duckdaotsu media arts

BLOOD ON MY HANDS TONIGHT

2011-09-21T22:41:00.000-06:00

Fireworks "stand" Cheyenne, WYO

2011-09-03T15:34:00.000-06:00

hound howling while geese honk in my world (ducks also share)

2011-06-11T22:57:00.000-06:00

my world

2011-06-11T22:53:00.002-06:00

67 Sueños Shows Love for an Undocumented Majority - COLORLINES

2011-05-31T13:24:00.001-06:00

67 Sueños from New America Media on Vimeo.
67 Sueños Shows Love for an Undocumented Majority - COLORLINES

Wednesday, May 25 2011

Over at New America Media’s Youth Outlook, Josue Rojas and Ann Bassette bring us the tale of 67 Sueños, a youth-led collective based in Oakland that strives to tell the stories of everyday young people who are often left out of the national narrative on immigration reform.

The group’s name is a response to a recent report put out by the Migration Policy Institute, which estimates that 67 percent of undocumented youth and young adults wouldn’t qualify for the DREAM Act. Given that stark statistic, the collective’s working to give voice to folks who are neither criminals nor class valedictorians.
“Our young folks don’t want to be separated from their one cousin who did get a 4.0,” says one of the group’s founders. “The struggle is the same struggle, and one deportation in that family effects the entire family.”

please comment on page (link above)

Playing for Change

2011-05-29T16:18:00.000-06:00

Join War Resisters' International!

2011-05-16T13:59:00.000-06:00

Beijing police detain another prominent democracy advocate

2011-04-05T21:27:00.000-06:00

China’s crackdown on free speech and political activists is getting worse. We’ve just learned that Beijing police have detained another prominent democracy advocate, the world-famous artist and nominee for Time Magazine’s 2011 List of Most Influential People, Ai Weiwei, as he tried to board a flight to Hong Kong yesterday.[1]

Fearing that any mention of the revolutions currently sweeping the Middle East might spark similar popular protests in China, the Chinese authorities are cracking down hard. In the past month, dozens of Chinese lawyers, bloggers, and dissidents have been detained or “disappeared” and in less than 24 hours after his arrest, Ai’s name was virtually erased from the Chinese internet.[2]

Today, the UK, Germany, France, and the US all publicly called for Ai’s release, and now it’s time for us to show that the world’s internet users stand with him and the countless number of his compatriots who have been similarly detained. Please sign this urgent petition urging the Chinese government to step up as the global leader it aspires to be, by ending its practice of detaining its critics and attempting to erase them from the internet.

https://www.accessnow.org/deleted-from-the-internet

Following an anonymous post on the US-based site Boxun.com in February calling for a Middle East-style “Jasmine Revolution” in China, Chinese authorities have been cracking down on activists of all stripes, even those who have traditionally been immune from censorship. Indeed, Ai Weiwei (who was not even involved in any of the calls for a Chinese Jasmine Revolution) is known as a Chinese hero and China's most famous artist – his Sunflower Seeds exhibit is at the Tate Modern in London right now and he helped to design the “bird’s nest” stadium used at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Now, the Chinese government is attempting to delete all mention of him from the internet, while restricting the movements of countless others.[3] We need to send a strong message to the Chinese government that security and stability comes from addressing the underlying causes of dissent, not censoring it. Ai and his art could be an international example of China’s growing leadership on the world stage, but instead they’ve decided to erase him from national cultural memory, and thereby diminished their stature in the international community.

https://www.accessnow.org/deleted-from-the-internet

The Chinese government has recently made strides in expanding access to the internet to its citizens, but this crackdown – the worst in at least a decade – is rapidly jeopardizing any progress that has been made. And now in Big Brother fashion, they’re trying to erase all mention of Ai and many others who have spoken out against the regime.

Ai is clear that human rights are not western values, they are universal values. Yet only the most circumspect posts about Ai, such as this one, remain uncensored: “When a fat guy lost his freedom, you said, “It has nothing to do with me, because I’m skinny.” When someone with a beard lost his freedom, you said, “It has nothing to do with me, because I don’t have a beard.” When a man who sells sunflower seeds lost his freedom, you said, “It has nothing to do with me, because I don’t sell sunflower seeds.” When they are after everyone—even the skinny, beardless ones that don’t sell sunflower seeds—there will be no one left to speak for you anymore.”[4]

Please help us free Ai by signing this petition. If enough of us take action now, we can help release him, bring him back to life online, and make sure that Chinese voices of freedom aren’t lost forever.

https://www.accessnow.org/deleted-from-the-internet

With hope,
The Access Team

P.S. World renowned human rights advocate Bianca Jagger has teamed up with Access to help drive this campaign, and we look forward to working with her to deliver your petition to Chinese officials.

[1]http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2058044_2060338_2063019,00.html
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/31/china-disappeared-lawyers?CMP=twt_gu
[3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/31/china-crackdown-on-activists-arrests-disappearances
[4] http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2011/04/ai-weiwei-disturbing-the-peace.html#ixzz1IZXH2EyG

Conscientious objector Halil Savda sentenced to five months imprisonment for solidarity with Israeli conscientious objectors

2011-03-08T17:54:00.000-07:00

conscientious objectors need our support

War
Resisters' International,
London, 07 March 2011

TURKEY: Conscientious objector Halil Savda sentenced to five months imprisonment for solidarity with Israeli conscientious objectors

Halil Savda

Turkish conscientious objector Halil Savda has been finally sentenced on 3 March 2011 to five months' imprisonment for a solidarity statement for Israeli conscientious objectors Itzik Shabbat and Amir Pastar on 1 August 2006.

Halil Savda was initially sentenced on 2 June 2008 by the Sultanahmet 1st Court of First Instance in Istanbul to five months' imprisonment for the press statement (see Bianet, 3 June 2008), but appealed against the sentence. This sentence was now
upheld and finalised by the Court of Appeals.

Various institutions and committees released a press statement to protest
the prison sentences handed down to Halil Savda and other conscientious
objectors. Savda's sentence was upheld and finalized by the Court of Appeals,
Bianet reported on 4 March 2011.

In June 2010, Halil Savda was sentenced in a similar case - a statement in support of then imprisoned
Turkish conscientious objector Enver Aydemir - to six months' imprisonment, together with three co-defendants (see Bianet 18 June 2010). An appeal against this sentence is still pending.

Article 318 of the Turkish Penal Code represents an unfair limitation of the right to freedom of expression in Turkey, and is considered to be in direct breach of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which protect the right to freedom of expression and to which Turkey is a state party.

More information on Article 318 is available at http://www.wri-irg.org/node/3554
.
War Resisters' International calls for letters of protest to the Turkish authorities, and Turkish embassies abroad.

Presidency of the Turkish Republic: Fax +90-312-4271330, email cumhurbaskanligi@tccb.gov.tr.

A protest email to the Turkish President Abdullah Gül can be sent at http://wri-irg.org/node/12315.

Andreas Speck
War Resisters' International

Archives of co-alert can be found at http://wri-irg.org/news/alerts

Support War Resisters' International! Donate today!

“Everywhere you look today there’s a story about Charley (effing) Sheen.”

2011-03-06T22:24:00.003-07:00

“Everywhere you look today there’s a story about Charley (effing) Sheen.”

Yes, that is the the lead line in the story (Under the title of "community news") titled:

Charlie Sheen Doesn't Need 12 Step Recovery

And Says You Don't Either

Many people whose lives have been saved by twelve steps have taken offense to the distasteful way Mr. Sheen quoted (or should I say “misquoted”) out of one of the most recognizable recovery text available around the world. For some it may have felt as if their holiest books had been tossed aside.

But this wasn't the Talmud, the K'oran, or the Bible. It was the Big Book.

Why all the anger and confusion, you ask? I personally know many people whose lives are completely changed by following the twelve steps and twelve traditions of whatever fellowship we find fits us the best. So I get the idea that throwing a book away is really tough to see.

However, these are simply texts written many years ago to help the addict to stay clean.

I am unwilling to depart with my grey form - the precursor to the NA Basic Text. I have shared in many a study hours about the roots of our literature; and been involved with more engaging discussions than I care to mention. But the truth is that the words do make a difference in our lives.

However the actions of recovery speak louder than even Charlie Sheen in a manic state can destroy.

Threatened by someone trashing the steps? Then practice the spiritual principles that the steps and traditions should be teaching you.

Love thy neighbor. Know that there's always going to be a copy of your book available to you. And remember the cliche - there but for the grace of .....

love from this addict in Colorado

A few words shared about the disease of addiction; as well as money, property and prestige ...

2011-03-06T20:03:00.002-07:00

in reply to a copyrighted newsletter that asked for feedback:

The "ridiculous" shows you talk about are the very ones that got me back on the right track after a relapse, and if I remember correctly ITR embraced the interventionists when they got involved with this website.

That said: When Rush Limbaugh admitted his addiction, it was a bit issue with me and the progressive community I am involved with. He is one of my family now. As is said about many situations in the free world "I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to my death your right to say it."

This situation is much more critical than many others. He is dying before our very eyes. I pray that his family gets him on a course of intervention and pray that he finds recovery before he dies.

It's scary watching our own disease manifest itself so loudly and blatantly in front of us, but if you remember THAT IS THE DISEASE OF ADDICTION TALKING and if you think it's gone from your thinking, just look at how disgusted you are about it being everywhere. One finger pointing out leaves three pointing back at you.

Since you took the opportunity to put yourself first and list your accomplishments in the article, I might just say that the article appears to be filled with addictive thinking and that isn't just quoting Charlie Sheen. Who did the photoshopping of the picture? Would you do this with any other family member who desperately needs to get in the rooms of a twelve step fellowship?

When I pray for the sick and suffering addict, I pray for that addict without concern for their social status or wealth, their drug of choice or whether they are living under a bridge or have a bridge named after them.

Anonymity means (among other things) that we are all of one mind, we are all the same, there is no distinction. Principles before personalities comes to mind LOUDLY HERE. You are me and she is we and they are us and WE ARE ALL TOGETHER.

Prayer to all addicts who are still suffering and thank you Craig Ferguson who comes out and says "I won't tell any jokes about people struggling with addiction. It's life and death." Celebrity or not, left or right, regardless of age race creed sexual identity religion or lack of religion -- you are my family.

I live in a world where "when one of us is in pain, we all feel the ramifications of that pain" -- I might be a stranger to you but I will stand up for your right to do whatever it takes to find recovery. God bless family, friends, loved ones and most of all, the addict. Pray Them Up In These Rooms.

I personally keep them on my prayer list (even Limbaugh) cuz I know that tradition TWELVE is one of the most important ones in the book (besides the other eleven). love and respect,

lizzie from Colorado
optimist

A different kind of discussion about Charlie Sheen

2011-03-05T17:52:00.008-07:00

Charlie Sheen is not a joke. His disease is fatal. The fact that the media has put him in the position of power is simply called "enabling" and it must stop. Only one article I've seen lately even hints at the enabling caused by the running-jokes about his demise.

The owners of a popular 12 Step Recovery Website have had their moment making a point of cashing in on Charlie Sheen's meltdown, making me wonder who ISN'T interested in watching this travesty occur before our very eyes.

My discussion on that forum was obviously so clearly stated that it was censored. Even other addicts seem to want to watch the meltdown. How telling the response is to the owners ' dedication to free thought on the site.

Maybe America likes to watch melt-downs. Perhaps people with less money think it's interesting to watch a man who seemingly has everything go off the deep end in a spiral of drugs, alcohol, sex addiction and just plain mania. Whatever the reason, a clear word must be said about making fun of this tragedy.

STOP.

Craig Ferguson has it right. Here's an example of socially-conscious reporting. On a Late-Night Talk Show.

A Casualty

Sheen is just one more casualty in the war on drugs and the media's fascination with celebrity and absurdity. Whatever the reason, this man is very very sick. As a person with the same disease (addiction) I cannot go on watching him become the butt of every one's jokes.

Absolutely — his words have been filled with self-centeredness and his actions show an obsessive and compulsive denial of even being an addict. That is the definition of addiction. Kissing it off to "no one can get help unless they want it" has proved to be a fallacy. Watch a few episodes of "Intervention" to know that the bottoming out process can be lovingly pointed out and orchestrated by those who truly love and care for the addict.

The man might have bi-polar disorder. He certainly looks as if he is close to death. The producer of the hit show that was just canceled as a result of Sheen's antics is one of the few people who have shown they will no longer stand by and watch him crash and burn. The intervention started at that very moment by a man who has obviously seen his share of enabling and co-dependence.

Thank you to the honesty of this Hollywood mover-and-shaker who realized his only chance at getting help for Sheen was to cut the cord.

