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Newo
~ Abstract Brain ~
Spain
2674 Posts |
 Posted - 08/15/2005 : 08:10:30
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Over here, Helen Keller is chiefly known for her disabilities, so this is an article by a historian called Mickey Z, I found him when one of his pieces on World War 2 was published in a Disinformation anthology. He makes stories pretty much daily to www.mickeyz.net, he's also a really nice fellow.
Helen Keller: Not Blind to War Crimes
By Mickey Z.
In a textbook example of whitewashing, if today’s America knows Helen Keller (1880-1968) at all, it’s the easy-to-digest image portrayed in the 1962 film, “The Miracle Worker.” Brave deaf and blind girl “overcomes” all obstacles to inspire everyone she meets. “The Helen Keller with whom most people are familiar is a stereotypical sexless paragon who was able to overcome deaf-blindness and work tirelessly to promote charities and organizations associated with other blind and deaf-blind individuals,” writes Sally Rosenthal in Ragged Edge.
But, in 1909, Helen Keller became a socialist. Soon after, she emerged as a vocal supporter of the working class and traveled the nation to voice her opposition to war. “How can our rulers claim they are fighting to make the world safe for democracy,” she asked, “while here in the U.S. Negroes may be massacred and their property burned?” Of course, as a woman with disabilities, she was patronized by the same mainstream media that previously ch
ampioned her as a heroine. The editors of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote: “Her mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her development.”
Keller minced no words in her responses...one of which appeared in newspapers across America: “So long as I confine my activities to social services and the blind, the newspapers compliment me extravagantly, calling me an ‘arch-priest of the sightless’ and ‘wonder woman’. But when I discuss poverty and the industrial system under which we live that is a different matter.”
As the militaristic frenzy spread across America, Keller appeared at New York City’s Carnegie Hall on January 5, 1916. “I have a word to say to my good friends, the editors, and others who are moved to pity me,” she said. “Some people are grieved because they imagine I am in the hands of unscrupulous persons who lead me astray and persuade me to espouse unpopular causes and make me the mouthpiece of their propaganda. Now, let it be understood once and for all that I do not want their pity; I would not change places with one of them. I know what I am talking about. My sources of information are as good and reliable as anybody else’s. I have papers and magazines from England, France, Germany and Austria that I can read myself. Not all the editors I have met can do that. Quite a number of them have to take their French and German second hand. No, I will not disparage the editors. They are an overworked, misunderstood class. Let them remember, though, that if I cannot see the fire at the end of their cigarettes, neither can they thread a needle in the dark. All I ask, gentlemen, is a fair field and no favor. I have entered the fight against preparedness and against the economic system under which we live. It is to be a fight to the finish, and I ask no quarter.”
Keller’s critique of the government propaganda campaign to stir up Americans to support U.S. intervention in the war remains more germane than ever. “Every modern war has had its root in exploitation” Keller said. “The Civil War was fought to decide whether the slaveholders of the South or the capitalists of the North should exploit the West. The Spanish-American War decided that the United States should exploit Cuba and the Philippines. The South African War decided that the British should exploit the diamond mines. The Russo-Japanese War decided that Japan should exploit Korea. The present war is to decide who shall exploit the Balkans, Turkey, Persia, Egypt, India, China, Africa. And we are whetting our sword to scare the victors into sharing the spoils with us. Now, the workers are not interested in the spoils; they will not get any of them anyway.”
She urged workers—the ones who do the fighting and dying—to strike at the heart of America’s drive toward war. “Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought,” she declared. “Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings. Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction. Be heroes in an army of construction.”
(In solidarity with Cindy Sheehan)
Excerpted from the soon-to-be-released “50 American Revolutions You’re Not Supposed to Know: Reclaiming American Patriotism.” Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at: www.mickeyz.net." target="_blank">http://www.mickeyz.net.
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Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music -- the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself. |
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Erebus
* Dog in the Sand *
USA
1834 Posts |
Posted - 08/15/2005 : 15:30:49
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http://corner.nationalreview.com/
RAMESH ON HIROSHIMA by John Derbyshire
Nice piece by Ramesh, but I can't shake off the feeling that moralizing about total war is pointless.
I have met rather a lot of people who were complicit in the wartime mass killing of civilians. (I recorded one such encounter here, first item.) Some of those people, in fact, were relatives of mine. All were very nice people: kind, good family men, thoughtful and law-abiding. I could never get any of them to admit to, or betray in tone or gesture, the slightest unease about what they had done.
War is coded deep in human nature. Not restrained war, either -- tribal war, in which the object is to exterminate the other tribe, or inflict such damage on them that the few who are left will yield abjectly. Human beings have been conducting themselves like this for hundreds of millennia.
