, a hardworking and well-respected figure on the national scene. But that's just one factor that makes for racial peace, one that Newark will soon outgrow, because I believe black Newarkers are ready to vote for a good person no matter his or her color. You see, black Newarkers are black people, with the stress on "people". They don't have the racial chip on the shoulder that so many "blacks" in New York and other cities have. They have manners and extend courtesy and respect to people as an automatic reflex, for having the expectation of being treated courteously by others -- which they are. Newark is a very polite city. People hold the door open for you, to elevators and public buildings. This happens so often that it is not just refreshing to someone, like me, who spent 35 years in New York City. It's nearly astonishing how nice Newarkers are.
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So if you live near or are visiting the Newark/New York area, check out Newark. We have a major museum, the Newark Museum and a Performing Arts Center that contains what Clive Barnes of The New York Times called "the most glamorous theater in the Nation". The cherry blossoms are gone, this year, but will be back mid-April next year. And the Museum and NJPAC, Cathedral, parks and streets are open year-round.
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Item 2: (Anti-Post): Whatever Happened to Empathy? The New York Post isn't alert to irony. An editorial today blasts al-Qaeda for "using mass murder as a political weapon." What, exactly, has George Bush done if not exactly that? He launched a "pre-emptive" war against Iraq, a country that never attacked us. That is properly called "aggression", and, outside the niceties of "war", mass murder. Murder is killing without provocation or justification. Iraq never attacked us; ergo, killing Iraqis in an invasion was murder. As Prussian military theorist Karl von Clausewitz observed, "War is the continuation of politics by other means." Thus, killing thousands upon thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children, soldiers and civilians both, in war (even if that war was undeclared and thus illegal) is quite literally "mass murder as a political weapon". In short, mass murder is mass murder, no matter who commits it.
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In the same edition, on "Page Six", Richard Johnson calls Michael Moore a "deranged documentarian" for "liken[ing] the cowards who murder U.S soldiers in Iraq to the colonists who fought in the American Revolution." Let's review.
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In 1776, the legitimate and de facto government of all Thirteen Colonies was the British government of His Majesty George III. The colonists were quite literally "insurgents", which is defined as people who "ris[e] in revolt against established authority, especially a government". The British authority was literally a government; the U.S. occupation is not a government, and occupied Iraq does not have a legitimate government; the U.S. occupying administration, however, functions as a government, against which Iraqi "insurgents" are "rising".
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In 1776, the British were seen as foreign invaders; in 2004, Americans are, without question, foreign invaders.
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Americans employed guerrilla warfare against the British invaders; Iraqis are employing guerrilla warfare against Americans. The British denounced the Americans as cowards for not standing out in the open and firing where they could be fired upon, 'like men' in the European custom of the day. The Post denounces as cowards Iraqis who won't risk traditional military engagement against overwhelming U.S. superiority.
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The comparison between Iraqi opponents to the U.S. occupation today and American opponents to the British occupation of the 1770s is, alas, exact.
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If the circumstances were reversed and Iraq had invaded and conquered us, would we consent to be "liberated" from the Bush Administration by force and occupied by an Iraqi army for months or years after that particular "regime change" had been effected? Or would some of our people have the guts to fight back, no matter the dangers and unlikelihood of military success, at great risk to life and limb?
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Fighting a guerrilla war is not risk-free behavior, and people who take up arms against a powerful occupying army are anything but cowards.
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What has happened to this country when we can't see the other guy's side but insist that when we do terrible things, they're fine, but when the other guy does exactly the same things, they're crimes? We used to side with the underdog as an automatic, kneejerk response. Now we're the bully on the block and have no sympathy whatsoever for the people that bully is kicking and killing in the name of "liberation" -- but really to make the Middle East safe for Zionism.
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Iraq was never a threat to the United States; only to Israel. The American people, in their innocence (a polite word for "ignorance" or "stupidity"), bought the lie that a tiny country 6,000 miles away was capable of taking on the greatest power in the history of the world, so we had ‘no choice' but to attack first. The practically instantaneous defeat on their own territory of this ‘threat' put the lie to that pile of crap. No Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found. The "regime" has been "changed". Why are we still there?
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Iraq was stable under Saddam -- repressive, but stable. Now Iraqis suffer a new oppression, worse than Saddam's. No aspect of life can go on as usual, because bombs and mortar shells are exploding all around them. To go to the market is to risk death. The oil industry, Iraq's one commodity with value enuf to lift the people out of misery, is being systematically targeted by terrorists attracted to Iraq by the U.S. occupation -- terrorists Saddam would have found and killed before they could hurt innocents.
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Every Iraqi death from both U.S. actions and terrorists who could not have operated under Saddam is our fault. Every single one.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:02 PM