Martin Sheen has been open about his own struggle with the disease and should know quite well that there is a road to death by this disease and there is a road back called recovery. What I ask now is "Where are the family members? When are they going to step in?" The shame of having an addict in the family can only be measured by how far the family will go to get the addict help. Sheens? Where are you? Do you feel the need to step away from Charlie as he goes through his own personal hell?

I remember reading about and watching Martin Sheen melt down in an early scene in "Apocalypse Now" when he was obviously very drunk and allowed to go the extreme lengths of self-destruction to shoot that scene and to show the horror of a man and his demons. At least M. Sheen was able to see on screen just exactly what meltdown looks like as the director and editor chose to leave the horrific drunken rage in the film, even after being physically attacked during the shooting.

There are no high priced directors and big money backers watching Charlie Sheen melt down. There are only people who will either cheer him on or walk away from him.

This addict embraces her brother in the fellowship of recovery just as much as I embraced Rush Limbaugh into the family. Was that hard to do? No. Did I get a ridiculous amount of flack for supporting him. You bet.

But had it not been for those who stood by me while I was going down and telling me they would not watch me kill myself I would not be here today to write about and for any person enduring this disease. Laugh if you want. But know that there were a great deal of people who enjoyed watching the beheading of Royalty in Britain and the Colosseum spectacles in Rome.

Question is, what does you heart tell you? If you care about your fellow human being, I pray you will stop all Sheen jokes as you hear them being told and remind the joke teller that life and death are no joking matter.

Getting Help

Praying for you Mr. Sheen. May that the next article I read about you not be an obituary. Here's a link you might be interested in... Get Help for Charie Sheen!

genderandmilitarism: The Trials of Pinar Selek

2011-03-05T11:18:00.002-07:00

The Trials of Pinar Selek

by Cynthia Cockburn

Pinar Selek, Turkish feminist and antimilitarist writer and activist, framed on a charge of terrorism, has been the subject of an unresolved legal process for twelve years. On 9 February 2011 she was acquitted for the third time in an Istanbul court. Next day the prosecution appealed for the third time to the Supreme Court to over-rule the finding.This is not justice but judicial bullying.

The experiences of Pinar Selek at the hands of the Turkish judicial system defy understanding. I have just returned from the February 9 hearing of her case in the Istanbul Court. The charge against her is implication in a deadly bomb explosion. The sentence called for is a life term in solitary. I attended the hearing as a representative of War Resisters International, one of a score of international ‘observers’, including several Members of the European Parliament and a representative of Human Rights Watch.

We joined Pinar’s supporters, friends and relatives in the tightly packed public gallery. We watched as the presiding judge heard a cursory presentation of old evidence, retired to deliberate for fifteen minutes, and returned to pronounce the few words necessary to acquit Pinar. There was singing and dancing outside the court as we celebrated the removal of the threat hanging over Pinar. We phoned her in her exile in Germany and said “Come home and join the party tonight, Pinar!” Fortunately, wisely, she hesitated to do so. Twenty-four hours later we were confounded and dismayed to hear that the prosecution had appealed to the Supreme Court for a retrial.

So what is this all about? In 1998, Pinar, then a young feminist sociologist, seeking to understand the motivations of both sides in the enduring armed conflict between the Kurdish minority and the Turkish state, carried out a research project that involved interviewing members of the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. On return she was apprehended by the Turkish security services and, when she refused to reveal the names of her informants, was severely tortured.

A little while before this, an explosion in the Istanbul Spice Bazaar had caused a number of deaths and injuries. Pinar, now conveniently in the hands of the state on account of her research, was a handy suspect ‘bomber’. In the twelve years since that fateful explosion she has been subject to continuous unresolved prosecution. She has been imprisoned for two and a half of those years. During periods of relative freedom, after acquittals and before re-prosecutions, she has founded and been active in a feminist antimilitarist organization, Amargi. Amargi women activists have in turn been at the core of her support group. Recently Pinar, aged 40, has been living the life of an exile in Germany, supported by a grant from International PEN, the worldwide assocation of writers. She is the editor of Amargi Journal and respected for her many analytical articles and books, the most recent of which is a critique of militarized masculinity.

In a succession of court hearings, no credible evidence has ever been produced to suggest that the explosion in the Spice Bazaar was caused by a bomb. On the contrary, the material facts point to a gas leak. The only link between Pinar and the explosion that, for a while, seemed credible, was a confession by a man who named her as his partner in this ‘crime’. At his trial, however, he retracted his statement, which had been obtained under torture. The truth was that he did not even know Pinar. He was acquitted. Pinar however continued to be suspect.

She has been tried twice in the Istanbul local court (in 2006 and 2008) and each time acquitted. On both occasions the prosecution has refused to accept this verdict and appealed to the Supreme Court which has found Pinar guilty of the charges against her and called on the Istanbul Court to re-open the case. The hearing of February 9 was the third occasion the matter has come before the Istanbul Court. February 10 was the third occasion the prosecution has batted the ball back to the higher judiciary in what has become a game of ping-pong that would be a joke were it not so malign. This is not any recognizable judicial process but rather a sustained harassment. In short - bullying.

Poignancy is added to this case by the fact that Pinar Selek’s leading advocate is her father, a respected lawyer. Besides, Pinar’s sister decided to study law in order to pursue justice in the case. She has had ample time in these years to qualify and practise law. I found it very moving to see both family members in court last week, not only reviewing the evidence for the defence but also telling the judge, from their own bitter knowledge, of the psychological trauma being inflicted on Pinar.

The media paid full attention to the court hearing. All the international observers including myself made short statements to the assembled journalists. The case was headlined in the Turkish evening TV news programmes and the newspapers the following day. For twenty-four hours we were hopeful that the knowledge that the world was watching them would be an added prompt to the Turkish judiciary to finally deliver the justice it purports to uphold. But no. The only explanation of its bizarre behaviour is that the trials of Pinar Selek, like several other recent and current cases before the Turkish courts, are in fact designed by the Turkish state for a political purpose - to be an object lesson to anyone who thinks of stepping out of line.

Cynthia Cockburn

Video shows 'US attack' on Iraqis

2010-12-24T15:40:00.000-07:00

Manning Speaks About His Conditions By David House

2010-12-24T15:15:00.002-07:00

December 24, 2010 -- Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old Army private accused of leaking classified information to Wikileaks, has been held in the brig at Quantico Marine Corp Base for five months in inhumane conditions, with severe restrictions on his ability to exercise, communicate, or even sleep. Manning has not been convicted of any crime. Nor is there a date certain for any court hearing.

The conditions of Bradley Manning’s confinement became a top issue in the press last week as bloggers traded blows with US officials over allegations that Manning endures inhumane treatment at the Quantico, VA detainment facility. In the midst of this rush by the Defense Department to contextualize Manning’s confinement, I traveled to see the man himself at the Marine Corps detainment facility in Quantico, VA.

In my visit to see Bradley at the Quantico brig, it became clear that the Pentagon’s public spin from last week sharply contradicts the reality of Bradley Manning’s detainment. In his five months of detention, it has become obvious to me that Manning’s physical and mental well-being are deteriorating. What Manning needs, and what his attorney has already urged, is to have the unnecessary “Prevention of Injury” order lifted that severely restricts his ability to exercise, communicate, and sleep.

My Visits to Manning in Quantico

I am one of the few people allowed to visit Bradley Manning while he is detained in the Quantico brig.

Manning is held in “maximum custody,” the military’s most severe detention policy. Manning is also confined under a longstanding Prevention of Injury (POI) order which limits his social contact, news consumption, ability to exercise, and that places restrictions on his ability to sleep.

Manning has been living under the solitary restrictions of POI for five months despite being cleared by a military psychologist earlier this year, and despite repeated calls from his attorney David Coombs to lift the severely restrictive and isolating order. POI orders are short-term restrictions that are typically implemented when a detainee changes confinement facilities and these orders are lifted after the detainee passes psychological evaluation.

Our conversations, which take place in the presence of marines and electronic monitoring equipment, typically revolve around topics in physics, computer science, and philosophy; he recently mentioned that he hopes to one day make use of the GI Bill towards earning a graduate degree in Physics and a bachelors in Political Science. He rarely if ever talks about his conditions in the brig, and it is not unusual for him to shy away from questions about his well-being by changing the subject entirely.

When I arrived at the brig on December 18th I found him to be much more open to lines of inquiry regarding his circumstances, and in a two and a half hour conversation I learned new details about his life in confinement.

Manning’s Conditions Exposed, Pentagon Goes on Defense

The media skirmishes began on December 15th when Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com published an article stating that Manning’s pretrial confinement conditions are equivalent to solitary confinement. Greenwald based his assertions partially upon written and verbal statements made by Quantico brig official Brian Villiard. The Quantico information office reacted the next day by publishing a statement on Greenwald’s blog entitled “Safety and Security = Job #1 at the Brig” which defended the nature of Manning’s “maximum custody” detainment and distanced his conditions from those of solitary confinement.

The statement reads in part:

A maximum custody detainee is able to receive the same privileges that a detainee classified as general population may receive. … A maximum custody detainee also receives daily television, hygiene call, reading and outside physical activity without restraint.

The Quantico information office also posted a text transcript of Greenwald’s interview with Villiard as purported evidence that Greenwald had misrepresented the facts of Manning’s confinement; this transcript includes Villiard’s official statement regarding Manning’s confinement with particular focus paid to details surrounding Manning’s access to news, adequate exercise, and proper bedding:

Pfc. Manning, as well as every other maximum custody detainee, is allotted approximately one hour of television per day. He may view any of the available channels. …
Pfc. Manning is allotted one hour of recreation time per day, as is every other maximum custody detainee. Depending on the weather, his recreation time may be spend indoors or outdoors. Activities may include calisthenics, running, basketball, etc. …

Pfc. Manning, as well as all other detainees, is issued adequate bedding.

This transcript and the accompanying statement by the Quantico information office were quickly cited in the press as a riposte to Greenwald’s original piece on the conditions of Manning’s confinement.

The Guardian contacted me for a comment about Bradley’s conditions on December 16th. Apart from his attorney, David Coombs, I am the only person that regularly visits Brad in the brig. I gave an interview to the Guardian in which I made my concerns for Bradley’s health known, based on my observations of a decline in his mental well-being and noticeable changes in his physical health due to a complete lack of exercise (more on that later).

The Guardian article ran the following morning, and in the interim the media coverage of the issue intensified. Early Friday, in a likely reaction to mounting press attention, Pentagon spokesperson Col. David Lapan issued a statement that downplayed the isolation aspect of Manning’s confinement while harping on four circumstances that allegedly separate Manning’s detainment from a situation consistent with solitary confinement.

From the Washington Post:

Defense Department spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said Friday that Manning has the same privileges as all other prisoners held in what the military calls “maximum custody.” He said Manning is in a standard single-person cell and gets exercise, recreation, access to newspapers and visitors.

Manning Detained Beyond “Maximum Custody”

The unusual nature of a longstanding POI order and the consequences it carries (such as 23-hour per day cell confinement with no substantive exercise) has led Manning’s lawyer David Coombs to make an uncharacteristic appeal in the press, to halt what he says is punitive pretrial treatment of his client. Coombs appears in an interview with the Daily Beast, released shortly after (and possibly in response to) Lapan’s statement on Friday:

When he was first arrested, Manning was put on suicide watch, but his status was quickly changed to “Prevention of Injury” watch (POI), and under this lesser pretense he has been forced into his life of mind-numbing tedium. His treatment is harsh, punitive and taking its toll, says Coombs.
Both Coombs and Manning’s psychologist, Coombs says, are sure Manning is mentally healthy, that there is no evidence he’s a threat to himself, and shouldn’t be held in such severe conditions under the artifice of his own protection.”

Yes, that was Bradley Manning’s lawyer echoing the concerns of Glenn Greenwald: severe, punitive, solitary treatment under the auspices of protecting Bradley.

Villiard still had one final point to make late last Friday: appearing in the same article as Coombs, Villiard defends Manning’s compulsory alternative bedding, brought about as a condition of the POI, in a statement to the Daily Beast:

First Lieutenant Brian Villiard, an officer at Quantico, said [Manning] is allowed bedding of “non-shreddable” material. “I’ve held it, I’ve felt it, it’s soft, I’d sleep under it,” he told The Daily Beast.

As a final act of public education, attorney David Coombs published a facts-only account of Manning’s detention on his blog last Saturday. The article details a typical day for the Private, and lists the specific conditions that Manning must live under as part of the punitive POI order:

PFC Manning is held in his cell for approximately 23 hours a day.
[]

He is not allowed to have a pillow or sheets. However, he is given access to two blankets and has recently been given a new mattress that has a built-in pillow.

He is not allowed to have any personal items in his cell.

