Dear Tanya
April 9, 2010
As one of the participants in the Nicaragua Delegation, I would like to express my opinion on the program that I have experienced during the tour.
Overall, I have enjoyed the program you have set up for us, especially a visit and stay in the tobacco farm even though I think that we should spend more time in the farm.
Frankly speaking, I was overwhelmed by their level of poverty and misery that I had witnessed the same while I was in the Philippines in early 2000, and I did not see even a glimmer of hope in the farm but only a mendacity of hope that the campesinos have to live by.
One of the odd and quaint projects was a visit to the US Embassy and I wondered why we have to spend our precious time to lend our ears to the boilerplate briefings from the US State Department officials (or the CIA case officer?).
The only thing I learned from the visit was that the US Government has lots of money, the borrowed money that has to be eventually paid back by the US taxpayers; the conference room was cool and comfortable, and we maximized our comfort time by asking them more questions and getting another dosage of B*** S*** for two and half hours..
We should rather go and see the working environment of the maquiladora industrial complex where hundreds of Nicaraguan men and women toil under the blazing heat of the sun.
Instead, we were taken briefly to the sewing factory run by the co-op and offered to buy some leftover T-shirts that only fit small-sized person.
The main source of our annoyance was an unbearable heat we have faced for almost all day and even in the night while we sleep…we were housed in a hostel that was built for the garage or automobile repair shop.(we named our quarters “Hanoi Hilton”).
One of our delegates, 76-year-old man couldn’t get sleep, got sick, and dropped out from going to visit the farm and had to spend three days recuperating in A/Ced Hotel spending his own money.
After spending the first night horribly in a sweating heat at the Hanoi Hilton, I asked one of our facilitator, Sara Riegler whether we could have new bed sheets next day.
She did not reply with my query, but count-punched me derisively with a blunt one liner: “Do you change your bed sheet every day?”
In the first place, I was flabbergasted about her brutish manner and offensive remark toward the delegate as a team leader.
I barked at the moon: “Of course, we do not change bed sheets at home every day, but we also do not sleep in a room of extremely hot air that we sweat out all and every night, so that we do not have to change bed sheet everyday!!. You, moron!!”
Since this face-off, I decided not to rely on her in any circumstances, because I saw there is no way to get any problem solved or redressed with such a cold-blooded team leader.(I joked about her to my compadre in the team that she could be only a good candidate for a Sayanim that the Mossad want to recruit for the future operation in Nicaragua.)
Sarah also began to show fatigue and irritation whenever she was translating the Spanish speaking lecturers…she repetitively mumbles, murmurs, groans, stutters, drags, and eats her words that I am sure she needs a public speech therapy if she wants to continue her work.
She also did not seem to have much knowledge about the past history (the Sandinista Movement) and current situation in Nicaragua. (I learned that she has been in Nicaragua for only six months, paid by the stipend, not the salary.)
Without the timely intervention by Mrs. Sharon Hostetler, the Delegation Tour would have ended in a worthless excursion.
Sharon has displayed the excellent leadership and showed us her insightful knowledge about the Nicaraguan situation clearly and passionately.
Without her help and assistance that I had received during my stay in Nicaragua, I would have not gotten a correct understanding about the current Ortega Regime.
Above all, I appreciate that Witness for Peace has given me a great opportunity to know more about the current situation in Nicaragua. (I have written an article about my Delegation Tour and posted it in the Internet Web Site.)
Lastly, I want to make sure that this is my personal opinion and does not represent the opinion of any or all Delegates.
Dale Han
PS. I also appreciate that you have taken the immediate step to redress the accounting error that you have made on my credit card.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
A Dispatch from Managua Nicaragua
A Dispatch from Managua Nicaragua
April 1 2010
“I am a Sandinista, no Orteguista.” Daniel Alegria, An ex-cadre of Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN, The Frente)
Author’s note: I was always intrigued by the Nicaragua’s Sandinista Movement since my departure in 1975 from the South Korea where the Military Dictatorial Regime of Gen. Park CH had been launching the full court press in arresting, torturing, incarcerating and executing the dissident group of students, journalists, professors, human right activists and ordinary people.
In Nicaragua, the Somoza Regime was no less totalitarian than Gen. Park’s military rules and the Somoza Gang was fully supported by the US Government militarily and financially.
When the Frente overthrew the Somoza Regime in 1979 and won the 1984 election, the US President, Ronald Reagan who was a Hollywood actor-cum-prevaricator had launched the “Contra” insurgency in order to make Nicaraguans “cry Uncle”, declaring that the Sandinista was a commie agents for the Soviet Union.
The Sandinista Movement was a beacon of hope for the indigent Latin Americans in the 1980s and also an antithesis to the so-called “Free Market” economy, proposing a socialist/capitalist economic system based on Marxism, Liberation Theology, Nationalism and anarcho-syndicalist’s formula.
Fast forward to the present...Daniel Ortega, the President of Nicaragua, regained power after 16 years of hiatus since he lost power in 1990, still believes and tries to convince his people that his current regime is simply an extension of former Sandinista Revolution, while his detractors, ex-Sandinista comrades call the President a power-hungry liar.
I wanted to find out who is telling the truth...Ortega or ex-Sandinista-turned-opponent, like Daniel Alegria, that gang up to displace Ortega from the power.
As usual, I joined the small group of the NGO, Witness For Peace, for 10-day excursion spelunking every nook and corner of the Nicaraguan communities for an answer.
This tour was my third fact-finding mission in the region after Cuba and Venezuela tours in early 2000.
A. Living a life of a campesino (peasant)
For the I-pod crazy and cell-phone addict North Americans, living a life of a campesino, even in a few days in Nicaragua voluntarily must surely be deemed a stupid and idiotic thing ever to do.
However, since I do not buy any babbles of the mainstream media and believe in the immersion journalism, the only way to find the truth appears to be directly involved in the event or to place oneself physically and mentally in the locale where the event occurred. (I regret retrospectively that I had been totally programmed to take in what the established institutes want me to believe in.)
Otherwise, chances are you become a dumb ass to follow whatever the establishments want you to believe in.
We were divided into four teams and assigned to four families in the tobacco community located in the campo (rural area) about four-hour ride from the city of Managua.
The community is run like a cooperative farm where everyone knows everyone, what’s happening, who’s coming and going, etc., like a closely knitted tribal community.
And my team was quartered in a house where Augusto, a former Sandinista fighter dwells with his wife.
As in most of houses in the community, the main door is missing or does not exist at all, windows are covered with sheet, and floors are dirt mound where the bed has no mattress.
The kitchen shelves are stacked with unmatched bowls and dishes with no electric tchotchkes of toaster, grinder, mixer, oven, microwave, or dishwasher.
The electric power flickers often during the day, the potable water runs intermittently, and taking a shower means pouring water on your head with a bucket.
The outhouse is usually built in the backyard with no door...you sit on the basin that looks like a cement pyramid. When the hole under the pyramid is filled with human excrements, the outhouse is simply moved to other location.
The only exposure to modern civilization seems to be watching the TV drama, a soap opera that the campesinos envy about the story and lick their fingers.
We were taken to the tobacco farmland where a dozens of young girls pick the stacks of tobacco leaves under the unbearable heat of brazing sun.
A male boss briefed us that the worker is paid in weekly basis, $3.50 per day with no other benefit. (A cup of latte in Starbuck coffee shop?)
In the tobacco factory where people in the community get the cash payment for their labor, I found that several children work on behalf of their parents who were missing in order to attend other business.
As usual in all of Nicaragua, the roof of the building is covered with the corrugated tin or zinc panels that absorb the burning heat of mid-day sun and dispense it mercilessly on top of workers head. (Almost all roofs of houses in the country are covered with the same panels because the material is free of maintenance, last forever, and dirty cheap.)
We found the most disturbing reality that the campesinos gradually stop producing rice, beans, and other daily food stuffs, and instead plant tobacco trees as a cash crop, because they can make more money to sell the tobacco leaves to the cash-paying tobacco factory in the community rather than a back-breaking job of planting other stuffs.
In other words, they are totally rely on their livelihood on the fate of the tobacco factory that they do not have any recourse to save if the company goes belly up due to the world economy.
Their livelihood does not exist in their own hand, but in the grips of the Wall Street or Chicago Commodity Exchange where a cigar-chomping and pot-bellied robber barons hold sway on the destiny of poor campesinos whether they can have a loaf of bread in their dinner table.
I have witnessed the end results of the NAFTA and CAFTA that Uncle Sam forced the Caribbean and Latin Americans to sign in.
B. A Farce at the US Embassy
The NGO have arranged a Q & A meeting with the US Embassy staffs regarding the US Government’s role to enhance and develop the Nicaraguan economy.
First of all, I was a bit surprised to see the size of the embassy compound and the buildings...Nicaragua is the second poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere with only 5.7 million people and it was mind-boggling to observe the Embassy-site un-matched with the population and economy of the host country.
And I found an answer why the US Government needs such a huge facilities and manpower.
The meeting began with an introduction by a lady staff from the AID (Agency for the International Development) of the US State Department. (Read as an operating arm of the CIA around the world)
After the lady detailed the overall involvement of the US aids to Nicaragua, a political officer (read as a case officer from the CIA) took over and briefed how the US Government has been executing the aid programs in details.
Not surprisingly, he talked and explained the Nicaraguan economic policies as if he was a Pooh-Bah in the colonial government in early 1900s when Nicaragua was occupied by the US marines.
Since the US issued the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the United State Government has sent the US Marines several times to Nicaragua in order to install their favorable presidents and oust ones it did not like.
In 1926, more than 5,000 Marines and over 500 US officials are actively participating in the internal affairs of Nicaragua, establishing the infamous National Guards as their attack dogs to bite any dissident group.
And Anastasio Somoza Garcia, a close friend of the US ambassador, was appointed as a Director whose family ruled Nicaragua for more than forty years, amassing the largest family fortune in Nicaragua at the time.
FDR, the US president, reportedly said, “He may be a son of bitch, but at least he is OUR son of a bitch.”
The US Marines were there to enforce the exploitative policies of colonialism that the US-owned companies seek to profit as they paid Somoza millions of dollars in exchange for benefits to the company, such as not having to re-forest after they deforested taking all commercially valuable trees.
Now the US Government direct the policies of the IMF that endorse the Structural Adjustment Program (SAT), in which Nicaraguans imports the sacks of rice and beans with the cash earned by exporting tobacco products or coffee beans.
And above-mentioned political officer at the US embassy appeared to be working to achieve this goal as the only option to the Nicaraguan campesinos.
In other words, it appeared that the US embassy was there in Managua as an enforcer for the US interests (read as a bouncer at the door of the dancing hall, strip club, or chic bar), not as a representative for American people.
C. The Sandinista Movement is dead in the water.
The Sandinista Revolution in 1979 was a unique moment of the late twentieth century and the confluence of forces inspired utopian hopes as well as the very down-to-earth work of rebuilding Nicaragua destroyed by the US-backed Somoza gang.
