In a bold move that shocked Wall Street, Main Street and J Street, Israel expanded its settler housing to Washington DC . President Obama and his family were ordered to vacate the White House so that it would be available to Israeli officials when they visit the occupied territories in the Senate and the House.
Speaker Pelosi expressed surprise when told that Netanyahu had asked for her congressional leadership position in another bold move that showed Israel practicing its political chutzpah as never before.
“ I thought he would ask for the presidency and am flattered and of course only too willing to accede to any demands made by our most important friends in the world, the Israelis ” said Pelosi.
The ADL accused her of practicing thinly veiled anti-Semitism by only mentioning the world instead of the universe.
Obama supports Wealth Care for all Americans
In soaring emotional rhetoric not heard since his last soaringly emotional speech, the president expressed soaring emotional support for all wealthy Americans and for the overwhelming 90% majority who are not yet wealthy but will be someday if our free markets and credit purchases can fully flower and bloom and blossom and, uh, whatever.
“This nation will thrive and survive as long as people are free to get wealthy and I intend to fight to the last breath to keep the freedoms we enjoy that allow wonderful hard working billionaires to get even more rich and then help the rest of us with tax deductible donations to charity.”
When asked about health care for all Americans the president said he supported it, but it would only be possible when more rich people were given tax breaks that enabled them to buy more private health insurance companies and then make tax deductible donations to charity.
Bankers Urge Freeing Madoff: Say Fed Needs His Help
A consortium of bankers, financiers, entrepreneurs and gourmet chefs joined in calling for the release of convicted fraudster Bernie Madoff. A spokesperson for the group said that only someone with his skill sets could lead the Fed and help the nation out of its most serious financial crisis.
“Let’s face it, our economy has been a massive Ponzi scheme for years now and the person who can best get investors to buy into this mess has to be the man who did it before with absolutely nothing but his mouth and an enigmatic smile. Now he’ll be able to peddle shares in our new Financial Utilization of Credit Kleptocracy Unions of Penury fund, a derivative collateral fandango perceptivity subtracting coercion swapperama market which, along with that Mona Lisa quality of his, will be impossible for egotistical and exceptionally dumb investors to resist . Nothing will more insure the survival of our leaking ship of state than to have captain Bernie at the helm.”
Reality Celebrities?
Producers of reality shows and celebrity gossip programs have joined forces to create an all new viewing consumer product. It will combine the most appealing candid moments of real life embarrassing drama lived by ordinary people who thereby become celebrities, and scandalously embarrassing moments in the lives of celebrities which may reduce them to lives as ordinary people.
The new show will feature celebrities during unguarded moments as they use their toilets, or have sex or beat their children. Then ordinary people will be shown having the same experiences affording viewers the double pleasure of watching people who are better looking , more talented and have far more money than they make complete asses of themselves while also enjoying their peers who have little money, looks or talent becoming celebrities by virtue of being portrayed using toilets, having sex and beating their children.
A spokesperson for Humping International Values productions , which owns the rights to the proposed show said “ We know our viewers love watching their slightly better looking peers making asses of themselves enough to make them stars and they also love gossip about the flaws of celebrities they love and also hate. This will afford them a double pleasure . We expect it to be bigger than American Idol. The twits twixt twelve and twenty market will love it and bring the older mob of wannabes along with them.”
The working title for the show is: U HV NO LIFE SO WTCH THS
stay tuned to The Garlic for all the really important news
Friday, March 19, 2010
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Disease Care Insurance In A Sick Society
by Michael K. Smith
An extreme illness cannot be cured by a moderate medicine.
-----Malcolm X
Thirty years ago, Dr. Hugh Drummond, then medical editor of Mother Jones magazine, published a wonderfully insightful essay on the significance of the emerging national health insurance debate in the United States ("Your Health at Too High a Premium: National Health Insurance"). Drummond pointed out that the eagerness to enact a national health insurance bill stemmed from the intersection of two forces: the greed of insurance companies, horrified that millions of Americans were escaping paying the monthly ransom for receiving medical care, and the anxiety of an increasingly diseased general population, eager to "save its ass" from the inevitable consequences of living sedentary lives in an environment contaminated with thousands of untested chemicals.
Drummond made the often overlooked points that, (1) health insurance is not really that at all, but rather, "sickness insurance," and, (2) social and environmental conditions have a lot to do with patterns of disease. But since the social roots of disease are a source of considerable private profit, they typically remain unexplored. Therefore, it is not too surprising that discussion of national health insurance does not raise the crucial question of whether a healthy society would be compatible with maximizing profit for the medical insurance-pharmaceutical complex, that is, whether the limitless pursuit of profit might itself be sick.
The answer would appear to be yes. Since illness cannot be avoided, demanding profit as a condition of extending medical coverage amounts to a cynically opportunistic racket in which the poorest and sickest individuals are left to fend for themselves on the dubious assumption that they either don't want or don't deserve to have insurance (suffering much higher than normal death rates as a result). In fact, the only reason the issue of national health insurance ever emerged at all is because having government guarantee payment on behalf of the uninsured (now 48 million) and the underinsured (now 168 million) aroused the insurance companies' usual lust for limitless gain. In other words, there was a lot more money to be made off illness, irrespective of the prospects for prevention and cure, which are merely incidental outcomes of profit-seeking when they do occur.
Naturally, the central premise of the national health insurance advocates had little to do with health. The main idea was, and is, that everyone is terrified of cancer and heart disease, which therefore could and should be treated by enormously costly technological interventions like transplants, bypass procedures, and radiotherapy. Since the price tag for such treatments vastly exceeded patients' ability to pay, the solution seemed to be a classic case of government moving in to do for individuals what they could not do for themselves, that is, underwriting the expenses of medical procedures allegedly designed to cure, or at least temporarily subdue, fatal disease.
Overlooked in this "debate" about universal coverage was the more basic issue of how social and environmental conditions contributed to the pattern of diseases killing off Americans before their time. The pervasive illnesses of the poor and young - like malnutrition and lead poisoning - didn't even rate a mention. Likewise, the fact that highly invasive treatments initiated long after an unhealthy environment had predictably caused epidemics of cancer and heart disease was a far less promising approach than refraining from contaminating the environment in the first place, did not get the fair hearing it deserved. The reign of crackpot realism guaranteed that unexamined social causes of disease would continue generating massive suffering no matter how the debate about insuring treatment costs turned out.
Dreamy utopianist that he was, Dr. Drummond focused laser-like on logic. "To really stop cancer," he observed, "we would need to control all industrial pollutants, such as asbestos, vinyl chloride and sulphur dioxide." The enormous quantities of synthetic additives in food and drink would also "have to be eliminated." As for heart disease, Drummond argued that a general cure should at least entertain the idea of eliminating unemployment, "which has been documented to increase norepinephrine and cholesterol production to murderous levels." He also suggested that Americans eat, drink, smoke, and drive less, but he recognized that if healthy living were ever seriously pursued in the U.S. "the economy would collapse." Hence the need for a system of insurance that would add to corporate profits by underwriting the treatment of symptoms, while the proliferation of deadly chemicals and their attendant diseases went merrily on its way.
Given the unfortunate conflation of disease management with health care, even Medicaid and Medicare, though important social democratic advances, fell far short of their liberatory potential. What exactly happened in the aftermath of implementation of these programs, the precursors of today's debate about national health insurance for all? Most notably, a predictable gorging at the public trough. "In the first year," wrote Drummond, "doctors' fees rose two and a half times as fast as the cost of living." Hospital costs also soared, registering a four-and-a-half fold increase in the programs' initial years, with hospital administrators eagerly increasing their salaries at public expense.
The influx of federal money also went for fantastically expensive drugs and medical supplies, and the control of labor: hundreds of thousands of dollars were allocated to prevent union organizing in the medical industry. Most administrators and doctors welcomed the treasure-trove of government money, not at all persuaded that "socialized medicine" meant they would inevitably earn less than they had before.
Did salary increases for medical professionals constitute proper reward for an array of helpful new treatments? Apparently not. Drummond observed that the most obvious results of the new programs were that "a lot of doctors got richer," and "expensive and 'interesting' medical technology" was introduced, such as a hyperbaric chamber at Mt. Sinai in New York City, which was employed only sporadically and with "unconvincing necessity" in his view. For the money involved in offering this single high-tech treatment option, Drummond complained, the hospital could have funded 20,000 outpatient visits a year, or had a large-scale lead poisoning program for the residents of East Harlem. But that is not the way to expand profit and market share for pharmaceutical and medical insurance companies.
How about the patients these programs were intended to serve? It is true that fewer people were denied access to bad health care, but of those below the federal poverty level, one third remained unaffected by the existence of Medicaid and Medicare, and their illnesses continued to go undiagnosed and untreated.
The problem, of course, is that universal coverage, even if achieved, only fully subsidizes the current medical system; it does not require a change in its dismal health outcomes (the U.S. spends roughly double per capita on health care compared to other industrial countries but has among the worst health outcomes). Doctor-patient relationships do not inevitably improve; community controlled health clinics do not automatically emerge; better hospitals with more responsive staffs don't suddenly spring to life; the chemical industry doesn't stop polluting the air, land, and water.