 
ITEM 1, Anti-Post. AGAIN the Post publishes the insane ravings of the bloodthirsty psychopath Ralph Peters, who seems actually to be trying to provoke violence against us with ridiculous "fighting words" about all Arab countries being miserable, anti-modern failures. In the middle of his rant, he does finally utter the one word that makes any sense of his lunacy: "Israel". The pretense that this war, and all the others against the Arab world by the United States, was to help Arabs is blown away with the mention of Israel. Israel is the be-all and end-all of U.S. policy in the Middle East, the only reason we are attacked and hated by Islam.
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Arab failure is not all the doing of Arabs without any subversion from the U.S. Government and other Western powers. From early in the 20th Century, the West's role in the Arab world has been destructive, starting with the betrayal of Arab nationalism by the British after World War I. Instead of uniting the Arabs in a great and progressive federation, Britain and France, with the tacit assent of the United States, balkanized Arabia and imposed Western colonial rule over Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine -- which are all doing so well today!
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Worse, the British Empire established a Zionist state in Palestine, against warnings from the U.S. Government of the day that that would cause endless war. It has, and it's Britain's fault. Now the British, who misruled Iraq after World War I and produced endless war in Palestine, are co-conspirators in the humiliation of Iraq, again, but Ralph Peters pretends that the endless undermining of the Arab world by the U.S. and Britain has nothing to do with failures in some parts of that world. Bull.
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If Britain had been defeated in World War II and Germany had taken the whole of Great Britain but eventually returned everything but Greater London to the British, would the British simply accept the permanent loss of London and move on? Or would retaking lost London become an obsession that prevented Britain from moving on? That is the story of Palestine, and Jerusalem.
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To pretend that the creation of Israel and its defense by endless subversion of Arab unity by the U.S. and Britain has nothing to do with Arab failure is inexcusable dishonesty. (Responsive to "Escaping Arab Failure", April 23)
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ITEM 2, Slimy Japan. AOL hilited a story today about the hostile reception that former hostages in Iraq received from the Japanese. "The young Japanese civilians taken hostage in Iraq returned home this week, not to the warmth of a yellow-ribbon embrace but to a disapproving nation's cold stare. * * * 'You got what you deserve!' read one hand-written sign at the airport where they landed. * * * They had "caused trouble" for everybody. The government, not to be outdone, announced it would bill the former hostages $6,000 for air fare."
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What?!? Most Americans will be astonished by such a reception. Sadly, I know too much about the slimy monstrosity called "Japan" to be surprised at all.
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Japan is a HORRIBLE country that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. To this day Japan has never apologized for its hideous crimes in World War II, which, if anything, dwarf those of Germany. We will never have an accurate count of how many people Japan killed in pursuing empire under the euphemism "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere". But Chinese students protesting the first President Bush's impending trip to Japan asserted that Japan had killed 34 million Chinese! 34 million. I have no way to check such figures, because China didn't have reliable censuses.
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What I can say is that it is known with certitude that some of the stories of Japanese atrocities, such as Japanese soldiers tossing Chinese babies into the air and catching them on upraised bayonets, are confirmed as absolutely true. At the end of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, as MacArthur landed in Luzon, the Japanese set fire to large parts of Manila and shot the civilians fleeing from the flames! That is Japan.
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Japan got off almost scot-free for its massive crimes, including the use of prisoners of war, including Americans, in bomb-blast tests and other hideous experiments that were at least as bad as anything Germany's notorious Josef Mengele committed. Surviving Australians and Britons liberated from POW camps at the end of the war bore a stark resemblance to the cadaverously emaciated survivors of Nazi concentration camps in Europe.
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A Korean woman -- Korea was once (mis)ruled by Japan -- interviewed by TV as to whether it was wrong and excessive for the U.S. to drop two atomic bombs on Japan, said NO, that maybe 10 would have been the right number to drop on that horrible country.
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So what did we do to reconstruct Japan after the war? We left the Emperor who oversaw Japan's rampage of blood, on the throne! Saddam was a piker compared to Hirohito, but we left Hirohito in a place of great honor, even tho people killed, in his name, dozens of times as many people as Saddam killed.
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We established a British-style parliamentary government, even tho the British played essentially no part in defeating Japan. In Iraq too, we are establishing a non-American, even anti-American parliamentary government. What's wrong with our form of government? It has done well by us. Why do our rulers have no confidence in its utility for Japan or Iraq?
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We even let the Japanese continue to drive on the wrong side of the road, which set us up for massive harm to our auto industry because we couldn't sell cars in Japan because our steering wheels are on the wrong side for Japan. Japanese manufacturers, eager to invade our market — economic imperialism to get even for their military defeat — were perfectly willing to manufacture millions of cars with the steering wheel on our side.
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We did nothing to change the rigidly hierarchical structure of Japanese society. Indeed, we entrenched it in keeping Hirohito on the throne — indeed, retaining a throne rather than creating Japan into a republic. We should have hanged Hirohito in a public execution and abolished the monarchy, to make plain that a new day had arrived and the people of Japan were freed from the past, free to rise as high as their talents might take them, free from a culture where birth determines social status.
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The result of our trivial reconstruction of Japanese society, with no interference in the crazy mindset that produced Japan's rampage, is that Japan today is a pseudo-democracy that crushes the human spirit.
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Ordinary people must bow and scrape to their "superiors" every day. The greater the social difference, the deeper they must bow! Workers have to schmooze with their superiors after work, rather than return to their own home to tend to their own lives. The Japanese have an immovable, corrupt government that has been controlled by the same party for the entire postwar period, almost 60 years, and counting.
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Japanese pay something like 7 times the world price for rice, a staple of their diet. They pay thru the nose for meat, fruit, and other things for which we pay almost nothing, by contrast. The lives of ordinary people are awful, a constant grind of having to work long hours (tho not as long as ours) and put up with extraordinarily long commutes into their overcrowded cities. Japanese schools, like much of Japanese society, are regimented and filled with bullying. Each year dozens of Japanese children commit suicide because they can't stand the harassment — harassment the authorities do nothing to stop.
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Japanese kids are in a pressure cooker for a dozen years, having to go to extra classes after school, before school, on weekends and thru summers, if they want to get into the best colleges. Once they are there, however, they tend to goof off and not make best use of those superlative facilities.
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Japanese culture still looks fondly upon violence, with programming, even comic books for adults, that are filled with horrifying violence, castration, and other madness. It's an escape from the reality of being crushed by a horrible society they can fight back against only in fantasy.
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Americans and other people around the world should loudly denounce Japan's mistreatment of returned hostages, and tell the Japanese that they are miserable excuses for human beings who need to shake up society and join the modern world. They need a wake-up call. Let us shout out loud: "Japan is a hellhole! Change it!"
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:50 AM