And the Ortega regime survived in a devastating fight against the US-financed Contra insurgency in 1984, but lost in 1990 election when George HW Bush provided the opposition party with $13 million.
After 16 years of hiatus, Ortega returned to power again in 2006 when he made various adjustment and collaboration with his opponents and picked the ex-Contra enemy Jaime Morales Carazo as his vice president.
Ortega also patched a conflict with Catholicism, marrying in the church and receiving the blessings of former arch-enemy Cardinal Obando y Bravo. In return, he backed a law to prohibit abortion in Nicaragua, a law which passed in 2006.
In short, Ortega finally buckled and cried Uncle.
Daniel Ortega reminded me of the late South Korean President and Nobel Peace Prize winner DJ Kim...
DJ was a quintessential nationalist-cum-anti-American activist when he started a political career in the Gen. Park’s Regime era in 1970s.
He emphatically and correctly believed that the divided Korea could not possibly be reunited as a one nation as far as the US military occupied in the Korean peninsula.
However, he turned 180 degree opposite in his argument against the US Military presence in South Korea after coming back from the three-year exile in the US, collaborated with his arch enemy, ex-KCIA boss, JP Kim, and got elected the President.
DJ was under the care of the Rockefeller Foundation during his exile and surely tutored by the Foundation that he would never be elected a President if he refuses to compromise his stand against the US military occupation, and he was rewarded with a presidency and Nobel Peace Prize, even though he finalized his betrayal with his three sons in jail for bribery.
Ortega did not seem to have much choice but to buckle under the US boots when he was accused of raping his step-daughter in 1998. (I personally queried about this incident while I was with his supporters or detractors and all of them admitted that the rape occurred even though Daniel strongly refuses to acknowledge it happened.)
In addition, Ortega seems to be metamorphosed into a sleazy politician, like DJ Kim, from a long and wild-haired revolutionary Sandinista...and he does not seem to care much about licking any boots when he would be rewarded with prestige and power.
He surely can not stand on a par as a compadre with Hugo Chavez, the recalcitrant and defiant president of Venezuela against the hegemonic US imperialism.
For Augusto, an ex-Sandinista guerrilla and my host at the tobacco farm, Ortega is still his hero as other indigent and illiterate campesinos continue to live by the mendacity of hope.
What else do they have?
Clearly and unfortunately, I see not a zilch of hope there except a plenty of misery and poverty under the blazing heat of mid-day sun.
I parted with Augusto after I gave him an advice that the village should have a survival plan when the tobacco factory leaves town or goes belly up.
He defiantly stood there arms in akimbo and his piercing pair of eyes seemed to ask me: “Have you people in the North ever cared about the life of peasants in the South?”
I turned around and got on the van that takes us, the wise people from the North, back home.
One thing is cocksure: Augusto and I would never meet each other again in our lifetime.
April 1 2010
“I am a Sandinista, no Orteguista.” Daniel Alegria, An ex-cadre of Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN, The Frente)
Author’s note: I was always intrigued by the Nicaragua’s Sandinista Movement since my departure in 1975 from the South Korea where the Military Dictatorial Regime of Gen. Park CH had been launching the full court press in arresting, torturing, incarcerating and executing the dissident group of students, journalists, professors, human right activists and ordinary people.
In Nicaragua, the Somoza Regime was no less totalitarian than Gen. Park’s military rules and the Somoza Gang was fully supported by the US Government militarily and financially.
When the Frente overthrew the Somoza Regime in 1979 and won the 1984 election, the US President, Ronald Reagan who was a Hollywood actor-cum-prevaricator had launched the “Contra” insurgency in order to make Nicaraguans “cry Uncle”, declaring that the Sandinista was a commie agents for the Soviet Union.
The Sandinista Movement was a beacon of hope for the indigent Latin Americans in the 1980s and also an antithesis to the so-called “Free Market” economy, proposing a socialist/capitalist economic system based on Marxism, Liberation Theology, Nationalism and anarcho-syndicalist’s formula.
Fast forward to the present...Daniel Ortega, the President of Nicaragua, regained power after 16 years of hiatus since he lost power in 1990, still believes and tries to convince his people that his current regime is simply an extension of former Sandinista Revolution, while his detractors, ex-Sandinista comrades call the President a power-hungry liar.
I wanted to find out who is telling the truth...Ortega or ex-Sandinista-turned-opponent, like Daniel Alegria, that gang up to displace Ortega from the power.
As usual, I joined the small group of the NGO, Witness For Peace, for 10-day excursion spelunking every nook and corner of the Nicaraguan communities for an answer.
This tour was my third fact-finding mission in the region after Cuba and Venezuela tours in early 2000.
A. Living a life of a campesino (peasant)
For the I-pod crazy and cell-phone addict North Americans, living a life of a campesino, even in a few days in Nicaragua voluntarily must surely be deemed a stupid and idiotic thing ever to do.
However, since I do not buy any babbles of the mainstream media and believe in the immersion journalism, the only way to find the truth appears to be directly involved in the event or to place oneself physically and mentally in the locale where the event occurred. (I regret retrospectively that I had been totally programmed to take in what the established institutes want me to believe in.)
Otherwise, chances are you become a dumb ass to follow whatever the establishments want you to believe in.
We were divided into four teams and assigned to four families in the tobacco community located in the campo (rural area) about four-hour ride from the city of Managua.
The community is run like a cooperative farm where everyone knows everyone, what’s happening, who’s coming and going, etc., like a closely knitted tribal community.
And my team was quartered in a house where Augusto, a former Sandinista fighter dwells with his wife.
As in most of houses in the community, the main door is missing or does not exist at all, windows are covered with sheet, and floors are dirt mound where the bed has no mattress.
The kitchen shelves are stacked with unmatched bowls and dishes with no electric tchotchkes of toaster, grinder, mixer, oven, microwave, or dishwasher.
The electric power flickers often during the day, the potable water runs intermittently, and taking a shower means pouring water on your head with a bucket.
The outhouse is usually built in the backyard with no door...you sit on the basin that looks like a cement pyramid. When the hole under the pyramid is filled with human excrements, the outhouse is simply moved to other location.
The only exposure to modern civilization seems to be watching the TV drama, a soap opera that the campesinos envy about the story and lick their fingers.
We were taken to the tobacco farmland where a dozens of young girls pick the stacks of tobacco leaves under the unbearable heat of brazing sun.
A male boss briefed us that the worker is paid in weekly basis, $3.50 per day with no other benefit. (A cup of latte in Starbuck coffee shop?)
In the tobacco factory where people in the community get the cash payment for their labor, I found that several children work on behalf of their parents who were missing in order to attend other business.
As usual in all of Nicaragua, the roof of the building is covered with the corrugated tin or zinc panels that absorb the burning heat of mid-day sun and dispense it mercilessly on top of workers head. (Almost all roofs of houses in the country are covered with the same panels because the material is free of maintenance, last forever, and dirty cheap.)
We found the most disturbing reality that the campesinos gradually stop producing rice, beans, and other daily food stuffs, and instead plant tobacco trees as a cash crop, because they can make more money to sell the tobacco leaves to the cash-paying tobacco factory in the community rather than a back-breaking job of planting other stuffs.
In other words, they are totally rely on their livelihood on the fate of the tobacco factory that they do not have any recourse to save if the company goes belly up due to the world economy.
Their livelihood does not exist in their own hand, but in the grips of the Wall Street or Chicago Commodity Exchange where a cigar-chomping and pot-bellied robber barons hold sway on the destiny of poor campesinos whether they can have a loaf of bread in their dinner table.
I have witnessed the end results of the NAFTA and CAFTA that Uncle Sam forced the Caribbean and Latin Americans to sign in.
B. A Farce at the US Embassy
The NGO have arranged a Q & A meeting with the US Embassy staffs regarding the US Government’s role to enhance and develop the Nicaraguan economy.
First of all, I was a bit surprised to see the size of the embassy compound and the buildings...Nicaragua is the second poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere with only 5.7 million people and it was mind-boggling to observe the Embassy-site un-matched with the population and economy of the host country.
And I found an answer why the US Government needs such a huge facilities and manpower.
The meeting began with an introduction by a lady staff from the AID (Agency for the International Development) of the US State Department. (Read as an operating arm of the CIA around the world)
After the lady detailed the overall involvement of the US aids to Nicaragua, a political officer (read as a case officer from the CIA) took over and briefed how the US Government has been executing the aid programs in details.
Not surprisingly, he talked and explained the Nicaraguan economic policies as if he was a Pooh-Bah in the colonial government in early 1900s when Nicaragua was occupied by the US marines.
Since the US issued the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the United State Government has sent the US Marines several times to Nicaragua in order to install their favorable presidents and oust ones it did not like.
In 1926, more than 5,000 Marines and over 500 US officials are actively participating in the internal affairs of Nicaragua, establishing the infamous National Guards as their attack dogs to bite any dissident group.
And Anastasio Somoza Garcia, a close friend of the US ambassador, was appointed as a Director whose family ruled Nicaragua for more than forty years, amassing the largest family fortune in Nicaragua at the time.
FDR, the US president, reportedly said, “He may be a son of bitch, but at least he is OUR son of a bitch.”
The US Marines were there to enforce the exploitative policies of colonialism that the US-owned companies seek to profit as they paid Somoza millions of dollars in exchange for benefits to the company, such as not having to re-forest after they deforested taking all commercially valuable trees.
Now the US Government direct the policies of the IMF that endorse the Structural Adjustment Program (SAT), in which Nicaraguans imports the sacks of rice and beans with the cash earned by exporting tobacco products or coffee beans.
And above-mentioned political officer at the US embassy appeared to be working to achieve this goal as the only option to the Nicaraguan campesinos.
In other words, it appeared that the US embassy was there in Managua as an enforcer for the US interests (read as a bouncer at the door of the dancing hall, strip club, or chic bar), not as a representative for American people.
C. The Sandinista Movement is dead in the water.
The Sandinista Revolution in 1979 was a unique moment of the late twentieth century and the confluence of forces inspired utopian hopes as well as the very down-to-earth work of rebuilding Nicaragua destroyed by the US-backed Somoza gang.
And the Ortega regime survived in a devastating fight against the US-financed Contra insurgency in 1984, but lost in 1990 election when George HW Bush provided the opposition party with $13 million.
After 16 years of hiatus, Ortega returned to power again in 2006 when he made various adjustment and collaboration with his opponents and picked the ex-Contra enemy Jaime Morales Carazo as his vice president.
Ortega also patched a conflict with Catholicism, marrying in the church and receiving the blessings of former arch-enemy Cardinal Obando y Bravo. In return, he backed a law to prohibit abortion in Nicaragua, a law which passed in 2006.
In short, Ortega finally buckled and cried Uncle.
Daniel Ortega reminded me of the late South Korean President and Nobel Peace Prize winner DJ Kim...