On the other hand, if President Obama were backing single-payer insurance, a form of which exists in every other industrial country, at least we could look forward to the demise of the medical insurance industry, now fattening its already enormous bottom line at the expense of an American people suffering epidemics of obesity, cancer, and heart disease. But Obama does not favor this. On the contrary, he is pushing for an outcome where everyone has to be covered by the current HMO-dominated system, the most inefficient care delivery there is, with administrative costs many times greater than Medicare. And he wants to pay for those excessive costs at least in part by cutting Medicare benefits, which ought to be increased. This is not universal insurance at all, but the same "rob Peter to underpay Paul" system that continues the American people's subordination to the very medical-insurance-pharmaceutical complex that needs to be eliminated. It is by now virtually certain that we will get some version of the Obama plan, since the HMOs have invested a lot of money in it, which means we will be forced to pay too much for crappy care, with high deductibles and co-payments pushing ever more people into bankruptcy, an accelerated version of what we have already.
And rest assured that no attention will be given to making radical changes in our war-obsessed, consumption-mad culture, so as to achieve a genuinely healthy way of life. Quite the contrary. Obama will instead move ahead with plans to privatize Medicare and Social Security, widening the scale of our current disaster by converting entitlements into speculative schemes like the ones that collapsed the economy in 2008.
For him, that's "change you can believe in."
Sources:
Hugh Drummond, M.D.,"Doctor Drummond's Spirited Guide To Health Care in a Dying Empire," (Grove Press, 1980)
David Himmelstein, Steffie Woolhandler, Ida Hellander, "Bleeding the Patient - The Consequences of Corporate Health Care," (Common Courage, 2001)
Vicente Navarro, "Obama's Mistakes in Health Care Reform," Counterpunch, September 7, 2009
Eduardo Orbea, "Corporate Power is 'Crushing' - The Health System According to Noam Chomsky," Univision On Line, September 18, 2009
-------Michael K. Smith is the author of "Portraits of Empire" and "The Madness of King George" (illustrations by Matt Wuerker), from Common Courage Press. He can be reached at proheresy@yahoo.com
An extreme illness cannot be cured by a moderate medicine.
-----Malcolm X
Thirty years ago, Dr. Hugh Drummond, then medical editor of Mother Jones magazine, published a wonderfully insightful essay on the significance of the emerging national health insurance debate in the United States ("Your Health at Too High a Premium: National Health Insurance"). Drummond pointed out that the eagerness to enact a national health insurance bill stemmed from the intersection of two forces: the greed of insurance companies, horrified that millions of Americans were escaping paying the monthly ransom for receiving medical care, and the anxiety of an increasingly diseased general population, eager to "save its ass" from the inevitable consequences of living sedentary lives in an environment contaminated with thousands of untested chemicals.
Drummond made the often overlooked points that, (1) health insurance is not really that at all, but rather, "sickness insurance," and, (2) social and environmental conditions have a lot to do with patterns of disease. But since the social roots of disease are a source of considerable private profit, they typically remain unexplored. Therefore, it is not too surprising that discussion of national health insurance does not raise the crucial question of whether a healthy society would be compatible with maximizing profit for the medical insurance-pharmaceutical complex, that is, whether the limitless pursuit of profit might itself be sick.
The answer would appear to be yes. Since illness cannot be avoided, demanding profit as a condition of extending medical coverage amounts to a cynically opportunistic racket in which the poorest and sickest individuals are left to fend for themselves on the dubious assumption that they either don't want or don't deserve to have insurance (suffering much higher than normal death rates as a result). In fact, the only reason the issue of national health insurance ever emerged at all is because having government guarantee payment on behalf of the uninsured (now 48 million) and the underinsured (now 168 million) aroused the insurance companies' usual lust for limitless gain. In other words, there was a lot more money to be made off illness, irrespective of the prospects for prevention and cure, which are merely incidental outcomes of profit-seeking when they do occur.
Naturally, the central premise of the national health insurance advocates had little to do with health. The main idea was, and is, that everyone is terrified of cancer and heart disease, which therefore could and should be treated by enormously costly technological interventions like transplants, bypass procedures, and radiotherapy. Since the price tag for such treatments vastly exceeded patients' ability to pay, the solution seemed to be a classic case of government moving in to do for individuals what they could not do for themselves, that is, underwriting the expenses of medical procedures allegedly designed to cure, or at least temporarily subdue, fatal disease.
Overlooked in this "debate" about universal coverage was the more basic issue of how social and environmental conditions contributed to the pattern of diseases killing off Americans before their time. The pervasive illnesses of the poor and young - like malnutrition and lead poisoning - didn't even rate a mention. Likewise, the fact that highly invasive treatments initiated long after an unhealthy environment had predictably caused epidemics of cancer and heart disease was a far less promising approach than refraining from contaminating the environment in the first place, did not get the fair hearing it deserved. The reign of crackpot realism guaranteed that unexamined social causes of disease would continue generating massive suffering no matter how the debate about insuring treatment costs turned out.
Dreamy utopianist that he was, Dr. Drummond focused laser-like on logic. "To really stop cancer," he observed, "we would need to control all industrial pollutants, such as asbestos, vinyl chloride and sulphur dioxide." The enormous quantities of synthetic additives in food and drink would also "have to be eliminated." As for heart disease, Drummond argued that a general cure should at least entertain the idea of eliminating unemployment, "which has been documented to increase norepinephrine and cholesterol production to murderous levels." He also suggested that Americans eat, drink, smoke, and drive less, but he recognized that if healthy living were ever seriously pursued in the U.S. "the economy would collapse." Hence the need for a system of insurance that would add to corporate profits by underwriting the treatment of symptoms, while the proliferation of deadly chemicals and their attendant diseases went merrily on its way.
Given the unfortunate conflation of disease management with health care, even Medicaid and Medicare, though important social democratic advances, fell far short of their liberatory potential. What exactly happened in the aftermath of implementation of these programs, the precursors of today's debate about national health insurance for all? Most notably, a predictable gorging at the public trough. "In the first year," wrote Drummond, "doctors' fees rose two and a half times as fast as the cost of living." Hospital costs also soared, registering a four-and-a-half fold increase in the programs' initial years, with hospital administrators eagerly increasing their salaries at public expense.
The influx of federal money also went for fantastically expensive drugs and medical supplies, and the control of labor: hundreds of thousands of dollars were allocated to prevent union organizing in the medical industry. Most administrators and doctors welcomed the treasure-trove of government money, not at all persuaded that "socialized medicine" meant they would inevitably earn less than they had before.
Did salary increases for medical professionals constitute proper reward for an array of helpful new treatments? Apparently not. Drummond observed that the most obvious results of the new programs were that "a lot of doctors got richer," and "expensive and 'interesting' medical technology" was introduced, such as a hyperbaric chamber at Mt. Sinai in New York City, which was employed only sporadically and with "unconvincing necessity" in his view. For the money involved in offering this single high-tech treatment option, Drummond complained, the hospital could have funded 20,000 outpatient visits a year, or had a large-scale lead poisoning program for the residents of East Harlem. But that is not the way to expand profit and market share for pharmaceutical and medical insurance companies.
How about the patients these programs were intended to serve? It is true that fewer people were denied access to bad health care, but of those below the federal poverty level, one third remained unaffected by the existence of Medicaid and Medicare, and their illnesses continued to go undiagnosed and untreated.
The problem, of course, is that universal coverage, even if achieved, only fully subsidizes the current medical system; it does not require a change in its dismal health outcomes (the U.S. spends roughly double per capita on health care compared to other industrial countries but has among the worst health outcomes). Doctor-patient relationships do not inevitably improve; community controlled health clinics do not automatically emerge; better hospitals with more responsive staffs don't suddenly spring to life; the chemical industry doesn't stop polluting the air, land, and water.
On the other hand, if President Obama were backing single-payer insurance, a form of which exists in every other industrial country, at least we could look forward to the demise of the medical insurance industry, now fattening its already enormous bottom line at the expense of an American people suffering epidemics of obesity, cancer, and heart disease. But Obama does not favor this. On the contrary, he is pushing for an outcome where everyone has to be covered by the current HMO-dominated system, the most inefficient care delivery there is, with administrative costs many times greater than Medicare. And he wants to pay for those excessive costs at least in part by cutting Medicare benefits, which ought to be increased. This is not universal insurance at all, but the same "rob Peter to underpay Paul" system that continues the American people's subordination to the very medical-insurance-pharmaceutical complex that needs to be eliminated. It is by now virtually certain that we will get some version of the Obama plan, since the HMOs have invested a lot of money in it, which means we will be forced to pay too much for crappy care, with high deductibles and co-payments pushing ever more people into bankruptcy, an accelerated version of what we have already.
And rest assured that no attention will be given to making radical changes in our war-obsessed, consumption-mad culture, so as to achieve a genuinely healthy way of life. Quite the contrary. Obama will instead move ahead with plans to privatize Medicare and Social Security, widening the scale of our current disaster by converting entitlements into speculative schemes like the ones that collapsed the economy in 2008.
For him, that's "change you can believe in."