[]

He is prevented from exercising in his cell. If he attempts to do push-ups, sit-ups, or any other form of exercise he will be forced to stop.

He does receive one hour of “exercise” outside of his cell daily. He is taken to an empty room and only allowed to walk. PFC Manning normally just walks figure eights in the room for the entire hour. If he indicates that he no long feels like walking, he is immediately returned to his cell.

When PFC Manning goes to sleep, he is required to strip down to his boxer shorts and surrender his clothing to the guards. His clothing is returned to him the next morning.

This report from Coombs is consistent on each count with the investigative findings of Glenn Greenwald in the December 15 Salon article that broke this story. But there is one potential error: attorney David Coombs’ claim that Manning’s exercise regimen consists of walking circles in an empty room seems to be inconsistent with the Quantico information office’s December 16 statement cited above, which claims that Manning is allowed “outside physical activity without restraint”, and also appears to be inconsistent with Villiard’s December 14 statement that calisthenics, basketball, and running may constitute part of Manning’s exercise. This is likely just some mistake on the part of the brig and Villiard, right?

The only statements I can find from the Department of Defense about this whole issue reinforce the “maximum custody” trope without addressing the administrative solitary confinement that results from the longstanding POI order. Either Brian Villiard, Col. David Lapan, and the Quantico Information Office have somehow never heard of Manning’s POI order, which implies incompetence, or they are skirting around it in the media in order to avoid admitting Manning’s true conditions of confinement, which implies deception. Let’s find out which it is.

Manning’s Reality vs. Pentagon’s Spin

My meeting with Bradley this weekend provided new information to refute the Pentagon’s assertions this week about Bradley’s detention, and that show the Prevention of Injury (POI) order under which Bradley is held and restricted is unnecessary and should be removed.

1 – Ability to View Current Events & Access to Newspapers

“Pfc. Manning, as well as every other maximum custody detainee, is allotted approximately one hour of television per day. He may view any of the available channels.” — Quantico brig official Brian Villiard, Interview with Glenn Greenwald, posted online December 14 2010
“Defense Department spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said Friday that Manning has the same privileges as all other prisoners held in what the military calls “maximum custody.” He said Manning is in a standard single-person cell and gets exercise, recreation, access to newspapers and visitors.” — Col. Dave Lapan, Pentagon Statement released to AP December 17 2010

Manning’s Response

Manning related to me on December 18 2010 that he is not allowed to view international news during his television period. He mentioned that he might theoretically be able to view local news, but his television period is typically from 7pm – 8pm such that no local news is playing in the Quantico, VA area.

Manning told me explicitly on December 18 2010 that he is not, nor has he ever been, allowed newspapers while in confinement. When I said “The Pentagon has stated that you are allowed newspapers”, his immediate reaction was surprised laughter.

Analysis

Villiard skirts the issue of news censorship by playing word games with “available” channels. Two days later Greenwald posts this update to his December 15 2010 Salon article: “I was contacted by Lt. Villiard … he claims that Manning is not restricted from accessing news or current events during the prescribed time he is permitted to watch television.” Although his word games are little more than evasive sophistry, the claim from Villiard to Greenwald that Manning is not denied access to news or current events directly contradicts what Manning clearly related during our December 18 2010 meeting.

Lapan’s December 17 2010 statement encourages the reader that Manning’s conditions are no different than those of anyone else held in maximum custody. In reality, Manning has an extra set of restrictions imposed upon his confinement — the longstanding POI order — that by definition requires Manning to be denied basic exercise and isolated for 23 hours per day. Either Lapan is unaware of the harsh conditions imposed on Manning by a POI, or he is (mistakenly or not) conflating “maximum custody restrictions” with “POI restrictions”, or he is being deceptive to the media and the public about the conditions of Manning’s confinement. Not a lot of good options here.

Lapan’s December 17 2010 statement concludes by claiming outright that Manning has access to newspapers. This contradicts Manning’s explicit statement during our December 18 2010 meeting that he has not, nor has he ever been, allowed newspapers during his time in confinement.

2 – Ability to Engage in Outdoor Recreation

“Depending on the weather, his recreation time may be spend [sic] indoors or outdoors. Activities may include calisthenics, running, basketball, etc.” — Quantico brig official Brian Villiard Interview with Glenn Greenwald, posted online December 14 2010
“A maximum custody detainee is able to receive the same privileges that a detainee classified as general population may receive. … A maximum custody detainee also receives daily television, hygiene call, reading and outside physical activity without restraint.” — Quantico information office Statement posted to Salon.com December 16 2010

Manning’s Response

Manning stated to me on December 18 2010 that he has not been outside or into the brig yard for either recreation nor exercise in four full weeks. He related that visits to the outdoors have been infrequent and sporadic for the past several months.

Analysis

The statement sent by Villiard to Glenn Greenwald on December 14 2010 and later posted to Salon by the Quantico information office implies that Manning has the option to spend time outdoors on days with fair weather. Manning’s assertion in our December 18 2010 meeting that outdoor trips over the last several months have been rare leads me to believe that the claim “Depending on the weather, his recreation time may be spent indoors or outdoors” directly contradicts the reality of Manning’s situation as expressed in his own words.

The statement released by the Quantico information office stating that detainees receive “outside physical activity without restraint” is inconsistent with reports from Manning that outside recreation is sporadic and rare.

3 – Ability to Exercise

“Depending on the weather, his recreation time may be spend [sic] indoors or outdoors. Activities may include calisthenics, running, basketball, etc.” — Quantico brig official Brian Villiard Interview with Glenn Greenwald, posted online December 14 2010
“Defense Department spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said Friday that Manning has the same privileges as all other prisoners held in what the military calls “maximum custody.” He said Manning is in a standard single-person cell and gets exercise, recreation, access to newspapers and visitors.” — Col. Dave Lapan, Pentagon Statement released to AP December 17 2010

Manning’s Response

Manning related to me on December 18 2010 that he does not receive any substantive exercise and cannot perform even basic exercises in his cell. When told of the Pentagon’s statement that he did indeed receive exercise, Manning’s reply was that he is able to exercise insofar as walking in chains is a form of exercise.

Analysis

As Manning stated during our December 18 2010 meeting and as David Coombs confirms in notes on his blog, Manning’s only exercise is walking in an empty room for an hour each day. It is unknown whether Manning’s reference to chains during my meeting with him was meant to imply that he is in chains during his period of circle-walking exercise, or if he was instead referring to the action of wearing chains while being escorted through the halls of the brig. Regardless, it is safe to say that Villiard’s claim of “calisthenics, running, basketball” is every bit as untrue as Lapan’s claim that Manning gets exercise at all — insofar as walking in circles, potentially chained, is exercise.

4 – Conditions of Bedding

Pfc. Manning, as well as all other detainees, is issued adequate bedding.” — Quantico brig official Brian Villiard Interview with Glenn Greenwald, posted online December 14 2010
“…First Lieutenant Brian Villiard, an officer at Quantico, said [Manning] is allowed bedding of “non-shreddable” material. “I’ve held it, I’ve felt it, it’s soft, I’d sleep under it,” he told The Daily Beast.” — Quantico brig official Brian Villard, Interview with Daily Beast, December 17 2010

Manning’s Response

Manning related to me on December 19 2010 that his blankets are similar in weight and heft to lead aprons used in X-ray laboratories, and similar in texture to coarse and stiff carpet. He stated explicitly that the blankets are not soft in the least and expressed concern that he had to lie very still at night to avoid receiving carpet burns. The problem of carpet burns was exacerbated, he related, by the stipulation that he must sleep only in his boxer shorts as part of the longstanding POI order. Manning also stated on December 19 2010 that hallway-mounted lights shine through his window at night. This constant illumination is consistent with reports from attorney David Coombs’ blog that marines must visually inspect Manning as he sleeps.

Analysis

It is apparent from Manning’s description of his bedding and his explicit concern about their propensity to cause carpet burn that Brian Villiard’s statement attesting to the comfort of the bedding is without basis.

It would be useful to determine how many times per night Manning is rousted from sleep as a result of either the blankets, the lights, or the guards. Such an analysis of his sleeping conditions might give insight into his mental state determined by his overall ability to maintain rest in conditions of isolation.

Manning’s POI Order Should Be Lifted Immediately

Based on Bradley Manning’s description of his detention to myself and to his attorney, there are clear, unavoidable contradictions with the Pentagon’s public statements about Manning. Because of the longstanding POI order, Manning is subjected to restrictions far beyond the minimum right of other “maximum custody” prisoners held in the same brig.

Since his arrest Bradley Manning has been neither a threat to himself nor others. Over the course of my visits to see Bradley in Quantico, it’s become increasingly clear that the severe, inhumane conditions of his detention are wearing on Manning. The extraordinary restrictions of Manning’s basic rights to sleep, exercise, and communicate under the Prevention of Injury order are unnecessary and should be lifted immediately.

Please add your name to my letter urging the Quantico Brig Commanding Officer to lift Bradley Manning’s unnecessary POI order. I’ll deliver your signature to the Quantico Brig when I visit Bradley next month.

* Special note: No notepads, pens, phones, tape recorders, or other useful documentation devices are allowed into the brig’s visitation rooms. For this reason the key points of my conversations with Manning, his explicit replies to questions regarding confinement, were temporarily stored mentally through repetition. I am fortunate that many of his replies could be summed up in very few words. When visiting hours conclude I create a voice memo with a brain-dump of the meeting that just took place. I’ll try to get the relevant recordings online in the next few days. Aside from that, I encourage any curious parties to file an FOIA request for the government-curated audio tapes created in brig visitation room #2 on December 18 and December 19 2010 from 1:00pm – 3:00pm.

David House is a researcher at MIT who helped set up the Bradley Manning Support Network, a group raising funds for Manning’s legal defense. Glenn Greenwald has an account here of House being harassed at the border, like others associated in one way or another with Wikileaks.

Bradley Manning Suffering Extreme Isolation Prison Torture by Our Goverment -- Courageous Whistleblower 'Physically Deteriorating'

2010-12-24T13:32:00.003-07:00

Bradley Manning Suffering Extreme Isolation Prison Torture by Our Goverment -- Courageous Whistleblower 'Physically Deteriorating'

Bradley Manning is suffering inhumane isolation in prison that numerous experts say is a form of real torture.

December 23, 2010 |

Last week, Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of giving classified materials to Wikileaks, spent his 23rd birthday in the brig of the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia. He has been convicted of no crime, but endures the kind of highly restrictive detention that's usually reserved for the most dangerous criminals in America's supermax prisons. He is kept isolated in his cell 23 hours a day, where he is cut off from most human contact, denied reading materials and personal items, prevented by the guards from exercising and regularly awakened from his sleep. He has been at Quantico for five months, following two months of detention in Kuwait.

The circumstances of Manning's detention gained prominence last week after Salon's Glenn Greenwald wrote a scathing exposé of what he called “conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture.” As AlterNet's Sarah Seltzer noted, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture has started a probe to determine whether Manning's solitary confinement constitutes torture under international law.

The Pentagon reacted to the story by claiming that Manning is “a maximum custody detainee” who can “receive the same privileges that a detainee classified as general population may receive … [including] daily television, hygiene call, reading and outside physical activity without restraint.” But David House, one of the few people able to visit Manning, said that Manning told him he'd only been allowed outdoors sporadically, and his exercise consisted of being placed in a room where he can only walk around in circles.

Manning also has a “Prevention of Injury” (POI) order that requires him to be constantly monitored by guards, and prevents him from having normal bedding. He has to strip down to his underwear and surrender his clothes to the guards each night before sleeping under a “suicide blanket” – he told House it's “similar in weight and heft to lead aprons used in X-ray laboratories, and similar in texture to coarse and stiff carpet.” Manning “expressed concern that he had to lie very still at night to avoid receiving carpet burns.” According to Greenwald, prison medical officials are administering him antidepressants.

POI orders are usually issued for brief periods of time for inmates who are judged to be suicidal or have not yet undergone a psychological evaluation. Manning has been evaluated, and there is no indication he is a threat to himself or others. He has been, by all accounts, a model prisoner.

Psychiatrist Jeff Kaye spoke to House after his visit with Manning, and while he stressed that a complete evaluation of Manning's well-being is impossible without personal contact, he predicted that “Solitary confinement will slowly wear down the mental and physical condition of Bradley Manning.”

Solitary confinement is an assault on the body and psyche of an individual. It deprives him of species-specific forms of physical, sensory and social interaction with the environment and other human beings. Manning reported last weekend he had not seen sunlight in four weeks, nor does he interact with other people but a few hours on the weekend. The human nervous system needs a certain amount of sensory and social stimulation to retain normal brain functioning. The effects of this deprivation on individuals varies, and some people are affected more severely or quickly, while others hold out longer against the boredom and daily grind of dullness that never seems to end.

