'Marvin the Martian wouldn't have a chance in Saudi Arabia'

If a Martian had attended last week's UN conference on religious tolerance hosted by Saudi Arabia, one of the world's most oppressive states, he would have been a very puzzled alien.

On the one hand, he would have seen Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah promoting tolerance. On the other, if our visiting Martian had taken the time to land his space ship in Saudi Arabia, he would have experienced something quite different.

Let's say that after settling into his hotel in Riyadh, Marvin went to the nearest public park wearing his best religious regalia, set up his portable shrine, prayed and thanked the Martian gods for his safe arrival on Earth.

In the blink of an alien's inscrutable eye, poor Marvin would have found out that -- extraterrestrial or not -- he's still an infidel.

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Editorial: Religious freedom and human dignity
16 Nov, 2008

It was rather rich to see Saudi Arabia sponsoring a United Nations conference last week on religious tolerance. This from an Islamic nation that maintains a national police force to enforce strict Wahhabi orthodoxy. As one dissident Saudi Shiite Muslim put it, that's like having a U.N. conference on racial harmony put on by apartheid-era South Africa.

Saudi Arabia is not the only Islamic nation with problems tolerating other religions. Bahais are persecuted by Iran. Religious intolerance abounds in Iraq. Egypt is grappling with similar issues. Even the Palestinian territories, previously known for strong Christian-Muslim relations, are experiencing a rise in tension.
Religious intolerance is not just a Muslim thing. Last week, authorities in India arrested nine alleged members of a radical Hindu terror cell in connection with a bombing that killed six Muslims. And Hindu extremists also have been intensifying their deadly attacks on India's tiny Christian minority. The persecution has gotten so bad that a coalition of U.S. Christian leaders petitioned President George Bush last week to intervene with the Indian government.

As it happened, Mr. Bush spoke at the U.N. summit, where he called on nations "to understand that religious freedom is the foundation of a healthy and hopeful society." True, that.

However imperfect, America is a prime example of a modern nation of religious vitality in a broad culture of religious tolerance. It's difficult for Americans to appreciate how unusual this is.

Religions make truth claims about reality. They may all be wrong – an atheist would certainly affirm that – but they cannot all be right. For the truly devout, religious orthodoxy is the most important thing imaginable, because it involves ultimate truth.

When competing religious truth claims clash in America, we typically agree to disagree. But throughout human history, and in much of the world today, religious conflict often turns violent. Religious tolerance cannot exist if one believes that to tolerate another's faith is to diminish one's own by accepting an untruth.
Is there a way out? In the 1960s, the Roman Catholic Church, which had long denied religious freedom to non-Catholics with the teaching that "error has no rights," reconciled religious orthodoxy with modern pluralism. The Second Vatican Council declared that indeed error has no rights, but humans do. In other words, people have a God-given right to be wrong about God.

In that simple but revolutionary formulation – based on the groundbreaking work of the American Jesuit Father John Courtney Murray – the Catholic Church opened the door to genuine respect and tolerance for non-Catholics, while preserving its own truth claims.

In that new understanding, to deny religious freedom is to affront the dignity of humans created in the image of God, and in turn, to offend God. It may not be as easy for theologians in other faiths to find grounds within their particular traditions to justify religious tolerance, but God knows they should try.

~ Dallas Morning News ~

 

'Joyce he said, 'James Joyce'

Joyce was an author committed to busting literary taboos, in particular taboos about human sexuality. His determination to explore sexuality in life and in print gave an added twist to his anti-clericalism, which, in turn, was born out of his background in Irish nationalism. His family were bourgeois, followers of the Home Rule party, led by Charles Stewart Parnell. Parnell's political downfall in 1891 at the hands of respectable Irish society (he was caught having an affair with a married woman) coincided with the Joyce family's tumble into poverty. Joyce's father spent the rest of his life in semi-employment, grubbing amongst the members of the rabblement. His mother, Mary, died in 1903 from cancer of the liver, weakened by years of poverty and fifteen pregnancies. Joyce was barely 21 at the time. He described the scene in a letter to his future common-law wife:

When I looked on her face as she lay in her coffin – a face grey and wasted with cancer – I understood I was looking on the face of a victim and I cursed the system which had made her a victim.

In his works he took a long hard look at that system: a system that not only exhausted his mother but his mother country, Ireland. Joyce was an implacable opponent of British imperialism, in life and works, from start to end, from the imperialist allegory of After The Race to the shooting of the Russian general in Finnegans Wake.

 

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After about a page one of the sisters stops 'as if she were communing with the past'. The conversation takes a turn. She too noticed 'something queer' about the priest. He was 'too scrupulous'. Priesthood 'was too much for him'. He was 'a disappointed man'.