Sources:
Hugh Drummond, M.D.,"Doctor Drummond's Spirited Guide To Health Care in a Dying Empire," (Grove Press, 1980)
David Himmelstein, Steffie Woolhandler, Ida Hellander, "Bleeding the Patient - The Consequences of Corporate Health Care," (Common Courage, 2001)
Vicente Navarro, "Obama's Mistakes in Health Care Reform," Counterpunch, September 7, 2009
Eduardo Orbea, "Corporate Power is 'Crushing' - The Health System According to Noam Chomsky," Univision On Line, September 18, 2009
-------Michael K. Smith is the author of "Portraits of Empire" and "The Madness of King George" (illustrations by Matt Wuerker), from Common Courage Press. He can be reached at proheresy@yahoo.com
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Humanity vs Insanity
Whenever there is a crisis in the system’s stability ruling power often reacts in a disarray approaching panic but the numerous crises of the present moment bring with them an even more serious situation. It warrants aroused action from a unified and informed population but so far we are only aroused. We need to become less divided and more informed before matters already far from our control become completely beyond the illusion of democracy many think we already have.
The drums of war beat loudly and not just for the ongoing brutality in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan . Changing the label on those mass murders from one idiotic brand name to another seems the only difference between the deranged policies of the last regime and their demented continuation by the new one. But the unrelenting drive to war against the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran has taken a more frenzied tone . The irrational charges against that nation and its president and the cynical use of movements for civil liberties within it are becoming far more deadly.
Mind managers are maneuvering the American people into an insane fear of attack from a nuclear weapons powered Iran despite no such evidence in the material world. The only reliable information questions the motives and mental health of those creating this diabolical disinformation . Many have already forgotten the supposed menace represented by Iraq which existed only in the twisted minds of the war party in Washington and its dominating caucus representing Israel .
We have not finished our devastation of Iraq as we further it in Afghanistan and extend it into Pakistan, but that does not yet satisfy a paranoid military-religious-psycho cult that finds itself surrounded by enemies, mostly where it creates them. The cult’s development of ever more fiendish weapons with which to destroy and torture its adversaries is accompanied by its hysterical screaming about adversaries allegedly poised to terrorize and invade it : in other words, do to us exactly what we are doing to them.
A frustrated public understands that government is squandering its tax dollars on wanton waste and the bribing of rich minorities, but it’s so confused that describing its behavior as people on the sinking Titanic rearranging the deck chairs would be an understatement. It’s as though some passengers plead the new captain be given more time to find the hole where the water is entering with the rest near hysteria over the exorbitant room rates while the owners of the crippled ship buy more drone missiles and poison gas to ward off pending attack from terrorist penguins . But it isn’t funny.
Many Americans and a substantial number of Iranians have been led to believe an election decisively won by Ahmadinejad was actually stolen , this based on the evidence of wishful thinking, blatant lies and possible treason. A genuine movement for civil liberties in that nation has been deformed by the USA and Israel into an alleged counter revolution and sometimes instigated to act as a traitorous force within the country. When the American government and media howl about injustice in Iran after they censured any criticism of Israel’s mass brutality in Gaza they make vultures vomit and jackals gag. The normal noxious garbage flow from corporate government and its media stenographers has become so hazardous that we need to clear the political air before we are smothered by this mass attack of toxic mental pollution.
Recurring stories about Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons mostly come from an Israeli network of undercover operatives and an intelligence apparatus that reaches deeply into our government. Why does Israel want to hurt Iran and especially Ahmadinejad? Alone among world leaders he has been outspoken in calling for justice in Palestine, highlighting the suffering of its people and the maddening hypocrisy in making Palestinians pay for a European crime. Meanwhile the USA, still smarting over losing its puppet ruler in the 1979 revolution , continues vindictively attempting to destroy the Islamic regime. It is the threat of imperial collapse more than control of oil that moves America into such easily manipulated desire for destroying Iran’s revolution, but Israel’s hatred is more malevolent and dangerous.
Left to its own bumbling barbarism it might be unlikely that the US would openly attack, but given their possession of nuclear weapons and a tortured cultural narrative of Jews as eternal victims , there is no telling what the Israelis might attempt.
The present danger finds a globally dominant imperial force with power capable of wiping out millions the world over fast losing its control. But the empire and its minions are either in complete denial of material reality or motivated by immaterial beliefs that only their rule and mythology is worthwhile and all others must succumb or be destroyed. If we were confronted by a maniac wielding an ax we’d have a frightening problem, but when that maniac is an empire in possession of nuclear weapons and incredible fire power, all humanity has a terrifying problem.
Democracy, like charity, begins at home but ultimately extends much further than a locality or a nation. It is time for the endangered species - the overwhelming majority of earth’s population - to gain control of the situation before it is too late. The important work of the immediate future involves whether that happens through a truly democratic United Nations controlled by the real global majority, or that majority acting through smaller groups of allied countries and NGOs acting in common interest for global salvation. One thing seems all but certain: If we don't soon remove the barriers that separate us as members of a human race, inhuman forces which profit from their creation may bring them crashing down on all our heads.
Copyright (c) 2010 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.
The drums of war beat loudly and not just for the ongoing brutality in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan . Changing the label on those mass murders from one idiotic brand name to another seems the only difference between the deranged policies of the last regime and their demented continuation by the new one. But the unrelenting drive to war against the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran has taken a more frenzied tone . The irrational charges against that nation and its president and the cynical use of movements for civil liberties within it are becoming far more deadly.
Mind managers are maneuvering the American people into an insane fear of attack from a nuclear weapons powered Iran despite no such evidence in the material world. The only reliable information questions the motives and mental health of those creating this diabolical disinformation . Many have already forgotten the supposed menace represented by Iraq which existed only in the twisted minds of the war party in Washington and its dominating caucus representing Israel .
We have not finished our devastation of Iraq as we further it in Afghanistan and extend it into Pakistan, but that does not yet satisfy a paranoid military-religious-psycho cult that finds itself surrounded by enemies, mostly where it creates them. The cult’s development of ever more fiendish weapons with which to destroy and torture its adversaries is accompanied by its hysterical screaming about adversaries allegedly poised to terrorize and invade it : in other words, do to us exactly what we are doing to them.
A frustrated public understands that government is squandering its tax dollars on wanton waste and the bribing of rich minorities, but it’s so confused that describing its behavior as people on the sinking Titanic rearranging the deck chairs would be an understatement. It’s as though some passengers plead the new captain be given more time to find the hole where the water is entering with the rest near hysteria over the exorbitant room rates while the owners of the crippled ship buy more drone missiles and poison gas to ward off pending attack from terrorist penguins . But it isn’t funny.
Many Americans and a substantial number of Iranians have been led to believe an election decisively won by Ahmadinejad was actually stolen , this based on the evidence of wishful thinking, blatant lies and possible treason. A genuine movement for civil liberties in that nation has been deformed by the USA and Israel into an alleged counter revolution and sometimes instigated to act as a traitorous force within the country. When the American government and media howl about injustice in Iran after they censured any criticism of Israel’s mass brutality in Gaza they make vultures vomit and jackals gag. The normal noxious garbage flow from corporate government and its media stenographers has become so hazardous that we need to clear the political air before we are smothered by this mass attack of toxic mental pollution.
Recurring stories about Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons mostly come from an Israeli network of undercover operatives and an intelligence apparatus that reaches deeply into our government. Why does Israel want to hurt Iran and especially Ahmadinejad? Alone among world leaders he has been outspoken in calling for justice in Palestine, highlighting the suffering of its people and the maddening hypocrisy in making Palestinians pay for a European crime. Meanwhile the USA, still smarting over losing its puppet ruler in the 1979 revolution , continues vindictively attempting to destroy the Islamic regime. It is the threat of imperial collapse more than control of oil that moves America into such easily manipulated desire for destroying Iran’s revolution, but Israel’s hatred is more malevolent and dangerous.
Left to its own bumbling barbarism it might be unlikely that the US would openly attack, but given their possession of nuclear weapons and a tortured cultural narrative of Jews as eternal victims , there is no telling what the Israelis might attempt.
The present danger finds a globally dominant imperial force with power capable of wiping out millions the world over fast losing its control. But the empire and its minions are either in complete denial of material reality or motivated by immaterial beliefs that only their rule and mythology is worthwhile and all others must succumb or be destroyed. If we were confronted by a maniac wielding an ax we’d have a frightening problem, but when that maniac is an empire in possession of nuclear weapons and incredible fire power, all humanity has a terrifying problem.
Democracy, like charity, begins at home but ultimately extends much further than a locality or a nation. It is time for the endangered species - the overwhelming majority of earth’s population - to gain control of the situation before it is too late. The important work of the immediate future involves whether that happens through a truly democratic United Nations controlled by the real global majority, or that majority acting through smaller groups of allied countries and NGOs acting in common interest for global salvation. One thing seems all but certain: If we don't soon remove the barriers that separate us as members of a human race, inhuman forces which profit from their creation may bring them crashing down on all our heads.
Copyright (c) 2010 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Interview With a Director
After his new film “ Vainglorious Scumbags” opened to rave reviews Legalienate interviewed Hollywood’s foremost maker of shockingly straightforward and successfully horrible films, Fenwick Garbagino.