 
ON April 16, the Post dropped the first shoe in publishing an opinion piece by Ilan Berman that seemed to call for a wider war, against Syria and Iran. Six days later, the Post dropped the other shoe, with the bloodthirsty psycho Peter Brookes calling for an attack upon Syria, and hinting that attacking Iran might also be necessary.
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Brookes claims that Syria must be helping infiltrate militants into Iraq because it could clearly stop them from crossing the arid wastes of their shared desert, but we can't stop Mexicans from coming across our own desert border!
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Among the 'crimes' of Syria that he wants us to punish is its occupying part of Lebanon. Hmm. It was okay for Israel to occupy part of Lebanon and is great for the U.S. and Britain to occupy all of Iraq, but it's not okay for Syria, a brother Arab nation, to occupy part of Lebanon. Curious reasoning.
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Brookes also says, without using the term, that Syria has or is developing WMD! How stupid does he think the people of the United States are? "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
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At least he doesn't claim, this time, that Syria has the means to reach the U.S. with its (pretend) WMD. No, it's plain that Peter Brookes, and the Post, care only about Israel. I don't give a fig about Israel. It's not my country, and I don't want my country killing, and our kids dying, for Israel.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:36 AM

 
TWO MENTIONS. Yesterday, in searching Google to see if it had found this blog yet, I chanced across two mentions of me on the Internet, one that recognizes my role in gay history and one that insults me.
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The first is a one-line entry in “3,500 Rainbow Lives” (No. 2,855 in alphabetical order): “Craig Schoonmaker, American gay activist and an early advocate of outing other gay people”. The site is a list of “queer” people thru history, “each leaving their mark upon the world”. I suppose it’s an honor to be listed in such a short list on a planet of over 6 billion people, hundreds of millions of whom might be called “queer” -- tho the great majority of gay men (some 78%, according to the poll on the Mr. Gay Pride website, http://members.aol.com/MrGayPride) prefer the term “gay”. That’s a better ratio of distinction than for Who’s Who in America, where I am also shown, because about one in every 1,500 Americans is in Who’s Who.
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The source for the information about me is shown as a book, The Gay Decades: From Stonewall to the Present: The People and Events That Shaped Gay Lives by Leigh W. Rutledge, 1992, the Penguin Group. I hadn’t known I was even in that book. I know of some other mentions, from very long quotes in The Gay Crusaders by Donn Teal (1971, republished 1995), and brief quotes in Long Road to Freedom edited by Mark Thompson (1994) and the bestseller Conduct Unbecoming by the late Randy Shilts (1995), but not that one.
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A lot of people probably think that the “Founding Fathers” of the gay rights movement are all dead. Alas, many are. But some of us, of the second generation at least, are still around. My friend John Lauritsen, an outspoken AIDS Dissident (see www.virusmyth.com), is still active in countering nonsense about that drug injury reinvented into a transmissible “disease” by antisexual (and especially antihomosexual Republicans) -- but he’s not in 3,500 Queer Lives. And the list is now to be enlarged only with the addition of Canadians (it was created by a Manitoba librarian). Sorry, John.
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For those of you who don’t know, I’m the man who in 1970 proposed the term “Gay Pride” for the weekend of events designed to draw people into New York City for the first of what we hoped would become an annual march commemorating the Stonewall Riots of 1969. The original proposal had been “Gay Power Weekend”. I thought that too strident and outward-looking. I wanted something more celebratory and inward-looking, concerned with gay people’s own view of themselves, so proposed “Gay Pride Weekend” instead. Jerry Hoose (of Gay Liberation Front? -- I think he’s still alive too) seconded the motion. It was adopted instantly, without discussion. And that was that.
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Rainbow Lives also has a blog on this service, at http://rainbowlives.blogspot.com.
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I am more ambivalent about the second mention of me that I found yesterday. A Portuguese-language blog on this service, “Alto Volta” (http://altovolta.blogspot.com/), mentioned the Expansionist Party, including our logo, in a March entry, which is good, I suppose, even tho the writer was ostensibly more amused than favorably disposed. One immediately thinks of the quote usually attributed to Mae West: “I don't care what they say as long as they spell my name right.” But the Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, NY warns government officials that that is NOT a good stance. Mae West offered another observation relevant here: “It's better to be looked over than overlooked.” Still, when someone calls you an “anti-Semite”, in any language, you need to correct the record. (S/he was referring to passages in a very long (c. 31,000 word) presentation I wrote to oppose the then-contemplated war against Iraq: www.geocities.com/lcraigschoonmaker/NoIraqAttack.html.)
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It is true that I am doctrinally hostile to Judaism’s “God of Wrath”. I don’t believe in God at all (tho I hold out the remote possibility that He exists), but if I were to choose a god to believe in, it would be the Christians’ God of Love. It’s hard to reconcile such a conception of God with what English terms “acts of God”, such as today’s tornado in Illinois. The very term “act of God” for “natural disaster” bespeaks the kind of primitive superstition that caused ancient tribes to sacrifice virgins to volcanoes. I don’t believe in a God that would demand that a woman be tossed into a cauldron of lava, and I don’t believe in a God that drowned the world for the sins of one species.
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I am also hostile to Zionism, a political movement that violates the fundamental basis of Jewish ethical teachings. To the extent that Judaism has any claim to being “a great religion”, it is because of the Ten Commandments. Zionism violates three of them, those against coveting your neighbor’s property, stealing it, and killing him if he tries to stop you! It is thus impossible for a pious, ethical Jew to be a Zionist.
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“Anti-Semitic” is a particularly objectionable form of name-calling. First, it terms Jews “Semites”, whereas “Semite” means “speaker of a Semitic language”, and the overwhelming preponderance of all speakers of Semitic languages are ARABS. So “anti-Semitic” more properly relates to anti-ARAB bias than anti-Jewish bias. I am certainly not anti-Semitic but pro-Arab.
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Second, it suggests that hostility to a given religious doctrine is unacceptable. Everyone has the right to reject any religious or other teaching they choose, for their own reasons, without being regarded as a bigot. It is indeed both intellectually and morally required that we make rational choices among ideas, and when we find an offensive or unacceptable teaching in any religion, we have the right not just to reject it personally but also to denounce it publicly. I reject many teachings from many religions, from antihomosexualism and animal sacrifice in the Old Testament (Jewish) book of Leviticus, to “predestination” in Calvinism (before a person is born, God chooses who will go to heaven and who to hell, and there’s nothing anyone can do to change that fate), to reincarnation (and thus the insignificance of this present life) in Buddhism, to the caste system (people choose, between lives, what caste they will belong to in the next life, and it is not for us to make life better for people in a low caste because they chose to suffer its conditions) in Hinduism.
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The difference between rejection of doctrine and religious bigotry is that the bigot (or zealot) says that because s/he rejects a given doctrine, no one should be allowed to believe it! I don’t say any such thing. If anybody wants to believe the ridiculous things I find detestable, that’s fine with me, as long as they don’t try to inflict that doctrine on me. Thus it is defensible to reject the antihomosexualism of Leviticus but indefensible to use the power of the state to suppress homosexuality because “God says so”.
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Moreover, “anti-Semite” willfully confuses flesh with doctrine, as to transfer hostility from an unacceptable dogma to the people who believe in it. This is the notorious “racial” view of Jewishness, in which one talks not of Judaism but “Jewish blood”. That, of course, is nonsense. A Jew is not a person born to Jews but a person who identifies as a Jew and/or who is an adherent of Judaism, a religion with universalist aspirations. Nazis are not alone in thinking of Jews as a “race” or “tribe”. Many Jews do, too. Zionism indeed is premised on the notion that Jews are “the Chosen People”, a tribe specially blessed by the Lord and given a “Promised Land” that they have divine right to occupy, no matter how many people they have to kill -- in violation of the ethical teachings of Judaism -- to do so. Canaan was, after all, not empty when the Jews arrived. The ancient Israelites took Canaan from the Canaanites by force, killing those who objected to having their country stolen right out from under them by people who had never lived there before. So the “Promised Land” turns out to be the twice-stolen land, and Jews who now claim a “right of return” to Palestine ignore the fact that when the Hebrews first arrived in Canaan, they weren’t “returning” to anything, because they came from Sumer: Iraq!
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Finally, “anti-Semitic” is usually not a genuine description of views at all but only a slander. It is employed not to describe ideas but to cut off discussion thru name-calling. Judaism and Zionism are not beyond discussion or criticism. Nothing is.
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(By the way, to return to the takeoff point of this blog entry, no, Google seems not to have found this blog yet.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:06 AM