DJ was a quintessential nationalist-cum-anti-American activist when he started a political career in the Gen. Park’s Regime era in 1970s.
He emphatically and correctly believed that the divided Korea could not possibly be reunited as a one nation as far as the US military occupied in the Korean peninsula.
However, he turned 180 degree opposite in his argument against the US Military presence in South Korea after coming back from the three-year exile in the US, collaborated with his arch enemy, ex-KCIA boss, JP Kim, and got elected the President.
DJ was under the care of the Rockefeller Foundation during his exile and surely tutored by the Foundation that he would never be elected a President if he refuses to compromise his stand against the US military occupation, and he was rewarded with a presidency and Nobel Peace Prize, even though he finalized his betrayal with his three sons in jail for bribery.
Ortega did not seem to have much choice but to buckle under the US boots when he was accused of raping his step-daughter in 1998. (I personally queried about this incident while I was with his supporters or detractors and all of them admitted that the rape occurred even though Daniel strongly refuses to acknowledge it happened.)
In addition, Ortega seems to be metamorphosed into a sleazy politician, like DJ Kim, from a long and wild-haired revolutionary Sandinista...and he does not seem to care much about licking any boots when he would be rewarded with prestige and power.
He surely can not stand on a par as a compadre with Hugo Chavez, the recalcitrant and defiant president of Venezuela against the hegemonic US imperialism.
For Augusto, an ex-Sandinista guerrilla and my host at the tobacco farm, Ortega is still his hero as other indigent and illiterate campesinos continue to live by the mendacity of hope.
What else do they have?
Clearly and unfortunately, I see not a zilch of hope there except a plenty of misery and poverty under the blazing heat of mid-day sun.
I parted with Augusto after I gave him an advice that the village should have a survival plan when the tobacco factory leaves town or goes belly up.
He defiantly stood there arms in akimbo and his piercing pair of eyes seemed to ask me: “Have you people in the North ever cared about the life of peasants in the South?”
I turned around and got on the van that takes us, the wise people from the North, back home.
One thing is cocksure: Augusto and I would never meet each other again in our lifetime.
Monday, March 1, 2010
God comes along for the ride as we evolve
God comes along for the ride as we evolve
March 1 2010
To Jeff:
Generally speaking, I concur with your affirmative statement that Jesus Christ, if he ever existed historically in the first century,
1. was a Jewish rabbi whose Hebrew name was Yeshua or Yehoshua.
2. taught in his entire life only the Jewish laws and never abandoned his Jewish belief.
3. neither started a new religion nor was he the founder of Christianity.
Obviously, above facts would suffice to give most of Christian fools the shocking food for thought about their religious devotion on Jesus Christ.
1. Jesus (Savior) Christ (Messiah) was, posthumously and involuntarily, recruited as an ‘Anchor Baby’** in the Judaic community by the Hellenized Jew, Apostle Paul in Asia Minor.
2. As he allegedly stated in ipsissima verba, Matthew 5: 17: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy but to fulfill”, he only taught the Jewish laws to his people and he was a devout Jew as his 12 disciples, not Christians at all.
3. He was no less a tribal cult leader in Judaism than Rev. Sun Myung Moon is a sectarian preacher in Christianity. He died on the Cross without knowing that he was a Christian God.
In addition, I would like to remind you that we, the 21st Century people, were not the ‘target audience’ for the Bible’s authors, but the people who believed in theories like earth is flat, a unicorn exists, or the celestial teapot revolving around the sun, etc.
And also I would like to remind you that we often forget the fact that we have constantly been evolving, in the course of our lives, in choosing, interpreting, and defining the meanings and paradigms of our political, social, cultural, and religious sensibilities...in other words, from primitive polytheism to the current monotheism, Gods that we worship were chosen, shaped, discarded, abandoned, defined, re-interpreted and re-created according to changes in human dynamics, and Jesus Christ was not an exception...he simply comes along for the ride as we evolve.
For example, Christianity now thrives in the US and South Korea dressed in the garment of ‘prosperity gospel’ that believes in God who wants His children to enjoy health, happiness and wealth NOW and not as an eternal reward after their death in Heaven.
They have a vision of the Gospel in which sanctifies the human desire for wealth by declaring that “money printed the Bible, money builds our churches, money sends your missionaries, or money pays your preachers, etc.”
In other words, the things you possess can also be a measure of your godliness.
Reading the verses of Bible in a fashion that the rich man has less chance to get into the Heaven than an Elephant passing through the hole in the needle makes no more sense any more than a homeless beggar was blessed by Jesus Christ.
The Christian Gospels have been contextualized** within various world cultures by the Evangelical Movement, in which process makes the verses of Scripture often marginalized depending on who you asked about.
When these cultural setting is prioritized, God’s meaning is syncretized** fitting into categories relevant to the particular cultural context, for example in case of the South Korean Christianity that is specifically designed for the South Korean people; not by transplanting in the pot of Western culture but by planning it in the South Korean cultural soil so it can take root, flourish, and grow into a tapestry of beliefs, rites, and values of their indigenous shamanistic religion.
In the South Korean cultural setting in the North America, what is worthwhile is to have more—always more—even at the cost of others having less or having nothing.
For them, to be is to have and to be the class of “the haves”.
Therefore, the South Korean Churches cater to what people want. It is more a vendor of goods and services than a community of the Kingdom of God.
When the idea of a God formed in one generation by one set of human beings becomes to be meaningless and powerless in another generation, it is quietly discarded and replaced by a new God as the primitive shamanism was removed from the community to accommodate more powerful and adorned deity.
Each generation has to create the image of god that works for it.
That is why modern Christians have decaffeinated, defanged, laundered, purified, and universalized the tribal Yahweh God of Old Testament into a modern, responsive, refined, peace-loving and fast food type of a contextualized** and syncretized** God.
**anchor baby is a term also called a jackpot baby used to refer to a child born in the US to illegal immigrants or non-citizens. The term refers to the role of an illegal alien’s child as a US citizen, in facilitating immigration under the birthright clauses in the immigration act. The anchor baby is a pejorative term that most Americans despise them because these babies exhaust the national revenues and burden the educational institution while they do not contribute any expenses as taxpayers.
As about 5,000 late-term pregnant women of South Koreans annually travel to the US to deliver the same numbers or more babies in the US Hospital for the US citizenship, I boldly suggest that Apostle Paul needed Jesus to propagate his syncretized** version of Judaism to the Jewish community. Some say Christianity should be called Paulianity.
**contextualization is a term used in the study of Bible in relation to their relevant cultural settings in order to communicate the Christian teachings in cultures which had not previously experienced them.
Contextualization is broadly used by secular, religious and political groups to render their message into different settings by adjusting or accommodating words, phrases or meanings into understandable contexts in respondent cultures.
**syncretism refers to the attempt to bring together beliefs from several different and often contradictory schools of thought. Many modern theologians lay claim that most religions have either now or in the past practiced a certain degree of syncretism.
Mainstream Christianity for instance, has incorporated much Judaic thought, and also picked up practices along the way that were not a part of early Christianity.
When we celebrate Christmas with Christmas trees, and feasts, we hearken back to Pagan rituals that were swept up and incorporated into Christianity in an effort to convert non-Christians.
If you hunt Easter eggs at Easter, you’re not only celebrating the resurrection of Christ but also adding Greek and Roman pagan ritual to your beliefs as a Christian.
Syncretism cannot be defined without an understanding of contextualization since two processes are interrelated.
March 1 2010
To Jeff:
Generally speaking, I concur with your affirmative statement that Jesus Christ, if he ever existed historically in the first century,
1. was a Jewish rabbi whose Hebrew name was Yeshua or Yehoshua.
2. taught in his entire life only the Jewish laws and never abandoned his Jewish belief.
3. neither started a new religion nor was he the founder of Christianity.
Obviously, above facts would suffice to give most of Christian fools the shocking food for thought about their religious devotion on Jesus Christ.
1. Jesus (Savior) Christ (Messiah) was, posthumously and involuntarily, recruited as an ‘Anchor Baby’** in the Judaic community by the Hellenized Jew, Apostle Paul in Asia Minor.
2. As he allegedly stated in ipsissima verba, Matthew 5: 17: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy but to fulfill”, he only taught the Jewish laws to his people and he was a devout Jew as his 12 disciples, not Christians at all.
3. He was no less a tribal cult leader in Judaism than Rev. Sun Myung Moon is a sectarian preacher in Christianity. He died on the Cross without knowing that he was a Christian God.
In addition, I would like to remind you that we, the 21st Century people, were not the ‘target audience’ for the Bible’s authors, but the people who believed in theories like earth is flat, a unicorn exists, or the celestial teapot revolving around the sun, etc.
And also I would like to remind you that we often forget the fact that we have constantly been evolving, in the course of our lives, in choosing, interpreting, and defining the meanings and paradigms of our political, social, cultural, and religious sensibilities...in other words, from primitive polytheism to the current monotheism, Gods that we worship were chosen, shaped, discarded, abandoned, defined, re-interpreted and re-created according to changes in human dynamics, and Jesus Christ was not an exception...he simply comes along for the ride as we evolve.
For example, Christianity now thrives in the US and South Korea dressed in the garment of ‘prosperity gospel’ that believes in God who wants His children to enjoy health, happiness and wealth NOW and not as an eternal reward after their death in Heaven.
They have a vision of the Gospel in which sanctifies the human desire for wealth by declaring that “money printed the Bible, money builds our churches, money sends your missionaries, or money pays your preachers, etc.”
In other words, the things you possess can also be a measure of your godliness.
Reading the verses of Bible in a fashion that the rich man has less chance to get into the Heaven than an Elephant passing through the hole in the needle makes no more sense any more than a homeless beggar was blessed by Jesus Christ.
The Christian Gospels have been contextualized** within various world cultures by the Evangelical Movement, in which process makes the verses of Scripture often marginalized depending on who you asked about.
When these cultural setting is prioritized, God’s meaning is syncretized** fitting into categories relevant to the particular cultural context, for example in case of the South Korean Christianity that is specifically designed for the South Korean people; not by transplanting in the pot of Western culture but by planning it in the South Korean cultural soil so it can take root, flourish, and grow into a tapestry of beliefs, rites, and values of their indigenous shamanistic religion.
In the South Korean cultural setting in the North America, what is worthwhile is to have more—always more—even at the cost of others having less or having nothing.
For them, to be is to have and to be the class of “the haves”.
Therefore, the South Korean Churches cater to what people want. It is more a vendor of goods and services than a community of the Kingdom of God.
When the idea of a God formed in one generation by one set of human beings becomes to be meaningless and powerless in another generation, it is quietly discarded and replaced by a new God as the primitive shamanism was removed from the community to accommodate more powerful and adorned deity.
Each generation has to create the image of god that works for it.
