Things to consider—

Since early 2011, Obama's been waging proxy war on Syria. Imported death squads masquerade as freedom fighters. The scheme's familiar. It repeats. It reflects US imperialism's dark side. In the 1980s, CIA-recruited mujahideen fighters battled Afghanistan's Soviet occupiers. Ronald Reagan called them "the moral equivalent of our founding fathers." He characterized Contra killers the same way. —Stephen LendmanFor over a century now US ambassadors have acted as fifth columns in the nations they are embedded in, their role chiefly to foster corporate and plutocratic power and coordinate machinations against any truly pro-democratic government.•••••"The dead end identity politics of SF Pride, which sells out a peace hero like Bradley Manning to curry favor with the American ruling class, is what I had in mind. The empire loves your tameness, irrelevance and cowardice, SF Pride. You don’t bother the American ruling class — a five foot two, 105 pound soldier does because he has a conscience and because he didn’t make comfort the guiding principle of his life...." —Randy Shields

topeditor

The mother of all paradoxes

 American "Way of Life", GAITHER STEWART  4 Responses »
Jul 032011
 

FROM OUR ARCHIVES: Articles you missed the first time around.

For most Americans, the defense of “Americanism” is indistinguishable from the defense of capitalism, aka “the free enterprise system”—its favorite euphemism. Only in America can a citizen opposed to capitalism be denounced as “un-American.”

By Gaither Stewart  &  Patrice Greanville
Originally published on 2 August, 2008

A nation of immigrants with an uncertain identity has made America far more susceptible to chauvinist appeals than other modern societies.

The dismal demise of the American Dream (if it ever really existed), the dream not of what we believe it was but of what we wanted to believe it was.  “It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude.” (Aldous Huxley in a 1962 speech at Berkeley)

__________________________________________________

Dateline: (Rome) July 31, 2008  [print_link]

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PHOTO: (Left) JFK, long enshrined as one of America’s best presidents, was a plutocrat in his own right, and a de facto propagandist for the superiority of the “American Way of Life.” No US president could govern (or get elected) on a platform that disparaged individualism, or the core values of capitalism.

IT’S UNDENIABLE THAT THE AMERICAN SOCIAL MODEL (the vaunted “American Way of Life”) is a paradox in the world. All you have to do is look around at other nations and the difference is clear as the Rome sky in July. Even today at the nadir of its profound social crisis because of its flagrant, outright failure, America continues unabashedly to hammer away at its people how fortunate they are, while simultaneously proposing itself to the world as the paradigm, the quintessence, the very epitome of western civilization. Continue reading »

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The True Richard Holbrooke Legacy

 ANNOTATED NEWS  Comments Off
Dec 162010
 
Business Chiefs Gather For GBC Summit In Paris

 

 

Why De mortuis nil nisi bonum must not apply

Dead on December 13 at age 69 after two aorta tear surgeries failed to save him, Western media headlines hailed the man London Guardian writers Ed Pilkington and Adam Gabbat called a “giant of US foreign policy,” saying his loss leaves “a substantial hole to fill.”
______________

By Stephen Lendman | [print_link]

On December 13, New York Times writer Robert McFadden headlined, “Strong American Voice in Diplomacy and Crisis,” saying:

“Mr. Holbrooke was hospitalized on (December 10) after becoming ill. (After two major surgeries, he) remained in very critical condition until his death….A brilliant, sometimes abrasive infighter, he used a formidable arsenal of facts, bluffs, whispers, implied threats and, when necessary, pyrotechnic fits of anger to press his positions.” For good reason, he was nicknamed “The Bulldozer.”

Former CIA officer, turned activist and political critic, Ray McGovern, called him a favorite Democrat party “go-to diplomat for particularly messy conflicts,” like the 1990s Balkans wars and current Afghanistan/Pakistan (Af-Pak) ones “where a strong moral compass was viewed as something of a disqualifier.” (He) was counted on to bulldoze through and over any ethical qualms to achieve what Washington wanted.” He obliged.