 
WHAT an odd piece Ralph Peters has written. Wisely and generously -- how out of keeping with his general work is that!? -- he opposes religious revanchism, saying "Wherever opposing factions claim the same land for their gods, conflicts are insoluble without extremes of bloodshed. When we insist on chaining God to any patch of earth, we make Him as small as us." Is this the same Ralph Peters who is a rabid Zionist? Doesn't he see the conflict between opposing a Christian resurgence to retake Constantinople (the ultimate goal of Serbian attacks upon Bosnia and Kosovo) and Moslem aspirations to reconquer lost territory in Europe, while defending the right of Jews to retake Palestine? Don't Zionists 'make God as small as tiny Israel' when they kill for a piece of real estate?
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What's sauce for the goose really is sauce for the gander. If the United States throws all its power to the insane Jewish revanchism of Zionism, why NOT retake Constantinople and all the realms that once comprised Christendom? We have the power. Why should we, the world's greatest Christian power, use that power for Jewish revanchism but not for a great world crusade for Christianity? Why shouldn't WE take the CHRISTIAN Holy Land and either toss both the Jews and the Moslems out, or let them live in OUR Holy Land but not control it?
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If it would be mad to use our huge power to retake lost Christian territories, why on Earth are we using it to retake and hold for the Jews territory that our spiritual father, Rome, expelled the Jews from over 1,900 years ago? (Responsive to "Holy Turf Wars", April 20)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:04 PM

 
HOW desperate is the Post when it wastes ink complaining that Kerry paid his full Massachusetts state taxes but not a penny more? What next? He drives only 55mph in a 55mph zone?
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Sure, he could have opted to pay Massachusetts taxes at an abolished rate. He and other multimillionaires could also pay federal taxes at the 1978 rate. He could even turn over his entire fortune to government, which would gladly accept it, and give it to other rich people as interest payments on the national debt -- that Dubya is doubling -- rather than spend one cent of it on the poor, infrastructure renewal, or any other worthy cause that the national debt takes from.
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Why would anyone pay more in tax than the law requires? And why is anyone complaining that Kerry paid every cent he owed? We know he's rich and his wife even richer. Only rich people can run for high office in this country, thanks to Republican refusals to reform campaign finance in a meaningful way. Dubya's rich too. As Anne Richards said of his father but could say even more aptly of the son, "He was born with a silver foot in his mouth."
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If that's the best the Radical Right can come up with, Kerry is sure to be inaugurated President on January 3, 2005.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:08 AM