Over time, isolation produces a particular well-known syndrome which is akin to that of an organic brain disorder, or delirium. The list of possible effects upon a person is quite long, and can include an inability to tolerate ordinary stimuli, sleep and appetite disturbances, primitive forms of thinking and aggressive ruminations, perceptual distortions and hallucinations, agitation, panic attacks, claustrophobia, feelings of loss of control, rage, paranoia, memory loss, lack of concentration, generalized body pain, EEG abnormalities, depression, suicidal ideation and random, self-destructive behavior.

According to Kaye, the detention is already having effects on Manning – he appears to have difficulty concentrating and his physical condition is deteriorating.

As Glenn Greenwald notes, prolonged solitary confinement is, “widely viewed around the world as highly injurious, inhumane, punitive, and arguably even a form of torture.”

In his widely praised March, 2009 New Yorker article-- entitled "Is Long-Term Solitary Confinement Torture?" -- the surgeon and journalist Atul Gawande assembled expert opinion and personal anecdotes to demonstrate that, as he put it, "all human beings experience isolation as torture." By itself, prolonged solitary confinement routinely destroys a person’s mind and drives them into insanity. A March, 2010 article in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law explains that "solitary confinement is recognized as difficult to withstand; indeed, psychological stressors such as isolation can be as clinically distressing as physical torture."

It's important to recognize that Manning is a true whistleblower – according to chat logs obtained by Wired magazine, Manning saw what he viewed as serious crimes committed by U.S. forces in Iraq, and felt compelled to release the information in the hope that it would spark “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms.” “I want people to see the truth,” he wrote, “regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” He succeeded in that – the release of video showing an American helicopter attack on a group of unarmed civilians, and subsequent attack on rescuers rushing to evacuate the survivors, was an eye-opening look at the horrors of war that's never seen in the sanitized footage released by the military.

Given that Manning has not been shown to be suicidal or a threat to others, it's hard to disagree with Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange's claim that “Manning is being held as a political prisoner in the United States.”

Greenwald wrote that what Manning's solitary confinement “achieves is clear.”

Having it known that the U.S. could and would disappear people at will to "black sites," assassinate them with unseen drones, imprison them for years without a shred of due process even while knowing they were innocent, torture them mercilessly, and in general acts as a lawless and rogue imperial power created a climate of severe intimidation and fear. Who would want to challenge the U.S. government in any way -- even in legitimate ways -- knowing that it could and would engage in such lawless, violent conduct without any restraints or repercussions?

Bradley Manning's detention is not comparable with the horrific measures imposed on Jose Padilla, an American citizen who was accused of plotting to detonate a “dirty bomb” and held as an “enemy combatant” for six years before being convicted on a lesser charge. Padilla's attorneys alleged that he was subjected to sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and tortured with psychotropic drugs until he lost his mind. But Manning is also a 23-year-old who, whether he is right or wrong, thought he was doing the right thing, and has now run into the maw of a vindictive American security state.

Fyodor Dostoevsky famously said that "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." The Web site FireDogLake has asked people to sign a letter urging the military to stop its “inhumane” treatment of Bradley Manning. You can add your name here.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America).

BRADLEY MANNING - ETHICAL GIANT

2010-12-24T13:21:00.000-07:00

Bradley Manning is the key – GEARFUSE

2010-12-21T19:21:00.001-07:00

Bradley Manning is the key

Posted by Matthew Battles on December 16, 2010, 11:12 PM

Where Julian Assange is not: London's Wandsworth Prison

While Julian Assange has left Wandsworth Prison in London for the relative freedom of Vaughan Smith’s Suffolk mansion, the key to the whole affair suffers a tellingly different fate. Here’s Glenn Greenwald in Salon on the conditions under which Bradley Manning, the alleged source of the Wikileaks documents, is currently being held in the Quantico brig:

From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day — for seven straight months and counting — he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he’s barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he’s being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs. Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not “like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole,” but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out.

In sum, Manning has been subjected for many months without pause to inhumane, personality-erasing, soul-destroying, insanity-inducing conditions of isolation similar to those perfected at America’s Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado: all without so much as having been convicted of anything. And as is true of many prisoners subjected to warped treatment of this sort, the brig’s medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation.

Now think about this: solitary confinement has been a tool in officially-sanctioned at least since Daedalus built the labyrinth for King Minos. It’s bestial, it’s horrible, it’s incontrovertibly torture. But only in our time do antidepressants figure in its protocols. Of course, the minions of Nebuchadnezzar or Philip II had no recourse to serotonin reuptake inhibitors; nonetheless it’s telling that we should seek so efficaciously to treat the symptoms of the very punishment we’re administering. We need to meditate on this paradigm of therapeutic torture, a regimen at once far subtler and more banal than, say, the punishments imagined by George Orwell and Anthony Burgess. There’s something irredeemably sick in the extra measure, something far more sinister than the hanging-manacled-from-the-wall routines of yore.

And let us consider for a moment Manning’s rank: the term “private” came into use in the sixteenth century, when soldiers of the Parliamentary Army in the English Civil War began objecting to the feudal associations of the term “common soldier.” In grasping at privacy, Cromwell’s soldiers asserted a new degree of sovereignty over themselves—a “taking” of personal autonomy that was the modest mirror-image of the “enclosure” of the common fields and pastures that accompanied the rise of property. And now we’re in the midst of another struggle for sovereignty—sovereignty over information. And the lines of battle are similarly drawn. In the sixteenth century, personhood was a kind of property; today it’s information. Then, the contested terms were rights and duties; today, the tension stretches between privacy and secrecy.

Private Manning is now “private” in a very different way from the rest of us. A “maximum custody detainee,” Manning’s contacts with the outside world are restricted in the extreme. The question of his sexuality, too, engages the axis of privacy and secrecy in ways that expose the contradictions bound up in the expression of power in our society. So while Manning’s travails now take place largely out of public view, they’re not outside of the system. Therapeutic torture of the secrecy state, like the bureaucratized prejudices of US policy with respect to gays in the military, is a cruel mirror of postmodern civil society. This is why Private Manning, and not Julian Assange, is the key to the Wikileaks episode. Because what is happening to him in the name of the law is what the leaks are all about.

In l’affaire Assange, there’s no end of distraction to help us assuage these devastating complexities. But we should think of distraction as a obsolete method of dealing with perplexities of the modern age—the way of the twentieth century. Distraction, delivered in the form of mass culture epitomized by television, was the crude tool of a bygone era. Behind it grew thickets of secrecy so complex and interwoven as to seem inextricable from civil society. Of course, the Internet has proven a distraction engine of great efficacy, despite its seeming promise as a tool for cutting the Gordian knot that binds secrecy to privacy in the postmodern state. With Wikileaks, that inextricability is facing its first real test.

You can donate to Bradley Manning’s defense fund here.

Is long-term solitary confinement torture?: newyorker.com

2010-12-18T20:59:00.002-07:00

Annals of Human Rights

Hellhole

The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture?

by Atul Gawande March 30, 2009

Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.

Children provide the clearest demonstration of this fact, although it was slow to be accepted. Well into the nineteen-fifties, psychologists were encouraging parents to give children less attention and affection, in order to encourage independence. Then Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, produced a series of influential studies involving baby rhesus monkeys.

He happened upon the findings in the mid-fifties, when he decided to save money for his primate-research laboratory by breeding his own lab monkeys instead of importing them from India. Because he didn’t know how to raise infant monkeys, he cared for them the way hospitals of the era cared for human infants—in nurseries, with plenty of food, warm blankets, some toys, and in isolation from other infants to prevent the spread of infection. The monkeys grew up sturdy, disease-free, and larger than those from the wild. Yet they were also profoundly disturbed, given to staring blankly and rocking in place for long periods, circling their cages repetitively, and mutilating themselves.

At first, Harlow and his graduate students couldn’t figure out what the problem was. They considered factors such as diet, patterns of light exposure, even the antibiotics they used. Then, as Deborah Blum recounts in a fascinating biography of Harlow, “Love at Goon Park,” one of his researchers noticed how tightly the monkeys clung to their soft blankets. Harlow wondered whether what the monkeys were missing in their Isolettes was a mother. So, in an odd experiment, he gave them an artificial one.

In the studies, one artificial mother was a doll made of terry cloth; the other was made of wire. He placed a warming device inside the dolls to make them seem more comforting. The babies, Harlow discovered, largely ignored the wire mother. But they became deeply attached to the cloth mother. They caressed it. They slept curled up on it. They ran to it when frightened. They refused replacements: they wanted only “their” mother. If sharp spikes were made to randomly thrust out of the mother’s body when the rhesus babies held it, they waited patiently for the spikes to recede and returned to clutching it. No matter how tightly they clung to the surrogate mothers, however, the monkeys remained psychologically abnormal.

In a later study on the effect of total isolation from birth, the researchers found that the test monkeys, upon being released into a group of ordinary monkeys, “usually go into a state of emotional shock, characterized by . . . autistic self-clutching and rocking.” Harlow noted, “One of six monkeys isolated for three months refused to eat after release and died five days later.” After several weeks in the company of other monkeys, most of them adjusted—but not those who had been isolated for longer periods. “Twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially,” Harlow wrote. They became permanently withdrawn, and they lived as outcasts—regularly set upon, as if inviting abuse.

The research made Harlow famous (and infamous, too—revulsion at his work helped spur the animal-rights movement). Other psychologists produced evidence of similarly deep and sustained damage in neglected and orphaned children. Hospitals were made to open up their nurseries to parents. And it became widely accepted that children require nurturing human beings not just for food and protection but also for the normal functioning of their brains.

We have been hesitant to apply these lessons to adults. Adults, after all, are fully formed, independent beings, with internal strengths and knowledge to draw upon. We wouldn’t have anything like a child’s dependence on other people, right? Yet it seems that we do. We don’t have a lot of monkey experiments to call upon here. But mankind has produced tens of thousands of human ones, including in our prison system. And the picture that has emerged is profoundly unsettling.

Among our most benign experiments are those with people who voluntarily isolate themselves for extended periods. Long-distance solo sailors, for instance, commit themselves to months at sea. They face all manner of physical terrors: thrashing storms, fifty-foot waves, leaks, illness. Yet, for many, the single most overwhelming difficulty they report is the “soul-destroying loneliness,” as one sailor called it. Astronauts have to be screened for their ability to tolerate long stretches in tightly confined isolation, and they come to depend on radio and video communications for social contact.

The problem of isolation goes beyond ordinary loneliness, however. Consider what we’ve learned from hostages who have been held in solitary confinement—from the journalist Terry Anderson, for example, whose extraordinary memoir, “Den of Lions,” recounts his seven years as a hostage of Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Anderson was the chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press when, on March 16, 1985, three bearded men forced him from his car in Beirut at gunpoint. He was pushed into a Mercedes sedan, covered head to toe with a heavy blanket, and made to crouch head down in the footwell behind the front seat. His captors drove him to a garage, pulled him out of the car, put a hood over his head, and bound his wrists and ankles with tape. For half an hour, they grilled him for the names of other Americans in Beirut, but he gave no names and they did not beat him or press him further. They threw him in the trunk of the car, drove him to another building, and put him in what would be the first of a succession of cells across Lebanon. He was soon placed in what seemed to be a dusty closet, large enough for only a mattress. Blindfolded, he could make out the distant sounds of other hostages. (One was William Buckley, the C.I.A. station chief who was kidnapped and tortured repeatedly until he weakened and died.) Peering around his blindfold, Anderson could see a bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling. He received three unpalatable meals a day—usually a sandwich of bread and cheese, or cold rice with canned vegetables, or soup. He had a bottle to urinate in and was allotted one five- to ten-minute trip each day to a rotting bathroom to empty his bowels and wash with water at a dirty sink. Otherwise, the only reprieve from isolation came when the guards made short visits to bark at him for breaking a rule or to threaten him, sometimes with a gun at his temple.

He missed people terribly, especially his fiancée and his family. He was despondent and depressed. Then, with time, he began to feel something more. He felt himself disintegrating. It was as if his brain were grinding down. A month into his confinement, he recalled in his memoir, “The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There’s nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind’s gone dead. God, help me.”

He was stiff from lying in bed day and night, yet tired all the time. He dozed off and on constantly, sleeping twelve hours a day. He craved activity of almost any kind. He would watch the daylight wax and wane on the ceiling, or roaches creep slowly up the wall. He had a Bible and tried to read, but he often found that he lacked the concentration to do so. He observed himself becoming neurotically possessive about his little space, at times putting his life in jeopardy by flying into a rage if a guard happened to step on his bed. He brooded incessantly, thinking back on all the mistakes he’d made in life, his regrets, his offenses against God and family.