That is why modern Christians have decaffeinated, defanged, laundered, purified, and universalized the tribal Yahweh God of Old Testament into a modern, responsive, refined, peace-loving and fast food type of a contextualized** and syncretized** God.
**anchor baby is a term also called a jackpot baby used to refer to a child born in the US to illegal immigrants or non-citizens. The term refers to the role of an illegal alien’s child as a US citizen, in facilitating immigration under the birthright clauses in the immigration act. The anchor baby is a pejorative term that most Americans despise them because these babies exhaust the national revenues and burden the educational institution while they do not contribute any expenses as taxpayers.
As about 5,000 late-term pregnant women of South Koreans annually travel to the US to deliver the same numbers or more babies in the US Hospital for the US citizenship, I boldly suggest that Apostle Paul needed Jesus to propagate his syncretized** version of Judaism to the Jewish community. Some say Christianity should be called Paulianity.
**contextualization is a term used in the study of Bible in relation to their relevant cultural settings in order to communicate the Christian teachings in cultures which had not previously experienced them.
Contextualization is broadly used by secular, religious and political groups to render their message into different settings by adjusting or accommodating words, phrases or meanings into understandable contexts in respondent cultures.
**syncretism refers to the attempt to bring together beliefs from several different and often contradictory schools of thought. Many modern theologians lay claim that most religions have either now or in the past practiced a certain degree of syncretism.
Mainstream Christianity for instance, has incorporated much Judaic thought, and also picked up practices along the way that were not a part of early Christianity.
When we celebrate Christmas with Christmas trees, and feasts, we hearken back to Pagan rituals that were swept up and incorporated into Christianity in an effort to convert non-Christians.
If you hunt Easter eggs at Easter, you’re not only celebrating the resurrection of Christ but also adding Greek and Roman pagan ritual to your beliefs as a Christian.
Syncretism cannot be defined without an understanding of contextualization since two processes are interrelated.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
THERE NEVER WAS A PERSON NAMED JESUS CHRIST?
Jeff
February 3 2010
Yes, that is what I said.
There never was a person who went by the name Jesus Christ!
The person who countless millions have referred to by this name was actually a Rabbi who Jewish people know precious little about.
He had a Hebrew name, Yeshua, since he was a Jew who was born and lived his entire life in Israel.
His mother’s name was Miriam not Mary. And yes Yeshua was a strictly observant Jewish Rabbi.
He never started a new religion nor was he the founder of Christianity.
If you look at his teachings you will discover they are mostly profoundly powerful and insightful explanations of the Torah.
In fact many of our Jewish leaders who were his contemporaries even those who opposed him were astounded at his teaching!
After two thousand years he remains the most often quoted Jew of all time and without a doubt the most influential.
There is no other Jew or any person in all of history who has had such a profound impact on humanity.
Yeshua never abandoned the Jewish faith.
He is the most misunderstood Jewish sage in all of our history.
There is no other person whose life, death and message is more misunderstood by his own people than the Rabbi from Nazareth.
February 3 2010
Yes, that is what I said.
There never was a person who went by the name Jesus Christ!
The person who countless millions have referred to by this name was actually a Rabbi who Jewish people know precious little about.
He had a Hebrew name, Yeshua, since he was a Jew who was born and lived his entire life in Israel.
His mother’s name was Miriam not Mary. And yes Yeshua was a strictly observant Jewish Rabbi.
He never started a new religion nor was he the founder of Christianity.
If you look at his teachings you will discover they are mostly profoundly powerful and insightful explanations of the Torah.
In fact many of our Jewish leaders who were his contemporaries even those who opposed him were astounded at his teaching!
After two thousand years he remains the most often quoted Jew of all time and without a doubt the most influential.
There is no other Jew or any person in all of history who has had such a profound impact on humanity.
Yeshua never abandoned the Jewish faith.
He is the most misunderstood Jewish sage in all of our history.
There is no other person whose life, death and message is more misunderstood by his own people than the Rabbi from Nazareth.
Monday, February 1, 2010
There Never Was A Jewish People
February 1 2010
“There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened—hence there was no return.”
Above is from the book jacket description for the international best seller titled “The Invention of the Jewish People” written by Shlomo Sand, the History Professor of the Tel Aviv University.
The book remained on the best seller list in Israel (it was originally written in Hebrew, later translated in English and French) for 19 weeks, in which even the author himself was astonished by the ferocity of Israelis interest on the subject.
Gilad Atzmon, an Israeli-born British jazz musician and author, praised the book saying that it is one of the most important exposures of the Jewish Zionist lethal fantasy...in his book, Professor Sand proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the Jewish people never existed as a ‘nation-race’, they never share a common origin, but instead they are a colorful mix of groups that at various stages in history adopted the Jewish religion.
Constantly and laboriously, world has historically been taught, persuaded, and brain-washed by the Bible-thumping Christian fundamentalist institution, the Jewish-managed mainstream media, the Jewish academic scholars, and other pro-Zionist propagandists who collectively hijacked the spiritual and religious meanings of the Hebrew Scripture (the Old Testament) into viewing these events in the Bible as a real chain of events in the past and unanimously rendered the Jews a title of the Palestinian Land as “a land without the people for a people without the land”.
For Professor Sand, it was not easy for him as a Jew to challenge and rebuke against the matters of the Jewish identity, arguing that “Jews were never a people, never exiled from the Holy Land, most of Jews actually descended from proselytes whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe and have no historical connection to the land, so that Jews have no right to ‘make aliyah’ to the Palestinian region.”
It goes without saying that the subject he raised is absolutely a taboo in the contemporary Western world where Israel is the only country to be allowed to engage in the colonial occupation on other people’s land for decades and still to be called a democratic country, not the ethnocentric and apartheid sovereignty.
Debunking the Biblical Myth
First of all, Professor Sand has debunked the biblical myth of unique nation of Israel that had expelled, wandered, and finally returned home after two millennia.
Dr Sand has trashed the nexus of the Old Testament from the wanderings of Abraham and Jacob, the Exodus from Egypt, appearances of Philistines, Aramaeans, camels in the region, to the Kingdoms of David and Solomon.
According to the Bible, Abraham migrated to Canaan in the 21st or 20th century BCE, while all the archaeological and epigraphical evidences indicated otherwise: that Philistines appeared in the region no earlier than the 12th century BCE.
Aramaeans, who played a significant role in the Book of Genesis, first appeared in Near Eastern inscriptions from the 11th century BCE and became a notable presence from the 9th Century BCE onward.
The camel was first domesticated at the start of the first millennium BCE and as beasts of burden in commercial activity from the 8th century BCE.
The camels gave big trouble to the writers of the Old Testament...in Genesis Chapter 24, when Abraham had sent his servant to fetch his son, Isaac’s wife, ten camels followed the servant to Nahor, in Mesopotamia and there are numerous episodes about camels drinking water etc.
The Exodus from Egypt gives another significant trouble to the very definition of Jewish identity...in the 13th century BCE, the purported time of the Exodus, Canaan was still ruled by the Egyptian pharaohs.
In other words, Moses led the Jews out of Egypt into Egypt?
Biblical narrative depicts Moses leading through wilderness for 40 years with army of 600.000 warriors (3 million if you include their wives and kids) with no epigraphic or archaeological traces whatsoever in the Sinai Peninsula.
Then the fearless David and wise Solomon kingdom crumbled after the excavations in Jerusalem by the post 1967 archaeologists failed to find any traces of an important tenth Century BCE Kingdoms, the presumed time of David and Solomon.
The carbon-14 test confirmed that the famous Solomon gates and other colossal structures in the area date not from Solomon reign but from the time of northern Kingdom of Israel.
In other words, if there was a political entity in tenth-century BCE Judea, it was a small tribal kingdom, not the glorious age in Jewish history.
Inventing the Diaspora
Secondly and most importantly, Dr. Sand emphatically called the Jewish exile a myth concocted by Christians who depicted that event as divine punishment imposed on the Jews for having rejected the Christian gospels and for the crucifixion of Jesus.
There is no literature regarding the exile, not even in the New Testament that describes the mass exodus of Jewish people after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.
The reason is that the Romans did not exile peoples and they could not have done so even if they had wanted to. They did not have trucks, trains or other means to deport entire population. That kind of logistics did not exist until the 20th Century.
For Jews, the concept of exile becomes essential to claim that they, as the original Jerusalem deportees, belong to the seeds of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob so their standing as the “chosen people” was connected genetically.
“After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration it of their political freedom.”--thus states the preamble to the Israeli Declaration of Independence.
In fact, the supreme paradigm of exile was needed in order to construct a long range memory in which an imagined and exiled nation-race was posited as the direct continuation of the people of the Bible that preceded it.
Dr. Sand also emphasized that Jews historically did not always seek to return to Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile and the second exile in the 70s, even though they were not prohibited to do so...during the Babylonian exile many Jews went to Baghdad instead of Jerusalem, Jewish deportees from Spain migrated to all around the Mediterranean, but only a few chose to go to Zion, in ferocious pogrom and the rise of aggressive nationalism in Eastern Europe, the masses of Yiddish-speaking Jews migrated to westward Europe and United States.
The rabbinical Judaism does not accept the salvation of the world that Jesus brought with his sacrifice...the anticipated salvation would come only when the messiah king of the seed of David arrived, and with this a mass return to Jerusalem.
This was the reason Jews did not always seek to return to their homeland.
Thus, it is clearer than the sun at the noonday that Jews were not forcibly deported from their homeland and there was no voluntarily return to it.
Then, how did millions of Jews appear around the Mediterranean Sea and Eastern Europe?
First, there is a gross misconception about Jewish religion that it does not convert people to Judaism...conversely, in early Judaism there was a great thirst to convert others starting the Hasmonean Dynasty producing large number of Jews through mass conversion under the influence of Hellenism.
After the wide spread dissemination of Christianity, Judaism moved to the pagan world, including Yemen and North Africa, flooding with the Judaic faith.
The deep-rooted sources of the large Jewish community in Spain were the Berber soldiers in North Africa who converted to Judaism earlier.
These Maghreb (modern-day Algeria, Tunis, Morocco) Jews were the descendants of Judaized Berbers and Judaized Arabs who accompanied the armies of Islam and later becoming Spanish Jewry, the Sephardic Jews.
The most crucial demographic addition to the Jewish population of the world came in the wake of the conversion of the Kingdom of Khazaria—a huge empire that arose in the Middle Ages on the steppes on the Volga River in the eight century reaching toward Kiev and modern day Georgia, and these Judaized Khazars constituted the main origins of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe becoming a “Diaspora mother”, the Ashkenazi Jews after mixing with the Slavs.
Zionist Jews were aware from the beginning that the Biblical myth of the exile and wandering is the valuable sources of legitimization for Jews being in Palestinian land, and any attempt to destroy the connectivity, genetically or historically, of the Jews to the land undermines their rights to establish the Jewish State of Israel.