 
Imitation Democracy. I received a sample ballot for school elections in my city, Newark, NJ, thru the mail last week. It consists of 11 names and the instruction “VOTE FOR THREE” “MEMBERS OF THE ADVISORY BOARD”. What is the Advisory Board, and what does it do? Does it have any real power, or is all power over educational decisions in the hands of a schools chancellor or superintendent, or even the Mayor? I haven’t a clue.
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On what basis am I to vote? No information whatsoever about these people accompanied the sample ballot: no bio, no statement of principles or campaign promises; nothing. Indeed, I am only assuming these names represent people. For all the voter knows, they could be goats or rhinoceruses (protest parties in various countries have in fact run animals for office).
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No party affiliation is shown. Nor an address for any of them, so I can’t even balance my choices by section of the city to be represented. Is even one of them from my neighborhood, Vailsburg?
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The sample ballot shows no slates of candidates, as would reveal interrelationships between these meaningless names: Progressive Ticket, New Age Thinkers, Back-to-Basics Slate. I haven’t received so much as one piece of mail about any of the named candidates.
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I have no time to read newspapers, and I watch little local news on television. My clock radio is set to WINS, a New York radio station that gives scant attention to New Jersey generally or Newark in particular. The non-national news I do occasionally watch, cable’s News12 New Jersey, claims to be “as local as local news gets” (even tho it covers the entire State of New Jersey and “News from beyond New Jersey”), but I haven’t seen anything at all about Newark’s school elections, much less a methodical, comprehensive examination of the differences among candidates.
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Like many people nowadays, I get most of my news from the Internet and national news programs. I just did a search on Google for “newark new jersey school elections 2004", and only after ten minutes of searching thru results and online articles did I finally find something in our local newspaper, the Star-Ledger, about the election. Three candidates of the 11 showed up at a public forum at which 10 spectators appeared! This is democracy?
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The article went on to point out that there are two slates, of three candidates each, the “Daddy Cares” ticket and the “For Our Kids” ticket, and speaks briefly about each group’s purposes. The article also speaks very briefly about three independent candidates not part of any slate, and says that the two remaining independent candidates didn’t even reply to calls from the Star-Ledger!
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After putting myself out, I have the barest of information on which to base my vote Tuesday — and will vote for the "Daddy Cares" slate, because they want to involve men more in the lives of their children and their schools: Omar Nieves, Patrick Council, and Leonard Wheeler. But for all I know, they are also fundamentalist Christian, anti-gay fanatics with whom I disagree on every other issue!
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This is no way to run an election. Individual voters should not have to take time from their busy lives to go out of their way to find information about candidates, and know that they still know almost nothing, certainly not enuf to make wise choices.
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In a democracy, information should come to the voter, thru the mail or mass media. Or a single, central repository of impartial information should be established on the Internet and be widely publicized, e.g., newarknjboardofelections.gov (doesn’t exist; I just tried), where candidates file information they swear, under penalty of perjury, to be true to the best of their information and belief, and make promises they expect to be held to.
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The present system is not democracy, but a sham: an imitation and travesty of democracy. It’s worse than student council elections in high school. Those elections are popularity contests but at least you knew who those kids were. I had never heard of any of these people. I don’t even know how one of the surnames is pronounced: “Ndiaye”. From the information I was sent, the most I can tell about any of them is that those with Spanish names are probably Hispanic! Is “Seelinger” white? Jewish? Well, he’s got “Jr.” at the end of his name, and at least Orthodox Jews don’t generally name a child after his father or any living relative -- however, if the father died after the child was conceived but before he was born, he could be a “Jr.”, I suppose.
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City Council elections in Newark are little or no better than these sham school board elections, because they too are nonpartisan. At least with a party, you have some idea of where people stand philosophically. Perhaps Newark is so preponderantly Democratic that no Republican would stand a chance if he ran with that party identification. Or would s/he, as a stark break from the past? Are Portuguese immigrants in the Ironbound natural Democrats?
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“Elections” in which voters are expected to vote without any information whatsoever are not real choices at all. They are meaningless, offenses to the principle that an informed electorate can make informed choices. So how do we reform Newark’s elections, and other such useless, worthless ‘elections’ that may actually be worse than no elections at all?
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When I lived in New York City, I voted in another useless election, for judges. In judicial elections, it is routine that multiple parties endorse the same person, which should be utterly forbidden, for it renders ostensibly partisan elections into the same useless, nonpartisan, nonchoice ‘elections’. I voted blindly, and learned only afterward that the nice WASP-y named “Bruce Wright” turned out to be “Turn ‘em Loose Bruce”, a black judge notorious for leniency and siding with criminals over victims!
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We have got to restore meaning to local elections.
— All elections should be partisan. What are parties for if not to give us guidance as to the principles of candidates? Party identification and/or slate identification should be shown on every ballot.
— A sworn statement from all candidates should be distributed to the voters, preferably by mail in a single brochure, but at least thru a single, centrally located and well-publicized website run by the Board of Elections and monitored by organizations such as the League of Women Voters.
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But perhaps we need more.
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There are a host of ‘elections’ most people don’t want to bother with, for offices we don’t care about or in subject-matter areas in which we feel we have insufficient expertise to make wise decisions, such as the qualifications of judges. Perhaps we need a new institution, an intermediary between the electorate in general and candidates for these minor or specialized offices: a standing electoral college.
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How this would work is, we create a Local Electoral College, a voters' panel that will do, for us, all voting for minor offices. We, the general electorate, would just vote for our local representative. We’d set a target like one Local Electoral College member per 1,000 residents, and vote, in elections in which candidates are identified by party and/or slate, for our particular own member of the Local Electoral College.
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With only 1,000 people to have to reach, each candidate for a Local Electoral College could be assured a good chance of meeting every single constituent, and every constituent would be confident that s/he could look the candidate in the eye, talk about the issues that concern him or her, and get a real sense of who that candidate is and where s/he stands.
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Then, for the next two years, the Local Electoral College would vote for all the minor offices, and EVERY office would be up for election by the Local Electoral College. Every school board member, the schools superintendent, every department head, every judge, every trustee of every public corporation and agency (from the Water Department to, here, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) would have to run for office, and if defeated by the Local Electoral College, would be turned out.
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Major offices — mayor, city councilmember, county executive, state assemblyman, state senator, Governor, federal Representative, federal Senator — would still be voted on by the general electorate directly.
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In this way we would broaden democracy by making every member of every public authority answerable to the electorate without requiring the electorate to go to the polls every month and vote blindly for people we know nothing about. We would vote for the guy or gal down the street, and if we had a bone to pick about someone they voted for in our name, we’d have their number and could explain, in person, why s/he mustn’t do that again!
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:55 AM