You are a student of old film who delights in making new ones which quote from the old classics while introducing new techniques of brutality and grossness unknown to old directors. Tell us how you came to that film making technique.
As a child I was always creative and kinda pushed the envelope way beyond what my teachers could understand. In grade school art class I sculpted a copy of Michaelangelo's Pieta, but all in dried snot from my own nose. They threw me out of class but a psychologist saw my work and sent me to Commercial Art School. So I was always inclined to be different and it got the attention of people who really understood creativity, like psychologists , film teachers and venture capitalists. One thing led to another and soon I was mixing blood and guts with snot and the rest is history.
Your previous film “ Filthy Rotten Bastids” dealt with Mafia wives getting even with their husbands by beating them with baseball bats, cutting off their genitals and using them in making tomato sauce . Now this latest film tells the story of the children of Japanese survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who capture and torture American service men whether or not they had anything to do with these attacks on Japanese cities in the second world war. Talk to us about the themes of retribution, vengeance, vindictiveness and grotesque horror that seem to repeat themselves in your work.
Gladly. I’m very pissed at reality and especially interested in the commercial potential in appealing to other pissed off people, which is most people. One way to do that is to keep alive old hatreds and make films that enable people to get their rocks off watching disturbingly horrible torture being inflicted on people who may not personally deserve it, but who stand in for those who do. That way you get two markets, both the vindictive and vengeance oriented, along with the gullible who react to blood and animal like human behavior in ways that make us feel akin to biblical and other original creators of mass slaughter.
Do you think there is any social cost in making such films, like maybe cheapening the notion of pain and suffering even while trying to get even for its infliction?
Yes, but then there is the art of film to consider. I did go to film school and wrote many papers on the illusions of light and still photos flashing before the eyes, the experience of being in a large dark room with others and watching flashing lights on a big screen, and that same experience shrunk to a little room, a little screen and maybe only one person in his underwear with a beer and pretzels and a dvd or blu-ray copy of one of my art works. So you see, I have far more knowledge of film than the average person who only watches film. I have studied them and now make then and also have become rich at my art, which shows that I have a profound sense of the impact on consciousness of telling stories and having them acted out on a big screen and making lots of money.
But again, beyond your obvious depth and knowledge of film and its commercial value, do you think the images, as in your latest film, of Japanese terrorists cutting out the tongues of American soldiers and carving images of the rising sun on their eyeballs is something that will heal the wounds of past wars? Could they make things worse and lead to more revenge fantasies that could become reality?
That’s possible, but we are all subconsciously warriors and inflicters of brutality - except for those of us who are artists, politicians and lawyers - and so it’s natural for this behavior to go on. We’ve always done it so I’m not suggesting anything new, I’m just dramatizing it in a way that entertains. People brutalize other people, it’s what makes life a success for the ones who commit the brutality and a failure for those on whom it is committed.
That almost sounds profound.
Hey, I went to college , I’m an artist and I’m successful. Being profound is what I take to the bank.
What are your future plans.
My next film will deal with American Indians capturing a family of Europeans and water boarding them in front of their children before skinning them alive and feeding them to their horses. It will be cathartic for Indians who never seem to act out vengeance the way some people do, and the same way some Japanese thanked me for giving them some sadistic pleasure, I think Indians will love my film. I’ve already raised a hundred million dollars from their gambling casinos for the preproduction costs and as soon as Hollywood gets into the act this could be a bigger blockbuster than my last film. Business is looking good. America is back!
You are a student of old film who delights in making new ones which quote from the old classics while introducing new techniques of brutality and grossness unknown to old directors. Tell us how you came to that film making technique.
As a child I was always creative and kinda pushed the envelope way beyond what my teachers could understand. In grade school art class I sculpted a copy of Michaelangelo's Pieta, but all in dried snot from my own nose. They threw me out of class but a psychologist saw my work and sent me to Commercial Art School. So I was always inclined to be different and it got the attention of people who really understood creativity, like psychologists , film teachers and venture capitalists. One thing led to another and soon I was mixing blood and guts with snot and the rest is history.
Your previous film “ Filthy Rotten Bastids” dealt with Mafia wives getting even with their husbands by beating them with baseball bats, cutting off their genitals and using them in making tomato sauce . Now this latest film tells the story of the children of Japanese survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who capture and torture American service men whether or not they had anything to do with these attacks on Japanese cities in the second world war. Talk to us about the themes of retribution, vengeance, vindictiveness and grotesque horror that seem to repeat themselves in your work.
Gladly. I’m very pissed at reality and especially interested in the commercial potential in appealing to other pissed off people, which is most people. One way to do that is to keep alive old hatreds and make films that enable people to get their rocks off watching disturbingly horrible torture being inflicted on people who may not personally deserve it, but who stand in for those who do. That way you get two markets, both the vindictive and vengeance oriented, along with the gullible who react to blood and animal like human behavior in ways that make us feel akin to biblical and other original creators of mass slaughter.
Do you think there is any social cost in making such films, like maybe cheapening the notion of pain and suffering even while trying to get even for its infliction?
Yes, but then there is the art of film to consider. I did go to film school and wrote many papers on the illusions of light and still photos flashing before the eyes, the experience of being in a large dark room with others and watching flashing lights on a big screen, and that same experience shrunk to a little room, a little screen and maybe only one person in his underwear with a beer and pretzels and a dvd or blu-ray copy of one of my art works. So you see, I have far more knowledge of film than the average person who only watches film. I have studied them and now make then and also have become rich at my art, which shows that I have a profound sense of the impact on consciousness of telling stories and having them acted out on a big screen and making lots of money.
But again, beyond your obvious depth and knowledge of film and its commercial value, do you think the images, as in your latest film, of Japanese terrorists cutting out the tongues of American soldiers and carving images of the rising sun on their eyeballs is something that will heal the wounds of past wars? Could they make things worse and lead to more revenge fantasies that could become reality?
That’s possible, but we are all subconsciously warriors and inflicters of brutality - except for those of us who are artists, politicians and lawyers - and so it’s natural for this behavior to go on. We’ve always done it so I’m not suggesting anything new, I’m just dramatizing it in a way that entertains. People brutalize other people, it’s what makes life a success for the ones who commit the brutality and a failure for those on whom it is committed.
That almost sounds profound.
Hey, I went to college , I’m an artist and I’m successful. Being profound is what I take to the bank.
What are your future plans.
My next film will deal with American Indians capturing a family of Europeans and water boarding them in front of their children before skinning them alive and feeding them to their horses. It will be cathartic for Indians who never seem to act out vengeance the way some people do, and the same way some Japanese thanked me for giving them some sadistic pleasure, I think Indians will love my film. I’ve already raised a hundred million dollars from their gambling casinos for the preproduction costs and as soon as Hollywood gets into the act this could be a bigger blockbuster than my last film. Business is looking good. America is back!
Friday, February 19, 2010
The Schlock* Doctrine
As our imperial stature declines the worst aspects of consumption culture show more hazardous and contradictory qualities. Our programmed fascination for new goods to replace old commodities has long been a social pathology in a system that breeds mental divisions among individuals to deny the existence of social structure. This, while it simultaneously rots the material foundation of that structure. We are now consuming more garbage then ever even as we attempt to stop the flow of sewage into our life support systems. We haven’t yet realized that the production and distribution of waste is essential to a political economy we need to transform before we are destroyed by its attempted maintenance.
We’ve long consumed useless goods we didn't really want and worthless services we didn't really need under mind management that convinced us we’d lack something vital without that necessary product. And the failure of each purchase to bring the bottom line of whatever it promised to create always meant the need for another newer, more stylish or healthy purchase. That conditioning has kept a majority shopping while a minority prospers from our search for survival through market warfare disguised as happy consumers seeking personal fulfillment or whatever else a particular sales item and promotion campaign promised.
Obeying the dictatorship of political economic advertisements for endless uncritical consumption has us performing as fabled lemmings, but we are rushing towards an all too real social extinction.
The Schlock doctrine teaches us to accept bargain outlet stores selling cigarettes long after they’ve been proved deadly to individual health and the social environment, usurious rates charged to the working poor in order to get cash advances on paychecks which are too little to meet expenses anyway, and higher costs for health care and insurance with less means for people to afford them. Previously reliable auto producers have to recall hundreds of thousands of unsafe vehicles, food supplies are regularly found tainted by contaminants and hospitals are killing more people than the nation’s traffic wars which take an average of almost one hundred lives a day. As fossil fuels become a greater environmental problem , public transit services are cut forcing more into their cars and furthering the use of fossil fuels .
And all this while we spend trillions for war, a stock market “recovers”, millions are newly unemployed and bank executives receive bonus checks which are paid for with massive loans from the working population.
An individual experiencing such contradictory behavior would be diagnosed as clinically insane and placed under protective control. In our political economic anarchy, no such power exists except for the most antidemocratic and totalitarian minority force of corporate capital.