Obama called him “a true giant of American foreign policy,” pursuing a belligerent imperial agenda he didn’t mention. Nor did major media reports, presenting their customary sanitized versions of current issues, history, and notable public figures like Holbrooke, misportrayed as heros.

His diplomatic career spanned nearly five decades, first in Vietnam as an Agency for International Development (USAID) representative, then a staff assistant to ambassadors Maxwell Taylor and Henry Cabot Lodge. Re-asssigned to the White House, he served Lyndon Johnson in the same capacity. In the late 1960s, he wrote one volume of the Pentagon Papers, and served as special assistant to Under Secretaries of State Nicholas Katzenbach and Elliot Richardson. He also was a member of the US Delegation to the Vietnam Paris Peace Talks.

In the 1970s, he was a fellow at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, a Peace Corp Director in Morocco, managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, and National Security Affairs coordinator for the Carter/Mondale presidential campaign.

He then became Carter’s Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and held other various public and private positions, including as managing director for Lehman Brothers.

Under Clinton, he was Ambassador to Germany, UN Ambassador, Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, and chief architect of the 1995 Dayton Accords, ending the early 1990s Balkan wars. More on them below. He then served as Clinton’s Special Envoy to Bosnia, Kosovo, and Cyprus. Most recently, he was Obama’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. More on that as well.

The Holbrooke Legacy Media Reports Won’t Explain

Hailed as the architect of the 1995 Dayton Accords, ending the early 1990s Balkan wars, major media reports didn’t explain how it artificially split the former Yugoslav republic in two, establishing the Federation of Bosnia/Herzegovina (the Muslim/Croat alliance) and the Serb Republic of Bosnia/Herzegovina (Republika Srpska).

Also left out was the West’s economic and social assault on Yugoslavia under Slobodan Milosevic. It precipitated civil war, serving as an imperial scheme to divide, conquer, occupy and control. As a result, millions of people remain impoverished. Bosnia is a Western, largely US colony, under NATO military occupation. Its 1999 war of aggression followed. More on it below.

Diana Johnstone wrote the definitive account of the Balkan wars. Her book, “Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions,” is essential reading to understand its causes and long-lasting effects. For the West, it was about deterring Milosevic’s “Greater Serbia” quest, a gross mischaracterization of truth about a war Western powers wanted and initiated, notably Washington and Germany. They encouraged cessation, provoking conflict, then taking credit for ending it. In 1995, Holbrooke served as point man for round one, followed by his role again leading up to NATO’s 1999 war of aggression, concluding its unfinished business.

Milosevic, an opportunistic politician (see photo left), in fact, wanted Yugoslavia’s disintegration prevented. When it happened, he wanted minority Serbs protected, allowed either to stay in Yugoslavia or get autonomy in the newly created rump states. Besides occupation and colonization, Johnstone believes Washington’s aims included:

– preventing a European-backed settlement;

– “assert(ing) its dominance over European allies in the arbitration of European conflicts;” Holbrooke admitted it in his memoirs and played a key role;

– expanding NATO through a new “out of area” humanitarian mission, aka US dominated colonization and military occupation; and

– “gain(ing) influence in the Muslim world by championing the Bosnian Muslims.”

She also called “government by international bureaucracy (a) new trend in the New World Order.” Since Holbrooke’s negotiated Dayton Accords:

“Bosnia-Herzegovina has been ruled by a similar combination: a complicated set of local authorities under the strict supervision of a ‘High Representative’ (a contemporary Proconsul or Viceroy) who can, and does, annul laws adopted by the local democratic institutions or dismiss democratically chosen officials” not in tow with America’s imperial aims.

In other words, it’s a dictatorship portrayed as democracy, the kind Washington disdains and won’t tolerate abroad or at home, never in one of its colonies. 