 
THE Associated Press issued a surprisingly evasive report today about Mike Danton, a forward for the Saint Louis Blues of the National Hockey League, being arrested for "trying to kill a male acquaintance whom he had fought with Tuesday over Danton's 'promiscuity and use of alcohol.' The complaint said Danton feared the acquaintance, who is not named, would talk to St. Louis Blues management and ruin Danton's career." Why would a "male acquaintance" care about Danton's promiscuity? For that matter, why would a hockey team care if a player is promiscuous? Hmm.
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The story then clarifies, sort of: "In a telephone call recorded by authorities, the acquaintance asked why Danton wanted to kill him. According to the complaint, Danton broke down and sobbed, and explained that he ordered the killing because he 'felt the acquaintance was going to leave him.'" Ohboy! The hockey player's a fruit, who at once doesn't want the world to know he's gay and is afraid his boyfriend is leaving him! So he figures he'll stop the emotional hurt and prevent the story from getting out by killing his boyfriend!?! How detestable.
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The story concludes, "Danton, formerly known as Mike Jefferson, was suspended twice by the New Jersey Devils, who eventually traded him to St. Louis last June. He had seven goals, 12 points and 141 penalty minutes in 68 games this season with the Blues." Oh, great. He lived in my state awhile. And changed his name. And is violent. Sounds like great boyfriend material. Good thing I didn't meet him in a bar. That's the kind of guy I want to stay far, far away from.
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When will gay men in sports understand that society has moved faster than they have, and is perfectly willing to accept that a tough guy on the ice or gridiron or anyplace else in sports can be gay? The issue is not the management of the Saint Louis Blues or any other team, nor the reactions of fans. The issue is internalized self-hatred and unearned guilt. Thirty-five years after Stonewall, gay men are still unable to outgrow the fact that they were raised to be straight and instead accept their nature, in large part because the gay-rights Movement is dominated by self-despising losers.
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In 1970 I was part of the committee that was planning the first of what we hoped would become an annual commemoration of the Stonewall Riots of 1969, to celebrate gay men's standing up to police harassment. I offered the term "Gay Pride" for the weekend of events to draw people in for the first march up Avenue of the Americas in New York City, because we wanted to make gay people proud of their nature and demand from themselves -- more than just from society -- a full and happy life as homosexuals. The march did become an annual event, and the term "Gay Pride" became hugely popular, making a difference in the way gay people are perceived, by themselves not least. Before then, "shame" had been more often associated with homosexuality. Now "gay" and "pride" go together very nicely.
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Alas, confused people are not able to help others sort themselves out. And the dynamics of The Movement are such that people who have already sorted themselves out, after years of difficult unlearning of their upbringing, run out of patience with the endless confusions of the new people who keep coming into The Movement, so leave the organizations, leave the publications, and thus, sadly, leave those institutions in the hands of the confused.
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In the Sixties and early Seventies, we thought it would be a very long time before society would follow our lead and accept homosexuals. My own organization, Homosexuals Intransigent!, pursued the idea that at end it doesn't matter what straight people think, because our happiness rests with each other, not with what outsiders think of us. We felt that if we were happy to be gay and lived lives of decency and permanency, we would win the respect of society for deserving it.
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Still, we thought we would lead the way and straights would follow. Ironically, well-adjusted straight people turn out to be more ready to accept homosexuality than are maladjusted homosexuals! People happy in and respectful of their own love relationships can understand sexual love between other people, and in this great and tolerant country are willing to let others 'live and let love'. So straight people are leading the way to a better life for gay men and lesbian women. Weird, ain't it?
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Now if only the Mike Jefferson/Dantons of the world would catch up, we'd be in good shape.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:20 PM

 
ILAN Berman says, "Iran is the chief culprit among the outside players behind much of Iraq's current instability." No. The United States is the chief culprit. Iraq was stable under Saddam. So we ousted him. Berman also refers to Iraq as Iran's "eastern neighbor". Iraq is to Iran's WEST, in every sense. Further, readers must recognize that when Berman says "the recipe for long-term stability in Iraq rests in taking up the thorny issue of external influence - and in unequivocally demonstrating to regional rogues that their troublemaking carries real consequences", he is calling for an even wider war, against Iran and Syria. Is the present war going so well that we can take on more?
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It's refreshing that a Post piece calls Hezbollah "the Iranian-backed, Lebanon-based Shi'ite militia" instead of "terrorist group", but he reverts to form in calling Hamas "the Palestinian terrorist group". Why is Hezbollah a "militia" but Hamas a "terrorist group"? They are both guerrilla movements, with similar goals. We have got to stop calling unconventional warriors "terrorists". They don't wear uniforms, but they are nonetheless soldiers, in a war that they see as having been inflicted upon them by outsiders, starting with the British Empire's Balfour Declaration, which took a nutso, pie-in-the-sky pipedream, recreating ancient Israel in 20th Century Palestine, and made it a reality. It is that nutso scheme that produced the region's endless violence, as Colonel House, Woodrow Wilson's aide at Versailles, warned the British at the time. They went ahead anyway, and we are paying the price for insane British arrogance, giving away somebody else's country.
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Only when we accept that Israel is not a permanent fact but as reversible as the Bolshevik Revolution (of the same year, 1917, as the Balfour Declaration) will we achieve peace in the Middle East: by merging Israel back into Palestine, and creating a "secular, pro-Western regime" not just in Iraq but in Palestine as well.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:52 PM

 
CATCHUP time: I started this blog on April 15th, 2004 but had some items from earlier that I wanted to be part of it. I saw no way to pre-date posts, so this first day has a bunch of posts addressed to different New York Post columns. In the future, posts (or 'anti-Posts') will average perhaps one a day (like the vitamin pills; think of checking this blog when you take your daily multivitamin -- they're both good for you). Cheers.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:40 PM

 
ARNOLD Ahlert has rewritten history to make the Democrats responsible for withdrawing from Vietnam. The reality is that John Kennedy, a liberal Democrat, took us into Vietnam to defend against totalitarianism, and Richard Nixon, a conservative Republican, took us out, to leave the defenseless people of that region to suffer mass death and tyranny.
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The real difference between this war and the Vietnam War is that Jewish-dominated media were opposed to the war in Vietnam while the same Jewish-dominated media are gungho for this war, because it is a war for Israel. If Saddam had been a Communist, not an anti-Zionist, we wouldn't have made war on Iraq. (Responsive to (“Vietnam’s Real Lesson”, 4/15/04)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:33 PM