We’re not only being victimized by shoddy material goods but even more by the Schlock Doctrine’s invasions of our collective consciousness. The propaganda machine that works to keep us fearing imaginary menaces outside while camouflaging the malfunctions of our internal system is working overtime to get us into a new war. The death profiteers who no longer have Soviet Communism to use as demonized source of evil switched to terrorism after 9/11, and none more so than the American protectors of israel who guided us into the Iraqi bloodbath and are now working more feverishly to destroy Iran. The mental garbage we have consumed about that nation and its leader would manifest as the largest dump of decomposed excrement imaginable if it assumed material form. Its putrid stench would make the world’s six billion people gag , yet this nation allows its fanatically perverse creators to continue running foreign policy. That could lead to a horror beyond anything yet experienced, and not only for the nation and people of Iran.
Whether we consider the impact on raw nature or in its reshaped form under human hands, it should be clear that continued total reliance on the private market mechanism could lead to total oblivion of the human social organism. That’s if we’re able to analyze and understand the evidence. Under the reign of the Schlock Doctrine it can seem that dumb conservatives, wimpy liberals, killer terrorists or evil spirits are mucking things up and as soon as we can produce more green garbage without interference from market molesters and do so in a diverse, multi cultural way, everything will be just fine.
Under present circumstances of a growing sense of social breakdown with little understanding of why it is happening, the least damaging outcome may be for a procession of millions of Americans openly carrying guns while angrily marching to city hall to marry their gay dogs. Or cats.
The state of emergency established by Bush neoconservatives has been extended by Obama neoliberals to help the market create more schlock for everyone else to consume. More than 700 foreign bases with more than a quarter million troops employed by taxpayers to maintain an imperial order that threatens to crumble on our heads, and we are urged to continue shopping for success that insures failure. Even in our confusion we‘re becoming aware that serious changes must be made not only for the survival of our nation, but of our world. Other national groups are ahead of us in realizing that systemic change is needed, but if our general sense of unease and physical failure are understood in time, we may still catch up and even overtake the rest of the world in moving towards salvation through material transformation. We can only hope that further forms of shock therapy are not needed to bring about real change in the Schlock Doctrine by which we are presently controlled. How much more war and recession can we tolerate? Don’t ask, just rebel.
* merchandise of very low quality or value
Copyright (c) 2010 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.
We’ve long consumed useless goods we didn't really want and worthless services we didn't really need under mind management that convinced us we’d lack something vital without that necessary product. And the failure of each purchase to bring the bottom line of whatever it promised to create always meant the need for another newer, more stylish or healthy purchase. That conditioning has kept a majority shopping while a minority prospers from our search for survival through market warfare disguised as happy consumers seeking personal fulfillment or whatever else a particular sales item and promotion campaign promised.
Obeying the dictatorship of political economic advertisements for endless uncritical consumption has us performing as fabled lemmings, but we are rushing towards an all too real social extinction.
The Schlock doctrine teaches us to accept bargain outlet stores selling cigarettes long after they’ve been proved deadly to individual health and the social environment, usurious rates charged to the working poor in order to get cash advances on paychecks which are too little to meet expenses anyway, and higher costs for health care and insurance with less means for people to afford them. Previously reliable auto producers have to recall hundreds of thousands of unsafe vehicles, food supplies are regularly found tainted by contaminants and hospitals are killing more people than the nation’s traffic wars which take an average of almost one hundred lives a day. As fossil fuels become a greater environmental problem , public transit services are cut forcing more into their cars and furthering the use of fossil fuels .
And all this while we spend trillions for war, a stock market “recovers”, millions are newly unemployed and bank executives receive bonus checks which are paid for with massive loans from the working population.
An individual experiencing such contradictory behavior would be diagnosed as clinically insane and placed under protective control. In our political economic anarchy, no such power exists except for the most antidemocratic and totalitarian minority force of corporate capital.
We’re not only being victimized by shoddy material goods but even more by the Schlock Doctrine’s invasions of our collective consciousness. The propaganda machine that works to keep us fearing imaginary menaces outside while camouflaging the malfunctions of our internal system is working overtime to get us into a new war. The death profiteers who no longer have Soviet Communism to use as demonized source of evil switched to terrorism after 9/11, and none more so than the American protectors of israel who guided us into the Iraqi bloodbath and are now working more feverishly to destroy Iran. The mental garbage we have consumed about that nation and its leader would manifest as the largest dump of decomposed excrement imaginable if it assumed material form. Its putrid stench would make the world’s six billion people gag , yet this nation allows its fanatically perverse creators to continue running foreign policy. That could lead to a horror beyond anything yet experienced, and not only for the nation and people of Iran.
Whether we consider the impact on raw nature or in its reshaped form under human hands, it should be clear that continued total reliance on the private market mechanism could lead to total oblivion of the human social organism. That’s if we’re able to analyze and understand the evidence. Under the reign of the Schlock Doctrine it can seem that dumb conservatives, wimpy liberals, killer terrorists or evil spirits are mucking things up and as soon as we can produce more green garbage without interference from market molesters and do so in a diverse, multi cultural way, everything will be just fine.
Under present circumstances of a growing sense of social breakdown with little understanding of why it is happening, the least damaging outcome may be for a procession of millions of Americans openly carrying guns while angrily marching to city hall to marry their gay dogs. Or cats.
The state of emergency established by Bush neoconservatives has been extended by Obama neoliberals to help the market create more schlock for everyone else to consume. More than 700 foreign bases with more than a quarter million troops employed by taxpayers to maintain an imperial order that threatens to crumble on our heads, and we are urged to continue shopping for success that insures failure. Even in our confusion we‘re becoming aware that serious changes must be made not only for the survival of our nation, but of our world. Other national groups are ahead of us in realizing that systemic change is needed, but if our general sense of unease and physical failure are understood in time, we may still catch up and even overtake the rest of the world in moving towards salvation through material transformation. We can only hope that further forms of shock therapy are not needed to bring about real change in the Schlock Doctrine by which we are presently controlled. How much more war and recession can we tolerate? Don’t ask, just rebel.
* merchandise of very low quality or value
Copyright (c) 2010 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
The Open Fly Front
The Open Fly Front
The Open Carry gun movement has inspired a newer group of men to demand the right to appear in public with their pants unzipped. This Open Fly movement has caught authority with its pants down, since constitutional law doesn't seem to cover this aspect of freedom, which is being used by an even more vociferous group of rights-demanding American men. Legalienate interviewed the chairman of the New York chapter of Proudly Unzip That Zorch (Putz) at his home in Queens.
What has motivated you to demand this right to go out in public with your pants unzipped?
Anger around this issue has been building since Bill Clinton disgraced the country with his unmanly policies - like queers in the military and "No Fly" zones in Iraq. We want "Pro Fly" zones, not "No Fly" zones. We think it is time for American men to boldly present their manhood, or at least show that it is at hand for any emergency. We think that the sight of manly men with their pants opened and at the ready for exposure will help breed the respect, pride, and masculinity stolen from us by sissy culture.
Were you provoked by the Open Carry movement which has claimed the right to openly show a gun as long as it is unloaded?
We actually want to go one better because we feel the Open Carry movement is much less manly then our demand for Open Fly. In fact, I’ve long believed that men who need to show a gun are probably lacking in balls, and therefore need the feeling of comfort and security they get from carrying a fake weapon. We members of PUTZ, on the other hand, have got the real thing, always loaded, and we’re ready to flash it, expose it and use it at a moment's notice. That’s why we want to keep our flies open when we are in public, so that anyone who sees us knows that we are red-blooded American men who will respond as such in an instant, if provoked.
What does the law say about this?
There are laws against indecent exposure, but we will not expose ourselves unless there is a critical situation that demands it, in which case it becomes decent. So having an open fly is protected by law since it isn't prevented by law.
What would be a situation to cause you and other members to, uh, flash your members?
Well, if a terrorist or homosexual, for instance, was creating a problem, PUTZ members in the area could instantly expose their manly genitals and quickly bring the situation under control.
How?
Well we know that terrorists are horrified by the sight of the human body, especially a bold American male genital organ, and homosexuals would be even more scared at the sight of a real man.
Really? You don't think a homosexual man might be excited by such a sight?
Uh.... . . maybe we need to rethink that one a little bit. But anyway, those terrorists are mostly heterosexual. Why would they want all those virgins at death unless they were heteros? More important is the fact that our movement is part of a rising up of Americans, especially men, who are pushing for a spurt of real change in a nation that has not only lost its way in the last few years but seems to have lost its masculinity as well. Our thrust is to prick holes in sissy culture by mounting an offensive for a re-birth of American freedom through proudly unzipping our flies and letting air into our pants while simultaneously airing out the American system of democracy which seems to have fallen into a socialistic communistic way of life that threatens our heritage, our future, and our sacred honor. We can't lick our enemies by remaining soft.
So you see going out in public with your fly open as a way of bringing about the change you think we need. How do you feel about other changes being called for, along with Open Carry, like gay marriage and the rejection of Don't ask Don’t tell in the military?
We think Open Carry and Open Marry are aspects of the same destructive, anti-real man culture, and the military rejection of red blooded heroic manly killers stems from the same communist-socialist plot to subvert our Founding Fathers and their dream of a nation of manly rich men in powdered wigs and corsets who owned slaves and kept women and made this country the great and powerful nation it has become. We say, Unzip for Freedom and let it All hang Out. But only if provoked, of course. We are law abiding citizens.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Must We Loathe David Irving?
by Michael K. Smith
"The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data. The definition of 'important,' of course, depends on one's values."