In his role as Dayton Accords architect, Holbrooke, in fact, helped establish colonial rule and end Yugoslavia’s market socialism experiment, imposing Western-style “free market” harshness, the same type IMF measures spreading mass impoverishment in Europe and America. At the time, Newsweek called the agreement “less (for) peace….than a declaration of surrender,” giving America and NATO full colonial control. Yet Holbrooke was hailed as a peace architect – ending Yugoslav sovereignty at the point of a gun.

Holbrooke’s Role in NATO’s 1999 Serbia/Kosovo Aggression

In October 1998, a NATO air verification mission was agreed to for Kosovo. In November, Holbrooke brokered a framework for a political settlement with Milosevic. A second Verification Mission was then established to assure compliance with UN Security Council Resolutions 1160 and 1199.

As Special Envoy, Holbrooke worked closely with Christopher Hill, chief negotiator of the Rambouillet Agreement, the proximate cause of the 1999 war. In January that year, senior officials of the six “Contact Group” countries (America, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and Italy) held a London peace conference, threatening war unless Yugoslavia complied with stipulated terms. They were coming, the kind no legitimate leader could accept.

In February, Milosevic got them – the Rambouillet Accord. It was an ultimatum he couldn’t accept, a take-it-or-leave-it demand to surrender Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) sovereignty to a NATO occupation force with unimpeded access to its land, airspace and territorial waters, as well as any area or facility therein.  Moreover, it required the FRY to let NATO freely operate outside federal law.

It was an offer designed for rejection, giving a US-led NATO force cause to attack. It followed from March 24 – June 10, 1999, pounding the FRY mercilessly. Around 600 aircraft flew about 3,000 sorties, dropping thousands of tons of ordnance as well as hundreds of ground-launched cruise missiles. Up to then, its ferocity was unprecedented. 

Nearly everything was struck, causing massive destruction and disruption, including known or suspected military sites and targets; power plants; factories; transportation; telecommunications facilities; vital infrastructure, including roads, bridges and rail lines; fuel depots; schools; a TV station; the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade; hospitals; government offices; churches; historic landmarks; and more in cities and villages throughout the country. 

It was a lawless war of aggression portrayed as a humanitarian mission. Holbrooke was instrumental in launching it. It inflicted an estimated $100 billion in damage. A humanitarian disaster resulted. Environmental contamination was extensive. Large numbers were killed, injured or displaced. Two million people lost their livelihoods, many their homes and communities, and for most their futures under continuing military occupation.

Opening an avenue to Eurasia, a permanent US military presence was established, serving America’s broader imperial agenda. Iraq and Afghanistan followed, again bogusly waged on humanitarian grounds.

Holbrooke helped further Washington’s imperial agenda, from Vietnam to the Balkans to Afghanistan and Pakistan, his role as Special Representative from January 26, 2009 until his death.

Publicly his comments were upbeat. Privately, he was frustrated by a corrupt, inept Karzai regime, many US officials, and a conflict no combination of strategy and resources can turn around and win. Before receiving sedation for surgery, family members reportedly said his last words to his surgeon were, “You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.” Perhaps it was his only sensible opinion throughout nearly five decades of public service. Too bad, no one’s listening.

_______________

Senior Editor Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

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Collapsing Empire Watch

 ANNOTATED NEWS, COLUMNS  Comments Off
Oct 262010
 

An empire in free fall, but most Americans are blissfully ignorant or disbelieve the imminence of the catastrophe