His captors moved him every few months. For unpredictable stretches of time, he was granted the salvation of a companion—sometimes he shared a cell with as many as four other hostages—and he noticed that his thinking recovered rapidly when this occurred. He could read and concentrate longer, avoid hallucinations, and better control his emotions. “I would rather have had the worst companion than no companion at all,” he noted.

In September, 1986, after several months of sharing a cell with another hostage, Anderson was, for no apparent reason, returned to solitary confinement, this time in a six-by-six-foot cell, with no windows, and light from only a flickering fluorescent lamp in an outside corridor. The guards refused to say how long he would be there. After a few weeks, he felt his mind slipping away again.

“I find myself trembling sometimes for no reason,” he wrote. “I’m afraid I’m beginning to lose my mind, to lose control completely.”

One day, three years into his ordeal, he snapped. He walked over to a wall and began beating his forehead against it, dozens of times. His head was smashed and bleeding before the guards were able to stop him.

Some hostages fared worse. Anderson told the story of Frank Reed, a fifty-four-year-old American private-school director who was taken hostage and held in solitary confinement for four months before being put in with Anderson. By then, Reed had become severely withdrawn. He lay motionless for hours facing a wall, semi-catatonic. He could not follow the guards’ simplest instructions. This invited abuse from them, in much the same way that once isolated rhesus monkeys seemed to invite abuse from the colony. Released after three and a half years, Reed ultimately required admission to a psychiatric hospital.

“It’s an awful thing, solitary,” John McCain wrote of his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam—more than two years of it spent in isolation in a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot cell, unable to communicate with other P.O.W.s except by tap code, secreted notes, or by speaking into an enamel cup pressed against the wall. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” And this comes from a man who was beaten regularly; denied adequate medical treatment for two broken arms, a broken leg, and chronic dysentery; and tortured to the point of having an arm broken again. A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam, many of whom were treated even worse than McCain, reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered.

And what happened to them was physical. EEG studies going back to the nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a week or more of solitary confinement. In 1992, fifty-seven prisoners of war, released after an average of six months in detention camps in the former Yugoslavia, were examined using EEG-like tests. The recordings revealed brain abnormalities months afterward; the most severe were found in prisoners who had endured either head trauma sufficient to render them unconscious or, yes, solitary confinement. Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury.

On December 4, 1991, Terry Anderson was released from captivity. He had been the last and the longest-held American hostage in Lebanon. I spoke to Keron Fletcher, a former British military psychiatrist who had been on the receiving team for Anderson and many other hostages, and followed them for years afterward. Initially, Fletcher said, everyone experiences the pure elation of being able to see and talk to people again, especially family and friends. They can’t get enough of other people, and talk almost non-stop for hours. They are optimistic and hopeful. But, afterward, normal sleeping and eating patterns prove difficult to reëstablish. Some have lost their sense of time. For weeks, they have trouble managing the sensations and emotional complexities of their freedom.

For the first few months after his release, Anderson said when I reached him by phone recently, “it was just kind of a fog.” He had done many television interviews at the time. “And if you look at me in the pictures? Look at my eyes. You can tell. I look drugged.”

Most hostages survived their ordeal, Fletcher said, although relationships, marriages, and careers were often lost. Some found, as John McCain did, that the experience even strengthened them. Yet none saw solitary confinement as anything less than torture. This presents us with an awkward question: If prolonged isolation is—as research and experience have confirmed for decades—so objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country in history has?

Recently, I met a man who had spent more than five years in isolation at a prison in the Boston suburb of Walpole, Massachusetts, not far from my home. Bobby Dellelo was, to say the least, no Terry Anderson or John McCain. Brought up in the run-down neighborhoods of Boston’s West End, in the nineteen-forties, he was caught burglarizing a shoe store at the age of ten. At thirteen, he recalls, he was nabbed while robbing a Jordan Marsh department store. (He and his friends learned to hide out in stores at closing time, steal their merchandise, and then break out during the night.) The remainder of his childhood was spent mostly in the state reform school. That was where he learned how to fight, how to hot-wire a car with a piece of foil, how to pick locks, and how to make a zip gun using a snapped-off automobile radio antenna, which, in those days, was just thick enough to barrel a .22-calibre bullet. Released upon turning eighteen, Dellelo returned to stealing. Usually, he stole from office buildings at night. But some of the people he hung out with did stickups, and, together with one of them, he held up a liquor store in Dorchester.

“What a disaster that thing was,” he recalls, laughing. They put the store’s owner and the customers in a walk-in refrigerator at gunpoint, took their wallets, and went to rob the register. But more customers came in. So they robbed them and put them in the refrigerator, too. Then still more customers arrived, the refrigerator got full, and the whole thing turned into a circus. Dellelo and his partner finally escaped. But one of the customers identified him to the police. By the time he was caught, Dellelo had been fingered for robbing the Commander Hotel in Cambridge as well. He served a year for the first conviction and two and a half years for the second.

Three months after his release, in 1963, at the age of twenty, he and a friend tried to rob the Kopelman jewelry store, in downtown Boston. But an alarm went off before they got their hands on anything. They separated and ran. The friend shot and killed an off-duty policeman while trying to escape, then killed himself. Dellelo was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. He ended up serving forty years. Five years and one month were spent in isolation.

The criteria for the isolation of prisoners vary by state but typically include not only violent infractions but also violation of prison rules or association with gang members. The imposition of long-term isolation—which can be for months or years—is ultimately at the discretion of prison administrators. One former prisoner I spoke to, for example, recalled being put in solitary confinement for petty annoyances like refusing to get out of the shower quickly enough. Bobby Dellelo was put there for escaping.

It was an elaborate scheme. He had a partner, who picked the lock to a supervisor’s office and got hold of the information manual for the microwave-detection system that patrolled a grassy no man’s land between the prison and the road. They studied the manual long enough to learn how to circumvent the system and returned it. On Halloween Sunday, 1993, they had friends stage a fight in the prison yard. With all the guards in the towers looking at the fight through binoculars, the two men tipped a picnic table up against a twelve-foot wall and climbed it like a ladder. Beyond it, they scaled a sixteen-foot fence. To get over the razor wire on top, they used a Z-shaped tool they’d improvised from locker handles. They dropped down into the no man’s land and followed an invisible path that they’d calculated the microwave system would not detect. No alarm sounded. They went over one more fence, walked around a parking lot, picked their way through some woods, and emerged onto a four-lane road. After a short walk to a convenience store, they called a taxi from a telephone booth and rolled away before anyone knew they were gone.

They lasted twenty-four days on the outside. Eventually, somebody ratted them out, and the police captured them on the day before Thanksgiving, at the house of a friend in Cambridge. The prison administration gave Dellelo five years in the Departmental Disciplinary Unit of the Walpole prison, its hundred-and-twenty-four-cell super-maximum segregation unit.

Wearing ankle bracelets, handcuffs, and a belly chain, Dellelo was marched into a thirteen-by-eight-foot off-white cell. A four-inch-thick concrete bed slab jutted out from the wall opposite the door. A smaller slab protruding from a side wall provided a desk. A cylindrical concrete block in the floor served as a seat. On the remaining wall was a toilet and a metal sink. He was given four sheets, four towels, a blanket, a bedroll, a toothbrush, toilet paper, a tall clear plastic cup, a bar of soap, seven white T-shirts, seven pairs of boxer shorts, seven pairs of socks, plastic slippers, a pad of paper, and a ballpoint pen. A speaker with a microphone was mounted on the door. Cells used for solitary confinement are often windowless, but this one had a ribbonlike window that was seven inches wide and five feet tall. The electrically controlled door was solid steel, with a seven-inch-by-twenty-eight-inch aperture and two wickets—little door slots, one at ankle height and one at waist height, for shackling him whenever he was let out and for passing him meal trays.

As in other supermaxes—facilities designed to isolate prisoners from social contact—Dellelo was confined to his cell for at least twenty-three hours a day and permitted out only for a shower or for recreation in an outdoor cage that he estimated to be fifty feet long and five feet wide, known as “the dog kennel.” He could talk to other prisoners through the steel door of his cell, and during recreation if a prisoner was in an adjacent cage. He made a kind of fishing line for passing notes to adjacent cells by unwinding the elastic from his boxer shorts, though it was contraband and would be confiscated. Prisoners could receive mail and as many as ten reading items. They were allowed one phone call the first month and could earn up to four calls and four visits per month if they followed the rules, but there could be no physical contact with anyone, except when guards forcibly restrained them. Some supermaxes even use food as punishment, serving the prisoners nutra-loaf, an unpalatable food brick that contains just enough nutrition for survival. Dellelo was spared this. The rules also permitted him to have a radio after thirty days, and, after sixty days, a thirteen-inch black-and-white television.

“This is going to be a piece of cake,” Dellelo recalls thinking when the door closed behind him. Whereas many American supermax prisoners—and most P.O.W.s and hostages—have no idea when they might get out, he knew exactly how long he was going to be there. He drew a calendar on his pad of paper to start counting down the days. He would get a radio and a TV. He could read. No one was going to bother him. And, as his elaborate escape plan showed, he could be patient. “This is their sophisticated security?” he said to himself. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

After a few months without regular social contact, however, his experience proved no different from that of the P.O.W.s or hostages, or the majority of isolated prisoners whom researchers have studied: he started to lose his mind. He talked to himself. He paced back and forth compulsively, shuffling along the same six-foot path for hours on end. Soon, he was having panic attacks, screaming for help. He hallucinated that the colors on the walls were changing. He became enraged by routine noises—the sound of doors opening as the guards made their hourly checks, the sounds of inmates in nearby cells. After a year or so, he was hearing voices on the television talking directly to him. He put the television under his bed, and rarely took it out again.

One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction. Once, Dellelo was allowed to have an in-person meeting with his lawyer, and he simply couldn’t handle it. After so many months in which his primary human contact had been an occasional phone call or brief conversations with an inmate down the tier, shouted through steel doors at the top of their lungs, he found himself unable to carry on a face-to-face conversation. He had trouble following both words and hand gestures and couldn’t generate them himself. When he realized this, he succumbed to a full-blown panic attack.

Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, received rare permission to study a hundred randomly selected inmates at California’s Pelican Bay supermax, and noted a number of phenomena. First, after months or years of complete isolation, many prisoners “begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind—to organize their own lives around activity and purpose,” he writes. “Chronic apathy, lethargy, depression, and despair often result. . . . In extreme cases, prisoners may literally stop behaving,” becoming essentially catatonic.

Second, almost ninety per cent of these prisoners had difficulties with “irrational anger,” compared with just three per cent of the general population.* Haney attributed this to the extreme restriction, the totality of control, and the extended absence of any opportunity for happiness or joy. Many prisoners in solitary become consumed with revenge fantasies.

“There were some guards in D.D.U. who were decent guys,” Dellelo told me. They didn’t trash his room when he was let out for a shower, or try to trip him when escorting him in chains, or write him up for contraband if he kept food or a salt packet from a meal in his cell. “But some of them were evil, evil pricks.” One correctional officer became a particular obsession. Dellelo spent hours imagining cutting his head off and rolling it down the tier. “I mean, I know this is insane thinking,” he says now. Even at the time, he added, “I had a fear in the background—like how much of this am I going to be able to let go? How much is this going to affect who I am?”

He was right to worry. Everyone’s identity is socially created: it’s through your relationships that you understand yourself as a mother or a father, a teacher or an accountant, a hero or a villain. But, after years of isolation, many prisoners change in another way that Haney observed. They begin to see themselves primarily as combatants in the world, people whose identity is rooted in thwarting prison control.

As a matter of self-preservation, this may not be a bad thing. According to the Navy P.O.W. researchers, the instinct to fight back against the enemy constituted the most important coping mechanism for the prisoners they studied. Resistance was often their sole means of maintaining a sense of purpose, and so their sanity. Yet resistance is precisely what we wish to destroy in our supermax prisoners. As Haney observed in a review of research findings, prisoners in solitary confinement must be able to withstand the experience in order to be allowed to return to the highly social world of mainline prison or free society. Perversely, then, the prisoners who can’t handle profound isolation are the ones who are forced to remain in it. “And those who have adapted,” Haney writes, “are prime candidates for release to a social world to which they may be incapable of ever fully readjusting.”

Dellelo eventually found a way to resist that would not prolong his ordeal. He fought his battle through the courts, filing motion after motion in an effort to get his conviction overturned. He became so good at submitting his claims that he obtained a paralegal certificate along the way. And, after forty years in prison, and more than five years in solitary, he got his first-degree-homicide conviction reduced to manslaughter. On November 19, 2003, he was freed.

