Featuring discussions of typology; John Calvin; Arminianism; materialism and idealism; phenomenal vs. noumenal; Puritan “plain style”; the form of the Puritan sermons; the Great Migration; William Bradford; and John Winthrop.
Video Rating: 4 / 5
Debra Medina for Texas Governor 2010 www.medinafortexas.com There’s a blatant disconnect between politicians and the people they are elected to represent. This political disregard of what’s best for the People of Texas and the profiteering of special interests has fueled a fire that is spreading across this Great State. We Texans now have the opportunity to put the Governor’s mansion back in the hands of the people through Debra Medina, a business woman, rancher, wife, mother, homeschooler and person of utmost integrity. For Debra Medina, politics isn’t about party, it’s about the people represented by those elected to government office. Debra Medina is the best candidate to put Texas back in the hands of Texans by leading the way to a return of constitutional government. Both Debra and her husband Noe were born in Beeville, Texas. Raised on a South Texas farm, Debra’s hard work and perseverance saw her through nursing school, a bachelor’s degree and the start of her own business while homeschooling and raising two children. Debra Medina will protect the rights of individual Texans to Life, Liberty and Property through the abolition of the property tax and by asserting the Sovereignty of the State of Texas as guaranteed under the 10th Amendment of the US Constitution. She’s proven her willingness to take a stand for what is right time and again, and now stands up to fight as David against two political Goliaths. Debra Medina’s commitment to principle and people over big …
Video Rating: 4 / 5
Bad Money, by Kevin Phillips
Image by elycefeliz
“I’ve given this book the title ‘Bad Money’, and part of the explanation is caught up in what I think of the malfeasance of ‘money’, including lax oversight of the financial sector by Washington past and present.
. . . ‘Bad Money” is not intended to evoke nineteenth century robber barons, twentieth-century salad oil swindlers, or twenty-first century Enron architects. For now, that is too parochial. . . . Money is ‘bad’, in the historical sense, when a leading world economic power . . . lets itself luxuriate in finance at the expense of harvesting, manufacturing or transporting things.
, , , ‘Bad’ in the systemic sense further applies to letting a financial elite elevate, expand and entrench itself as a county’s GNP- and profits-dominating sector, as has been done in the United States over the last quarter century.
. . . It’s also ‘bad’ to promote an overbearing financialization of American’s economy and culture, lesser versions of which in both U.S. and world history have led to extremes of income and wealth polarization, a culture of money worship, and over philosophic embrace of speculation and wide-open markets.”
www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/books/21gewen.html
By BARRY GEWEN
Published: April 21, 2008
The author of 13 previous books including at least one classic, “The Emerging Republican Majority,” Mr. Phillips sees a perfect economic storm coming. . . . Mr. Phillips begins with an overview of the current debt debacle. The 1980s were the start of “three profligate decades,” when the expansion of mortgage credit and the invention of financial instruments like collateralized debt obligations (C.D.O.’s) led to an orgy of leveraging and irresponsible speculation. The Federal Reserve kept the bubble afloat with easy money, while regulators and ratings agencies looked the other way.
By 2007 total indebtedness was three times the size of the gross domestic product, a ratio that surpassed the record set in the years of the Great Depression. From 2001 to 2007 alone, domestic financial debt grew to .5 trillion from .5 trillion, and home mortgage debt ballooned to almost trillion from .9 trillion, an increase of 102 percent. A crisis in the mortgage market in August 2007 brought the party to an end. Since then we have been living in a twilight zone of what a security analyst quoted in the book calls “one of the slowest-moving train wrecks we’ve seen.”
The second component of the perfect storm is the upheaval in the oil industry.
. . . Finally, Mr. Phillips turns to what he terms America’s “calcified” political system. We may need new regulations to deal with the debt mess, along with an energy policy to address the changing world of oil, but Washington, he says, has become dedicated to “the politics of evasion,” reluctant to pass dramatic reforms or to call for sacrifice from the public. Democrats and Republicans alike are so entrenched, so dependent on campaign money and special interests, that “the notion of a breath of fresh air has become almost a contradiction in terms.” Instead of a “vital center” in Washington, we now have a “venal center.” Mr. Phillips holds out little hope of improvement from a new president; he doubts that any administration could do much, even though “the crisis is no longer in the future, but upon us.”
Is such pessimism justified?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Phillips_(political_commentator)
Kevin Phillips (born November 30, 1940) is an American writer and commentator, largely on politics, economics, and history. Formerly a Republican Party strategist, Phillips has become disaffected with his former party over the last two decades, and is now one of its harshest critics. He is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio, and is a political analyst on PBS’ NOW with Bill Moyers.
The New York Times wrote: He identifies three broad and related trends — none of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration’s policies — that together threaten the future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt — current and prospective — that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating. If there is a single, if implicit, theme running through the three linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of leaders to look beyond their own and the country’s immediate ambitions and desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future.
Bill Moyers sits down with former Nixon White House strategist and political and economic critic Kevin Phillips, whose latest book BAD MONEY: RECKLESS FINANCE, FAILED POLITICS, AND THE GLOBAL CRISIS OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM explores the role that the crumbling financial sector played in the now-fragile American economy.
www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09192008/watch2.html
Transcript of Bill Moyers interview: www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09192008/transcript2.html
BILL MOYERS: If you read only one book on the route to this financial meltdown, I recommend this one: BAD MONEY: RECKLESS FINANCE, FAILED POLITICS, AND THE GLOBAL CRISIS OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM. The author, Kevin Phillips, has a history of being way ahead of the curve. As a young man working for Richard Nixon, he wrote THE EMERGING REPUBLICAN MAJORITY, a book that uncannily predicted how the GOP would regain power in Washington. Kevin Phillips saw our current crisis coming a long time ago. And in one book of historical insight after another, laid out the clues he was tracking. As recently as last spring in the AMERICAN PROSPECT magazine, Phillips wrote that what he thought was about to happen would be "unusual and potentially tragic."
In the preface of his book, he has written that these things usually come to fruition in August and September. And sure enough, here we are coping in September with the effects of bad money.
Succeeding in Business
query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9405E5DD1E31F934A…
As Joshua Green says in The Washington Monthly, in a must-read article written just before the administration suddenly became such an exponent of corporate ethics: ”The ‘new tone’ that George W. Bush brought to Washington isn’t one of integrity, but of permissiveness. . . . In this administration, enriching oneself while one’s business goes bust isn’t necessarily frowned upon.”
Question by : i want to start a political party?
how do i go about this
Best answer:
Answer by W W
Not sure, but i know you need quite a few people who are signed up for your cause before you are called a political party (in australia)
Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!
Wounded Nation (article)
Image by mallix
AFTER bathing in the warm, fuzzy glow of the Mandela years, South Africans
today are deeply demoralised people. The lights are going out in homes,
mines, factories and shopping malls as the national power authority, Eskom -
suffering from mismanagement, lack of foresight, a failure to maintain power
stations and a flight of skilled engineers to other countries – implements
rolling power cuts that plunge towns and cities into daily chaos.