By Glenn Greenwald | Salon  October 11, 2010 
________________
It’s easy to say and easy to document, but quite difficult to really internalize, that the United States is in the process of imperial collapse.  Every now and then, however, one encounters certain facts which compellingly and viscerally highlight how real that is.  Here’s the latest such fact, from a new study in Health Affairs by Columbia Health Policy Professors Peter A. Muennig and Sherry A. Glied (h/t):
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[print_link]
In 1950, the United States was fifth among the leading industrialized nations with respect to female life expectancy at birth, surpassed only by Sweden, Norway, Australia, and the Netherlands.  The last available measure of female life expectancy had the United States ranked at forty-sixth in the world.  As of September 23, 2010, the United States ranked forty-ninth for both male and female life expectancy combined.
     Just to underscore the rapidity of the decline, as recently as 1999, the U.S. was ranked by the World Health Organization as 24th in life expectancy. It’s now 49th.  There are other similarly potent indicators.  In 2009, the National Center for Health Statistics ranked the U.S. in 30th place in global infant mortality rates.  Out of 20 “rich countries” measured by UNICEF, the U.S. ranks 19th in “child well-being.”  Out of 33 nations measured by the OECD, the U.S. ranks 27th for student math literacy and 22nd for student science literacy.  In 2009, the World Economic Forum ranked 133 nations in terms of “soundness” of their banks, and the U.S. was ranked in 108th place, just behind Tanzania and just ahead of Venezuela. 
      There is, however, some good news:  the U.S. is now in fifth place in total number of executions, behind only China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and comfortably ahead of Yemen and Sudan, while there are two categories in which the U.S. has been and remains the undisputed champion of the world — this one and this one.  And, of course, the U.S. is not just objectively the greatest country on the planet, but the greatest country ever to exist in all of human history — as Dave Roberts put it in response to these life expectancy numbers:  ”but we’re No. 1 in bestness!” — so we’re every bit as exceptional as ever.

Crossposted with http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/10/11/empire

 

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Making ignorance chic

 COLUMNS  Comments Off
Oct 212010
 

Even dumb blondes used to aspire to knowledge

Maureen Dowd /  Thursday, October 21, 2010
HOLLYWOOD
[print_link]
Casanova’s rule for seduction was to tell a beautiful woman she was intelligent and an intelligent woman she was beautiful. The false choice between intellectualism and sexuality in women has persisted through the ages. There was no more poignant victim of it than Marilyn Monroe.
     She was smart enough to become the most famous dumb blonde in history. Photographers loved to get her to pose in tight shorts, a silk robe or a swimsuit with a come-hither look and a weighty book — a history of Goya or James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or Heinrich Heine’s poems. A high-brow bunny picture, a variation on the sexy librarian trope. Men who were nervous about her erotic intensity could feel superior by making fun of her intellectually.
LEFT: The myth lives on. Paris Hilton’s take on Marilyn’s allure.
     Marilyn was not completely in on the joke. Scarred by her schizophrenic mother and dislocated upbringing, she was happy to have the classics put in her hand. What’s more, she read some of them, from Proust to Dostoyevsky to Freud to Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Lincoln (given to her by husband Arthur Miller), collecting a library of 400 books.
Playwright Miller once called Marilyn “a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.”
     “Fragments,” a new book of her poems, letters and musings, some written in her childlike hand, is affecting. The world’s most coveted woman, a picture of luminescence, was lonely and dark. Thinking herself happily married, she was crushed to discover an open journal in which Miller had written that she disappointed and embarrassed him in front of his intellectual peers.
     “I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.”
     Her friend Saul Bellow wrote that Marilyn “conducts herself like a philosopher.” He observed: “She was connected with a very powerful current but she couldn’t disconnect herself from it,” adding: “She had a kind of curious incandescence under the skin.” LEFT: Marilyn by Avedon. He came closest to capturing her true reality.
     The sad sex symbol is still a candle in the wind. There’s a hit novel in Britain narrated by the Maltese terrier that Frank Sinatra gave her, which she named “Maf,” for Mafia, and three movies in the works about her. Naomi Watts plans to star in a biopic based on the novel “Blonde,” by Joyce Carol Oates. Michelle Williams is shooting “My Week With Marilyn.” Another is based on an account by a former deputy Los Angeles coroner who claims he was forced to change the star’s death certificate to read suicide instead of murder.
     At least, unlike Paris Hilton and her ilk, the dumb blonde of the ’50s had a firm grasp on one thing: It was cool to be smart. She aspired to read good books and be friends with intellectuals. But now another famous beauty with glowing skin and a powerful current, Sarah Palin, has made ignorance fashionable.
You struggle to name Supreme Court cases, newspapers you read and even founding fathers you admire? No problem. You endorse a candidate for the Pennsylvania Senate seat who is the nominee in West Virginia? Oh, well. At least you’re not one of those “spineless” elites with an Ivy League education, like President Barack Obama, who can’t feel anything.
     It’s news to Christine O’Donnell that the Constitution guarantees separation of church and state. It’s news to Joe Miller, whose security guards handcuffed a journalist, and to Carl Paladino, who threatened The New York Post’s Fred Dicker, that the First Amendment exists, even in tea party land. Michele Bachmann calls Smoot-Hawley Hoot-Smalley. Sharron Angle sank to new lows of obliviousness when she told a classroom of Hispanic kids in Las Vegas: “Some of you look a little more Asian to me.”
RIGHT: Lindsay Lohan impersonating Marilyn last February. Beware of imitations.
As Ms. Palin tweeted in July about her own special language: ” ‘Refudiate,’ ‘misunderestimate,’ ‘wee-wee’d up.’ English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!”
     Ms. Palin believes in American exceptionalism. But when it comes to the people running the country, exceptionalism is suspect; leaders should be — as Ms. Palin, Ms. O’Donnell and Ms. Angle keep saying — just like you.
     In Marilyn’s America, there were aspirations. The studios tackled literary novels rather than one-liners like “He’s Just Not That Into You” and navel-gazing drivel like “Eat Pray Love.” Walt Disney’s “Fantasia” paired cartoon characters with famous composers. Even Bugs Bunny did Wagner.
But in Sarah’s America, we’ve refudiated all that.
.
Maureen Dowd is a syndicated columnist for The New York Times.
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Real crossfire: Henwood debates Schiff on the economy