------Howard Zinn, Failure To Quit
This year marks the tenth anniversary of the David Irving - Deborah Lipstadt libel trial. Irving sued Lipstadt and Penguin Books for having called him a "Holocaust Denier" as part of what he claimed was a campaign to ruin his reputation. In his opening statement to the court, he complained that the label Holocaust Denier was a "verbal yellow star," designed to destroy him for being an enemy of what Norman Finkelstein has termed "The Holocaust Industry."
Judge Charles Gray did not agree with Irving, but one hardly needs the sanction of judicial opinion to recognize that the Holocaust Denier label is intended to discredit, not illuminate, in the same way that "nigger" is. What would it mean to prove to the satisfaction of a court that someone "really was" a nigger? Only that racism was alive and well in the judicial system. In a similar way, the court's decision against Irving represents complicity in the demonization of Holocaust heretics, not a victory for history and truth, as was claimed by the capitalist media in the wake of the trial.
No one survives having the denier label affixed to his work, even when one accepts, as Irving does, that the Nazis inflicted appalling carnage on European Jews during World War II. The point of this defamatory label is not the preservation of historical truth (as though historians didn't regularly falsify history to advance the interests of favored states), but the destruction of official enemies. As the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci put it, intellectuals are "experts in legitimation," not scholarship, and historical fact is quite beside the point. Irving had to be "delegitimized" not for his historiography but because he publicly challenged the Holy Trinity of what has become a Holocaust religion: (1) homicidal gas chambers (2) the six million (3) intention to exterminate. The Holocaust Industry does not allow anyone to get away with that.
Predictably, the highlight of the case was Auschwitz and the homicidal gas chambers that are said to have existed there. Irving expressed skepticism that there had been any, while defense attorney Richard Rampton flatly rejected the idea that he had any obligation to build an affirmative case for them:
“I am not here to prove that Auschwitz had gas chambers, homicidal gas chambers. I do not need to do that. If you . . . have an open mind and you look at the convergence of evidence - eyewitness testimony from victims, perpetrators, and the contemporaneous documentary evidence and the archeological remains - you are going to conclude, as a matter of probability at the very least, that indeed what the eyewitnesses tell us is true."
Of course, as my co-blogger Frank Scott points out, this is magical thinking, and a prescription for reducing history to mythology, to wit:
"I am not here to prove that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. I do not need to do that. If you . . . have an open mind and you look at the convergence of evidence - eyewitness testimony from those who saw the empty tomb, Roman perpetrators of the murder, and the contemporaneous documentary evidence and the archeological remains - you are going to conclude that what the Bible tells us is true."
In the text of his decision Judge Gray admitted he was predisposed to believe in homicidal gas chambers (both sides in the Holocaust controversy agree that there were gas chambers to control disease). “I have to confess that, in common I suspect with most other people," wrote Gray, "I had supposed that the evidence of mass extermination of Jews in the gas chambers at Auschwitz was compelling.” The judge would have rendered a great public service had he inquired into exactly why a majority of people had come to believe in something whose material basis Gray himself admitted was largely absent. In any case, his predisposition to believe combined with the vast manpower advantage enjoyed by Lipstadt and Penguin Books, made the trial's outcome easy to predict.
To arrive at the conclusion that homicidal gas chambers existed, the judge accepted the legitimacy of a David Ray Griffin-style "cumulative proof," which dispensed with the need to find or cite direct evidence - a great convenience. Thus, the defense did not have to suffer the embarrassment of being unable to produce photographs of the homicidal gas chambers or their physical remains, nor contemporary German documents discussing the myriad complexities involved in (allegedly) systematically exterminating millions of people with an industrial assembly line of death.
In effect, the judge asserted that since solid evidence for the homicidal gas chambers was lacking, flimsy evidence would have to do. “The consequence of the absence of any overt documentary evidence of gas chambers at these camps, coupled with the lack of archeological evidence, means that reliance has to be placed on eyewitness and circumstantial evidence . . .”
But of course no one has to grant eyewitness testimony and circumstancial evidence the power to decide the case. After all, a cumulative proof based on inferential speculation is not nearly as convincing as an argument employing direct evidence, and it is curious that an alleged program of industrial extermination should be so lacking in such evidence. Judge Gray, who appeared eager to avoid having to judge historical questions, missed an opportunity to sidestep the thorny gas chamber question by pointing out the dubious nature of a cumulative proof.
Instead, he endorsed a speculative case based squarely on circumstantial evidence and eyewitness testimony, much of it patently ridiculous, which concluded that there "must have been" homicidal gas chambers. Accepting the validity of "must have been," of course, requires a certain leap of faith, which the trial's much invoked "objective, fair-minded historian" should not have required.
Judge Gray asserted that there was a "convergence" of evidence "which is to the ordinary, dispassionate mind overwhelming that hundreds of thousands of Jews were systematically gassed to death at Auschwitz." But in the very next breath he issued a qualification that ought to be posted at the entrance of every Holocaust museum in the world: ". . . the contemporaneous documents, such as drawings, plans, correspondence with contractors and the like, yield little clear evidence of the existence of gas chambers designed to kill humans. Such isolated references to the use of gas as are to be found amongst these documents can be explained by the need to fumigate clothes so as to reduce the incidence of diseases such as typhus." It's a wonder Lipstadt didn't accuse the judge of being a Holocaust Denier.
As for the eyewitness evidence, even the Lipstadt-Penguin team had to concede that it was not exactly sound. “The Defendants recognise that not all of the evidence which I have sought to summarise above is altogether reliable," wrote Judge Gray. "This applies with particular force to the evidence of the eye-witnesses.” He found that "witnesses may have repeated and even embellished the (invented) accounts of other witnesses with the consequence that a corpus of false testimony is built up." Nevertheless, he concluded that the "cumulative effect of the documentary evidence for the genocidal operation of the gas chambers at Auschwitz is considerable." How a stream of evidence heavily contaminated by "false testimony" leads an unprejudiced mind to belief rather than skepticism was left rather unclear by the judge.
Irving tried to get the case back on a material footing, but judge Gray rejected his contention that the absence of (venting) holes in the roof of the morgue at Auschwitz's crematorium 2 meant that no mass gassing operation could have taken place there. ". . . the apparent absence of evidence of holes in the roof at crematorium 2 falls short of being a good reason for rejecting the cumulative effect of the evidence on which the Defendants rely." (emphasis added.) Defense witness Robert Jan van Pelt suggested that the holes were cemented in in the fall of 1944. Irving responded scathingly: "So what you are saying is with the Red Army just over the River Vistula ever since November 1944 and about to invade and the personnel of Auschwitz concentration camp in a blue funk and destroying their records and doing what they can, some SS Rottenfuhrer has been given the rotten job of getting up there with a bucket and spade and cementing in those four holes - in case after we have blown up the building they show?"
On the issue of intentionality, the judge disagreed with Irving about Hitler allegedly not knowing about the "extermination" of the Jews. He claimed that Irving's ideological convictions distorted his historical findings, allegedly on purpose.
If indeed Irving was guilty of this, that makes him very much like historians in general, who regularly falsify the historical record to protect the reputation of their favored states, often quite deliberately. Consider the fact that American historians - for 200 years! - didn't even mention that Washington deliberately destroyed North American Indian nations.
That's deliberate falsification.
There are plenty of other examples.
What about the six million? Holocaust death tolls were calculated in the aggregate, based on estimated population sizes. Wrote Judge Gray: “(Christopher) Browning advanced what is in effect a demographic argument in support of the Defendants’ contention that Jews were exterminated in the gas chambers at the death camps in vast numbers. He calculated the approximate number who were deported from western European countries and removed from the ghettos of Poland; he asserted that contemporaneous evidence proves that many of them were transported to Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka . . ." Those unaccounted for were presumed dead in the Holocaust. ". . . since they were never heard of again, Browning considers it reasonable to infer that they were put to death in the camps” (emphasis added).
But how accurate were the "estimated" population sizes and the "approximate" number of deportees? Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem claims it has the names of three million European Jews who died during WWII - including those who died from natural causes - which constitutes only half of the deaths routinely attributed to the Holocaust. What about the other half? Irving claimed that the Jewish death toll at the hands of the Nazis was between one and four million. Since the upper end of his range exceeds the numbers from Yad Vashem, why is his view considered scandalous? Furthermore, presumed dead is not the same as proven murdered, much less "exterminated" in gas chambers. There are many ways to die, especially in a war zone.
The defense attempted to prove that Irving not only distorted and falsified history, but that he did so from a motive to rehabilitate and resuscitate Nazism. (The hysteria that "it" is about to happen again is routinely used to deflect serious questions about what exactly "it" refers to in the first place.) But Judge Gray stated that, though racist, Irving was not guilty of inciting racist violence. “I accept that Irving is not obsessed with race. He has certainly not condoned or excused racist violence or thuggery. But he has on many occasions spoken in terms which are plainly racist.”