Major industrial projects are on hold. The only healthy enterprise now worth
being involved in is the sale of small diesel generators to powerless
households but even this business has run out of supplies and spare parts
from China .
The currency, the rand, has entered freefall. Crime, much of it gratuitously
violent, is rampant, and the national police chief faces trial for
corruption and defeating the ends of justice as a result of his alleged
deals with a local mafia kingpin and dealer in hard drugs.
Newly elected African National Congress (ANC) leader Jacob Zuma, the state
president-in-waiting, narrowly escaped being jailed for raping an
HIV-positive woman last year, and faces trial later this year for soliciting
and accepting bribes in connection with South Africa’s shady
multi-billion-pound arms deal with British, German and French weapons
manufacturers.
One local newspaper columnist suggests that Zuma has done for South Africa
‘s international image what Borat has done for Kazakhstan . ANC leaders in
2008 still speak in the spiritually dead jargon they learned in exile in
pre-1989 Moscow, East Berlin and Sofia while promiscuously embracing
capitalist icons – Mercedes 4x4s, Hugo Boss suits, Bruno Magli shoes and
Louis Vuitton bags which they swing, packed with money passed to them under
countless tables – as they wing their way to their houses in the south of
France.
It all adds up to a hydra-headed crisis of huge proportions – a perfect
storm as the Rainbow Nation slides off the end of the rainbow and descends
in the direction of the massed ranks of failed African states. Eskom has
warned foreign investors with millions to sink into big industrial and
mining projects: we don’t want you here until at least 2013, when new power
stations will be built.
In the first month of this year, the rand fell 12% against the world’s major
currencies and foreign investors sold off more than £600 million worth of
South African stocks, the biggest sell-off for more than seven years.
"There will be further outflows this month, because there won’t be any news
that will convince investors the local growth picture is going to change for
the better," said Rudi van de Merwe, a fund manager at South Africa ‘s
Standard Bank.
Commenting on the massive power cuts, Trevor Gaunt, professor of electrical
engineering at the University of Cape Town , who warned the government eight
years ago of the impending crisis, said: "The damage is huge, and now South
Africa looks just like the rest of Africa . Maybe it will take 20 years to
recover."
The power cuts have hit the country’s platinum, gold, manganese and
high-quality export coal mines particularly hard, with no production on some
days and only 40% to 60% on others.
"The shutdown of the mining industry is an extraordinary, unprecedented
event," said Anton Eberhard, a leading energy expert and professor of
business studies at the University of Cape Town .
"That’s a powerful message, massively damaging to South Africa ‘s reputation
for new investment. Our country was built on the mines."
To examine how the country, widely hailed as Africa’s last best chance,
arrived at this parlous state, the particular troubles engulfing the
Scorpions (the popular name of the National Prosecuting Authority) offers a
useful starting point.
The elite unit, modelled on America ‘s FBI and operating in close
co-operation with Britain ‘s Serious Fraud Office (SFO), is one of the big
successes of post-apartheid South Africa . An independent institution,
separate from the slipshod South African Police Service, the Scorpions enjoy
massive public support.
The unit’s edict is to focus on people "who commit and profit from organised
crime", and it has been hugely successful in carrying out its mandate. It
has pursued and pinned down thousands of high-profile and complex networks
of national and international corporate and public fraudsters.
Drug kingpins, smugglers and racketeers have felt the Scorpions’ sting. A
major gang that smuggle platinum, South Africa ‘s biggest foreign exchange
earner, to a corrupt English smelting plant has been bust as the result of a
huge joint operation between the SFO and the Scorpions. But the Scorpions,
whose top men were trained by Scotland Yard, have been too successful for
their own good.
The ANC government never anticipated the crack crimebusters would take their
constitutional independence seriously and investigate the top ranks of the
former liberation movement itself.
The Scorpions have probed into, and successfully prosecuted, ANC MPs who
falsified their parliamentary expenses. They secured a jail sentence for the
ANC’s chief whip, who took bribes from the German weapons manufacturer that
sold frigates and submarines to the South African Defence Force. They sent
to jail for 15 years a businessman who paid hundreds of bribes to then state
vice-president Jacob Zuma in connection with the arms deal. Zuma was found
by the judge to have a corrupt relationship with the businessman, and now
the Scorpions have charged Zuma himself with fraud, corruption, tax evasion,
racketeering and defeating the ends of justice. His trial will begin in
August.
The Scorpions last month charged Jackie Selebi, the national police chief, a
close friend of state president Thabo Mbeki, with corruption and defeating
the ends of justice. Commissioner Selebi, who infamously called a white
police sergeant a "f***ing chimpanzee" when she failed to recognise him
during an unannounced visit to her Pretoria station, has stepped down
pending his trial.
But now both wings of the venomously divided ANC – ANC-Mbeki and ANC-Zuma -
want the Scorpions crushed, ideally by June this year. The message this will
send to the outside world is that South Africa ‘s rulers want only certain
categories of crime investigated, while leaving government ministers and
other politicians free to stuff their already heavily lined pockets.
No good reason for emasculating the Scorpions has been put forward. "That’s
because there isn’t one," said Peter Bruce, editor of the influential
Business Day, South Africa ‘s equivalent of, and part-owned by, The
Financial Times, in his weekly column.
"The Scorpions are being killed off because they investigate too much
corruption that involves ANC leaders. It is as simple and ugly as that," he
added.
The demise of the Scorpions can only exacerbate South Africa ‘s
out-of-control crime situation, ranked for its scale and violence only
behind Colombia . Everyone has friends and acquaintances who have had guns
held to their heads by gangsters, who also blow up ATM machines and hijack
security trucks, sawing off their roofs to get at the cash.
In the past few days my next-door neighbour, John Matshikiza, a
distinguished actor who trained at the Royal Shakespeare Company and is the
son of the composer of the South African musical King Kong, had been
violently attacked, and friends visiting from Zimbabwe had their car stolen
outside my front window in broad daylight.
My friends flew home to Zimbabwe without their car and the tinned food
supplies they had bought to help withstand their country’s dire political
and food crisis and 27,000% inflation. Matshikiza, a former member of the
Glasgow Citizens Theatre company, was held up by three gunmen as he drove
his car into his garage late at night. He gave them his car keys, wallet,
cellphone and luxury watch and begged them not to harm his partner, who was
inside the house.
As one gunman drove the car away, the other two beat Matshikiza unconscious
with broken bottles, and now his head is so comprehensively stitched that it
looks like a map of the London Underground.
These assaults were personal, but mild compared with much commonplace crime.
Last week, for example, 18-year-old Razelle Botha, who passed all her
A-levels with marks of more than 90% and was about to train as a doctor,
returned home with her father, Professor Willem Botha, founder of the
geophysics department at the University of Pretoria, from buying pizzas for
the family. Inside the house, armed gunmen confronted them. They shot
Professor Botha in the leg and pumped bullets into Razelle.
One severed her spine. Now she is fighting for her life and will never walk
again, and may never become a doctor. The gunmen stole a laptop computer and
a camera.
