Sophie's Choice

Authoritarianism.  Shall we pause for a moment to remember Sophie Scholl?  Sophie was a student at the University of Munich and was arrested in February of 1943 for distributing anti-Nazi propaganda.  After a show-trial before the notorious judge Roland Friesler, she and her brother Hans were sentenced to death for treason.  Their treason was passing out mimeographed articles critical of the Nazi regime.  Friesler's court, the Volksgerichtshof or people's court, was an extra-constitutional court which was formed by the Nazis for the prosecution of political crimes.  Freisler was judge, jury and prosecutor all rolled into one, and no appeal was possible.   Although Sophie and her brother were told by their lawyers that a death sentence would be carried out no sooner than 99 days after their trial, the siblings were led directly from the court to Stadelheim prison where they were executed that very afternoon.  Sophie was 21 years old.  She and her brother Hans were allowed to meet with their parents briefly before they were taken away and they shared tearful farewells.  Can you possibly imagine yourself in their shoes?  Close your eyes and put yourself in their place for a moment.  Your beautiful daughter is about to be taken away and beheaded for passing out a tract.  You will never see your handsome son again, your precious children are about to be murdered by YOUR OWN GOVERNMENT! 

It was never the intent of the Nazis to be sadistic or barbaric or cruel for its own sake.  It was their intent to be firm, to be united, to be one among many following the vision of the great leader. 

Sophie was taken into a courtyard before her executioner, Johann Reichhart, who was a professional, from a dynasty of ax-men which went back eight generations, and who kept meticulous records from the beginning of his career in 1924 to the abolition of capital punishment in Germany in 1949.  In all he executed over 3,000 souls.  Sophie said, "The sun is still shining."  She then was placed upon a bench, face down and her arms and shoulders held down by two assistants.  The fallbeil was then fitted past her neck and released.  The heavy blade, already raised and set before the prisoner had arrived, descended.  The death took three seconds at most from the time the prisoner entered the courtyard.

Reichhart was justifiably proud of the fact that he minimized the suffering of those who he was called upon to kill.  And though he was a dedicated Nazi and a true believer, he knew that something wasn't quite right with the government that he worked for.  When the Allies were approaching, he pulled off the side of the road on a bridge, and threw his fallbeil, his portable guillotine, into a ravine.  Reichhart was denazified after the war, and lived until 1972, advocating until he died for the reinstatement of capital punishment in Germany.

Gridlock

The government that governs best is that which governs least.

Join with me, friends, in the party of Gridlock.  My party, Gridlock, stands for one thing and one thing only: anti-authoritarianism.  Thus, at all costs, we must try to keep the President of the United States and the congressional majority of two different parties.  It matters little which party occupies the White House, as the position has become increasingly imperial and authoritarian in the past century.  When the President and Congress are at each other's throats--they don't have the energy to strangle US.  Join me, my friends.  Leave ideology behind.  We must end the political/military/corporate hegemony of America before we all wind up slaves to the government.  We must take back our country.  Don't give them another "great white leader."

Al In Hot Water

Al Sharpton is drawing fury over his denigration of the Mormon religion.  While I have rarely met a Mormon I didn't like--on an individual basis you understand--if I believed that Joseph Smith was other than a 19th Century charlaton/con man/failed novelist then I would belong to the Mormon church.  Actually, I believe he was a fraud, a deceiver, a libertine who wished to aggrandize himself at the expense of others, enjoy the fruits of other men's wives, and not have to toil very hard at all to make his living.  He may have been interested in occult, i.e., (hidden, mystic) frou-frou and bric-a-brac from the late 18th Century, including Freemasonry or Illuminatus, and the Spiritualism movement.

None of this questions any Mormon belief in God.  We cannot judge what is in a person's heart, now--can we?  Judge not, lest we be judged.  But, no rational person can hear the story of the authorship of the Book of Mormon, etc. and possibly believe it.  Too much ink, real and virtual, has been wasted on this pathetic cult.