There was anxiety about the legitimacy of the Zionist projects, like the Kibbutz Settlement, should it widely known that settling Jewish masses were not the direct descendants of the “Children of Israel”—such de-legitimization might lead to the broad challenge against the State of Israel’s right to exist.
Thus in Israel, the Khazaria research on Jewish culture, Himyarite (Yemeni) and Maghreb (Berber tribe) Jewry were treated a taboo that the Israeli historians have not taken up the subjects.
For Zionist Jews who hold the Old Testament (Hebrew Scripture) in their hand and ‘the exile of the Jewish people’ in their memory, it was a god-given chance to expand, occupy, and settle in the Arab land.
“We Came, We Won, and We are Here” is the way Americans, white South Africans and Australians boasted legitimizing their invasions to the indigenous lands, but unfortunately no longer available to the Jews claiming to the Palestinian land.
Therefore, during the early years of the State of Israel, Bible became a key factor in the formation of reborn state of Israel, justifying for the Jewish presence and the colonization in modern times; the description of the Exodus and the march through the Sinai Desert are interwoven with the modern war of 1956.
The conquest of Canaan is thrillingly described and is naturally associated with the conquest of the West Bank in 1967.
The victory of little David over gigantic Goliath symbolizes all the wars of Israel against the Arabs.
In other words, the Bible was given in early 19th Century by Zionists to play a leading role in the drama of the rise of the modern Jewish nation transferring the Book from the shelf of theological tracts to the history section as an incontrovertible truth.
And after the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel, the Bible was viewed as an historical text describing a real chain of events in the past and the school children read to learn about their ancient forefathers—children who would later march proudly as soldiers fighting wars of colonization.
Civil servants also were pressured to change their names to Hebrew ones, usually chosen from the Bible, and the rest of the population, seeking to emulate the established elites, did so willingly, even enthusiastically.
When was the Jewish people invented and who are the Jews?
According to Professor Sand, the Zionist intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people retrospectively, out of thirst to create a modern Jewish people...that is, the Jewish people is a made up notion consisting of a fictional (biblical) and imaginary (illusory) past with very little to back it up forensically, historically, or textually.
Professor Sand also came to the conclusion that the present-day Palestinians (a majority of them Arabs), though no population remains pure over a period of thousands of years, , are far more likely to be the descendants of the ancient Semitic people in Judea/Canaan than the current predominantly Khazarian-origin Ashkenazi crowd to which he himself admittedly belongs. (Even Ben Gurion, the father of state of Israel, admitted that Palestinian fellahin (peasants) were his potential brothers.)
Professor Sand mainly argues that most current Jews actually descended from converts whose native lands were scattered far across the Middle East and Eastern Europe, not mostly from the seeds of Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, so that there is no racial continuum among themselves but a hodgepodge collection of different ethnicity along the religious faith line, Judaism.
For example, the Yiddish speaking Jews in Easter Europe are rather a mixture of Khazars and Slavs who were pushed eastward than a small number of Jews who came from Mainz and Worms, because it can explain the massive concentration (three million) of Jews at the beginning of the 20th Century.
According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, in the 16th century the total Jewish population of the world amount to about one million. This seems to indicate that during the Middle Ages the majority of those who professed the Judaic faith were Khazars.
A substantial part of this majority, after conquered by the Mongols, went to Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, and Balkans where they founded the Easter Jewish community (Ashkenazim) which in turn became the dominant majority of World Jewry.
In other words, the Khazar-Turkic connection to the World Jewry appears to be predominant factor in the Eastern Europe compared with a meager numbers of Jewish immigrants from other regions such as Rhineland, France, and England.
Otherwise, there could see no other way to account for emergence, out of nowhere, of this unprecedented concentration of Jews in Eastern Europe.
The conventional view of the erstwhile immigration of Ashkenazi Jews from Franco-Rheinish origin belongs to the category of historic errors which are awaiting correction.
However, Zionist Jews wished to believe that genuine Jews of Semitic origin had gone to Poland on board ‘the Mayflower” as the chosen people, and later returned massively to claim their god-given land with their blood-line pure and original with biblical Tribes.
There are cumulative and historical evidences rebuking their wish that the bulk of modern Jewry is not of Palestinian but of Caucasian origin, in which the Khazar contribution to the genetic make-up of Ashkenazi Jews must be substantial and all likelihood dominant. (In common parlance, Jew is practically synonymous with Ashkenazi Jews, even though Jews of our time fall into two divisions: Sephardim 20% and Ashkenazim 80 %.)
Are Jews of Pure Race, as a Jewish People?
Under the “Chosen –Race” doctrine of orthodox Jewry, Zionist Jews took the Old Testament (Hebrew Scripture) the first and foremost the narratives of Israeli history: its credo is tribal rather than universal; every prayer and ritual observance only devote to Chosen race which automatically separate Jews from others where they live; the Jewish faith is nationally and socially self-segregating.
Beginning with biblical narratives, Jews, “the chosen people”, did not have a distinct racial entity but a hybrid collection of tribes in the region: even the first patriarch, Abraham cohabited with Hagar, an Egyptian; Joseph married Asenath who was not only Egyptian but the daughter of a priest; Moses married a Midianite, Zipporah; Samson whose mother was a Hittite was a Philistine; King David’s mother was a Moabite, and he married a princess of Geshur;
The Babylonian exile did not improve racial purity; even members of priestly families married Gentile women. In short, at the beginning of the Diaspora, the Israelites were already a hybridized race.
Another important sources of inbreeding were the vast numbers of people of most varied races converted Judaism.
As noted above, Judaism was a jealously proselytizing religion in earlier time...from black-skinned Falasha of Abyssinia, the Chinese Jews of Kai-Feng, Yemenite Jews with their dark olive complexion, Jewish Berber tribe of Sahara down to Khazars.
Everywhere from Antioch and Athens to Asia Minor and Rome until the spread of the hegemonic Christianity, the fervor of proselytism was one of the most distinctive traits of Judaism during the Greco-Roman epoch that could not be achieved without the infusion of Gentile blood.
To sum up, There is a wicked little fact that the further we move from religious norms and the more we focus our research on diverse daily practices, the more we discover that there never was a secular ethnographic common denominator between the Jewish believers in Asia, Africa and Europe.
In other words, world Jewry have always been a major religious culture, not a strange wandering nation, and they are mostly of Khazar-Turkish rather than Semitic origin that refutes the popular belief in a Jewish race descended from the biblical tribe.
Therefore, the word “Anti-Semitism” is devoid of meaning, just an empty signifier.
The Ethnocracy NOT A Democracy in Israel
In ethnocratic country like the Jewish State of Israel, the minority ethnic group (Arab-Israeli Citizens) is systematically discriminated against by the state and face repression or violations of human and civil rights at the hands of state organs.
No one can deny the fact that the state of Israel is the apartheid regime instituted on the basis with particular Jewish ethnic affiliation (defined in terms of race, descent, religion or language) as the distinguishing principle.
Imagine that you are an Israeli citizen but a non-Jew living in the country where there is no civil marriage or no ownership right of properties, even a lot in a cemetery to bury your dead body...you are discriminated even after your death, if you are not a Jew.
While the Israeli state explicitly allows the World Jewry making aliyah anywhere around the globe, non-Jewish citizens are forbidden to bring their brides from out side of Israeli boundary.
You, as a non-Jewish citizen, have less rights and privileges than a Jew living in Brooklyn in New York City who declines to make aliyah and lives a life of the rich and comfortable Diaspora.
On the other hand, the Israeli Government has been employing the fast-track immigration of so-called “the lost tribes” in order to fill the Jewish Settlements in the occupied Arab land. The program includes 100 Peruvian converts to Judaism, and other groups from Spain, South America, Russia, and China.
For example, Bnei Menashe, a group of more than 9,000 in the northeastern India bordering Burma who was headhunters and animists before they were converted to Christianity by the missionaries, was settled mostly in the West Bank, Hebron, and Gaza area in the last two decades, where most Israelis would not want to venture out to live.
The obvious reason for accepting these Tibeto-Burman animists as World Jewry appears to help solve the Israel’s demographic problem of recruiting more manpower to do dirty jobs and to fight against the indigenous Arabs. .
Can Israel be defined as a democratic entity? Absolutely Not!
For any state to be a democracy, sovereignty and equality for ALL human beings living together in civil society became the minimum requirement.
The Jewish exclusivity that dominates Israel society is not an open, inclusive ideology that invites to others to become part of it or to coexist with it on a basis of equality and in symbiosis.
On the contrary, it explicitly and culturally segregates the majority (Jews) from the minority (Non-Jewish Arab-Israeli citizens), and repeatedly asserts that the state belongs only to the majority; moreover, as noted above, it promises eternal proprietary rights to the World Jewry that does not choose to live in it.
Without the de-Zionization and de-Judaification in the Israeli state and society, there will be no peace in the Middle East region, but instead a permanent peace process industry continues to flourish while millions of people perish in a series of wars, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran, because brotherhood and reconciliation are foreign to Jewish tribal worldview and no room within the concept of Jewish and Zionistic nationalism.
Frankly speaking, I feel much more pessimistic than hopeful at the end of this essay, as the mainstream media in the US are busy preparing us for an Iranian War for the sake of the Jewish Israeli interests.
And I read the following news story in the AP wire:
The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu laid claim to the disputed territory where the tree-planting ceremony occurred in the Jewish Settlement just south of Jerusalem that it once belonged to the Palestinian Arabs.
“Our message is clear: We are planting here, we will stay here, we will build here, this place will be an inseparable part of the state of Israel for ETERNITY.”
February 1 2010
“There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened—hence there was no return.”
Above is from the book jacket description for the international best seller titled “The Invention of the Jewish People” written by Shlomo Sand, the History Professor of the Tel Aviv University.
The book remained on the best seller list in Israel (it was originally written in Hebrew, later translated in English and French) for 19 weeks, in which even the author himself was astonished by the ferocity of Israelis interest on the subject.
Gilad Atzmon, an Israeli-born British jazz musician and author, praised the book saying that it is one of the most important exposures of the Jewish Zionist lethal fantasy...in his book, Professor Sand proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the Jewish people never existed as a ‘nation-race’, they never share a common origin, but instead they are a colorful mix of groups that at various stages in history adopted the Jewish religion.
Constantly and laboriously, world has historically been taught, persuaded, and brain-washed by the Bible-thumping Christian fundamentalist institution, the Jewish-managed mainstream media, the Jewish academic scholars, and other pro-Zionist propagandists who collectively hijacked the spiritual and religious meanings of the Hebrew Scripture (the Old Testament) into viewing these events in the Bible as a real chain of events in the past and unanimously rendered the Jews a title of the Palestinian Land as “a land without the people for a people without the land”.
For Professor Sand, it was not easy for him as a Jew to challenge and rebuke against the matters of the Jewish identity, arguing that “Jews were never a people, never exiled from the Holy Land, most of Jews actually descended from proselytes whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe and have no historical connection to the land, so that Jews have no right to ‘make aliyah’ to the Palestinian region.”