Feeding the perfect storm are the two centres of ANC power in the country at
the moment. On the one hand, there is the ANC in parliament, led by
President Mbeki, who last Friday gave a state-of-the-nation address and
apologised to the country for the power crisis.
Mbeki made only the briefest of mentions of the national Aids crisis, with
more than six million people HIV-positive. He did not address the Scorpions
crisis. The collapsing public hospital system, under his eccentric health
minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, an alcoholic who recently jumped the
public queue for a liver transplant, received no attention. And the name
Jacob Zuma did not pass his lips.
Last December Mbeki and Zuma stood against each other for the leadership of
the ANC at the party’s five-yearly electoral congress. Mbeki, who cannot
stand again as state president beyond next year’s parliamentary and
presidential elections, hoped to remain the power behind the throne of a new
state president of his choosing.
Zuma, a Zulu populist with some 20 children by various wives and mistresses,
hoped to prove that last year’s rape case, and the trial he faces this year
for corruption and other charges, were part of a plot by Mbeki to use state
institutions to discredit him. Mbeki assumed that the notion of Zuma
assuming next year the mantle worn by Nelson Mandela as South Africa ‘s
first black state president would be so appalling to delegates, a deeply sad
and precipitous decline, that his own re-election as ANC leader was a
shoo-in.
But Mbeki completely miscalculated his own unpopularity – his perceived
arrogance, failure to solve health and crime problems, his failure to
deliver to the poor – and he lost. Now Zuma insists that he is the leader of
the country and ANC MPs in parliament must take its orders from him, while
Mbeki soldiers on until next year as state president, ordering MPs to toe
his line.
Greatly understated, it is a mess. Its scale will be dramatically
illustrated if South Africa ‘s hosting of the 2010 World Cup is withdrawn by
Fifa, the world football body.
Already South African premier league football evening games are being played
after midnight because power for floodlights cannot be guaranteed before
that time. Justice Malala, one of the country’s top newspaper columnists,
has called on Fifa to end the agony quickly.
"I don’t want South Africa to host the football World Cup because there is
no culture of responsibility in this country," he wrote in Johannesburg’s
bestselling Sunday Times.
"The most outrageous behaviour and incompetence is glossed over. No-one is
fired. I have had enough of this nonsense, of keeping quiet and ignoring the
fact that the train is about to run us over.
"It is increasingly clear that our leaders are incapable of making a success
of it. Scrap the thing and give it to Australia, Germany or whoever will
spare us the ignominy of watching things fall apart here – football tourists
being held up and shot, the lights going out, while our politicians tell us
everything is all right."
- CEDWYNN TOWEEL
11:50pm Saturday 9th February 2008
I’m on the cover of today’s Sunday Rutland Herald!
Image by jessohackberry
Here’s the article online, but you have to create an account:
rutlandherald.com/article/20101017/NEWS02/710179881/1004/…
Here’s the story. Don’t worry Rutland Herald, I’ll take this off in a few days:
"By DANIEL BARLOW
Vermont Press Bureau – Published: October 17, 2010
MONTPELIER — Soon after Josh Kramer moved to White River Junction last year, he began wondering what the story was behind the strange fenced-in grassy plot near the Polka Dot Diner.
“People kept telling me it used to be a strip club,” said Kramer, a second-year student at the Center for Cartoon Studies. “It was amazing to me that only five years ago there was a strip club in the center of the town.”
Kramer, who moved from Pennsylvania, began asking locals about the club and the mysterious 2005 fire that destroyed it. It seems, he said, everyone in the village and surrounding town had a story to tell about it.
So, the student took his pencil and ink pens and made a comic about it. That was after he conducted several interviews with locals, pored over hundreds of photographs and researched local land records. The result, Kramer’s 20-page “Scorched Earth” comic book, is a work of journalism.
“I don’t think many people understood at first when I told them I wanted to make a nonfiction comic about the fire,” Kramer said.
“Scorched Earth” tells the story of White River Junction’s development, its declines and its new designation as one of Vermont’s emerging arts communities. It’s also a community that, just five years ago, had a strip club in the center of its downtown.
“The town had concerns about a business like that downtown,” says Hartford Town Manager Hunter Rieseberg in the comic, as Kramer explains the failed legal attempts to shut the club down.
The strip club, called The Wrap, is perhaps best known for its death — the fire Feb. 14, 2005, that ripped through the building and destroyed adjacent businesses. The strip club (which also had a downstairs porn store) that had applied for its zoning permit as a “karaoke bar” was gone. The cause of the blaze was said to be a combination of soaked rags, sawdust and a new coat of polyurethane on the floors.
“Hundreds of people watched it burn down,” Kramer said.
Kramer, 23, studied journalism at American University in Washington, D.C., but said he didn’t enjoy the political scene. Last year he enrolled in the master’s program at the Center for Cartoon Studies, Vermont’s two-year cartooning college that was founded in 2005 (about six months after The Wrap burned).
“I liken the comics to ‘This American Life,’” Kramer said, citing a weekly public radio program. “The show was an inspiration for me. I wanted to tell stories the same way the show did, only as comics instead.”
Comics as journalism is not a new discovery. Cartoonist Joe Sacco has written and drawn several books about his travels through Palestine. Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall has made two trips to Afghanistan as a war correspondent. And this year James Sturm, the co-founder of the Center for Cartoon Studies, spent the day of the primary election with Democrat Matt Dunne, chronicling his attempt to become his party’s nominee for governor.
Kramer said he tries to be as accurate as possible in his comics, including photographing the people he interviews from many angles to ensure he has a good reference to draw from. Using the medium of comics, he added, allows him access to a big toolbox of storytelling techniques.
“Before I started the comic, I actually wrote it all out as a traditional news story first,” he explained. “And I used that as my guide when I started thumbnailing the comic out.”
Kramer’s most recent journalism comic, “One Place, One Cheese,” shows how Thistle Hill Farm in Pomfret creates its famous Tarentaise cheese. Kramer said he worked in several cheese shops in D.C. and one of his favorite types was Tarentaise. After moving to Vermont he discovered that the farm where the cheese originates was just 25 miles away.
“One Place, One Cheese” not only shows the process from cow to store, it also tells the stories of the people running the farm. Kramer said it was fulfilling for him to meet the people who have been making the cheese and to highlight the production of small, family-scale farm operations.
“I didn’t want to tell the story of some factory,” he said. “The comic was also about the people and the place.”
Kramer said he plans to launch a series of journalism comics zines in 2011 as part of his thesis project at the college. He’s now working on a comic about an apple farm in Lebanon, N.H., that lost 80 percent of its crop this year."
Chicago: Picasso sculpture, Richard J Daley Ctr
Image by jetzenpolis
photo: 10/11/2004
PICASSO SCULPTURE EYES CHICAGO
Picasso: A Paris View of Chicago?
Pablo Picasso’s sculpture is such a familiar, well known image, I wanted to take a photo of it at a somewhat different angle than that from which it’s usually seen.