Bobby Dellelo is sixty-seven years old now. He lives on Social Security in a Cambridge efficiency apartment that is about four times larger than his cell. He still seems to be adjusting to the world outside. He lives alone. To the extent that he is out in society, it is, in large measure, as a combatant. He works for prisoners’ rights at the American Friends Service Committee. He also does occasional work assisting prisoners with their legal cases. Sitting at his kitchen table, he showed me how to pick a padlock—you know, just in case I ever find myself in trouble.

But it was impossible to talk to him about his time in isolation without seeing that it was fundamentally no different from the isolation that Terry Anderson and John McCain had endured. Whether in Walpole or Beirut or Hanoi, all human beings experience isolation as torture.

The main argument for using long-term isolation in prisons is that it provides discipline and prevents violence. When inmates refuse to follow the rules—when they escape, deal drugs, or attack other inmates and corrections officers—wardens must be able to punish and contain the misconduct. Presumably, less stringent measures haven’t worked, or the behavior would not have occurred. And it’s legitimate to incapacitate violent aggressors for the safety of others. So, advocates say, isolation is a necessary evil, and those who don’t recognize this are dangerously naïve.

The argument makes intuitive sense. If the worst of the worst are removed from the general prison population and put in isolation, you’d expect there to be markedly fewer inmate shankings and attacks on corrections officers. But the evidence doesn’t bear this out. Perhaps the most careful inquiry into whether supermax prisons decrease violence and disorder was a 2003 analysis examining the experience in three states—Arizona, Illinois, and Minnesota—following the opening of their supermax prisons. The study found that levels of inmate-on-inmate violence were unchanged, and that levels of inmate-on-staff violence changed unpredictably, rising in Arizona, falling in Illinois, and holding steady in Minnesota.

Prison violence, it turns out, is not simply an issue of a few belligerents. In the past thirty years, the United States has quadrupled its incarceration rate but not its prison space. Work and education programs have been cancelled, out of a belief that the pursuit of rehabilitation is pointless. The result has been unprecedented overcrowding, along with unprecedented idleness—a nice formula for violence. Remove a few prisoners to solitary confinement, and the violence doesn’t change. So you remove some more, and still nothing happens. Before long, you find yourself in the position we are in today. The United States now has five per cent of the world’s population, twenty-five per cent of its prisoners, and probably the vast majority of prisoners who are in long-term solitary confinement.

It wasn’t always like this. The wide-scale use of isolation is, almost exclusively, a phenomenon of the past twenty years. In 1890, the United States Supreme Court came close to declaring the punishment to be unconstitutional. Writing for the majority in the case of a Colorado murderer who had been held in isolation for a month, Justice Samuel Miller noted that experience had revealed “serious objections” to solitary confinement:

A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others, still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover suffcient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.

Prolonged isolation was used sparingly, if at all, by most American prisons for almost a century. Our first supermax—our first institution specifically designed for mass solitary confinement—was not established until 1983, in Marion, Illinois. In 1995, a federal court reviewing California’s first supermax admitted that the conditions “hover on the edge of what is humanly tolerable for those with normal resilience.” But it did not rule them to be unconstitutionally cruel or unusual, except in cases of mental illness. The prison’s supermax conditions, the court stated, did not pose “a sufficiently high risk to all inmates of incurring a serious mental illness.” In other words, there could be no legal objection to its routine use, given that the isolation didn’t make everyone crazy. The ruling seemed to fit the public mood. By the end of the nineteen-nineties, some sixty supermax institutions had opened across the country. And new solitary-confinement units were established within nearly all of our ordinary maximum-security prisons.

The number of prisoners in these facilities has since risen to extraordinary levels. America now holds at least twenty-five thousand inmates in isolation in supermax prisons. An additional fifty to eighty thousand are kept in restrictive segregation units, many of them in isolation, too, although the government does not release these figures. By 1999, the practice had grown to the point that Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Nebraska, Nevada, Rhode Island, and Virginia kept between five and eight per cent of their prison population in isolation, and, by 2003, New York had joined them as well. Mississippi alone held eighteen hundred prisoners in supermax—twelve per cent of its prisoners over all. At the same time, other states had just a tiny fraction of their inmates in solitary confinement. In 1999, for example, Indiana had eighty-five supermax beds; Georgia had only ten. Neither of these two states can be described as being soft on crime.

Advocates of solitary confinement are left with a single argument for subjecting thousands of people to years of isolation: What else are we supposed to do? How else are we to deal with the violent, the disruptive, the prisoners who are just too dangerous to be housed with others?

As it happens, only a subset of prisoners currently locked away for long periods of isolation would be considered truly dangerous. Many are escapees or suspected gang members; many others are in solitary for nonviolent breaches of prison rules. Still, there are some highly dangerous and violent prisoners who pose a serious challenge to prison discipline and safety. In August, I met a man named Robert Felton, who had spent fourteen and a half years in isolation in the Illinois state correctional system. He is now thirty-six years old. He grew up in the predominantly black housing projects of Danville, Illinois, and had been a force of mayhem from the time he was a child.

His crimes were mainly impulsive, rather than planned. The first time he was arrested was at the age of eleven, when he and a relative broke into a house to steal some Atari video games. A year later, he was sent to state reform school after he and a friend broke into an abandoned building and made off with paint cans, irons, and other property that they hardly knew what to do with. In reform school, he got into fights and screamed obscenities at the staff. When the staff tried to discipline him by taking away his recreation or his television privileges, his behavior worsened. He tore a pillar out of the ceiling, a sink and mirrors off the wall, doors off their hinges. He was put in a special cell, stripped of nearly everything. When he began attacking counsellors, the authorities transferred him to the maximum-security juvenile facility at Joliet, where he continued to misbehave.

Felton wasn’t a sociopath. He made friends easily. He was close to his family, and missed them deeply. He took no pleasure in hurting others. Psychiatric evaluations turned up little more than attention-deficit disorder. But he had a terrible temper, a tendency to escalate rather than to defuse confrontations, and, by the time he was released, just before turning eighteen, he had achieved only a ninth-grade education.

Within months of returning home, he was arrested again. He had walked into a Danville sports bar and ordered a beer. The barman took his ten-dollar bill.

“Then he says, ‘Naw, man, you can’t get no beer. You’re underage,’ ” Felton recounts. “I says, ‘Well, give me my ten dollars back.’ He says, ‘You ain’t getting shit. Get the hell out of here.’ ”

Felton stood his ground. The bartender had a pocket knife on the counter. “And, when he went for it, I went for it,” Felton told me. “When I grabbed the knife first, I turned around and spinned on him. I said, ‘You think you’re gonna cut me, man? You gotta be fucked up.’ ”

The barman had put the ten-dollar bill in a Royal Crown bag behind the counter. Felton grabbed the bag and ran out the back door. He forgot his car keys on the counter, though. So he went back to get the keys—“the stupid keys,” he now says ruefully—and in the fight that ensued he left the barman severely injured and bleeding. The police caught Felton fleeing in his car. He was convicted of armed robbery, aggravated unlawful restraint, and aggravated battery, and served fifteen years in prison.

He was eventually sent to the Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum-security facility in Joliet. Inside the overflowing prison, he got into vicious fights over insults and the like. About three months into his term, during a shakedown following the murder of an inmate, prison officials turned up a makeshift knife in his cell. (He denies that it was his.) They gave him a year in isolation. He was a danger, and he had to be taught a lesson. But it was a lesson that he seemed incapable of learning.

Felton’s Stateville isolation cell had gray walls, a solid steel door, no window, no clock, and a light that was kept on twenty-four hours a day. As soon as he was shut in, he became claustrophobic and had a panic attack. Like Dellelo, Anderson, and McCain, he was soon pacing back and forth, talking to himself, studying the insects crawling around his cell, reliving past events from childhood, sleeping for as much as sixteen hours a day. But, unlike them, he lacked the inner resources to cope with his situation.

Many prisoners find survival in physical exercise, prayer, or plans for escape. Many carry out elaborate mental exercises, building entire houses in their heads, board by board, nail by nail, from the ground up, or memorizing team rosters for a baseball season. McCain recreated in his mind movies he’d seen. Anderson reconstructed complete novels from memory. Yuri Nosenko, a K.G.B. defector whom the C.I.A. wrongly accused of being a double agent and held for three years in total isolation (no reading material, no news, no human contact except with interrogators) in a closet-size concrete cell near Williamsburg, Virginia, made chess sets from threads and a calendar from lint (only to have them discovered and swept away).

But Felton would just yell, “Guard! Guard! Guard! Guard! Guard!,” or bang his cup on the toilet, for hours. He could spend whole days hallucinating that he was in another world, that he was a child at home in Danville, playing in the streets, having conversations with imaginary people. Small cruelties that others somehow bore in quiet fury—getting no meal tray, for example—sent him into a rage. Despite being restrained with handcuffs, ankle shackles, and a belly chain whenever he was taken out, he managed to assault the staff at least three times. He threw his food through the door slot. He set his cell on fire by tearing his mattress apart, wrapping the stuffing in a sheet, popping his light bulb, and using the exposed wires to set the whole thing ablaze. He did this so many times that the walls of his cell were black with soot.

After each offense, prison officials extended his sentence in isolation. Still, he wouldn’t stop. He began flooding his cell, by stuffing the door crack with socks, plugging the toilet, and flushing until the water was a couple of feet deep. Then he’d pull out the socks and the whole wing would flood with wastewater.

“Flooding the cell was the last option for me,” Felton told me. “It was when I had nothing else I could do. You know, they took everything out of my cell, and all I had left was toilet water. I’d sit there and I’d say, ‘Well, let me see what I can do with this toilet water.’ ”

Felton was not allowed out again for fourteen and a half years. He spent almost his entire prison term, from 1990 to 2005, in isolation. In March, 1998, he was among the first inmates to be moved to Tamms, a new, high-tech supermax facility in southern Illinois.

“At Tamms, man, it was like a lab,” he says. Contact even with guards was tightly reduced. Cutoff valves meant that he couldn’t flood his cell. He had little ability to force a response—negative or positive—from a human being. And, with that gone, he began to deteriorate further. He ceased showering, changing his clothes, brushing his teeth. His teeth rotted and ten had to be pulled. He began throwing his feces around his cell. He became psychotic.

It is unclear how many prisoners in solitary confinement become psychotic. Stuart Grassian, a Boston psychiatrist, has interviewed more than two hundred prisoners in solitary confinement. In one in-depth study, prepared for a legal challenge of prisoner-isolation practices, he concluded that about a third developed acute psychosis with hallucinations. The markers of vulnerability that he observed in his interviews were signs of cognitive dysfunction—a history of seizures, serious mental illness, mental retardation, illiteracy, or, as in Felton’s case, a diagnosis such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, signalling difficulty with impulse control. In the prisoners Grassian saw, about a third had these vulnerabilities, and these were the prisoners whom solitary confinement had made psychotic. They were simply not cognitively equipped to endure it without mental breakdowns.

A psychiatrist tried giving Felton anti-psychotic medication. Mostly, it made him sleep—sometimes twenty-four hours at a stretch, he said. Twice he attempted suicide. The first time, he hanged himself in a noose made from a sheet. The second time, he took a single staple from a legal newspaper and managed to slash the radial artery in his left wrist with it. In both instances, he was taken to a local emergency room for a few hours, patched up, and sent back to prison.

Is there an alternative? Consider what other countries do. Britain, for example, has had its share of serial killers, homicidal rapists, and prisoners who have taken hostages and repeatedly assaulted staff. The British also fought a seemingly unending war in Northern Ireland, which brought them hundreds of Irish Republican Army prisoners committed to violent resistance. The authorities resorted to a harshly punitive approach to control, including, in the mid-seventies, extensive use of solitary confinement. But the violence in prisons remained unchanged, the costs were phenomenal (in the United States, they reach more than fifty thousand dollars a year per inmate), and the public outcry became intolerable. British authorities therefore looked for another approach.

Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, they gradually adopted a strategy that focussed on preventing prison violence rather than on delivering an ever more brutal series of punishments for it. The approach starts with the simple observation that prisoners who are unmanageable in one setting often behave perfectly reasonably in another. This suggested that violence might, to a critical extent, be a function of the conditions of incarceration. The British noticed that problem prisoners were usually people for whom avoiding humiliation and saving face were fundamental and instinctive. When conditions maximized humiliation and confrontation, every interaction escalated into a trial of strength. Violence became a predictable consequence.

So the British decided to give their most dangerous prisoners more control, rather than less. They reduced isolation and offered them opportunities for work, education, and special programming to increase social ties and skills. The prisoners were housed in small, stable units of fewer than ten people in individual cells, to avoid conditions of social chaos and unpredictability. In these reformed “Close Supervision Centres,” prisoners could receive mental-health treatment and earn rights for more exercise, more phone calls, “contact visits,” and even access to cooking facilities. They were allowed to air grievances. And the government set up an independent body of inspectors to track the results and enable adjustments based on the data.