If true, this makes him much like Lipstadt, who opposes intermarriage and condones the founding of a Jewish apartheid state on Palestinian land. Unlike democratic states, Israel is not the state of its citizens, but the state of the Jewish people wherever they happen to be. The Palestinian Arabs are just in the way. Hence the genocidal attempt to eradicate their culture, which is a means of getting them to "voluntarily" leave, so they can be replaced by Jewish immigrants from around the world. In short, Lipstadt's racism supports the infliction of a massive injustice, while Irving's does not.
Furthermore, nothing could have been more ironic than the defense's attempt to smear Irving as an unreconstructed Nazi, dedicated to resurrecting the Hitler regime. For while Irving did nothing more serious than give talks, Germany led a successful campaign in the Balkans throughout the 1990s to promote ethnic homogeneity by force, a bedrock Nazi principle, ultimately dismembering Yugoslavia into ethnic statelets under foreign control, a policy which was (1) illegal (2) based on a demonized caricature of the Serbs that showed a striking resemblance to Nazi propaganda in the 1940s (3) carried out in alliance with the descendants of Hitler's Muslim and Croatian allies, justly famous for drug trafficking, kidnapping, rape, and murder.
In 1999, just months before the Lipstadt-Irving trial began the Luftwaffe bombed Yugoslavia on the pretext that Germany was overcoming its evil past and becoming a "normal nation" (i.e., an aggressive one) by attacking a Serbian Hitler (Slobodan Milosevic) who was allegedly committing genocide, though the fact of the matter was that there were no refugees during the last five months of peace and the internally displaced persons fleeing the three-way ethnic conflict numbered only a few thousand. But in the cartoon-like morality play shown on Western T.V., the Serbs were cast as Oriental barbarians, while the Croats and Muslims starred as their perpetually innocent victims.
German leaders announced that precisely because of the German role in the Holocaust, they had to abandon Berlin's pledge to forever renounce the use of military intervention abroad. This so-called humanitarian imperialism, noted author Diana Johnstone, expressed "perfect continuity with the most aggressive traditions of German policy toward the Balkans as practiced by Berlin in two world wars." In particular, the round condemnation of an entire ethnic group (Serbs) was "reminiscent of the pre-war propaganda against the Jews," she wrote.
But at the Irving-Lipstadt trial the judge and the general public were led to believe that David Irving was the real Nazi, because he gave a speech that inspired a group of skinheads to shout "Sieg Heil." Ask Yugoslavians if they think this is worse than the bombing campaign that destroyed their houses, old-age homes, hospitals, outdoor markets, buses, trains, columns of fleeing refugees, and the Chinese Embassy.
The fact of the matter is, there is no reason to accept the demonized image of Irving handed on to us by his political enemies. Moreover, even they concede that his efforts have contributed to the development of fresh historical research. Defense witness Christopher Browning, for example, admitted to Irving that his book, Hitler's War, "was the impetus for research . . . on decision-making process and Hitler's role." Meanwhile, Judge Gray had considerable praise to offer Irving the military historian:
Furthermore, the idea that an ideologically committed historian is intrinsically more susceptible to historical falsification is unfounded. As Michael Parenti, a firmly committed anti-capitalist and an outstanding scholar puts it:
And it is David Irving and the Holocaust revisionists who have in their partisan urgency revealed a Holocaust dogma masquerading as history. We needn't loathe them. In fact, we ought to help them, for who fails to benefit when the layers of legend and myth encrusting our history are peeled away?
Sources:
Justice Charles Gray, David Irving Vs. Penguin Books Ltd. and Deborah Lipstadt, April 11, 2000
D. D. Guttenplan, The Holocaust On Trial, (Granta Books, 2001)
Diana Johnstone, Fool's Crusade - Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions, (Monthly Review, 2002)
Michael Parenti, To Kill A Nation - The Attack on Yugoslavia, (Verso, 2000)
Michael Parenti, Against Empire (City Lights, 1995)
Daniel McGowan, "What Does Holocaust Denial Really Mean?" Dissident Voice, February 17, 2009
Mark Weber, "After the Irving-Lipstadt Trial: New Dangers and Challenges," Institute for Historical Review
Mark Weber, "Opportunity and Challenge in a New Era," Institute For Historical Review
"The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data. The definition of 'important,' of course, depends on one's values."
------Howard Zinn, Failure To Quit
This year marks the tenth anniversary of the David Irving - Deborah Lipstadt libel trial. Irving sued Lipstadt and Penguin Books for having called him a "Holocaust Denier" as part of what he claimed was a campaign to ruin his reputation. In his opening statement to the court, he complained that the label Holocaust Denier was a "verbal yellow star," designed to destroy him for being an enemy of what Norman Finkelstein has termed "The Holocaust Industry."
Judge Charles Gray did not agree with Irving, but one hardly needs the sanction of judicial opinion to recognize that the Holocaust Denier label is intended to discredit, not illuminate, in the same way that "nigger" is. What would it mean to prove to the satisfaction of a court that someone "really was" a nigger? Only that racism was alive and well in the judicial system. In a similar way, the court's decision against Irving represents complicity in the demonization of Holocaust heretics, not a victory for history and truth, as was claimed by the capitalist media in the wake of the trial.
No one survives having the denier label affixed to his work, even when one accepts, as Irving does, that the Nazis inflicted appalling carnage on European Jews during World War II. The point of this defamatory label is not the preservation of historical truth (as though historians didn't regularly falsify history to advance the interests of favored states), but the destruction of official enemies. As the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci put it, intellectuals are "experts in legitimation," not scholarship, and historical fact is quite beside the point. Irving had to be "delegitimized" not for his historiography but because he publicly challenged the Holy Trinity of what has become a Holocaust religion: (1) homicidal gas chambers (2) the six million (3) intention to exterminate. The Holocaust Industry does not allow anyone to get away with that.
Predictably, the highlight of the case was Auschwitz and the homicidal gas chambers that are said to have existed there. Irving expressed skepticism that there had been any, while defense attorney Richard Rampton flatly rejected the idea that he had any obligation to build an affirmative case for them:
“I am not here to prove that Auschwitz had gas chambers, homicidal gas chambers. I do not need to do that. If you . . . have an open mind and you look at the convergence of evidence - eyewitness testimony from victims, perpetrators, and the contemporaneous documentary evidence and the archeological remains - you are going to conclude, as a matter of probability at the very least, that indeed what the eyewitnesses tell us is true."
Of course, as my co-blogger Frank Scott points out, this is magical thinking, and a prescription for reducing history to mythology, to wit:
"I am not here to prove that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. I do not need to do that. If you . . . have an open mind and you look at the convergence of evidence - eyewitness testimony from those who saw the empty tomb, Roman perpetrators of the murder, and the contemporaneous documentary evidence and the archeological remains - you are going to conclude that what the Bible tells us is true."
In the text of his decision Judge Gray admitted he was predisposed to believe in homicidal gas chambers (both sides in the Holocaust controversy agree that there were gas chambers to control disease). “I have to confess that, in common I suspect with most other people," wrote Gray, "I had supposed that the evidence of mass extermination of Jews in the gas chambers at Auschwitz was compelling.” The judge would have rendered a great public service had he inquired into exactly why a majority of people had come to believe in something whose material basis Gray himself admitted was largely absent. In any case, his predisposition to believe combined with the vast manpower advantage enjoyed by Lipstadt and Penguin Books, made the trial's outcome easy to predict.
To arrive at the conclusion that homicidal gas chambers existed, the judge accepted the legitimacy of a David Ray Griffin-style "cumulative proof," which dispensed with the need to find or cite direct evidence - a great convenience. Thus, the defense did not have to suffer the embarrassment of being unable to produce photographs of the homicidal gas chambers or their physical remains, nor contemporary German documents discussing the myriad complexities involved in (allegedly) systematically exterminating millions of people with an industrial assembly line of death.
In effect, the judge asserted that since solid evidence for the homicidal gas chambers was lacking, flimsy evidence would have to do. “The consequence of the absence of any overt documentary evidence of gas chambers at these camps, coupled with the lack of archeological evidence, means that reliance has to be placed on eyewitness and circumstantial evidence . . .”
But of course no one has to grant eyewitness testimony and circumstancial evidence the power to decide the case. After all, a cumulative proof based on inferential speculation is not nearly as convincing as an argument employing direct evidence, and it is curious that an alleged program of industrial extermination should be so lacking in such evidence. Judge Gray, who appeared eager to avoid having to judge historical questions, missed an opportunity to sidestep the thorny gas chamber question by pointing out the dubious nature of a cumulative proof.
Instead, he endorsed a speculative case based squarely on circumstantial evidence and eyewitness testimony, much of it patently ridiculous, which concluded that there "must have been" homicidal gas chambers. Accepting the validity of "must have been," of course, requires a certain leap of faith, which the trial's much invoked "objective, fair-minded historian" should not have required.
Judge Gray asserted that there was a "convergence" of evidence "which is to the ordinary, dispassionate mind overwhelming that hundreds of thousands of Jews were systematically gassed to death at Auschwitz." But in the very next breath he issued a qualification that ought to be posted at the entrance of every Holocaust museum in the world: ". . . the contemporaneous documents, such as drawings, plans, correspondence with contractors and the like, yield little clear evidence of the existence of gas chambers designed to kill humans. Such isolated references to the use of gas as are to be found amongst these documents can be explained by the need to fumigate clothes so as to reduce the incidence of diseases such as typhus." It's a wonder Lipstadt didn't accuse the judge of being a Holocaust Denier.