Jim Webb

My thoughts yesterday on the occupation of Iraq were inspired by Senator Jim Webb's response to GWB's veto of the war spending bill.  I thought to myself, "what inspired brilliance!  This guy should run for president!"  Jim Webb is the junior senator from Virginia who ran as a democrat in the last election.  I recall there was a minor dust up when conservative tight-sphincters found blue passages from some of Webb's novels and suggested that anyone with such a lurid imagination wasn't morally qualified to hold elected office.  Of course, he won anyway. 

To parse the language here is very interesting.  During Vietnam, which was a war, the government called it a "police action" or "conflict" in order to lessen the impact of the onus of a continuing military intervention overseas.

Having learned its lesson from Vietnam, now they sell the conflict in Iraq as a "war" even though it's clearly not a war but rather a police action, i.e. it is trying to stablize and pacify a nation hell bent on tearing itself apart.  Webb is using the correct terms to describe what's really going on there.  There is no "war" because there is no "enemy."  You can't go to war with an invisible enemy or an invisible feeling of discontent or a general feeling of ill will or an attitude of disrespect toward the U.S.

Bring our troops home.  Struth!

Struth

"Struth!"

That's the word all of the the members of parliament would shout at various times in the course of the one-act play by Tom Stoppard "New Found Land", which is a political farce and I believe the word is a conjunction that means "it's the truth."  Well I'm going to co-opt it for my blog, because it's so much more elegant than izza truth. 

A Pox on Both Their Houses

At this point, it seems clear that a democrat president and a democrat congress is a certainty in 2008.  Why does that NOT have me jumping for joy and crying with glee?  Because I know that absolute power breeds corruption and the democrats are no more immune to it than the GOP.  Although I gave money to the democrats and so I am a defacto member of the democrat party, I would like to think that I'm not a liberal, that I cannot abide the far left fringe any more than the wacko right wing of the Republican party.  The good news is that the far left wing is likely to get just as much out of the democrats as the far right wing was out of the republicans, namely: nothing.

Izza truth.  We are not currently at war.  When GWB appeared on the deck of the air craft carrier and announced Mission Accomplished, that "major combat operations in Iraq were over."  He wasn't lying.  That was the truth.  The war was over.  Specifically, the government with whom we were at war had fallen and we were victorious in that quaint old 19th Century idea of warfare.  But the people of Iraq just didn't lie down and play dead.  Then the Bush administration perpetrated a bait and switch on the American people.  Rather than declaring victory and coming home, they engaged in a program of nation rebuilding.  Remember Richard Bremer?  Remember how Halliburton was going to reconstruct the Iraqi infrastructure?  Well that fell through because of the insurgency, and the Bush Administration shifted gears and conflated the war against Saddam's regime to the war against terror.  The rapidly expanding civil war between the Shiites and the Sunnis also further destabilized our efforts to reconstruct the nation, and it is now hopeless.  It is time to stop calling this a war--to call it what it is: an occupation, and to acknowledge that the direst prognostications of those who speculated that war in Iraq would lead to civil war and urban guerilla tactics have come to pass and to acknowledge that the Bush administration fought a brilliant 19th Century war three years ago to defeat Saddam Hussein but that their attempts to stabilize and reconstruct postwar Iraq have been utter failures, and to bring our weekend soldiers home.

Now--this is where we have to go from the 19th Century into the 21st Century.  We need to look at the lessons of Mossad.  We need to use intelligence androot out terror at the source.  When we find terrorist training camps we need to bomb them, no matter where they are.  We need to do this and damn the consequences.  Mistakes will be made but we must take this war to them using their tactics.  Exterminate them, quite frankly.  Although we need to keep in place the proscription against the assassination of sovereign heads of state, we do not necessarily need to proscript the assassination of terrorist masterminds who have no sovereign legitimacy.  We need to be very pragmatic.  If they give themselves up, then we also need to give them more to look forward to than Guantanamo Bay!

Izza truth.

Truth Is...

Truth Is...

I heart a hypocrite.  That's why I love it when a senior state department official is forced to resign when his name is connected to a high priced panderer in Washington DC.  But I love it even more when he's the spokesbushie for abstinence only education!  Hooray - hypocrisy on parade!  Do what I say, not what I do!  And make sure that all those massages are abstinently therapeutic, and the only "release" is muscular!!!  And be equally sure it aint that one-eyed trouser muscle, neither. 

Izza truth.