I also wanted to put the Richard J. Daley Ctr. in the backgound so you could see the details of its architectural facade more clearly. The steel and its color of the Picasso sculpture and Richard J. Daley Ctr. behind it match, too! (The Richard J. Daley Center was designed by the architect Jacques Brownson, who worked for the firm C. F. Murphy Associates. The building’s consstruction was finished in 1965.)
Mayor Richard J. Daley’s facial profile is said to appear when the Picasso sculpture is viewed from behind, at a corner angle. According to the Emporis website (which provides images and information about tall buildings in cities around the world), if you look at the Picasso sculpture from the northeast, you’ll see the profile of the man who was mayor of Chicago during the second half of the 1950s, all of the 1960s, and the first half of the 1970s. (His son, Richard M. Daley became the mayor of Chicago in 1989.) The photo is by: Daniel Kieköwer.
Look for the same sort of caricature profile you think of if you’ve seen the profile drawing of Alfred Hitchcock on the television show "Hitchcock Presents" which ran on air from 1955-1965. Both are a simple composition done in a few curved lines drawn. Alfred Hitchcock’s profile was drawn by the movie director, himself.
The Picasso sculpture was placed in Daley Plaza in 1967. It was commissioned in 1963 by the architects of the Richard J Daley Center. Picasso produced a maquette (small scaled model) of the sculpture in 1965.
Pablo Picasso did not accept a commission for his sculpture.
The steel sculpture is 50 feet tall, 162 lbs., and was made by U.S. Steel in Gary, Indiana.
There are many different ideas about what Picasso’s sculpture "is."
Some have described it as a "wolf." Some are more specific, saying it resembled Picasso’s dog, an Afghan. Others see the figure of a woman’s body (with very pronounced hips) in the part of the sculpture beneath its canine-shaped "face."
Of course, there is no "correct" way to interpret the sculpture. In fact, perhaps to your annoyance, it’s typical for artists to ask you what you think their work is. In other words, they are interested in your reaction to their art. They are not interested in telling you what you should think (about their art).
Creativity belongs to everyone: artist and audience. In other words, feel free to be create your own interpretations of Picasso’s sculpture.
That could be why the sculpture has no title naming it. If Picasso had titled the sculpture, he risked imposing his interpretation of it upon others.
If you look at what most people might call the sculpture’s "face," you might see a closely set pair of eyes. They are set inside what you could call a very furrowed "brow." (It has the same elongated shape as an American football or the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg, the zeppelin that exploded into flames upon landing in Lakehurst, New Jersey on May 6, 1937.) The "face" has a long, tapering canine snout that ends in a pair of "nostrils."
One the ways I interpret the sculpture is as a human figure who is impressed by his visit to the city. The woman’s "body" in this interpretation becomes, instead, two different pairs of lips. Each pair of lips faces outward from the sculpture in the opposite direction, away from each other.
Enlarge the sculpture’s face under this new interpretation to include the lips. The "snout" can then be reinterpreted as a long Gallic nose on the face of the human figure whose paying a visit to city.
Instead of limiting the sculpture to a single moment in time, the human visitor’s head has turned in three different positions as it looks up at the city around it. Each time it turns, the head is seen at a different moment in time, of course. (The head sits on top of a very short body. This short body is not done to true human scale.)
The sculpture turns its head to one side and then the other. You can see the profile of its nose when it turns its head: a high rounded hooked nose ending in a sharp point. (It’s the part of the sculpture that might otherwise be interpreted as one of the "ears" of the "wolf.")
As it turns its head, the sculpture also stops at mid-turn. It stares straight ahead.
In this photograph, you see how much the "eyes" are turned up at an angle, as if the sculpture’s "head" was cocked upwards at a severe angle, looking at the sights of the city.
The sculpture’s expression, to my eye, appears to take a somewhat unconscious delight in having the opportunity to see new places and meet new people. The lips are slightly parted: perhaps showing an unconscious opening of the mouth. This reveals the keen interest the sculpture takes in its Chicago setting.
A sense of culture "shock" can follow upon being exposed to a different world of unfamiliar habits and ways of thinking. Perhaps the human visitor to Chicago with the long, rounded hooked Gallic nose is suffering from such culture shock, too.
Such culture shock always absorbs you mind in your new surroundings. So much is unfamiliar to you. All your senses become heightened. This new place has got hold of you. Whether you want to be there or not, you are paying attention to where you are in a way you never do in more familiar surroundings..
Certainly, a visitor from Paris might be surprised by the attitudes of people and many of the things they do that Chicagoans simply take for granted as being part of the "ordinary" routine of their daily lives.
Despite their roughly equivalent population both as cities and metropolitian areas, Chicago and Paris have very different cultural personalities.
Picasso, who placed himself in self-imposed exile from Franco’s Spainand, lived in the French capital. He’s one of the interesting links between Chicago and Paris, two cities so radically different from each other in temperament in many ways that they are not often thought of together at the same time – even for the purpose of juxtaposing them against each other.
Chicago is often thought of as being "down to earth," "practical," "self-deprecating," "egalitarian," "blunt," "ordinary," and even "crude."
Paris, in contrast – especially as it is often thought of by many Americans – is supposed to be "proud," "haughty," "artistic," "romantic," "haute couture" ("high style"), and "sophisticated."
Chicago is never fond of ideological certainties. It goes againt the grain of the city’s character as much as pulling a handful of screeching fingernails down a blackboard would set its teeth on edge. Chicago is not known for the most stringent application of somebody else’s theoretical presumptions about how other people should live (or even how to "interpret" the law), most notably in matters of: race, the functioning of city government, and, during Prohibition in the 1920s, speakeasies and alcohol.
I think Chicagoans evaluate how good an idea is by its success in improving their daily lives. They are not temperamently disposed to the blind logical consistency of burdening others with lofty abstract principles that ignore the situation they find themselves living in.
Chicagoans, taken as a whole, for all the monumental scale of its downtown skyscraper studded skyline and the big lake, seem to take great delight in the most ordinary things. Of course, daily life is as "human scale" as it gets.
Paris intellectual and artistic life, however, lives for "big" ideas. It draws its mental breath from the intoxicating perfumes of their abstract ideological resins. These are often, furthermore, refined to a very high grade of greatest purity.
Paris, in other words, starts with the big idea and works down from there (seeking a strict application of theory to practice in daily life). Chicago, however, starts at the "bottom" (ordinary life) and works its way up.
But both cities have a strong streak of anti-authoritariansim in their political character.
Paris, of course, is a city of revolution: the Great Revolution of 1789 (which quickly resulted in the end of the French monarchy); the Paris Commune in 1871 (in the aftermath of France losing a war with Prussia); May 1968 (starting as a student protest against police arrests in the aftermath of a volatile meeting of opposing leftist factions at Nanterre University, an extension of the Sorbonne, built on the outskirts of Paris in the 1960s as an American-style campus – isolated on its own grounds, separate from the town and neighborhood in which it was placed). France also has a long history of labor unrest and general strikes.