 DI•A•LOG, MEDIA SCUM, THE USA  1 Response »
Oct 202010
 

Schiff Vs. Henwood on Economic Crisis

The Real News Network (TRNN) staged a debate on Oct. 20 between Doug Henwood and Peter Schiff. 

The encounter was moderated by Paul Jay, TRNN’s founder and senior correspondent.

Henwood, on the left,  is the editor and publisher of Left Business Observer, a contributing editor of The Nation, and hosts a radio weekly program called “Behind the News” on WBAI in New York. His most recent book, published in 2003, is called After the New Economy. He is now working on a new book about today’s American ruling class.

 

 

 

 

Unrepentant freemarketer Peter Schiff is the President and Chief Global Strategist of Euro Pacific Capital, a full service registered broker dealer, specializing in foreign securities. Mr. Schiff is the author of four bestselling books, including his latest: “How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes”, and “Crash Proof: How to Profit from the Coming Economic Collapse”, published in 2009.

[flv]http://www.greanvillepost.com/videos/debateSchiff-Henwood1015_med.flv[/flv]

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Dr. J.'s BF Commentary No. 155: The Wages of Hate: The Development of Political Homophobia

 CITIZEN TOOLS, HISTORY, Steven Jonas, THE USA  1 Response »
Oct 202010
 

By Steven Jonas | Crossposted at http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/206

HOMOPHOBIA HAS BEEN AROUND FOR A LONG TIME.  It turns up in the Old Testament of the Bible as well as in the New.  The Republican Religious Right relies on that view in support of its homophobia, and cites chapters and verses in support of it.  (Not every religious scholar agrees with that interpretation of the Bible.  Indeed, Minister Peter Gomes, the well-known gay [and African-American] Baptist long-time director of the Harvard Divinity School, strongly disagrees with it [see Gomes, P.J., "Homophobic? Re-read Your Bible,"  New York Times, August 17, 1992, and Westminster, J., The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022, East Setauket, NY, Thomas Jefferson Press, 1996, pp.155-56]).  
In modern times it was used by the Nazis to promote their ideology once Hitler’s dictatorship had been established.  Indeed, despite the fact  that the head of the Sturmabteilung, the SA, the most prominent pre-1933 Nazi armed force, Ernst Roehm (left), was himself homosexual and Hermann Goering was a cross-dresser, the Nazis went after the gays as their identity group of choice for demonization before they went after the Jews full force.
BELOW: Tyler Clementi (center), a teenage suicide who was outed by tormenting classmates (in picture).
    But the use of homophobia as a direct political weapon, designed to help win elections for a given political party, can be seen to be an invention of the modern US Republican Party.  Consider this from The 15% Solution (pp. 148-49):