It turns out, during a ceremony, the priest broke a chalice, the cup Catholics believe to carry the blood of Christ. For a priest this would be a serious thing. The sky didn't open up. The ground didn't swallow him whole. Nothing happened.

There we have it, a simple tale undermining the institutions ceremonies of the church: clear enough even to the casual reader. The eagle-eyed reader, however, will go back over the pages. Why is the story called The Sisters when they play such a peripheral role? What's with these heavily emphasised words 'paralysis', 'gnomon' and 'simony'?

A 'gnomon' is a piece of a parallelogram (we spend much of the story making sense of half finished sentences and suggestive phrases). 'Simony', in the Catholic Church, is the act of buying spiritual favours or powers. Think again about the sisters, two unmarried, elderly women of independent means. What was their means? Their brother, of course.

In an impoverished Catholic country like Ireland, sons and daughters were often sent off to join the church as a good source of income for the family. Joyce leaves a few hints in the story as to the class background of the sisters, not least the description of 'them new fangled carriages that makes no noise… them with the rheumatic wheels'.

The church is a good career move? This was political dynamite! Joyce followed this up with two more stories, one featuring references to mental illness and sexual perversion, the other drinking and gambling. They were turned down by the Homestead. There was further infamy when it was realised the 'paralysis' Joyce hinted at in The Sisters could've been the 'general paralysis of the insane', the latter stages of syphilitic infection.

Already we have teased out a number of themes that run through Dubliners (and on, through the rest of his work). Paralysis: in the form of the old priest's illness or Mr Duffy's hermit like life. Paralysis: like Eveline stuck on the wharf, or the canvassers huddling in the committee room because it's raining. Moments of deception and betrayal are cast through the book. Mrs Mooney's tender trap in The Boarding House; Corley swindling rich women; the nationalists' betrayal of the principles of Parnell.

 

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The Indian Wars have never ended - Killing Leroy Jackson

Jackson's friends claimed that the investigation into his death was cursory at best and pointed to irregularities and possible cover-ups. For example, the police refused to look into several credible reports that Jackson's van had not been parked at the Brazos overlook during the preceding week. The police also failed to photograph the crime scene or dust the van for fingerprints. For nearly a week, police left the van outside in a Chama parking lot before towing it to the crime lab in Santa Fe.

Although the New Mexico state police told Jackson's wife, Adella Begay, that only a small amount of blood was found on a pillow near Jackson's body, a source who was at the scene shortly after the van was discovered said the interior "looked staged. His body was posed and there was blood on the carpets and the seats."

Responding to a request from Jackson's friends, Bill Richardson, then the congressman representing northern New Mexico, sent a letter to the director of the FBI asking the agency to investigate the circumstances surrounding Jackson's death. In his letter, Richardson noted the recent threats Jackson had received for his environmental activism and suggested that, "a major crime may have been committed." Ultimately, the FBI declined to launch an inquiry, citing that the state police had concluded that Jackson had overdosed on methadone.

At Jackson's burial, his friends vowed to continue the search for his killer and to intensify the fight to protect the old forests on the Navajo reservation. "Those who killed Leroy thought they could silence him," said Earl Tulley, a traditionalist Navajo who co-founded Dine CARE with Jackson. "But they only made his cause stronger than when he was alive."

I met Leroy Jackson three times and talked to him often on the phone. We were friends. Kindred spirits. His voice radiated a rare combination of power, eloquence, and humility.

Leroy Jackson cared about his culture and the Navajo people as much as those forests on the slopes of the Chuskas. Indeed, for Jackson, the future of the Navajo forests was inseparably tied to the future of the Navajo people and their religion. That's what motivated his struggle.

The last time I spoke to Jackson was about two months before his death. He described in sharp detail plans by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Navajo Forest Products Industries to clearcut much of the last remaining old-growth ponderosa pine forest on the Big Reservation.

Jackson was angry, but not discouraged. He explained that his new alliance of traditionalist Navajo leaders and energetic young activists was growing in strength and power on the reservation. He believed that Dine CARE was on the verge of dramatically reshaping logging practices on Navajo lands.

"They are going after the heart of the old forest in the sacred mountains," Jackson told me. "But they will not get it. There is a new respect for the old ways."

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The power elite's use of wars and crises

When Congressional Reece Committee research director Norman Dodd's legal assistant Kathryn Casey looked at the planning documents for the founding of the Carnegie Endowment, she found something quite revealing. She found that they determined war would be helpful in furthering their objectives. Relevant to this, Rene Wormser in FOUNDATIONS: THEIR POWER AND INFLUENCE (1958) wrote that the head of the endowment, Nicholas Murray Butler, used the endowment's funds to get the U.S. into World War I.