Chicago has a long history of labor strikes and political protest: the Haymarket Riot (May 4, 1886, on the corner of W Randolph St. & Desplaines St., west of the Loop, a few blocks across the South Branch of the Chicago River, during a rally promoted by anarchists for the eight hour work day in which a bomb was thrown into police ranks, the police opening fire in response, the events resulting in the deaths of at least seven police officers and four workers); the Pullman Strike (May 11, 1894, which occurred after the Pullman Palace Car Co. cut wages in the early 1890s when there was an economic downturn); and the Democratic Party National Convention (August, 1968, in which young protesters opposed to the American government’s continued prosecution of the Vietnam War clashed with the Chicago police force).
Another example of the meeting of the (different) minds of Chicago and Paris is the downtown Van Buren St. Metra station entrance. It is a gift the city of Paris gave to Chicago in 2001. (The Metra is Chicago’s commuter rail network to its far-flung suburbs. The Van Buren Street Station is a station in downtown Chicago.)
The station entrance is a reproduction of a Paris Metro subway station entrance that was designed by Hector Guimard (1867-1942) in an art noveau style. The florid details and elongated designs of art noveau (a style known for stretching the human figure into a greater ratio of height to bredth than would occur in a more naturalistic depiction) stand in contrast to the "modern" functionalist designs of Chicago architecture by Louis Sullivan at the end of the nineteenth century and Mies van der Rohe in the middle of the twentieth century.
Paris is one of Chicago’s many sister cities. Perhaps it’s a question of "opposites attract," even when they don’t understand each other (especially when they don’t understand each other.)
Wikipedia: Alfred Hitchcock
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Hitchcock#Television_and_books
Wikipedia: Chicago Picasso
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Picasso
Wikipedia: enlargement of the image of the Chicago Picasso
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:2004-09-07_1800x2400_chicago_…
Wikipedia: Haymarket Riot
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_Riot
Wikipedia: Hector Guimard
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hector_Guimard
Wikipedia: May 1967
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_1968
Wikipedia: Pullman Strike
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike
Wikipedia: University of Parix X (Nanterre)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanterre_University
Wikipedia: Van Buren Street (Metra)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Buren_Street_(Metra)
Encyclopedia of Chicago: Picasso Sculpture in Daley Plaza
www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/3873.html
Glass Steel Stone: Chicago’s untitled Picasso sculpture
www.glasssteelandstone.com/BuildingDetail/1288.php
CHICAGOSISTERCITIES.ORG:
Paris, France: Chicago’s Sister City Since 1996
www.chicagosistercities.org/
Emporis: Richard J. Daley Center, Chicago
www.emporis.com/en/wm/bu/?id=richardjdaleycenter-chicago-...
Emporis: Picasso sculpture from the northeast showing Mayor Daley’s profile
www.emporis.com/en/il/im/?id=203420
2012 – Exercising EGO into Possession Showing the manifested-consequence of accepting and allowing self to exercise within the starting point of mind, energy and reactions and the effect it has on self physically and mentally For further reference/perspective of the question — visit the Desteni-Forum discussions on What is Self-Forgiveness here: forum.desteni.org As mentioned within the video-interview; to check-out Bastian Neumann and his process of walking Exercising as Breathing with and as the Physical — here: www.facebook.com www.youtube.com www.youtube.com bastianslifeblog1.blogspot.com http Follow the blog books regularly eqafe.com which are available at the Desteni Store eqafe.com along with many other self-supportive products.Also see the Non-Profit Organization — Equal Life Foundation equallife.org The Equal Money system will be a first step in the political agenda of the Equal Life Party worldwide once we start participating in democratic elections. Join the Desteni Forum for discussions. eqafe.com See life coaching desteniiprocess Join the forum Desteni at www.desteni.org Equal Money at http Destonian Social Network: www.destonians.com Intro music by Fidelis Spies from Robot Virgins http www.facebook.com Featured Art Work by Marlen Vargas Del Razo Facebook: www.facebook.com Youtube: www.youtube.com www.youtube.com Blogs: marlenvargasdelrazo.wordpress.com exercise, exorcize, Mind, physical, Pain, Yoga, Pilates, kickboxing, Dancing, aerobics, Ballet, sports …
Video Rating: 4 / 5
W.E.B. DuBois / Mary White Ovington
Image by dbking
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (pronounced [du'bojz]) (February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was a socialist, civil rights activist, sociologist, educator, historian, writer, editor, poet, and scholar. He became a naturalized citizen of Ghana in 1963 at the age of 95.
David Levering Lewis, his acclaimed biographer, wrote, "In the course of his long, turbulent career, W.E.B. Du Bois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism—scholarship, propaganda, integration, cultural and economic separatism, politics, international communism, expatriation, third world solidarity." [W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963]
W.E.B. Du Bois was born at Church Street on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington at the southwestern edge of Massachusetts to Alfred Du Bois and Mary Silvina Burghardt Du Bois, whose February 5, 1867 wedding had been announced in the Berkshire Courier. The birthplace of Alfred Du Bois was San Domingo, Haiti. Their son was born one year after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, and added to the U.S. Constitution. Alfred Du Bois was descended from free people of color, including Dr. James Du Bois of Poughkeepsie, New York, a physician. In the Bahamas, Du Bois sired three sons, including Alfred, and a daughter of his slave mistress.
In 1890 Du Bois graduated cum laude from Harvard University and attended the University of Berlin in 1892. In 1896 Du Bois became the first Black person to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University. After teaching at Wilberforce University in Ohio and the University of Pennsylvania, he went on to establish the first department of sociology in the United States at Atlanta University.
Du Bois wrote many books including three major autobiographies. Among his works considered most significant were The Philadelphia Negro in 1896, The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, John Brown in 1909, Black Reconstruction in 1935, and Black Folk, Then and Now in 1939. His book, The Negro (published in 1915) influenced the work of pioneer Africanist scholars as Drusilla Dunjee Houston and William Leo Hansberry.
In 1940 at Atlanta University, Du Bois founded Phylon magazine. In 1946, he wrote The World and Africa: An Inquiry Into the Part that Africa has Played in World History. In 1945 he helped organize the historic Fifth Pan-African Conference in Manchester, England.
Du Bois was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity established for African Americans.
While prominent white voices decried African American cultural, political and social relevance to American history and civic life, in his epic work, Reconstruction Du Bois documented how black people were the central figures in the American Civil War and Reconstruction. He demonstrated the ways Black emancipation—the crux of Reconstruction—promoted a radical restructuring of United States society, as well as how and why the country turned its back on human rights for African Americans in the aftermath of Reconstruction. This theme was taken up later and expanded by Eric Foner and Leon F. Litwack, the two leading contemporary scholars of the Reconstruction era.
Du Bois was the most prominent intellectual leader and political activist on behalf of African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. A contemporary of Booker T. Washington, the two carried on a dialogue about segregation and political disenfranchisement. Labeled the "father of Pan-Africanism", Du Bois believed that people of African descent should work together to battle prejudice and inequality.