    As early as 1985, at a conference entitled ‘How to Win an Election,‘ the future patron of  [the fictional first US fascist President] Jefferson Davis Hague, Newton Gingrich, spoke  about Acquired Immune  Deficiency Syndrome.  ’AIDS,’ as it was known, was a painfully  debilitating condition that almost invariably lead to death.  It was later shown that in  many of its victims AIDS was associated with a wide variety of diseases that generally  weakened the immune system, some of which diseases were sexually transmitted.  However, it had been quite incorrectly thought for quite some time that the appearance of  AIDS had some special linkage to homosexuality.  (The homophobes never abandoned  that view.)

    In any case, in 1985 when Gingrich addressed the issue AIDS presented as a serious  public health threat, one that was poorly understood.  An increasing number of people,  many of them happening to be homosexual, were suffering terribly from the condition.  At  that time, addressing a Right-wing Reactionary political planning conference, the future  speaker of the House of Representatives had this to say about it (The Freedom Writer):   ‘AIDS is a real crisis.  It is worth paying attention to, to study.  It’s something you ought  to be looking at.’
    ’Ah ha,’ you might say, ‘your arch Rightwing Reactionary is showing concern about  AIDS and its victims, and thinks something should be done to deal with it.’  Well-no.  Our  ’Mr. Newt’ as the Right-wing Reactionary political flack Rush Limbaugh inexplicably liked  to call him, was not showing concern about this new disease and its victims.  Rather he  was showing concern about the potential to exploit this growing health and health care  problem for Right-wing political purposes.  For he had gone on to say:
“‘AIDS will do more to direct America (sic) back to the cost of violating traditional  values, and to make America (sic) aware of the danger of certain behavior than  anything we’ve seen. For us, it’s a great rallying cry (emphasis added).’ “
By the 2000s, AIDS had retreated as a major illness in the US, both because of the dying off of susceptibles and because of the development of a series of at least somewhat effective pharmaceuticals to be used in its management.  But political homophobia was well-entrenched within the GOP.  Rather than AIDS, the new representative issue was gay marriage.  Everyone, GOP-er and opponents as well, knew exactly what they were talking about, but since they were supposedly addressing the “institution of marriage,” they could claim that they were not being homophobic, only “defending” the former.  That marriage in the United States is a bimodal institution, both religious and civil, that there is a major body of civil law in each of the 50 states that governs both marriage and its dissolution, that thus the right of gays to marry is covered by the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, has been treated both by the Religious Right and the GOP as totally irrelevant.  (And it is only recently that the gay rights movement itself has finally moved away from “fairness” and “justice” to recognize the centrality of the 14th in protecting their interests.)
    Homophobia is embedded in the US culture.  Indeed the US is the most homophobic country on the planet other than those of the Muslim world.  And so, there is the GOP to exploit it.  In 2004, Karl Rove (left), running a candidate who was getting less and less popular in many quarters, even though he faced a remarkably weak opponent in John Kerry, made a special point of getting an anti-gay marriage of one kind or another onto the ballot in 11 states.  He knew that such an initiative would draw to the polls potential GOP-voters who might otherwise stay at home.  And it worked.  Its use has continued hot and heavy.
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    In 2008, the Mormons, a most solid part of the GOP base as is well-known, organized the “Prop. 8″ political campaign in California to overturn that state’s law legalizing gay marriage.  Their position is well-summarized in a recent statement on the subject by one Boyd K. Packer, the second-highest leader of the Mormon Church who said in a recent sermon that “same-sex attraction is ‘impure and unnatural’ and can be overcome and that same-sex unions are morally wrong” (Human Rights Campaign, hrc@hrc.org, 10/4/10).  Nothing wrong with saying that, or believing, right?  Except that the Mormons use it politically.  And so do the Republicans.