It goes without saying that the subject he raised is absolutely a taboo in the contemporary Western world where Israel is the only country to be allowed to engage in the colonial occupation on other people’s land for decades and still to be called a democratic country, not the ethnocentric and apartheid sovereignty.
Debunking the Biblical Myth
First of all, Professor Sand has debunked the biblical myth of unique nation of Israel that had expelled, wandered, and finally returned home after two millennia.
Dr Sand has trashed the nexus of the Old Testament from the wanderings of Abraham and Jacob, the Exodus from Egypt, appearances of Philistines, Aramaeans, camels in the region, to the Kingdoms of David and Solomon.
According to the Bible, Abraham migrated to Canaan in the 21st or 20th century BCE, while all the archaeological and epigraphical evidences indicated otherwise: that Philistines appeared in the region no earlier than the 12th century BCE.
Aramaeans, who played a significant role in the Book of Genesis, first appeared in Near Eastern inscriptions from the 11th century BCE and became a notable presence from the 9th Century BCE onward.
The camel was first domesticated at the start of the first millennium BCE and as beasts of burden in commercial activity from the 8th century BCE.
The camels gave big trouble to the writers of the Old Testament...in Genesis Chapter 24, when Abraham had sent his servant to fetch his son, Isaac’s wife, ten camels followed the servant to Nahor, in Mesopotamia and there are numerous episodes about camels drinking water etc.
The Exodus from Egypt gives another significant trouble to the very definition of Jewish identity...in the 13th century BCE, the purported time of the Exodus, Canaan was still ruled by the Egyptian pharaohs.
In other words, Moses led the Jews out of Egypt into Egypt?
Biblical narrative depicts Moses leading through wilderness for 40 years with army of 600.000 warriors (3 million if you include their wives and kids) with no epigraphic or archaeological traces whatsoever in the Sinai Peninsula.
Then the fearless David and wise Solomon kingdom crumbled after the excavations in Jerusalem by the post 1967 archaeologists failed to find any traces of an important tenth Century BCE Kingdoms, the presumed time of David and Solomon.
The carbon-14 test confirmed that the famous Solomon gates and other colossal structures in the area date not from Solomon reign but from the time of northern Kingdom of Israel.
In other words, if there was a political entity in tenth-century BCE Judea, it was a small tribal kingdom, not the glorious age in Jewish history.
Inventing the Diaspora
Secondly and most importantly, Dr. Sand emphatically called the Jewish exile a myth concocted by Christians who depicted that event as divine punishment imposed on the Jews for having rejected the Christian gospels and for the crucifixion of Jesus.
There is no literature regarding the exile, not even in the New Testament that describes the mass exodus of Jewish people after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.
The reason is that the Romans did not exile peoples and they could not have done so even if they had wanted to. They did not have trucks, trains or other means to deport entire population. That kind of logistics did not exist until the 20th Century.
For Jews, the concept of exile becomes essential to claim that they, as the original Jerusalem deportees, belong to the seeds of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob so their standing as the “chosen people” was connected genetically.
“After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration it of their political freedom.”--thus states the preamble to the Israeli Declaration of Independence.
In fact, the supreme paradigm of exile was needed in order to construct a long range memory in which an imagined and exiled nation-race was posited as the direct continuation of the people of the Bible that preceded it.
Dr. Sand also emphasized that Jews historically did not always seek to return to Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile and the second exile in the 70s, even though they were not prohibited to do so...during the Babylonian exile many Jews went to Baghdad instead of Jerusalem, Jewish deportees from Spain migrated to all around the Mediterranean, but only a few chose to go to Zion, in ferocious pogrom and the rise of aggressive nationalism in Eastern Europe, the masses of Yiddish-speaking Jews migrated to westward Europe and United States.
The rabbinical Judaism does not accept the salvation of the world that Jesus brought with his sacrifice...the anticipated salvation would come only when the messiah king of the seed of David arrived, and with this a mass return to Jerusalem.
This was the reason Jews did not always seek to return to their homeland.
Thus, it is clearer than the sun at the noonday that Jews were not forcibly deported from their homeland and there was no voluntarily return to it.
Then, how did millions of Jews appear around the Mediterranean Sea and Eastern Europe?
First, there is a gross misconception about Jewish religion that it does not convert people to Judaism...conversely, in early Judaism there was a great thirst to convert others starting the Hasmonean Dynasty producing large number of Jews through mass conversion under the influence of Hellenism.
After the wide spread dissemination of Christianity, Judaism moved to the pagan world, including Yemen and North Africa, flooding with the Judaic faith.
The deep-rooted sources of the large Jewish community in Spain were the Berber soldiers in North Africa who converted to Judaism earlier.
These Maghreb (modern-day Algeria, Tunis, Morocco) Jews were the descendants of Judaized Berbers and Judaized Arabs who accompanied the armies of Islam and later becoming Spanish Jewry, the Sephardic Jews.
The most crucial demographic addition to the Jewish population of the world came in the wake of the conversion of the Kingdom of Khazaria—a huge empire that arose in the Middle Ages on the steppes on the Volga River in the eight century reaching toward Kiev and modern day Georgia, and these Judaized Khazars constituted the main origins of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe becoming a “Diaspora mother”, the Ashkenazi Jews after mixing with the Slavs.
Zionist Jews were aware from the beginning that the Biblical myth of the exile and wandering is the valuable sources of legitimization for Jews being in Palestinian land, and any attempt to destroy the connectivity, genetically or historically, of the Jews to the land undermines their rights to establish the Jewish State of Israel.
There was anxiety about the legitimacy of the Zionist projects, like the Kibbutz Settlement, should it widely known that settling Jewish masses were not the direct descendants of the “Children of Israel”—such de-legitimization might lead to the broad challenge against the State of Israel’s right to exist.
Thus in Israel, the Khazaria research on Jewish culture, Himyarite (Yemeni) and Maghreb (Berber tribe) Jewry were treated a taboo that the Israeli historians have not taken up the subjects.
For Zionist Jews who hold the Old Testament (Hebrew Scripture) in their hand and ‘the exile of the Jewish people’ in their memory, it was a god-given chance to expand, occupy, and settle in the Arab land.
“We Came, We Won, and We are Here” is the way Americans, white South Africans and Australians boasted legitimizing their invasions to the indigenous lands, but unfortunately no longer available to the Jews claiming to the Palestinian land.
Therefore, during the early years of the State of Israel, Bible became a key factor in the formation of reborn state of Israel, justifying for the Jewish presence and the colonization in modern times; the description of the Exodus and the march through the Sinai Desert are interwoven with the modern war of 1956.
The conquest of Canaan is thrillingly described and is naturally associated with the conquest of the West Bank in 1967.
The victory of little David over gigantic Goliath symbolizes all the wars of Israel against the Arabs.
In other words, the Bible was given in early 19th Century by Zionists to play a leading role in the drama of the rise of the modern Jewish nation transferring the Book from the shelf of theological tracts to the history section as an incontrovertible truth.
And after the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel, the Bible was viewed as an historical text describing a real chain of events in the past and the school children read to learn about their ancient forefathers—children who would later march proudly as soldiers fighting wars of colonization.
Civil servants also were pressured to change their names to Hebrew ones, usually chosen from the Bible, and the rest of the population, seeking to emulate the established elites, did so willingly, even enthusiastically.
When was the Jewish people invented and who are the Jews?
According to Professor Sand, the Zionist intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people retrospectively, out of thirst to create a modern Jewish people...that is, the Jewish people is a made up notion consisting of a fictional (biblical) and imaginary (illusory) past with very little to back it up forensically, historically, or textually.
Professor Sand also came to the conclusion that the present-day Palestinians (a majority of them Arabs), though no population remains pure over a period of thousands of years, , are far more likely to be the descendants of the ancient Semitic people in Judea/Canaan than the current predominantly Khazarian-origin Ashkenazi crowd to which he himself admittedly belongs. (Even Ben Gurion, the father of state of Israel, admitted that Palestinian fellahin (peasants) were his potential brothers.)
Professor Sand mainly argues that most current Jews actually descended from converts whose native lands were scattered far across the Middle East and Eastern Europe, not mostly from the seeds of Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, so that there is no racial continuum among themselves but a hodgepodge collection of different ethnicity along the religious faith line, Judaism.
For example, the Yiddish speaking Jews in Easter Europe are rather a mixture of Khazars and Slavs who were pushed eastward than a small number of Jews who came from Mainz and Worms, because it can explain the massive concentration (three million) of Jews at the beginning of the 20th Century.
According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, in the 16th century the total Jewish population of the world amount to about one million. This seems to indicate that during the Middle Ages the majority of those who professed the Judaic faith were Khazars.
A substantial part of this majority, after conquered by the Mongols, went to Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, and Balkans where they founded the Easter Jewish community (Ashkenazim) which in turn became the dominant majority of World Jewry.
In other words, the Khazar-Turkic connection to the World Jewry appears to be predominant factor in the Eastern Europe compared with a meager numbers of Jewish immigrants from other regions such as Rhineland, France, and England.
Otherwise, there could see no other way to account for emergence, out of nowhere, of this unprecedented concentration of Jews in Eastern Europe.
The conventional view of the erstwhile immigration of Ashkenazi Jews from Franco-Rheinish origin belongs to the category of historic errors which are awaiting correction.
However, Zionist Jews wished to believe that genuine Jews of Semitic origin had gone to Poland on board ‘the Mayflower” as the chosen people, and later returned massively to claim their god-given land with their blood-line pure and original with biblical Tribes.
There are cumulative and historical evidences rebuking their wish that the bulk of modern Jewry is not of Palestinian but of Caucasian origin, in which the Khazar contribution to the genetic make-up of Ashkenazi Jews must be substantial and all likelihood dominant. (In common parlance, Jew is practically synonymous with Ashkenazi Jews, even though Jews of our time fall into two divisions: Sephardim 20% and Ashkenazim 80 %.)
Are Jews of Pure Race, as a Jewish People?
Under the “Chosen –Race” doctrine of orthodox Jewry, Zionist Jews took the Old Testament (Hebrew Scripture) the first and foremost the narratives of Israeli history: its credo is tribal rather than universal; every prayer and ritual observance only devote to Chosen race which automatically separate Jews from others where they live; the Jewish faith is nationally and socially self-segregating.
Beginning with biblical narratives, Jews, “the chosen people”, did not have a distinct racial entity but a hybrid collection of tribes in the region: even the first patriarch, Abraham cohabited with Hagar, an Egyptian; Joseph married Asenath who was not only Egyptian but the daughter of a priest; Moses married a Midianite, Zipporah; Samson whose mother was a Hittite was a Philistine; King David’s mother was a Moabite, and he married a princess of Geshur;
The Babylonian exile did not improve racial purity; even members of priestly families married Gentile women. In short, at the beginning of the Diaspora, the Israelites were already a hybridized race.