The results have been impressive. The use of long-term isolation in England is now negligible. In all of England, there are now fewer prisoners in “extreme custody” than there are in the state of Maine. And the other countries of Europe have, with a similar focus on small units and violence prevention, achieved a similar outcome.

In this country, in June of 2006, a bipartisan national task force, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons, released its recommendations after a yearlong investigation. It called for ending long-term isolation of prisoners. Beyond about ten days, the report noted, practically no benefits can be found and the harm is clear—not just for inmates but for the public as well. Most prisoners in long-term isolation are returned to society, after all. And evidence from a number of studies has shown that supermax conditions—in which prisoners have virtually no social interactions and are given no programmatic support—make it highly likely that they will commit more crimes when they are released. Instead, the report said, we should follow the preventive approaches used in European countries.

The recommendations went nowhere, of course. Whatever the evidence in its favor, people simply did not believe in the treatment.

I spoke to a state-prison commissioner who wished to remain unidentified. He was a veteran of the system, having been either a prison warden or a commissioner in several states across the country for more than twenty years. He has publicly defended the use of long-term isolation everywhere that he has worked. Nonetheless, he said, he would remove most prisoners from long-term isolation units if he could and provide programming for the mental illnesses that many of them have.

“Prolonged isolation is not going to serve anyone’s best interest,” he told me. He still thought that prisons needed the option of isolation. “A bad violation should, I think, land you there for about ninety days, but it should not go beyond that.”

He is apparently not alone among prison officials. Over the years, he has come to know commissioners in nearly every state in the country. “I believe that today you’ll probably find that two-thirds or three-fourths of the heads of correctional agencies will largely share the position that I articulated with you,” he said.

Commissioners are not powerless. They could eliminate prolonged isolation with the stroke of a pen. So, I asked, why haven’t they? He told me what happened when he tried to move just one prisoner out of isolation. Legislators called for him to be fired and threatened to withhold basic funding. Corrections officers called members of the crime victim’s family and told them that he’d gone soft on crime. Hostile stories appeared in the tabloids. It is pointless for commissioners to act unilaterally, he said, without a change in public opinion.

This past year, both the Republican and the Democratic Presidential candidates came out firmly for banning torture and closing the facility in Guantánamo Bay, where hundreds of prisoners have been held in years-long isolation. Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain, however, addressed the question of whether prolonged solitary confinement is torture. For a Presidential candidate, no less than for the prison commissioner, this would have been political suicide. The simple truth is that public sentiment in America is the reason that solitary confinement has exploded in this country, even as other Western nations have taken steps to reduce it. This is the dark side of American exceptionalism. With little concern or demurral, we have consigned tens of thousands of our own citizens to conditions that horrified our highest court a century ago. Our willingness to discard these standards for American prisoners made it easy to discard the Geneva Conventions prohibiting similar treatment of foreign prisoners of war, to the detriment of America’s moral stature in the world. In much the same way that a previous generation of Americans countenanced legalized segregation, ours has countenanced legalized torture. And there is no clearer manifestation of this than our routine use of solitary confinement—on our own people, in our own communities, in a supermax prison, for example, that is a thirty-minute drive from my door.

Robert Felton drifted in and out of acute psychosis for much of his solitary confinement. Eventually, however, he found an unexpected resource. One day, while he was at Tamms, he was given a new defense lawyer, and, whatever expertise this lawyer provided, the more important thing was genuine human contact. He visited regularly, and sent Felton books. Although some were rejected by the authorities and Felton was restricted to a few at a time, he devoured those he was permitted. “I liked political books,” he says. “ ‘From Beirut to Jerusalem,’ Winston Churchill, Noam Chomsky.”

That small amount of contact was a lifeline. Felton corresponded with the lawyer about what he was reading. The lawyer helped him get his G.E.D. and a paralegal certificate through a correspondence course, and he taught Felton how to advocate for himself. Felton began writing letters to politicians and prison officials explaining the misery of his situation, opposing supermax isolation, and asking for a chance to return to the general prison population. (The Illinois Department of Corrections would not comment on Felton’s case, but a spokesman stated that “Tamms houses the most disruptive, violent, and problematic inmates.”) Felton was persuasive enough that Senator Paul Simon, of Illinois, wrote him back and, one day, even visited him. Simon asked the director of the State Department of Corrections, Donald Snyder, Jr., to give consideration to Felton’s objections. But Snyder didn’t budge. If there was anyone whom Felton fantasized about taking revenge upon, it was Snyder. Felton continued to file request after request. But the answer was always no.

On July 12, 2005, at the age of thirty-three, Felton was finally released. He hadn’t socialized with another person since entering Tamms, at the age of twenty-five. Before his release, he was given one month in the general prison population to get used to people. It wasn’t enough. Upon returning to society, he found that he had trouble in crowds. At a party of well-wishers, the volume of social stimulation overwhelmed him and he panicked, headed for a bathroom, and locked himself in. He stayed at his mother’s house and kept mostly to himself.

For the first year, he had to wear an ankle bracelet and was allowed to leave home only for work. His first job was at a Papa John’s restaurant, delivering pizzas. He next found work at the Model Star Laundry Service, doing pressing. This was a steady job, and he began to settle down. He fell in love with a waitress named Brittany. They moved into a three-room house that her grandmother lent them, and got engaged. Brittany became pregnant.

This is not a story with a happy ending. Felton lost his job with the laundry service. He went to work for a tree-cutting business; a few months later, it went under. Meanwhile, he and Brittany had had a second child. She had found work as a certified nursing assistant, but her income wasn’t nearly enough. So he took a job forty miles away, at Plastipak, the plastics manufacturer, where he made seven-fifty an hour inspecting Gatorade bottles and Crisco containers as they came out of the stamping machines. Then his twenty-year-old Firebird died. The bus he had to take ran erratically, and he was fired for repeated tardiness.

When I visited Felton in Danville last August, he and Brittany were upbeat about their prospects. She was working extra shifts at a nursing home, and he was taking care of their children, ages one and two. He had also applied to a six-month training program for heating and air-conditioning technicians.

“I could make twenty dollars an hour after graduation,” he said.

“He’s a good man,” Brittany told me, taking his arm and giving him a kiss.

But he was out of work. They were chronically short of money. It was hard to be optimistic about Felton’s prospects. And, indeed, six weeks after we met, he was arrested for breaking into a car dealership and stealing a Dodge Charger. He pleaded guilty and, in January, began serving a seven-year sentence.

Before I left town—when there was still a glimmer of hope for him—we went out for lunch at his favorite place, a Mexican restaurant called La Potosina. Over enchiladas and Cokes, we talked about his family, Danville, the economy, and, of course, his time in prison. The strangest story had turned up in the news, he said. Donald Snyder, Jr., the state prison director who had refused to let him out of solitary confinement, had been arrested, convicted, and sentenced to two years in prison for taking fifty thousand dollars in payoffs from lobbyists.

“Two years in prison,” Felton marvelled. “He could end up right where I used to be.”

I asked him, “If he wrote to you, asking if you would release him from solitary, what would you do?”

Felton didn’t hesitate for a second. “If he wrote to me to let him out, I’d let him out,” he said.

This surprised me. I expected anger, vindictiveness, a desire for retribution. “You’d let him out?” I said.

“I’d let him out,” he said, and he put his fork down to make the point. “I wouldn’t wish solitary confinement on anybody. Not even him.” ♦

*Correction, April 6, 2009: Three per cent of the general population had difficulties with “irrational anger,” not three per cent of prisoners in the general population, as originally stated.

ILLUSTRATION: BRAD HOLLAND

To get more of The New Yorker's signature mix of politics, culture and the arts: Subscribe Now

Back Story on Manning 'Whistleblower' transferred to US - Americas - Al Jazeera English

2010-12-18T01:21:00.001-07:00

'Whistleblower' transferred to US

Soldier charged with handing over classified documents flown to US to face trial.

Bradley Manning has been charged with leaking a gruesome 2007 military video to WikiLeaks [AFP]

The US army intelligence specialist accused of handing a secret military video to Wikileaks website has been moved from Kuwait to Quantic Marine base in the US, the US military has said.

Private first class Bradley Manning, 22, arrived at the military base in Virginia on Thursday night where he will be held while awaiting trial for leaking military intelligence, after he was transfered from Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, the army said in a statement on Friday.

Manning currently faces four charges related to allegations that he released classified video showing a 2007 US Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, that killed several people.

In addition to leaking the video, Manning reportedly claimed to have downloaded more than 150,000 diplomatic cables.

The intelligence specialist is also suspected of possible involvement in the massive leak of more than 92,000 classified military files releated to the war in Afghanistan.

'Life in prison'

Al Jazeera's Rosiland Jordan, reporting from Washington, said that Manning could potentially face the death penalty if he is convicted with leaking the Afghan information in addition to the Iraq video.

In Depth

Video shows 'US attack on Iraqis'
Why the world needs WikiLeaks

"Certainly he [could be] looking at life in a military prison in the US" if convicted, she said.

The Pentagon and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have launched an investigation into the leak of Afghanistan documents while US leaders and Hamid Karzai, the Afghan presiden, have condemned the leak.

In a statement, the defence department said Manning was transfered to the US "due to a potentially lengthy pre-trail confinement because of the complexity of the charges and an ongoing investigation."

Our correspondent said that the US military wants to use Manning to send a message to future whistleblowers.

"If you violate the trust of security clearance, you will be prosecuted," she said.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has called Manning a "political prisoner" and alleged that the US kept him in detention in Kuwait to render him "incommunicado".

formspring.me

2010-12-17T00:36:00.001-07:00

what is bliss? http://formspring.me/lisbethwest

What religion do you follow?

2010-12-17T00:28:00.001-07:00

What religion do you follow?

Answer here

2010-11-02T20:32:00.000-06:00

9th Grade Class Forced to Enlist in JROTC

2010-08-25T16:05:00.005-06:00

High School enlists ninth grade to Military Training

Freshmen all put in JROTC
Welcome to high school. Now drop and give me 50.

By Gina Vasselli

The entire freshman class at Carvers Bay High School has been automatically enrolled in the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps, a military-sponsored program that trains high school students in military discipline and concepts. Principal Richard Neal, a Navy veteran, said the school's Marine Corps JROTC class is fulfilling the student's physical education requirement and is part of the school's Ninth Grade Academy.

But Charles Holloway, the parent of a freshman student at Carvers Bay, said he did not want his son in that program and when he asked that his son be taken out, his son was put in a class by himself.Holloway said he feels his son was being punished for not wanting to take part in that class.

Holloway said the JROTC class simply showed up on his son's schedule in place of gym class and he did not receive any information about the class or how to get his son out of it.

"What happened to our freedom of choice?" Holloway said. "I wanted nothing to do with anything related to the military."

According to the South Carolina Department of Education, high school students must take at least one credit of physical education in order to graduate. ROTC can also fill that requirement.

Neal said he initiated the program because studies show that students in leadership programs are more likely to stay in school and graduate. He said so far the program has had an "extremely high positive response," but "any parent who did not want their son or daughter [to participate] has the opportunity to participate in other elective classes."

Neal said letters and fliers about Ninth Grade Academy were sent to parents. The class is an elective and students had the option to select other programs as well, he said, but noted that the ninth grade class was "enrolled" in the program.

"We accepted all of the freshman class into our program," said Master Sgt. Joe Epps, one of the instructors of the ROTC program at Carvers Bay. "What used to be the PE element ... we have taken that over."

Georgetown County Superintendent Randy Dozier said freshmen are not required to take part in the JROTC class.

"We're not going to draft people into ROTC if they don't want to be in there," Dozier said. "They certainly can opt out."

Holloway said he is concerned that other parents do not know their child is in this program. He said that other students are "going to my son, saying 'how did you get out of it?'"

"No one else knows because no one else is in that second class with my son," he said. "This was not transparent."

contact gvasselli (at) thesunnews (dot) com

duckdaotsu fair use notice:
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Who's the most talented person you know?

2010-08-07T23:22:00.001-06:00

You are.

what is bliss?

Were you a Michael Jackson fan?

2010-08-07T23:18:00.001-06:00

a fan does not understand the concept of past tense.

what is bliss?

Were you a Michael Jackson fan?

2010-08-07T23:15:00.001-06:00

Never saw one, do they cool down the house?

what is bliss?

What was the worst place you've traveled to?

2010-08-07T23:14:00.003-06:00

hell on earth: active addiction

what is bliss?

What's one food you'll never eat again?