BELOW (right) Proposition 8 supporters rally in Fresno, California, to protest gay marriage. 
    It is interesting to note that while the Mormons rail against homosexuality and politicize the issue as well, they seem to have no problem with a behavior that many find to be morally reprehensible and is in fact illegal, even in Utah: bigamy (in that state and just across the border in certain rural areas of others like Colorado, politely known as polygamy).  There has been a recent flap over the matter due to a reality show that centers on it.  ”However,” Frank Lovece tells us in Newsday of Oct. 7, 2010, “Scott Troxel, spokesman for the state attorney general’s office, told the Daily Herald of Provo, Utah, ‘It has been our office’s position not to pursue cases of bigamy between consenting adults.’ ”  Funny, but the super-sanctimonious Mormon Senator from Utah, Orrin Hatch, surely didn’t take the “if it’s between consenting adults, especially when it’s not illegal, it’s OK” position in the matter of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.
    Here’s the never-married Christine “I’m Not a Witch” O’Donnell, Republican (yes, that’s Republican, not Tea Party, although theirs were the votes that got her the nomination) candidate for the US Senate from Delaware.  ”She’s crusaded to ‘cure’ gays through prayer, insinuated [that] her primary opponent was gay, supported a group who [sic] smeared an openly gay Ambassador candidate as a pedophile [oh by the way, 95% of pedophiles are heterosexual], thinks that the government has spent too much fighting AIDS, and called homosexuality an ‘identity disorder’ ” (Human Rights Campaign, hrc@hrc.org, 10/6/10).
    So where does this all lead?  It’s just politics, no?  Well, no.  We have seen what the politicization of anti-Semitism did in Europe in the last century.  Like homophobia, anti-Semitism had been around for a long time.  It was a societal/repressive weapon wielded by Christian churches for centuries since its invention around the time of St. Augustine in the 4th and 5th centuries, CE.  But it did not come to have a specifically political use, that is to be used to promote certain political programs and to be used as an issue/weapon in political campaigns, until it was specifically developed as such, beginning in Austria in the 1880s, by such figures as Georg von Schoenerer, whom Hitler regarded as an important inspiration.  The Nazi Party ran politically on anti-Semitism, it was fueled by anti-Semitism, its ideology was based in part on the supposition that the Jews were at first “different,” then not worthy of/entitled to citizenship, then “less than human.”  There was a natural progression that proved impossible to stop under the Nazis, that began with politicization of anti-Semitism.
    This is not to say that the palpable politicization of homophobia by the GOP will necessarily to lead to a Nazi-type outcome (although in “The 15% Solution” it does, see chap. 18).  But the danger is there.  The politicization of homophobia makes it “OK” in certain quarters.  And so we have the tragic suicide in New Jersey as the result of homophobic persecution.  That one got a lot of publicity, likely because it occurred in the New York City area and the poor young man jumped to his death off the George Washington Bridge.  It turns out, The Huffington Post reported on October 1, 2010, that there were four similar tragic incidents around the country in the previous three weeks.
    Our country is going down a very dangerous pathway. The German people had an excuse for what happened to them after Hitler took power: it had never happened before.  The American people do not have that excuse.
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STEVEN JONAS, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) and author/co-author/editor of 30 books. In addition to being a columnist for BuzzFlash, Dr. Jonas is also Managing Editor and a Contributing Author for TPJmagazine; a Featured Writer for Dandelion Salad; a Senior Columnist for The Greanville POST; a Contributor to TheHarderStuff newsletter; a Contributor to The Planetary Movement; and a Contributing Columnist for the Project for the Old American Century, POAC.
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