Another important sources of inbreeding were the vast numbers of people of most varied races converted Judaism.
As noted above, Judaism was a jealously proselytizing religion in earlier time...from black-skinned Falasha of Abyssinia, the Chinese Jews of Kai-Feng, Yemenite Jews with their dark olive complexion, Jewish Berber tribe of Sahara down to Khazars.
Everywhere from Antioch and Athens to Asia Minor and Rome until the spread of the hegemonic Christianity, the fervor of proselytism was one of the most distinctive traits of Judaism during the Greco-Roman epoch that could not be achieved without the infusion of Gentile blood.
To sum up, There is a wicked little fact that the further we move from religious norms and the more we focus our research on diverse daily practices, the more we discover that there never was a secular ethnographic common denominator between the Jewish believers in Asia, Africa and Europe.
In other words, world Jewry have always been a major religious culture, not a strange wandering nation, and they are mostly of Khazar-Turkish rather than Semitic origin that refutes the popular belief in a Jewish race descended from the biblical tribe.
Therefore, the word “Anti-Semitism” is devoid of meaning, just an empty signifier.
The Ethnocracy NOT A Democracy in Israel
In ethnocratic country like the Jewish State of Israel, the minority ethnic group (Arab-Israeli Citizens) is systematically discriminated against by the state and face repression or violations of human and civil rights at the hands of state organs.
No one can deny the fact that the state of Israel is the apartheid regime instituted on the basis with particular Jewish ethnic affiliation (defined in terms of race, descent, religion or language) as the distinguishing principle.
Imagine that you are an Israeli citizen but a non-Jew living in the country where there is no civil marriage or no ownership right of properties, even a lot in a cemetery to bury your dead body...you are discriminated even after your death, if you are not a Jew.
While the Israeli state explicitly allows the World Jewry making aliyah anywhere around the globe, non-Jewish citizens are forbidden to bring their brides from out side of Israeli boundary.
You, as a non-Jewish citizen, have less rights and privileges than a Jew living in Brooklyn in New York City who declines to make aliyah and lives a life of the rich and comfortable Diaspora.
On the other hand, the Israeli Government has been employing the fast-track immigration of so-called “the lost tribes” in order to fill the Jewish Settlements in the occupied Arab land. The program includes 100 Peruvian converts to Judaism, and other groups from Spain, South America, Russia, and China.
For example, Bnei Menashe, a group of more than 9,000 in the northeastern India bordering Burma who was headhunters and animists before they were converted to Christianity by the missionaries, was settled mostly in the West Bank, Hebron, and Gaza area in the last two decades, where most Israelis would not want to venture out to live.
The obvious reason for accepting these Tibeto-Burman animists as World Jewry appears to help solve the Israel’s demographic problem of recruiting more manpower to do dirty jobs and to fight against the indigenous Arabs. .
Can Israel be defined as a democratic entity? Absolutely Not!
For any state to be a democracy, sovereignty and equality for ALL human beings living together in civil society became the minimum requirement.
The Jewish exclusivity that dominates Israel society is not an open, inclusive ideology that invites to others to become part of it or to coexist with it on a basis of equality and in symbiosis.
On the contrary, it explicitly and culturally segregates the majority (Jews) from the minority (Non-Jewish Arab-Israeli citizens), and repeatedly asserts that the state belongs only to the majority; moreover, as noted above, it promises eternal proprietary rights to the World Jewry that does not choose to live in it.
Without the de-Zionization and de-Judaification in the Israeli state and society, there will be no peace in the Middle East region, but instead a permanent peace process industry continues to flourish while millions of people perish in a series of wars, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran, because brotherhood and reconciliation are foreign to Jewish tribal worldview and no room within the concept of Jewish and Zionistic nationalism.
Frankly speaking, I feel much more pessimistic than hopeful at the end of this essay, as the mainstream media in the US are busy preparing us for an Iranian War for the sake of the Jewish Israeli interests.
And I read the following news story in the AP wire:
The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu laid claim to the disputed territory where the tree-planting ceremony occurred in the Jewish Settlement just south of Jerusalem that it once belonged to the Palestinian Arabs.
“Our message is clear: We are planting here, we will stay here, we will build here, this place will be an inseparable part of the state of Israel for ETERNITY.”
Friday, January 22, 2010
Corporate Personhood and Political Free Speech
Tin Man KO's Straw Man
By MANUEL GARCIA, Jr.
With a 5-to-4 split decision on the 21st of January, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled "that labor unions and corporations can spend unlimited amounts to influence federal elections, throwing out a ban that had been in effect for 63 years and adding an explosive new element to this year’s midterm elections."
This ruling "dismayed lawmakers and public interest groups that fought for decades to limit the influence of wealthy special interests in politics." But voices for those interests expressed satisfaction with the success of their tactic of arguing against the ban in court on the grounds it was contrary to the First Amendment, because it was government control of free speech in election campaigns.
The new ruling specifically applies to federal elections, however it is certain to be used as the basis of new lawsuits aimed at overturning state laws, which limit corporate spending to influence state and local elections.
Speaking for the court's majority (with Alioto, Roberts, Thomas and Scalia), Justice Anthony Kennedy equated corporate and labor union spending on elections to free speech, which needed constitutional protection: “The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach.’’
The ruling also eviscerates the "McCain-Feingold" election campaign finance reform law of 2002, by removing the ban on corporate and union-sponsored “issue ads’’ in the waning days of a campaign. The court left unchanged the dollar limits for contributions to candidates by individuals and political action committees, preserving a fig leaf of respectability against the appearance of bribery.
Justice John Paul Stevens issued a spirited dissent (joined by Breyer, Ginsburg and Sotomayor), saying the majority had committed a grave error in equating corporate speech to that of human beings: “The difference between selling a vote and selling access is a matter of degree, not kind... and selling access is not qualitatively different from giving special preference to those who spent money on one’s behalf.” The definition of paid media as political free speech is corrupted by the inherent disproportion of wealth, people who can invest in media corporations know “that media outlets may seek to influence elections.”
From the perspective of public good, the fatal flaw here is as Justice Stevens acknowledged: “we have long since held that corporations are covered by the First Amendment,” in many prior Supreme Court decisions.
Indeed, the ideal remedy would be federal legislation -- ideally as a constitutional amendment -- defining "personhood" as solely the property of individual living human beings, and specifically not so for any corporate entity. Thus, corporations would be stripped of 1st, 5th and 14th Amendment rights. In brief, these Amendments define:
(1st) freedom of: religion, speech, the press, assembly; and freedom to petition;
(5th) indictments, due process, self-incrimination, double jeopardy, eminent domain;
(14th) citizenship.
The pernicious effect of allowing corporations 1st and 14th Amendment rights -- hence, the right to lobby Congress -- is evident today in the many distortions of government and public institutions to the detriment of the public good: 'pork barrel nation.'
Corporations can often be far wealthier than individual citizens, and thus capable of buying far more power (of any and every kind) to prevail in any contest with a human adversary. Also, corporations can outlive a normal human lifetime, and so have a temporal advantage over actual humans: corporations can use delay till a human contender's money is spent, or life expended. Of course, the best insurance for corporations is to use the wealth invested in them, and their possibly superhuman lifetimes, to acquire dominating political influence so as to shape the government and the laws to their particular economic advantage.
Corporations combine superhuman attributes for potential wealth accumulation and longevity, with the subhuman attribute of lacking an immediately responsible actor to be held accountable for the consequences of corporate actions. This combination is an affront to the very concept we actual human "persons" have of our individual selves, and it should not be equated with human reality in the laws devised to regulate human society.
People have human rights and they have property rights, but property itself has no rights; it is by definition not-human (the 13th Amendment abolishes slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime; property is stuff and livestock). People can form private clubs of pooled property -- corporations -- because these are profitable ways of engaging in commerce. But, by bending law to debase the definition of a human being so as to bestow "personhood" on pooled property clubs, we dehumanize society:
-- by allowing inhuman combines with superhuman attributes to overpower the interests of many individual people; and
-- by bestowing an often complete immunity from the hazard of personal responsibility, to the humans directing and profiting from corporate actions.
In brief: people have rights and property does not; and accumulated property does not shield the individual from responsibility for the consequences of their acts.
We take each of these principles to disqualify corporations from legal consideration as "persons." Let the living and breathing persons in corporations carry what personhood is claimed for such entities, and let those corporate people equally well carry the accountability that each and every other individual in the nation's public shoulders as their defining social responsibility.
The Supreme Court justices promoting this decision knew exactly what they were doing, and why. Behind the display of magisterial solemnity and jurisprudential weight, these justices know -- deep down -- they are just elements of a much larger machine, they are only where they are because of who they really serve.
“When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.”
Indeed, with corporations now freed from restraints on their propaganda spending and lobbying, the sanctity of their 'personhood' protected by the First Amendment, we can certainly expect the floodgates of censorship to burst, allowing a torrent of accurate, diverse and trustworthy information to wash away all trace of control on personal thought and public discourse, and to enhance the actual people's "freedom to think for ourselves."
Manuel Garcia, Jr., a former physicist at Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Laboratory, can be reached at mango@idiom.com
By MANUEL GARCIA, Jr.
With a 5-to-4 split decision on the 21st of January, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled "that labor unions and corporations can spend unlimited amounts to influence federal elections, throwing out a ban that had been in effect for 63 years and adding an explosive new element to this year’s midterm elections."
This ruling "dismayed lawmakers and public interest groups that fought for decades to limit the influence of wealthy special interests in politics." But voices for those interests expressed satisfaction with the success of their tactic of arguing against the ban in court on the grounds it was contrary to the First Amendment, because it was government control of free speech in election campaigns.
The new ruling specifically applies to federal elections, however it is certain to be used as the basis of new lawsuits aimed at overturning state laws, which limit corporate spending to influence state and local elections.
Speaking for the court's majority (with Alioto, Roberts, Thomas and Scalia), Justice Anthony Kennedy equated corporate and labor union spending on elections to free speech, which needed constitutional protection: “The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach.’’
The ruling also eviscerates the "McCain-Feingold" election campaign finance reform law of 2002, by removing the ban on corporate and union-sponsored “issue ads’’ in the waning days of a campaign. The court left unchanged the dollar limits for contributions to candidates by individuals and political action committees, preserving a fig leaf of respectability against the appearance of bribery.
Justice John Paul Stevens issued a spirited dissent (joined by Breyer, Ginsburg and Sotomayor), saying the majority had committed a grave error in equating corporate speech to that of human beings: “The difference between selling a vote and selling access is a matter of degree, not kind... and selling access is not qualitatively different from giving special preference to those who spent money on one’s behalf.” The definition of paid media as political free speech is corrupted by the inherent disproportion of wealth, people who can invest in media corporations know “that media outlets may seek to influence elections.”