In 1905, Du Bois helped to found the Niagara Movement with William Monroe Trotter but their alliance was short-lived as they had a dispute over whether or not white people should be included in the organization and in the struggle for Civil Rights. Du Bois felt that they should, and with a group of like-minded supporters, he helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
In 1910, he left his teaching post at Atlanta University to work as publications director at the NAACP full-time. He wrote weekly columns in many newspapers, including the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier and the New York Amsterdam News, three African-American newspapers, and also the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle.
For 25 years, Du Bois worked as Editor-in-Chief of the NAACP publication, The Crisis, which then included the subtitle A Record of the Darker Races. He commented freely and widely on current events and set the agenda for the fledgling NAACP. Its circulation soared from 1,000 in 1910 to more than 100,000 by 1920.
Du Bois published Harlem Renaissance writers Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer. As a repository of black thought, "the Crisis" was initially a monopoly, David Levering Lewis observed. In 1913, Du Bois wrote The Star of Ethiopia, a historical pageant, to promote African-American history and civil rights.
The seminal debate between Booker T. Washington and Du Bois played out in the pages of the Crisis with Washington advocating an accommodational philosophy of self-help and vocational training for Southern blacks while Du Bois pressed for full educational opportunities.
Du Bois became increasingly estranged from Walter Francis White, the executive secretary of the NAACP, and began to question the organization’s opposition to racial segregation at all costs. Du Bois thought that this policy, while generally sound, undermined those black institutions that did exist, which Du Bois thought should be defended and improved, rather than attacked as inferior. By the 1930s, Lewis said, the NAACP had become more institutional and Du Bois, increasingly radical, sometimes at odds with leaders such as Walter White and Roy Wilkins. In 1934, after writing two essays in the Crisis suggesting that black separatism could be a useful economic strategy, Du Bois left the magazine to return to teaching at Atlanta University.
In 1899, the American Historical Association (AHA) convened in Boston and Cambridge. According to Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis, "The Association then numbered fifteen hundred members and was presided over by James Ford Rhodes, successful Ohio businessman and even more successful author of the arbitral, multi-volume History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850. At this 1899 meeting, there were no Jews, no Negroes, no women to speak of, and all the gays were in the closet."
In 1909, W.E.B. Du Bois addressed the AHA. "His would be the first and last appearance of an African American on the program until 1940."
In a review of Part II of Lewis’s biography of Du Bois, Michael R. Winston observed that one historical question not often addressed is also fundamental to an understanding of American history. That questions is "how black Americans developed the psychological stamina and collective social capacity to cope with the sophisticated system of racial domination that white Americans had anchored deeply in law and custom."
Winston continued, "Although any reasonable answer is extraordinarily complex, no adequate one can ignore the man (Du Bois)whose genius was for 70 years at the intellectual epicenter of the struggle to destroy white supremacy as public policy and social fact in the United States."
Du Bois became impressed by the growing strength of Imperial Japan following the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War. Du Bois saw the victory of Japan over Tsarist Russia as an example of "colored pride". According to historian David Levering Lewis, Du Bois became a willing part of Japan’s "Negro Propaganda Operations" run by Japanese academic and Imperial Agent Hikida Yasuichi.
After traveling to the United States to speak with University students at Howard University, Scripps College and Tuskegee University, Yasuichi became closely involved in shaping Du Bois’s opinions of Imperial Japan. In 1936 Yasuichi and the Japanese Ambassador arranged a junket for Du Bois and a small group of fellow academics. The trip included stops in Japan, China, and the Soviet Union, although the Soviet leg was canceled because Du Bois’ diplomatic contact, Karl Radek, had been swept up in Stalin’s purges. While on the Chinese leg of the trip, Du Bois commented that the source of Chinese-Japanese enmity was China’s "submission to white aggression and Japan’s resistance", and he asked the Chinese people to welcome the Japanese as liberators. The effectiveness of the Japanese propaganda campaign was also seen when Du Bois joined a large group of African American academics that cited the Mukden Incident to justify occupation and annexation of southern Manchuria.
Du Bois was investigated by the FBI, who claimed in May of 1942 that "his writing indicates him to be a socialist," and that he "has been called a Communist and at the same time criticized by the Communist Party."
Du Bois visited Communist China during the Great Leap Forward. Also, in the 16 March 1953 issue of The National Guardian, Du Bois wrote "Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature."
Du Bois was chairman of the Peace Information Center at the start of the Korean War. He was among the signers of the Stockholm Peace Pledge, which opposed the use of nuclear weapons. He was indicted in the United States under the Foreign Agents Registration Act and acquitted for lack of evidence. W.E.B. Du Bois became disillusioned with both black capitalism and racism in the United States. In 1959, Du Bois received the Lenin Peace Prize. In 1961, at the age of 93, he joined the Communist Party, USA and announced his membership in The New York Times.
Du Bois was invited to Ghana in 1961 by President Kwame Nkrumah to direct the Encyclopedia Africana, a government production, and a long-held dream of his. When, in 1963, he was refused a new U.S. passport, he and his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, renounced their citizenship and became citizens of Ghana. Du Bois’ health had declined in 1962, and on August 27, 1963 he died in Accra, Ghana at the age of ninety-five, one day before Martin Luther King Jr.’s "I Have a Dream" speech.
In 1992, the United States honored W.E.B. Du Bois with his portrait on a postage stamp.
On October 5, 1994, the main library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst was named after him.
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Mary White Ovington (born April 11, 1865 in Brooklyn, New York – died July 15, 1951) a suffragette, socialist, unitarian, journalist, and co-founder of the NAACP.
Her parents, members of the Unitarian Church were supporters of women’s rights and had been involved in anti-slavery movement. Educated at Packer Collegiate Institute and Radcliffe College, Ovington became involved in the campaign for civil rights in 1890 after hearing Frederick Douglass speak in a Brooklyn church.
In 1895 she helped found the Greenpoint Settlement in Brooklyn. Appointed head of the project the following year, Ovington remained until 1904 when she was appointed fellow of the Greenwich House Committee on Social Investigations. Over the next five years she studied employment and housing problems in black Manhattan. During her investigations she met William Du Bois, an African American from Harvard University, and she was introduced to the founding members of the Niagara Movement.
Influenced by the ideas of William Morris, Ovington joined the Socialist Party in 1905, where she met people such as Daniel De Leon, Asa Philip Randolph, Floyd Dell, Max Eastman and Jack London, who argued that racial problems were as much a matter of class as of race. She wrote for radical journals and newspapers such as, The Masses, New York Evening Post, and The Call. She also worked with Ray Stannard Baker and influenced the content of his book, Following the Color Line (1908).
On September 3, 1908 she read an article written by socialist William English Walling entitled "Race War in the North" in The Independent. Walling described a massive race riot directed at black residents in the hometown of Abraham Lincoln, Springfield, Illinois that led to seven deaths, 40 homes and 24 businesses destroyed, and 107 indictments against rioters. Walling ended the article by calling for a powerful body of citizens to come to the aid blacks. Ovington responded to the article by writing Walling and meeting at his apartment in New York City along with social worker Dr. Henry Moskowitz. The group decided to launch a campaign by issuing a "call" for a national conference on the civil and political rights of African-Americans on the centennial of Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, 1909. Many responded to the “call” that eventually led to the formation of the National Negro Committee that held its first meeting in New York on May 31 and June 1, 1909. By May, 1910 the National Negro Committee and attendants, at its second conference, organized a permanent body known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) where Ovington was appointed as its executive secretary. Early members included Josephine Ruffin, Mary Talbert, Mary Church Terrell, Inez Milholland, Jane Addams, George Henry White, William Du Bois, Charles Edward Russell, John Dewey, Charles Darrow, Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, Fanny Garrison Villard, Oswald Garrison Villard and Ida Wells-Barnett.
