Russell Means: Twelfth day of snow emergency

Many hundreds of American Indians still snowbound and without electrical
power or water on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Sofia Romero, age 98, snowed in, no power, no water, food situation unknown.

Emme Zimiga, age 96, snowed in, no power, no water, food situation unknown.

Amanda Milk, age 80ʼs, no legs, dialysis patient, snowed in, presumed dead.

Hisle SD - 38 households (average of 17 persons per household on Reservation)
still snowed in with out power or water.

Lost Dog Community - 5 families snowed in, no power, no water, food situation
unknown.

Lacreek Electric Association reports that over 1,000 power distribution poles
broken by the storm have been replaced, but dozens more are still down, while
repair efforts have been diverted to the some of the main distribution lines still
partially inoperative.

Red Cross Effort Vehemently Incompetent, the American Red Cross sent a contingency of one volunteer, Monica Turkleson who departed the Reservation prematurely on Saturday, November 15th. Ms. Turklesonʼs "aide" consisted of nothing and her behavior was reported as impatient, rude and racist. Russell Means suggests that this organization change its name to the "White Cross."

 

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Fate of Lakotahs highlights America's failed Native American policies

On November 6, South Dakota's governor Michael Rounds declared a state of emergency as heavy snow blanketed the state and threatened all parts of it - including Native American reservations.

They, however, were excluded from his declaration. They'll get no badly needed help, and it's an all too familiar story for our nation's original inhabitants. They've been abused and slaughtered for over 500 years. At Mabila, Acoma Mesa, Conestoga, the Trail of Tears, Pamunkey, Mystic River, Yellow Creek, Sand Creek, Gnadenhutten, and Wooded Knee. At far too many other places as well at a cost of many millions of lives, now forgotten and erased from memory.

Worst still, our Native people continue to be systematically repressed and mistreated. They live in poverty and despair. They're mocked and demonized in films and society as drunks, beasts, primitives, savages, and people to be Americanized or warehoused on reservations and forgotten.

Their cultures are willfully denegrated. Their legacy is one of millions slaughtered, betrayal, treaties made and broken, stolen lands, rights denied, and welfare criminally ignored to this day.

The Lakotahs are one of many examples, and the Republic of Lakotah web site highlights their plight. It welcomes "all self-sufficient People who come with an open Heart, a Passion for Freedom and a Love for Grand Mother Earth."

In a commentary titled "Broken Promises & Laws," it describes a Broken People whose lands were stolen, buffalo massacred, people slaughtered, and who were herded onto reservations in violation of Treaties successive US governments signed and then abrogated.

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Obama and the Anti-Christ

Jeanne Dixon, the legendary, on again, off again psychic who called up the White
House in November 1963 and told the staff that President Kennedy must not go to
Dallas, or he would be assassinated by a man by the name of Oswald, had a
powerful vision of the Antichrist in 1962. As I said, Dixon was on again and
off again with her predictions, so we can take her predictions with a grain of
salt. Nonetheless, she was uncannily accurate at times.

In this vision in 1962, Dixon was shown that a Middle East figure was born that
year to a powerful Middle East family, who would groom this individual over many
decades for political prominence later in his career. Dixon was shown that
this child was born under the protective spirit of the Ancient Egyptian pharaoh
Akhenaton, and his queen, Nefertiti.

What is important here is that Akhenaton and Nefertiti led a religious
revolution in 14th century B.C.E. Egypt, and Akhenaton is considered the
founding grandmaster in the Rosicrucian tradition, which is descended from the
mystery schools of Ancient Egypt.

Nowadays in the Middle East, there are millions of disaffected youth who are
alienated from the Muslim fundamentalist traditions of their society, and are
looking for something fresh and new. They are ripe for a religious revolution
in the Middle East - - something that will sweep away the old dogmas, and all
the old religious animosities.

The mystery school tradition of the Middle East, which is still in existence
although very much guarded and underground, has similar views about the need to
overturn the ignorance and obscurantism. The Sufi orders are one of the
primary vehicles for the transmission of these traditions. And there are the
religious groups that have links to it like the Druze of Lebanon, and the Donmeh
of Turkey.

Paralleling Dixon's vision is the prophecy regarding the rise of Antichrist
shared by Dannion Brinkley in the New York Times bestseller "Saved by the Light"
(1994). Brinkley was shown that a Middle Eastern biological engineer would
develop a new revolutionary DNA based technology, which would be developed fully
by the Asian Tiger countries (South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, China).

This new technology would become the basis of the next global economic boom, and
would draw the world economic system out of an extended downturn. But with
this revolutionary technology, this biological engineer would become the world's
most powerful man. Because he and his team would control the software at the
center of the new tech revolution. (This technology will be linked to a new
generation of DNA based chips, according to the Brinkley vision. The chips
will have medical applications and will be implanted in millions.)

Barack was partly put in power by a whole generation of youth, especially ethnic
youth, that yearn for "change" and a "new paradigm." Unwittingly, Barack
might have unleashed new forces around the globe that will help bring the
Antichrist to power. The old entrenched elites are more likely to be suspect
about such sweeping changes and new ways. Not so the youth.

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'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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