From the perspective of public good, the fatal flaw here is as Justice Stevens acknowledged: “we have long since held that corporations are covered by the First Amendment,” in many prior Supreme Court decisions.
Indeed, the ideal remedy would be federal legislation -- ideally as a constitutional amendment -- defining "personhood" as solely the property of individual living human beings, and specifically not so for any corporate entity. Thus, corporations would be stripped of 1st, 5th and 14th Amendment rights. In brief, these Amendments define:
(1st) freedom of: religion, speech, the press, assembly; and freedom to petition;
(5th) indictments, due process, self-incrimination, double jeopardy, eminent domain;
(14th) citizenship.
The pernicious effect of allowing corporations 1st and 14th Amendment rights -- hence, the right to lobby Congress -- is evident today in the many distortions of government and public institutions to the detriment of the public good: 'pork barrel nation.'
Corporations can often be far wealthier than individual citizens, and thus capable of buying far more power (of any and every kind) to prevail in any contest with a human adversary. Also, corporations can outlive a normal human lifetime, and so have a temporal advantage over actual humans: corporations can use delay till a human contender's money is spent, or life expended. Of course, the best insurance for corporations is to use the wealth invested in them, and their possibly superhuman lifetimes, to acquire dominating political influence so as to shape the government and the laws to their particular economic advantage.
Corporations combine superhuman attributes for potential wealth accumulation and longevity, with the subhuman attribute of lacking an immediately responsible actor to be held accountable for the consequences of corporate actions. This combination is an affront to the very concept we actual human "persons" have of our individual selves, and it should not be equated with human reality in the laws devised to regulate human society.
People have human rights and they have property rights, but property itself has no rights; it is by definition not-human (the 13th Amendment abolishes slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime; property is stuff and livestock). People can form private clubs of pooled property -- corporations -- because these are profitable ways of engaging in commerce. But, by bending law to debase the definition of a human being so as to bestow "personhood" on pooled property clubs, we dehumanize society:
-- by allowing inhuman combines with superhuman attributes to overpower the interests of many individual people; and
-- by bestowing an often complete immunity from the hazard of personal responsibility, to the humans directing and profiting from corporate actions.
In brief: people have rights and property does not; and accumulated property does not shield the individual from responsibility for the consequences of their acts.
We take each of these principles to disqualify corporations from legal consideration as "persons." Let the living and breathing persons in corporations carry what personhood is claimed for such entities, and let those corporate people equally well carry the accountability that each and every other individual in the nation's public shoulders as their defining social responsibility.
The Supreme Court justices promoting this decision knew exactly what they were doing, and why. Behind the display of magisterial solemnity and jurisprudential weight, these justices know -- deep down -- they are just elements of a much larger machine, they are only where they are because of who they really serve.
“When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.”
Indeed, with corporations now freed from restraints on their propaganda spending and lobbying, the sanctity of their 'personhood' protected by the First Amendment, we can certainly expect the floodgates of censorship to burst, allowing a torrent of accurate, diverse and trustworthy information to wash away all trace of control on personal thought and public discourse, and to enhance the actual people's "freedom to think for ourselves."
Manuel Garcia, Jr., a former physicist at Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Laboratory, can be reached at mango@idiom.com
The Trouble with Corporate Personhood
The Trouble with Corporate Personhood
Freedom of Speech for a Fiction
By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM
I often correspond with a long-time Washington DC operator named Leigh Ratiner, who spent 40 years in government, serving under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Reagan, with cabinet-level posts in the Defense Department, under the Secretary of the Interior, in the Department of Energy, and in the State Department.
Usually I’m prompted to contact him while investigating this or that instance of criminality or stupidity in the federal government. We’re in conversation a lot. “Chris, no disrespect intended,” Leigh once wrote, “but I'm not sure yet that you truly understand how profoundly corrupt the government really is.
Lying, perjury, devious deception, law breaking have been a constant pattern in the American government for several decades and have driven us to the point where it has become impossible for an intelligent person to trust the government.” Leigh sometimes goes on for pages like this.
In the annals of lying and devious deception we can now add what will hopefully be remembered as one of the foulest decisions – but not a surprising one – by the Supreme Court to be imposed on the American public, namely the majority opinion in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission.
I’ll let the New York Times summarize: “Corporations have been unleashed from the longstanding ban against their spending directly on political campaigns and will be free to spend as much money as they want to elect and defeat candidates.
If a member of Congress tries to stand up to a wealthy special interest, its lobbyists can credibly threaten: We’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you.”
Or, better yet, as Leigh Ratiner puts it: “Obama’s failures amount to a thimble of sugar compared to this decision, which is equivalent to a truckload of oil barrels filled with rat poison.
The spending limits the court overturned were the unlimited sums of money that Lockheed, Boeing or Bank of America can take out of the corporate treasury and give to NBC in exchange for a two minute spot attacking a candidate without the stockholders’ permission. This is gigantic.”
Par for the course in the dying republic, where judges with the regularity of sun-up defend corporate interests against the public interest.
But what’s compelling here is that the decision hinges on another longstanding idea, which is that corporations have the rights of living breathing people.
The Supreme Court claims in this matter to be defending the corporate right of free speech.
The laws of corporate personhood go back to the 1860s, in decisions offered by judges with close ties to the very corporations whose rights they were asked to judge.
Corporate citizens, needless to say, have been a plague upon the land ever since (Joel Bakan, the law professor, has correctly observed that corporate citizenship often accords with sociopathic behavior, the kind of behavior that as a society we do not tolerate from individuals).
In any case, corporate freedom is not a constitutional right, and corporations do not very much care about freedom of speech, press or assembly as it involves the individual.
What a corporation cares about it is its collective endeavor.
To provide a collectivist institution with the rights of the individual, to announce a corporation as a citizen, is one of those wonderful juridical inventions that could only be taken seriously in a system where law is exploited to veil reality and to render lies as truth.
As Leigh Ratiner notes, no intelligent person can trust such a system.
And as regards “corporate persons,” Ratiner asks the right question: “If they are natural citizens and commit crimes, why don't we liquidate them as punishment (since they can’t be put in jail)?
Of course, the answer is that if you liquidate them it will hurt the economy and the innocent shareholders. But doesn’t that make it very clear that a corporation is not a person who can be put in a cage or hung by the neck until dead? That’s the kind of person the Founders were trying to protect.”
Right…so, for example, I can’t take a corporation out in the backyard and bury it alive.
I can’t smack a corporation flat across the face and break its nose.
I can’t take a corporation’s head and split it with an axe, nor can I chop off all its fingers, nor stab out its eyes with a rusty screwdriver, nor burn off its flesh with a blowtorch, nor flay it with an electric sander, nor stomp its kneecaps with a sledgehammer, nor cut its head off and parade it around the room on a broomstick, nor use its entrails as a rappel rope, nor smash its testicles with a spiked bat, nor do any of the things that really should be done to corporations these days – if they were people – but which one would never do to a human being.
If only corporate persons would finally show their fleshy faces.
Christopher Ketcham, a freelance writer in Brooklyn, NY, is writing a book about secessionist groups in the US. You can write him at cketcham99@mindspring.com.
Freedom of Speech for a Fiction
By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM
I often correspond with a long-time Washington DC operator named Leigh Ratiner, who spent 40 years in government, serving under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Reagan, with cabinet-level posts in the Defense Department, under the Secretary of the Interior, in the Department of Energy, and in the State Department.
Usually I’m prompted to contact him while investigating this or that instance of criminality or stupidity in the federal government. We’re in conversation a lot. “Chris, no disrespect intended,” Leigh once wrote, “but I'm not sure yet that you truly understand how profoundly corrupt the government really is.
Lying, perjury, devious deception, law breaking have been a constant pattern in the American government for several decades and have driven us to the point where it has become impossible for an intelligent person to trust the government.” Leigh sometimes goes on for pages like this.
In the annals of lying and devious deception we can now add what will hopefully be remembered as one of the foulest decisions – but not a surprising one – by the Supreme Court to be imposed on the American public, namely the majority opinion in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission.
I’ll let the New York Times summarize: “Corporations have been unleashed from the longstanding ban against their spending directly on political campaigns and will be free to spend as much money as they want to elect and defeat candidates.
If a member of Congress tries to stand up to a wealthy special interest, its lobbyists can credibly threaten: We’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you.”
Or, better yet, as Leigh Ratiner puts it: “Obama’s failures amount to a thimble of sugar compared to this decision, which is equivalent to a truckload of oil barrels filled with rat poison.
The spending limits the court overturned were the unlimited sums of money that Lockheed, Boeing or Bank of America can take out of the corporate treasury and give to NBC in exchange for a two minute spot attacking a candidate without the stockholders’ permission. This is gigantic.”
Par for the course in the dying republic, where judges with the regularity of sun-up defend corporate interests against the public interest.
But what’s compelling here is that the decision hinges on another longstanding idea, which is that corporations have the rights of living breathing people.
The Supreme Court claims in this matter to be defending the corporate right of free speech.
The laws of corporate personhood go back to the 1860s, in decisions offered by judges with close ties to the very corporations whose rights they were asked to judge.
Corporate citizens, needless to say, have been a plague upon the land ever since (Joel Bakan, the law professor, has correctly observed that corporate citizenship often accords with sociopathic behavior, the kind of behavior that as a society we do not tolerate from individuals).
In any case, corporate freedom is not a constitutional right, and corporations do not very much care about freedom of speech, press or assembly as it involves the individual.
What a corporation cares about it is its collective endeavor.
To provide a collectivist institution with the rights of the individual, to announce a corporation as a citizen, is one of those wonderful juridical inventions that could only be taken seriously in a system where law is exploited to veil reality and to render lies as truth.
As Leigh Ratiner notes, no intelligent person can trust such a system.
And as regards “corporate persons,” Ratiner asks the right question: “If they are natural citizens and commit crimes, why don't we liquidate them as punishment (since they can’t be put in jail)?
Of course, the answer is that if you liquidate them it will hurt the economy and the innocent shareholders. But doesn’t that make it very clear that a corporation is not a person who can be put in a cage or hung by the neck until dead? That’s the kind of person the Founders were trying to protect.”
Right…so, for example, I can’t take a corporation out in the backyard and bury it alive.
I can’t smack a corporation flat across the face and break its nose.
I can’t take a corporation’s head and split it with an axe, nor can I chop off all its fingers, nor stab out its eyes with a rusty screwdriver, nor burn off its flesh with a blowtorch, nor flay it with an electric sander, nor stomp its kneecaps with a sledgehammer, nor cut its head off and parade it around the room on a broomstick, nor use its entrails as a rappel rope, nor smash its testicles with a spiked bat, nor do any of the things that really should be done to corporations these days – if they were people – but which one would never do to a human being.
If only corporate persons would finally show their fleshy faces.
Christopher Ketcham, a freelance writer in Brooklyn, NY, is writing a book about secessionist groups in the US. You can write him at cketcham99@mindspring.com.
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