The following year she attended the Universal Races Congress in London. Ovington remained active in the struggle for women’s suffrage and as a pacifist opposed America’s involvement in the First World War. During the war Ovington supported Asa Philip Randolph and his magazine, The Messenger, which campaigned for black civil rights.
After the war Ovington served the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as board member, executive secretary and chairman. The NAACP fought a long legal battle against segregation and racial discrimination in housing, education, employment, voting and transportation. They appealed to the Supreme Court to rule that several laws passed by southern states were unconstitutional and won three important judgments between 1915-1923 concerning voting rights and housing.
The NAACP was criticised by some members of the African American community. Booker T. Washington opposed the group because it proposed an outspoken condemnation of racist policies in contrast to his policy of quiet diplomacy behind the scenes. Members of the organization were physically attacked by white racists. John R. Shillady, executive secretary of the NAACP was badly beaten up when he visited Austin, Texas in 1919.
She wrote several books and articles including a study of black Manhattan, Half a Man (1911), Status of the Negro in the United States (1913), Socialism and the Feminist Movement (1914), an anthology for black children, The Upward Path (1919), biographical sketches of prominent African Americans, Portraits in Color (1927), an autobiography, Reminiscences (1932) and a history of the NAACP, The Walls Come Tumbling Down (1947).
Ovington retired as a board member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1947 and in doing so, ended her 38 years service with the organization.
Francisco Juarez
Image by Sheila Steele
It’s great to see resistance growing against Canada’s slavish following of the U.S. war machine. Franciso Juarez was speaking in Toronto Oct. 28/06 to a rally which was one of 37 city protests in Canada.
(This grab is from an earlier interview) We need more brave Canadians like this!
Half of all Canadians want troops pulled out of Afghanistan: Poll
David Staples, CanWest News Service, Tuesday, October 31, 2006
EDMONTON – Canada is on new and shaky ground in the Afghan conflict. An unprecedented number of citizens are wavering in their support of the battle, something that Canada’s most prominent military historians say never happened in previous wars.
In some recent polls, about half of all Canadians said the federal government should pull the troops from Afghanistan. Such open talk of leaving never occurred during the Boer War, the First or Second World Wars or the Korean War.
"It’s a different country now and I’m not sure I’m all that happy about it,” says University of Calgary military historian David Bercuson. "Public support for the war is a news issue in a way that was not the case in earlier wars.”
Canadians are so lukewarm about Afghanistan that the issue has transcended the usual divide in our politics. In the past, English-Canadians generally favoured joining in with the country’s major allies to fight foreign enemies, while French-Canadians generally were against doing so, says Pierre Martin, a University of Montreal political scientist. But with the Afghanistan conflict, English-Canadians have also started to question things.
"This is unusual ground for us,” says Prof. Kim Richard Nossal of Queen’s University, author of The Politics of Canadian Foreign Policy. "Quite clearly what we’re seeing is some serious difficulties in terms of sustaining public support, and not only in Quebec.”
Support for military action by Canadian troops against al-Qaida and the Taliban has dropped from a high of 80 per cent in the weeks after the 9/11 attack. This summer, as Canadian troops began dying in larger numbers in Afghanistan, polls pegged national support for Canada’s role in the war at between 40 and 50 per cent. Support is lowest in Quebec (below 40 per cent), but it also dipped below 50 per cent in several other provinces.
Canadian armies suffered far greater losses in previous wars, with hundreds of men killed in single engagements (such as the Dieppe raid on Aug. 19, 1942, where 907 soldiers were killed), but never before has there been such a resulting dip in support, Bercuson says.
"What is happening here now is we’ve got 42 people dead in Afghanistan, and people are saying, `It’s time to go home.’ The Canada of 1942 would not have thrown up its hands the week after Dieppe and said, `It’s time to go home.’ People rolled up their sleeves and they said, ‘Well, I guess we’re going to have to try harder.’ ”
So why is the attitude so different now?
It’s clear that Canadian society has changed dramatically since the Boer War (1899-1902) and the First World War (1914-1918). These wars were the last time that large numbers of Canadians showed unbridled, flag-waving enthusiasm for war, says war historian Des Morton of McGill University.
At that time, the vast majority of English-Canadians were either born in Great Britain or had parents or grandparents from Great Britain. Many still identified strongly with “Queen and Empire.”
Nossal says his students today are puzzled by the notion Canada should spend money and lives in a war as far removed from the Canadian experience as Afghanistan is, but this wasn’t the case with English-Canadians in the early 1900s.
"If you’re a good Imperialist, you would see a defeat for the Empire in one place as a defeat everywhere,” Nossal said.
Only French-Canadians were against joining in the Boer War. They saw themselves as victims of British Imperialism, Martin says. Many of them identified with the enemy, the Dutch Afrikaners, and saw the conflict as a British imperialistic adventure. In the end, a volunteer force of roughly 8,000 Canadians fought there, with 244 men dying, half of them from disease.
The same pattern of anglophone support and francophone resistance developed during the First World War.
Quebecers resisted even though it was largely fought in France, the mother country of French-Canadians.
There had been little migration from France to Quebec since the 1760s. Family ties between the two places were weak, Nossal says.
"Many in French-speaking Canada simply didn’t see this as a war that involved Canadian interests.”
English Canada supported the war even after Canadian troops were slaughtered in the trenches (60,000 Canadians died in the First World War).
"There was never any notion that, `Well, we should bring the troops home,’ ” Nossal says.
"If in 1916 you actually say, `We’ve now lost 25,000 men, it’s time to come home,’ then what you’ve essentially said is that you’ve wasted those 25,000 men.”
"Here is where a weird reverse logic kicks in: the more men you lose, the more that you have to remain committed to the fight to ensure that you don’t diminish their memory by cutting and running and wasting their supreme sacrifice.”
After the battle of Ypres in April 1915 _ which saw gas attacks and the deaths of 6,000 Canadians soldiers over a three-day period _ enlistment in Canada actually shot up, Morton says.
The main opposition to the war came in 1917, when the federal government brought in measures to conscript troops and French-Canadians rioted. “We came as close to splitting the country then as we did in 1995,” Morton says.
But French Canada never argued that English Canada shouldn’t fight the war, only that French-Canadians shouldn’t be forced to fight.
A similar dynamic developed in the Second World War when the federal government brought in conscription in 1944, though this time the French-Canadian reaction wasn’t nearly so negative, as all Canadians accepted the need to confront Hitler.