 
WILL the Post never stop talking drivel? Robert B. Ward says that New York's estate tax "could make the difference between passing a thriving business to one's heirs, or having to sell assets to pay millions in tax to Albany". What pitiably fatuous nonsense! He points out that Donald Trump, the takeoff for the piece, "made his start in a family real-estate concern here". Did "The Donald" have to wait for his father to die to get that business? No, he did not.
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Businesses pass from one generation to another during the life of the older generation, when they retire, not at death. What passes at death are houses, horses, art, antiques, stocks, bonds, and the whole panoply of artifacts of wealth that maintains divisions in society when some inherit millions and others are left to pay the debts of their impoverished parents. The dead have no rights, and if society decides, as a matter of public policy, that evening things up a bit between different segments of society by reducing inequality at death, so much the better. Estate tax is one of the best taxes we have, and it never applied to the poor or middle class, but only to the rich. It is being abolished by liars who misrepresent it as a tax that adversely affects everyone, when in reality the federal estate tax affected only heirs to estates of over $900,000! To make up the shortfall when estate taxes are eliminated, people who don't have $900,000 to spare, but are lucky to have two bucks to rub together before they get their check on payday, have to pay higher taxes! That is "tax equity" as the rich see things. But it's not the way any decent person sees things. (Responsive to “Winning Is Easy; N.Y. Taxes Are the Challenge", 4/15/04)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:32 PM

 
GEORGE F. Will's observations about the turbulence of Iraq are the barest beginning of public understanding that maybe "regime change" there wasn't such a hot idea. Instead of Saddam killing people to suppress endless insurrectionary violence, we'll have to do it. And then the world will look at our bloodstained hands and declaim that we're no better than Saddam was.
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Frankly, if anyone had to be a butcher to maintain order (George Will's first requirement for any government), I'd rather it have been Saddam, not us. Maybe we just should have left Saddam in charge and tried to modify his behavior by degrees, week by week over years.
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I'm still waiting for a general recognition that Saddam's "excesses" might not have been as excessive as we originally thought. Can moderation defeat extremism in a place like Iraq? I'm not sure it can. (Responsive to "Iraq: Beyond Illusion", 4/14/04)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:31 PM

 
ERIC Fettmann has written what should be the epitaph for the Bush re-election campaign: "From the start, Bush and [Ariel] Sharon have been kindred spirits". That is precisely the problem. Ariel Sharon has spent decades killing Arabs wholesale, and hasn't achieved any peace at all. Anyone who admires Ariel Sharon is not only morally unfit to draw breath but also completely unqualified to advise any President about anything. (Responsive to "Sharon's lessons for Bush", 4/14/04)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:31 PM

 
DICK Morris shows a surprisingly naive side when he says that removing Saddam was enough to achieve, and that attempts by Bush to change Iraq's basic nature in perpetuity endanger his presidency. Morris should know that the quintessential purpose of the war was to make Israel safe. If Iraq becomes strong again, any popular Iraqi government will be militantly anti-Zionist, because the people of Iraq are militantly anti-Israeli. If Bush cannot neutralize Iraq as a threat to Israel, the war was for nothing. Next time there won't be a WMD excuse for attacking Israel's enemy, no chance in hell of persuading Americans that somehow tiny, distant Iraq endangers the huge and powerful U.S. This is the only chance the Israel lobby has to castrate Iraq. If they can't geld that stallion now, it will again threaten to trample Israel into the sand. (Responsive to : "Iraq Could Doom Bush", 4/13/04)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:30 PM

 
RALPH Peters pretends that the Kurds are a wonderful, peaceloving, democratic people who are a model for the Middle East. He says not one word about decades of guerrilla war by Kurds against Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and possibly also Syria. A Kurdish website proudly honors this incident: "On the 30th of June 1996 Zilan strapped her body with explosives and exploded her self near a parading Turkish army in Dersim."
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On January 3, 2004, CNN reported that "The Kurdish guerrilla group [Ansar al-Islam] has been linked to al Qaeda and is blamed for attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq." Hard figures are hard to find on how many people Kurds have slaughtered in pursuit of a Greater Kurdistan, but it is doubtless in the thousands, over at least two decades. Have the Kurds abandoned violence, to content themselves with autonomy within Iraq only? Will they gladly give up the dream of a new country, united Kurdistan, to be carved from four existing countries? I don't believe it. (Responsive to "Where the Fighting Isn't", Apr. 8)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:30 PM

 
DOES Peter Brookes (and does the Post) realize the lesson in his charge that "failing to implement political and economic reforms could destabilize the country. ... he responded with only token gestures and wrapped himself in the cloak of counterterrorism, insisting that any changes would lead to more terrorist activity. In fact, the lack of change has led to more terrorism"? Brookes meant to refer to Uzbekistan, but his warning holds equally for Israel, which instead of improving conditions for Palestinians has done everything in its power to make life hell for them. Should anyone wonder why there are so many Palestinians willing to die when life is hell? (Responsive to "A New Terror Central", Apr. 5)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:29 PM

 
THE NEW MILITARISM: The Post's rightwing columnists (Ralph Peters and Arnold Ahlert in the same day) tell us that harsh, aggressive militarism is good, and the surest guarantor of our security and freedom. Madness!
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Has Israel become secure and free from attacks by becoming a supermilitarist and terrorist state? Or does it have the most terrorism of any country on Earth? What kind of freedom do Israelis enjoy, when they are subject to endless search and are unable to travel freely or even go to the mall without fearing death? Consider what happened to Germany and Japan, countries that allowed militarism to become supreme in their culture.
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Zionists want us to believe that war against the United States by Moslems is natural and inescapable, so we must be in a state of permanent war against Islam. That too is insane. There is only one reason the U.S. is hated so much that hundreds of millions of Moslems want us all dead: endless U.S. backing of the most sordid crimes of Israel. If the U.S. were neutral or anti-Zionist, Islam would leave us alone. But we are never to think that, nor remove ourselves from the conflict and let the Zionists fight their own battles. So we will continue to see Americans killed, abroad and at home, to keep the monster Israel killing in the name of divine right.
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When will Americans understand that the only road to peace and security is justice? Absent justice, there will never be peace, no matter how militarist we become. (Responsive to two colums, 4/1/04)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:28 PM