The year after the endowment was founded in 1910, Robert Minor's cartoon in the ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH in 1911 depicted members of the power elite (John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P Morgan, etc.) welcoming Karl Marx and his "socialism" to Wall Street. The next year Woodrow Wilson ran for president, and his "handler" for the power elite, Colonel Edward M. House, assured his bosses that Wilson would support the Federal Reserve's establishment in 1913.

The year after that (1914), the power elite arranged the first World War long before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28 by members of the Narodna Odbrana (Black Hand) secret society. On May 29, Colonel House in Berlin wrote to President Wilson: "Whenever England consents, France and Russia will close in on Germany and Austria." The trick would be to make Germany think England would not enter the war. This was done by British Secretary of State Sir Edward Grey misleading German Ambassador to England Prince Karl Max Lichnowsky. Grey was close to the (Lord Alfred) Milner Group which was executing power elite member Cecil Rhodes' plan for world government.

Milner was the power behind the scenes in British government. He, not Prime Minister David Lloyd George, actually ran British foreign affairs. Milner was favorably disposed to Marxian socialism, and pro-Bolshevist Sir Basil Zaharoff (an armaments dealer who had sold arms to both sides in several wars) was consulted by President Wilson and Prime Minister George before any major military operation. This is according to author Donald McCormick, who said Zaharoff sought to divert munitions away from anti-Bolshevists.

When World War I began, Helmuth Johannes Ludwig von Moltke was head of the German General Staff. Interestingly, he was married to Dorothy Rose-Innes, the daughter of Sir James Rose-Innes, a member of Rhodes' Association of Helpers, as was their son Helmuth James von Moltke.

It was important for the power elite to drag the U.S. into the War, and so Lord Esher (executive committee member of Rhodes' secret Society of the Elect) wrote in his diary on August 3, 1917: "Can there be any doubt that the war has made for progress?" He followed this on August 11 with "Mr. Henry Morgenthau asked me to call on him.... He was one of the principal supporters of President Wilson.... They are ready to sacrifice the lives of American citizens.... Mr. Morgenthau realizes the importance... (of) shedding American blood at the earliest possible moment." Morgenthau would be a founding member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which was largely funded and staffed by J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller interests.

One of the key connections to these interests was William Boyce Thompson, who in 1914 became the first full-term director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. And the WASHINGTON POST (February 2, 1918) reported: "William B. Thompson, who was in Petrograd from July until November 1917, has made a personal contribution of $1,000,000 to the Bolsheviki for the purpose of spreading their doctrine in Germany and Austria."

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George Carlin's last interview

So after that transformation, to what extent is the persona that you have on stage—to what extent is it your real personality? I know you're making jokes and some of that involves exaggeration, but do you feel that you're acting angrier, more bitter, more caustic on stage? Or are you just being yourself as accurately as possible?

I've addressed this before when the question is asked more bluntly: Are you an angry man? What are you angry about; what are you so angry about? I don't live an angry life, not an angry person. I rarely lose my temper, can't remember the last time, never had a physical fight in my life, don't carry grudges, don't carry resentment either. Very very lucky in those respects. But I feel a very strong alienation and dissatisfaction from my groups.

Abraham Maslow said the fully realized man does not identify with the local group. When I saw that, it rang another bell. I thought: bingo! I do not identify with the local group, I do not feel a part of it. I really have never felt like a participant, I've always felt like an observer. Always. I only identified this in retrospect, way after the fact, that I have been on the outside, and I don't like being on the inside. I don't like being in their world. I've never felt comfortable there; I don't belong to that. So, when he says the "local group," I take that as meaning a lot of things: the local social clubs or fraternal orders, or lodges or associations or clubs of any kind, things where you sacrifice your individual identity for the sake of a group, for the sake of the group mind. I've always felt different and outside. Now, I also extended that, once again in retrospect, as I examined my feelings.

I don't really identify with America, I don't really feel like an American or part of the American experience, and I don't really feel like a member of the human race, to tell you the truth. I know I am, but I really don't. All the definitions are there, but I don't really feel a part of it. I think I have found a detached point of view, an ideal emotional detachment from the American experience and culture and the human experience and culture and human choices.

But even if I am a cynic, they say if you scratch a cynic, you find a disappointed idealist—that's what's underneath. That's the little flicker of flame, has a little life in it, the idealist: I would love to be able to entertain that side of me, but it doesn't work like that. I don't see what's in it yet, I mean I just like it out here.

I'm not an angry person, just very disappointed and contemptuous of my fellow humans' choices—and on stage those feelings sometimes are exaggerated for a theatric stage—you're on a stage you have an audience of 2500 or 3000 people: you need to project the feelings, the emotions it's heightened, and people mistake it for a personal anger but it's more dissatisfaction, disappointment and contempt for these things we've settled for.

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