As for the eyewitness evidence, even the Lipstadt-Penguin team had to concede that it was not exactly sound. “The Defendants recognise that not all of the evidence which I have sought to summarise above is altogether reliable," wrote Judge Gray. "This applies with particular force to the evidence of the eye-witnesses.” He found that "witnesses may have repeated and even embellished the (invented) accounts of other witnesses with the consequence that a corpus of false testimony is built up." Nevertheless, he concluded that the "cumulative effect of the documentary evidence for the genocidal operation of the gas chambers at Auschwitz is considerable." How a stream of evidence heavily contaminated by "false testimony" leads an unprejudiced mind to belief rather than skepticism was left rather unclear by the judge.
Irving tried to get the case back on a material footing, but judge Gray rejected his contention that the absence of (venting) holes in the roof of the morgue at Auschwitz's crematorium 2 meant that no mass gassing operation could have taken place there. ". . . the apparent absence of evidence of holes in the roof at crematorium 2 falls short of being a good reason for rejecting the cumulative effect of the evidence on which the Defendants rely." (emphasis added.) Defense witness Robert Jan van Pelt suggested that the holes were cemented in in the fall of 1944. Irving responded scathingly: "So what you are saying is with the Red Army just over the River Vistula ever since November 1944 and about to invade and the personnel of Auschwitz concentration camp in a blue funk and destroying their records and doing what they can, some SS Rottenfuhrer has been given the rotten job of getting up there with a bucket and spade and cementing in those four holes - in case after we have blown up the building they show?"
On the issue of intentionality, the judge disagreed with Irving about Hitler allegedly not knowing about the "extermination" of the Jews. He claimed that Irving's ideological convictions distorted his historical findings, allegedly on purpose.
If indeed Irving was guilty of this, that makes him very much like historians in general, who regularly falsify the historical record to protect the reputation of their favored states, often quite deliberately. Consider the fact that American historians - for 200 years! - didn't even mention that Washington deliberately destroyed North American Indian nations.
That's deliberate falsification.
There are plenty of other examples.
What about the six million? Holocaust death tolls were calculated in the aggregate, based on estimated population sizes. Wrote Judge Gray: “(Christopher) Browning advanced what is in effect a demographic argument in support of the Defendants’ contention that Jews were exterminated in the gas chambers at the death camps in vast numbers. He calculated the approximate number who were deported from western European countries and removed from the ghettos of Poland; he asserted that contemporaneous evidence proves that many of them were transported to Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka . . ." Those unaccounted for were presumed dead in the Holocaust. ". . . since they were never heard of again, Browning considers it reasonable to infer that they were put to death in the camps” (emphasis added).
But how accurate were the "estimated" population sizes and the "approximate" number of deportees? Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem claims it has the names of three million European Jews who died during WWII - including those who died from natural causes - which constitutes only half of the deaths routinely attributed to the Holocaust. What about the other half? Irving claimed that the Jewish death toll at the hands of the Nazis was between one and four million. Since the upper end of his range exceeds the numbers from Yad Vashem, why is his view considered scandalous? Furthermore, presumed dead is not the same as proven murdered, much less "exterminated" in gas chambers. There are many ways to die, especially in a war zone.
The defense attempted to prove that Irving not only distorted and falsified history, but that he did so from a motive to rehabilitate and resuscitate Nazism. (The hysteria that "it" is about to happen again is routinely used to deflect serious questions about what exactly "it" refers to in the first place.) But Judge Gray stated that, though racist, Irving was not guilty of inciting racist violence. “I accept that Irving is not obsessed with race. He has certainly not condoned or excused racist violence or thuggery. But he has on many occasions spoken in terms which are plainly racist.”
If true, this makes him much like Lipstadt, who opposes intermarriage and condones the founding of a Jewish apartheid state on Palestinian land. Unlike democratic states, Israel is not the state of its citizens, but the state of the Jewish people wherever they happen to be. The Palestinian Arabs are just in the way. Hence the genocidal attempt to eradicate their culture, which is a means of getting them to "voluntarily" leave, so they can be replaced by Jewish immigrants from around the world. In short, Lipstadt's racism supports the infliction of a massive injustice, while Irving's does not.
Furthermore, nothing could have been more ironic than the defense's attempt to smear Irving as an unreconstructed Nazi, dedicated to resurrecting the Hitler regime. For while Irving did nothing more serious than give talks, Germany led a successful campaign in the Balkans throughout the 1990s to promote ethnic homogeneity by force, a bedrock Nazi principle, ultimately dismembering Yugoslavia into ethnic statelets under foreign control, a policy which was (1) illegal (2) based on a demonized caricature of the Serbs that showed a striking resemblance to Nazi propaganda in the 1940s (3) carried out in alliance with the descendants of Hitler's Muslim and Croatian allies, justly famous for drug trafficking, kidnapping, rape, and murder.
In 1999, just months before the Lipstadt-Irving trial began the Luftwaffe bombed Yugoslavia on the pretext that Germany was overcoming its evil past and becoming a "normal nation" (i.e., an aggressive one) by attacking a Serbian Hitler (Slobodan Milosevic) who was allegedly committing genocide, though the fact of the matter was that there were no refugees during the last five months of peace and the internally displaced persons fleeing the three-way ethnic conflict numbered only a few thousand. But in the cartoon-like morality play shown on Western T.V., the Serbs were cast as Oriental barbarians, while the Croats and Muslims starred as their perpetually innocent victims.
German leaders announced that precisely because of the German role in the Holocaust, they had to abandon Berlin's pledge to forever renounce the use of military intervention abroad. This so-called humanitarian imperialism, noted author Diana Johnstone, expressed "perfect continuity with the most aggressive traditions of German policy toward the Balkans as practiced by Berlin in two world wars." In particular, the round condemnation of an entire ethnic group (Serbs) was "reminiscent of the pre-war propaganda against the Jews," she wrote.
But at the Irving-Lipstadt trial the judge and the general public were led to believe that David Irving was the real Nazi, because he gave a speech that inspired a group of skinheads to shout "Sieg Heil." Ask Yugoslavians if they think this is worse than the bombing campaign that destroyed their houses, old-age homes, hospitals, outdoor markets, buses, trains, columns of fleeing refugees, and the Chinese Embassy.
The fact of the matter is, there is no reason to accept the demonized image of Irving handed on to us by his political enemies. Moreover, even they concede that his efforts have contributed to the development of fresh historical research. Defense witness Christopher Browning, for example, admitted to Irving that his book, Hitler's War, "was the impetus for research . . . on decision-making process and Hitler's role." Meanwhile, Judge Gray had considerable praise to offer Irving the military historian:
“My assessment is that as a military historian, Irving has much to commend him. For his works of military history Irving has undertaken thorough and painstaking research into the archives. He has discovered and disclosed to historians and others many documents which, but for his efforts, might have remained unnoticed for years. It was plain from the way in which he conducted his case and dealt with a sustained and penetrating cross-examination that his knowledge of World War 2 is unparalleled. His mastery of the detail of the historical documents is remarkable. He is beyond question able and intelligent. He was invariably quick to spot the significance of documents which he had not previously seen. Moreover he writes his military history in a clear and vivid style. I accept the favourable assessment by Professor Watt and Sir John Keegan of the calibre of Irving’s military history and reject as too sweeping the negative assessment of [defense witness Richard] Evans.”
Furthermore, the idea that an ideologically committed historian is intrinsically more susceptible to historical falsification is unfounded. As Michael Parenti, a firmly committed anti-capitalist and an outstanding scholar puts it:
"Many mainstream academics manifest a remarkable detachment from the urgent realities of the world. What is unsettling is how this is treated as a scholarly virtue. Supposedly such detachment helps them to retain their objectivity. In fact, much of the best scholarship comes from ideologically committed scholars. Thus, it is female and African American researchers who respectively have produced the best work on the oppressions of sexism and racism, areas that their white male colleagues never imagined were fit subjects for study. It is they, in their partisan urgency, who have revealed the unexamined sexist and racist presumptions of conventional scholarship in the sciences and social sciences."
And it is David Irving and the Holocaust revisionists who have in their partisan urgency revealed a Holocaust dogma masquerading as history. We needn't loathe them. In fact, we ought to help them, for who fails to benefit when the layers of legend and myth encrusting our history are peeled away?
Sources:
Justice Charles Gray, David Irving Vs. Penguin Books Ltd. and Deborah Lipstadt, April 11, 2000
D. D. Guttenplan, The Holocaust On Trial, (Granta Books, 2001)
Diana Johnstone, Fool's Crusade - Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions, (Monthly Review, 2002)
Michael Parenti, To Kill A Nation - The Attack on Yugoslavia, (Verso, 2000)
Michael Parenti, Against Empire (City Lights, 1995)
Daniel McGowan, "What Does Holocaust Denial Really Mean?" Dissident Voice, February 17, 2009
Mark Weber, "After the Irving-Lipstadt Trial: New Dangers and Challenges," Institute for Historical Review
Mark Weber, "Opportunity and Challenge in a New Era," Institute For Historical Review
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