 
GEORGE F. Will writes admiringly of South Carolina's right-wing fanatic Jim DeMint who claims to believe that liberty requires that we all be invested in the stock market and take care of ourselves, even if we haven't 2 cents left over at the end of a pay period but indeed have to borrow two bucks just to get to work on payday. All the measures DeMint advocates favor the rich, rob the poor, and increase inequality in society. They 'encourage investment' by protecting ever larger portions of the income of the rich from taxation, and empower the rich to acquire ever more wealth, while the poor and lower middle class have nothing to save, so fall progressively farther behind. Are the rich really so stupid as to think we will never wake to what is happening, and use some of the 200 million guns in this country to take back what they have stolen? "Domestic tranquility" requires social justice, and DeMint and Will are staunch enemies of social justice.
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As for a nation on the dole, that would be Israel, where every man, woman, child, and babe in arms receives $1,500 American taxpayer dollars a year, endlessly and intergenerationally. Does Will favor ending that dependency? I do. (Responsive to "One Nation, on the Dole",3/29/04)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:27 PM

 
JOHN Podhoretz should be ashamed of himself for his outrageous assertion that "the war in Iraq was not only justified but necessary - as a pre-emptive action against a terrorist state that could have placed us in unimaginable jeopardy at some point in the near future". Iraq was NOT a terrorist state and there is no reason to believe it ever would have become so. The war was sold to the public as necessary to prevent Iraq from acquiring WMD and the means to deliver them to our homeland. There were no WMD and no way for Iraq to reach us from 6,000 miles away. For Podhoretz and his ilk now to suggest that tho Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, war against it was nonetheless necessary to prevent it from becoming a "terrorist state" some unspecified future someday is inexcusable slander. Iraq was NOT involved in any terrorism against us. The "war" was one-sided: U.S. aggression. There was no justification a year ago and there's none today. (Responsive to "Untangling Terror”, 3/26/04)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:27 PM

 
IS every conservative op-ed writer a fool and a liar? Robert A. George calls Israel "a free society living in the middle of intolerance". This "free society" is a hellhole of violence and oppression, violence CAUSED by oppression of the legitimate demands of Arabs for equal treatment under law. How free and tranquil would the United States be if we tried to suppress black aspirations with military force?
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There is only one way to defuse violence: do justice. Israel won't do that, so Israel will ALWAYS have violence. And let's cut the crap: count the bodies. Israel is not a blameless victim but a mass murderer. The only difference between "terrorists" and state terrorism is uniforms, and when you count the dead, it becomes plain that Zionists are far the worse terrorists. Americans must be forgiven if they "evenhanded"ly feel, "A plague on both your houses." But the Zionists have dragged us into this vile war on their side, and we are now legitimate targets for Arab rage. If we can't save Palestine from violence, we can at least save ourselves. We must end all support for Israel and let the Arabs and Zionists fight it out between themselves. (Responsive to "Slaying the Past", 3/23/04)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:26 PM

 
I WILL believe that Nicole Gelinas, George F. Will, and other commentators who see nothing wrong with "offshoring" good American jobs, when they consent to have their jobs taken by Indians or Chinese. I would much rather read the works of the best minds of India than those of the tiny homegrown intellects who now populate the editorial columns of the New York Post. Let's offshore the entire editorial staff of the Post. If they accept that gladly, THEN I'll believe they are sincere. (Responsive to "Jobs Dilemma", 3/22/04)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:25 PM

 
I COULD not get past this sentence in Paul Wolfowitz's dishonest op-ed piece: "Electricity reached pre-war levels last October, and is on track to reach 150 percent of pre-war levels, despite an infrastructure devastated by Saddam." What? Saddam bombed the electric power plants? Oh, no. It's the U.S., spurred by Wolfowitz, that destroyed civilian power plants. It is the U.S. Government, spurred by Wolfowitz, that spent a decade encircling and starving Iraq, and preventing Iraq from rebuilding the infrastructure destroyed by the LAST Gulf War. Saddam didn't devastate Iraq's infrastructure. Wolfowitz did.
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If Wolfowitz believes that what he and his ilk caused the U.S. to do was morally defensible, he should take credit for that devastation, not blame Saddam for what the United States did. But he doesn't take credit, does he? He knows the phrase should have been "an infrastructure devastated by the U.S.", but he knows it was wrong to devastate the civilian infrastructure that we are now merely rebuilding, at huge cost.
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Far from devastating Iraq, Saddam performed nearly a miracle in rebuilding the country despite a stringent embargo imposed on the nation. He rebuilt the bridges, reopened the power plants and TV stations, repaired the highways and hospitals and much of the rest of the devastation the U.S. caused in Gulf War I. Saddam may have been a very bad man, but he did a terrific job of rebuilding under a very difficult embargo situation.
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It is the second war that devastated Iraq's infrastructure AGAIN, which is why it took months of pouring in billions of dollars from abroad to get Iraq to "pre-war levels". It will take further years to rebuild what can be rebuilt. But what we never hear is what cannot be rebuilt: the lives snuffed out by U.S. Government violence. We hear only how many Iraqis Saddam killed. Let's be evenhanded and tell the American people how many Iraqis the United States has killed -- and continues to kill. Why has no tally ever been rendered? (Responsive to "Terror Is Losing", 3/19/04)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:20 PM

 
Welcome to The Expansionist/The Anti-Post, a place where I speak in favor of a wide and generous view of public policy and reply to the narrow, selfish views endlessly aired in the editorial pages of the New York Post. I get an emailed newsletter from the Post Monday-Friday and am usually incensed enuf to send off at least one indignant letter to the editor every day. But for reasons I don't understand, the Post doesn't publish these letters -- well, at least not all of them. You, however, don't need the Post to see these letters. Just tune in here. Cheers, L. Craig Schoonmaker, Chairman, Expansionist Party of the United States, Newark, NJ (http://members.aol.com/XPUS)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:17 PM