More than 42,000 Canadians died in the Second World War but, again, there was never any talk of pulling out of the battle. Unlike today with Canada’s adventure in Afghanistan, it was a time of total war, Nossal says, where everyone sacrificed. Any talk that might encourage the enemy was seen as unpatriotic and subject to censorship, or even arrest if it was deemed that a speaker actually sided with the enemy, Bercuson says.
In the early 1940s, polls were taken by the federal government for the first time, but the pollsters never asked if people supported the war. It simply wasn’t an issue.
Like the Afghanistan conflict, the Korean War was a limited war, led by the U.S. under a United Nations mandate and fought in a faraway country. The Canadian army was made up of volunteers and there were fewer killed _ 512. But unlike Afghanistan, public support never wavered in Korea.
"Everybody would regret the casualties, but it wouldn’t have resulted in an attack on government policy,” says Korean War expert Prof. Denis Stairs of Dalhousie University.
Not even in French Canada did the Korean War spark resistance. The province was still firmly Catholic, and the Chinese Communists, who supported North Korea, had brutally persecuted Catholics in the late 1940s, Nossal says. “From every pulpit in Quebec, priests were excoriating the Chinese Communists. This was a righteous fight.”
The current public wavering over Afghanistan is mainly the result of dramatic changes in the way Canadian society deals with combat deaths, military historian J.L. Granatstein says. Canada used to bury its dead on foreign soil, but that practice changed during Canada’s peacekeeping era of 1950-2000, with the bodies flown home for burial. Television cameras now roll as the caskets arrive on Canadian soil. Much more is made of each death than in the past, Granatstein says.
"If in World War One we had brought the casualties home in the way that we do them today, I don’t think that support would have lasted more than a month, and the same in World War Two E I don’t think any war effort can withstand that.”
A related issue, Morton argues, is that Canadians are less religious today. "In a secular society, we don’t have a great big heaven where (the dead soldiers) live happily ever after. Death is now an unrequited tragedy for everyone involved.”
There is a new equation for war support in Canada, says Martin. When the death toll mounts, support drops.
This dynamic was first seen during the conflict in Bosnia in the 1990s. At first, Canadians supported involvement in the Balkans, Martin says. But after the Serbian kidnapping and mock execution of 11 Canadian troops in December 1993, support for the Balkans mission dropped rapidly.
At the same time, he says, Prime Minister Jean Chretien presented a confused picture of his government’s stand on Bosnia when he declared he was considering the removal of Canada’s troops.
When troop losses are coupled with mixed messages from political leaders, support tends to plummet even more, Martin says. “If the political leaders can’t quite explain in three or four sentences why they’re doing what they’re doing, people start having doubts and questioning.”
Just as in Bosnia, the Canadian public initially showed strong support for the war against al-Qaida and the Taliban. One poll conducted a week after 9/11 found 81 per cent of Canadians favoured joining a military alliance to fight terrorists. But right from the start, the Liberal government gave unclear messages about what Canada’s involvement would be, Nossal says.
In the first few years of fighting, Canadian snipers were killing great numbers of the Taliban, but this was never heralded by the Liberals, Nossal says. Both Chretien and former prime minister Paul Martin preferred to sell the mission as peacekeeping and nation-building rather than as a war on the Taliban and al-Qaida.
"The Liberal governments that got us involved in Afghanistan did so without really levelling with the Canadian people,” Nossal says.
The notion Canadians are in Afghanistan only as peacekeepers is the most recent incarnation of four decades of Canada convincing itself that it is the world’s moral superpower, Granatstein says.
In this way of thinking, Canada’s job is never to make war, but to spread peace and the values of multiculturalism, gender equality and social justice. Many Canadians are so convinced of this world view that it is incomprehensible to them that a group like al-Qaida might see Canada as the enemy, Granatstein says.
"We have a society that is not aware of its national interest and forgets we are a country that simply cannot be loved by everyone, and that there are people out there who want to kill us. I think a harder, more realistic view of the world is essential for Canadians,” said Granatstein.
Public support in Canada only started to drop when Canadian soldiers moved into the violent Kandahar region in February 2006. By May _ when the House of Commons, led by Stephen Harper’s new Conservative minority, voted 149-145 to extend the mission until 2009 _ an Ipsos-Reid poll found that just 57 per cent of Canadians supported the use of Canadian troops to fight the Taliban and al-Qaida. Support continued to fall through the summer, as more troops died. An Ipsos-Reid poll in July showed 47-per-cent support for the mission.
Since then, Harper has spoken out repeatedly in favour of the mission. Popular support has risen slightly. Harper is doing a better job than Chretien or Martin, but must do more, Nossal says. "What we really need is the prime minister to go on TV, a national broadcast, and say, `This is why we’re there. This is why Canadians are dying.’ ”
In early September, NDP Leader Jack Layton said Canada should pull its troops from Afghanistan and blasted Harper’s government for joining in the United States’ so-called war on terror.
Back in the 1950s, the NDP’s predecessor, the CCF, backed the war mission in Korea. The socialist party was afraid if it spoke out against the war, it would be labelled pro-communist, Granatstein says. But it’s now clear a party can win votes by appealing to anti-American sentiment, he says.
It’s also permissible to voice such comments because Afghanistan isn’t a total war, like the Second World War.
"In 1939, if you were against the war, you must be for Hitler. Today you can be against the war and simply say, `Well, it’s the wrong place’ or, `It costs too much money’ or, `Too many lives are being lost’ or whatever argument you want to make.”
The unpopularity of U.S. President George W. Bush and his war in Iraq is by far the most important reason Canadians are doubting the Afghanistan mission, Bercuson says. “They (the antiwar coalition) can’t make the case without pinning it to George W. Bush.”
But Bercuson says Canada’s Afghanistan mission has little to do with Bush, that even a more dovish president like Jimmy Carter would have had to attack the Taliban and al-Qaida, and that Canada inevitably would have helped out militarily.
Morton agrees federal leaders have done a poor job explaining that it’s imperative to fight in Afghanistan simply because we must stay on good terms with the U.S. government.
"We weren’t affected by 9/11, we were affected by 9/12, which is when the (American) border closed, and everything we have done since 9/12 has been to keep that border open, as best we can, and to keep on terms with a relatively uncomfortable ally,” he says. "And even if we don’t think they’re rocket scientists, or even bow-and-arrowists, we still have to keep on terms with them.”
When he recently visited a Canadian army base, Morton found much support for the troops, but also many soldiers who were tired of the conflict and asking, "How many times are we going to have to go back?” and "What is the winning strategy? What is the end-game?”
The main problem with the Afghanistan conflict is it’s dragging on, Morton says, and people wonder if it can ever be won. A recent Decima Research poll suggested 59 per cent of Canadians agreed with the statement that “Canadian soldiers are dying for a cause we cannot win.”
But if the antiwar movement were to succeed in getting Canada to pull out of Afghanistan before its commitments were met, the consequences would be dire, Nossal says.
"If Canada now withdraws, it would cause huge rifts, and not just with the United States, but with other countries that would have to pick up our slack.”
dstaples@thejournal.canwest.com
Edmonton Journal