We are of course much better, morally, now than we used to be. Anthropologists -- see, for example, Geoff Blainey's history of the Australian aborigines -- tell us that rates of death by violence in hunter-gatherer tribes far exceed those for Europeans in WW2. Plains Indians cheerfully conducted campaigns of tribal extermination against each other until a technologically far superior tribe -- us -- showed up and put an end to it all.
Nature, of course, is, as the old quip has it, what we are put on earth to rise above. Given the least excuse, though, human societies revert to type. Then, when the emergency is over, they re-moralize themselves. Judging from my own encounters with WW2 veterans, this is pretty easy to do, and wellnigh everyone does it.
I know from my email -- and so I suppose Ramesh and my other colleagues know it, too -- that the USA is full of people who believe that some really major atrocity will be committed against us at some point in the next few years, and that we will respond by shucking off all civilized restraints, as we did in the later stages of WW2, until we have dealt with the issue. Then we shall calmly re-moralize.
This isn't a very nice picture. I sure don't feel happy about it. It seems to be how human societies work, though. It's nice that we have lifted ourselves so far above brute nature (I'm not being facetious; it **is** nice). We do, though -- collectively, if not in every individual case -- seem to have the ability to shuck off our sheep's clothing for a while, then don it again and get on with our lives without much introspection.
If -- which God forbid -- we again face total war, we will massacre our enemy's civilians and erase his cities, and he will do the same to us, until one of us cries Uncle, or ceases to exist. It's fine to argue the morality of this as a theological exercise; but if you believe -- I do -- that that's how things will inevitably go, then the arguments are all just about angels on the heads of pins.
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Newo
~ Abstract Brain ~
Spain
2674 Posts |
Posted - 08/16/2005 : 05:54:24
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I used to hear this argument a lot, both from people in favour of war and from those who didn't think it a good idea but thought it inevitable anyway - that war is coded in us, we're hardwired to kick tar of each other, 'it's in our nature' and the thing you said a while back about cell walls and an eternal dance. It is for you and I to decide if and how a bunch of previous instances, no matter how pervasive the pattern, will affect the choices we make now, and just because something has gone on in the past that does not mean it has to continue. Like that wise Texan William Melvin Hicks said, It's just a simple choice between fear and love. What I'm getting at basically is personal responsibility: if you tell me you you want war because it's how you feel problems can be solved most easily I will accept that as an honest answer but please don't blame it on your genes.
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Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music -- the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself. |
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Erebus
* Dog in the Sand *
USA
1834 Posts |
Posted - 08/16/2005 : 08:18:19
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I should note that as someone who does not at all believe people have free will, the language of choice and responsibility does not resonate with me. However, I do not reject the possibility of change. While I do not "want war", I do believe that things often reach the point where war is the easiest and even most merciful solution. The genes, with their range of behavioral dispositions, are what got us and other organisms to this point, so, while I neither blame nor credit genes for war, I also do not expect dramatic departure from the patterns that have brought us this far. Trust in the past and hope if you will, but if you trust in hope the past will most certainly triumph.
All of which is not to say that what brought us here cannot in turn lead us to extinction. It's just that at bottom we really don't have any choice in the matter. Only suffering will change the way we behave and I don't think we've suffered enough to expect, or even hope for, that, bizarre as that may seem. |
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Newo
~ Abstract Brain ~
Spain
2674 Posts |
Posted - 08/16/2005 : 09:51:19
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What do you feel guides you instead of your own choices?
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Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music -- the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself. |
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Erebus
* Dog in the Sand *
USA
1834 Posts |
Posted - 08/16/2005 : 10:15:48
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| I think the conscious mind is always the last to know. In other words, that the real work of the values calculus occurs neurosynaptically, which occurs with lawful necessity. I believe we commit an error when we see ourselves as selves, as an I or a me. We say "I do this" or "I consider and choose", when in actually we are complexes that come the conclusions we do, moment by moment, as a function of what we are at a molecular level. |
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Newo
~ Abstract Brain ~
Spain
2674 Posts |
Posted - 08/16/2005 : 11:03:46
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If it's any consolation, I don't think you're a robot at a conscious level.
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Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music -- the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself. |
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VoVat
>> Denizen of the Citizens Band <<
USA
9168 Posts |
Posted - 08/19/2005 : 06:53:51
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I'm pretty much totally anti-war, but I think there's something to the argument that it's natural. Well, to an extent, anyway. Fighting over conflicts is natural. Our current concept of war is largely rooted in the nation-state system, which I'm not sure IS totally natural. Sides tend to be chosen based on arbitrarily defined boundaries. While I don't think we, as a species, will ever totally get over the us-and-them way of thinking, I think a good step is to stop thinking of ourselves so much as citizens of countries, and more as simply human beings.
I hope that made sense.
I was all out of luck, like a duck that died. I was all out of juice, like a moose denied. |
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Out of the Memoryhole