2010-08-07T23:14:00.001-06:00

anything mind-altering or mood changing

what is bliss?

What would your perfect day look like?

2010-08-07T23:13:00.003-06:00

I just lived it, and tomorrow will be another

what is bliss?

If you could master one skill what would it be?

2010-08-07T23:13:00.001-06:00

absolute compassion

what is bliss?

If you could have an endless supply of any food, what would you get?

2010-08-07T23:12:00.005-06:00

food for all the hungry on the planet

what is bliss?

Who's the most famous person you've met?

2010-08-07T23:12:00.003-06:00

inner peace

what is bliss?

What music are you listening to today?

2010-08-07T23:12:00.001-06:00

hummingbirds, towhees, mourning doves, chickadees, nuthatches, ducks, chickens, peacock, geese, wind chimes, basset baying, finches, wrens, orioles, wood peewees, grosbeaks, hawks, eagles, crickets, wind through the pine trees, the song that my mind creates throughout the day;
Tenor Pablo Romero will perform in recital, "Immigrant Voices: A musical journey to the New World" a selection of classical pieces from italian romanticism, latin american composers, Zarzuela, American Art Song and Broadway Selections at the Magnolia Music Studio. Accompanying him at the piano is Zoe Ann Nishimuta (in my spirit tonight)

what is bliss?

Tao Thought: Invisibility and daodejing 76

2010-07-24T22:08:00.004-06:00

Invisibility is the best advantage.
But if forced to a confrontation,
Come out with all your skill.

There was once a roadside vendor who sold rheumatism formulas to the passersby. He was a cheery old man who was faithfully at his spot for years. One day a young bully began to harass the vendor. The old man tried very hard to avoid the confrontation, but eventually the bully became convinced that he had a coward to abuse as he pleased. When the moment of attack came, the old man defeated him with superior boxing skills. Significantly, the old man was never seen again. He had manifested his superiority at a critical moment, but once he had exposed himself, he disappeared.

In this competitive world, it is best to be invisible. Go through life without showing off, attracting attention to yourself, or making flamboyant gestures. These will only attract the hostility of others. The wise accomplish all that they want without arousing the envy or scorn of others. They make achievements only for the sake of fulfilling their inner yearnings.

Yet it is inevitable that you will have to prove yourself at one time or another. When that is necessary, then you must marshal all your skills and do your very best. Prove yourself when it is demanded, and when you must prove yourself, be superior. At that moment, it is no time to talk of philosophy and humility. Act. Do. Then fade back into invisibility.

invisibility
365 Tao
Daily Meditations
Deng Ming-Dao (author)
ISBN 0-06-250223-9

Tao Te Ching translated by various current scholars

76

When people are born they are soft and supple
when they perish they are hard and stiff

When plants shoot forth they are soft and tender
when they die they are withered and dry

Thus it is said the hard and strong are followers of death
the soft and weak are followers of life

When an army becomes strong it suffers defeat
when a plant becomes hard it snaps

The hard and strong dwell below
the soft and weak dwell above

— RED PINE

http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/taoism/taoism.php?name=taoteching.redpine

76

At birth a person is soft and yielding,
at death stiff and hard.

All beings, the grass, the trees: alive, soft, and yielding;
dead, stiff, and hard.

Therefore the hard and inflexible are friends of death.
The soft and yielding are friends of life.

An unyielding army is destroyed.
An unbending tree breaks.

The hard must humble itself or be otherwise humbled.
The soft will ultimately ascend.

— BRIAN BROWNE-WALKER

http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/taoism/taoism.php?name=taoteching.walker

76

Men are born soft and supple;
dead, they are stiff and hard.
Plats are born tender and pliant;
dead, they are brittle and dry.

Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible
is a disciple of death.
Whoever is soft and yielding
is a disciple of life.

The hard and stiff will be broken.
The soft and supple will prevail.

— STEPHEN MITCHELL

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html#76

OUR NEXT JOURNEY:

CHAD HANSEN’S CHINESE PHILOSOPHY PAGES

his site contains segments of an extended interpretive theory of Classical Chinese philosophy that takes Daoism (Taoism) as the philosophical center. The interpretive theory turns on a new, more philosophical reading of the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi (ChuangTzu 莊子). My analysis highlights skeptical and relativist themes in his thinking. The crucial novelty is the assumption that Zhuangzi was a philosopher of language, like his close friend and philosophical interlocutor, Hui Shi, . He was deeply engaged with the linguistic and other insights of the Later Mohists (sometimes called Neo-Mohists or Dialectical Mohists) and the School of Names. His relation to the other famous Daoist, Laozi (Lao Tzu) is rather more indirect but their views are complementary in that both deal with 道dao^guide at a higher level than do Confucians or Mohists.

The site also contains my related writings about Confucianism, Mohism, Legalism Asian values, human rights and rule of law. and some reflections on Asian values, human rights and rule of law.

If you find the interpretive approach and style worthwhile, you may be interested in my systematic and more complete treatment of Chinese thought. I am please to report that Oxford University Press has reissued my book, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought , in affordable paperback (at last!).
I add essays and translation here as I finish them for publication and also include links to classes I teach at the University of Hong Kong.

Much of this is work in progress and I would appreciate any feedback about, e.g., where it is hard to follow, makes historical errors, etc. Any Chinese characters in various postings use Big5 coding (gradually changing to Unicode). Hover over note icons in the detail pages for a brief description of each article.

If you have any comments, criticisms or suggestions send mail to: chansen (at) hku.hk
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Tao Thought: Choosing and daodejing 73

2010-07-22T00:42:00.002-06:00

One side of a ridge is cold and foggy,
The other is hot and dry.
Just by choosing where you stand,
You alter your destiny.

Those who follow Tao talk of destiny. They define destiny as the course or pattern of your life as it spontaneously takes shape. They do not think of destiny as a preordained set of circumstances. there is no rigid script for this mad stage that we are on.

Those who follow Tao then look of location. By this, they mean something as literal as where you situate your house or where you stand politically. They think that these factors are very important. Let us imagine for a moment that you had a job offer in another city far from where you were born. You move there with your family. Do you think that your life would change? We can refine this perception: If you went to a certain school, you would be educated differently. If you went into a different profession, it would change your outlook. If you lived in one neighborhood or another, you would be a different person. Every choice you make changes you.

N o matter how minor or how great, you must make choices each and every minute that passes. The irony of life is that it is a one-way journey. You cannot go back, you cannot make comparisons by trying one way and then another. There are no double-blind studies where it comes to your own life. Therefore, only wisdom will suffice to guide you.

choosing
365 Tao
Daily Meditations
Deng Ming-Dao
ISBN 0-06-250223-9

daodejing translated by current scholars

74

If people no longer fear death
why do we threaten to kill them

And if others fear death
and still act perverse
and we catch and kill them
who else will dare

As long as people fear death
the executioner will exist
to kill in the executioner's place
is to take the carpenter's place

Who takes the carpenter's place
is bound to hurt his hands

— RED PINE

http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/taoism/taoism.php?name=taoteching.redpine

74

If people don't love life,
they won't fear death,
and threatening them with it won't work.

If people have lives worth living,
then the threat of death is meaningful,
and they'll do what is right to avoid it.

But killing itself should be the province
of the great executioner alone.
Trying to take his place and kill
is like cutting wood
in the place of the master carpenter:

The odds are you'll hurt your own hand.

http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/taoism/taoism.php?name=taoteching.walker

74

If you realize that all things change,
there is nothing you will try to hold on to.
If you aren't afraid of dying,
there is nothing you can't achieve.

Trying to control the future
is like trying to take the master carpenter's place.
When you handle the master carpenter's tools,
chances are that you'll cut your hand.

—STEPHEN MITCHELL

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html#74

Stanford Studies on Daoism

Laozi

The Laozi Story
Date and Authorship of the Laozi
Textual Traditions
Commentaries
Approaches to the Laozi

Approaches to the Laozi
At the political level, the Laozi condemns aggressive measures such as war (ch. 30), cruel punishment (ch. 74), and heavy taxation (75), which reflect but the ruler's own desire for wealth and power. If the ruler could rid himself of desire, according to the Laozi, the world would be at peace of its own accord (chs. 37, 57).
In this sense, the Laozi describes the ideal sage-ruler as someone who understands and follows ziran (e.g., chs. 2, 17, 64). In this same sense, it also opposes the Confucian program of benevolent intervention, which as the Laozi understands it, addresses at best the symptoms but not the root cause of the disease. The Confucian project is in fact symptomatic of the decline of the rule of Dao. Conscious efforts at cultivating moral virtues only accentuate the loss of natural goodness, which in its original state would have been entirely commonplace and would not have warranted distinction or special attention (chs. 18, 38). Worse, Confucian ethics assumes that learning and moral self-cultivation can bring about personal and social improvement. From the Daoist perspective, artificial effort to “improve” things or to correct the order of ziran only fuels a false sense of self that alienates human beings from their inherent “virtue.”

The concept of nonaction is exceedingly rich. It brings into play a cutting discernment that value distinctions are ideological, that human striving and competitive strife spring from the same source. Nonaction entails also a critique of language and conventional knowledge, which to the Daoist sage has become impregnated with ideological contaminants. The use of paradoxes in the Laozi especially heightens this point. For example, the person of Dao is depicted as “witless” or “dumb,” whereas people driven by desire appear intelligent and can scheme with cunning (ch. 20). The way of learning, as one would normally understand, “increases” the store of knowledge and adds value to goods and services; in contrast, questioning the very meaning of such “knowledge” and “value,” the Laozi describes the pursuit of Dao as constantly “decreasing” or chipping away at the artifice built by desire (ch. 48). Driving home the same point, to cite but one more example, the Laozi states, “The highest virtue is not virtuous; therefore it has virtue” (ch. 38). In other words, those who fully realize “virtue” in the Daoist sense do not act in the way that men and women of conventional morality typically act or are expected to act. Paradoxes of this kind function as a powerful rhetorical device, which forces the reader, so to speak, to move out of his or her “comfort zone” and to take note of the proposed higher truth of Dao (see also, e.g., chs. 41, 45, 56). In this context, one can also understand some of the provocative statements in the Laozi telling the ruler, for example, to keep the people in a state of “ignorance” (ch. 65).

a reading list of books and interpretations of the Daodejing is available at
http://www.duckdaotsu.org/dao_books.html
archived at http://www.duckdaotsu.org/07/choosing.html

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Tao Thought: Internalizing and daodejing 73

2010-07-20T13:42:00.002-06:00

People think they don’t have to learn,
Because there is so much information available.
But knowledge is more than possessing
information.
Only the wise move fast enough.

The amount of information available today is unprecedented. In medieval times a few volumes could form an encyclopedia of all know facts, or a despot could control his subjects simply by isolating or destroying a library. Now information is available to us in tidal proportions.

Some people take a lethargic approach to this enormity. They feel that if there is so much at hand, they do not need t actually learn anything. they’ll go out and find it when they need it. But life moves too fast for us to rely on this laziness. Just as the flow of information has increased exponentially, so too has the pace of decision making accelerated. We can’t be passive, we have to internalize information and place ourselves precisely in the flow.

It has been stated that the average human being utilizes ten percent of his or her mental capacity. A [person with a high IQ] uses only fifteen percent. So we definately have the capacity to keep up—if we unlock our potential. This requires education, experience, and determination. One should never stop learning, never stop exploring, never stop going on adventures. Be like the explorers of old. What they acquired for themselves will always surpass those who merely read about their exploits.

internalizing
365 Tao
Daily Meditations
Deng Ming-Dao

daodejing translated by current scholars

73

Daring to act means death
daring not to act means life

Of these two one benefits
one harms what Heaven hates
who knows the reasons

The Way of Heaven
wins easily without a fight
answers wisely without a word
comes quickly without a summons
plans ingeniously without a thought

The Net of Heaven is all-embracing
it mesh is wide but nothing escapes

— RED PINE

http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/taoism/taoism.php?name=taoteching.redpine

73

Those who are courageous out of daring are killed.
Those who are courageous out of love survive.

The first is harmful, the second beneficial.
Heaven prohibits some things,
but who knows the reason?
Not even the sage knows the answer to this.

This is the way of heaven:
It doesn't contend, but easily overcomes.
It doesn't speak, but always responds.
It can't be summoned,
but comes of its own volition.
Utterly without haste,
it plans for everything.

The net of heaven is vast.
Though its meshes are wide,
nothing slips through.

— BRIAN BROWNE-WALKER

http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/taoism/taoism.php?name=taoteching.walker

73

The Tao is always at ease.
It overcomes without competing,
answers without speaking a word,
arrives without being summoned,
accomplishes without a plan.

Its net covers the whole universe.
And though its meshes are wide,
it doesn't let a thing slip through.

— STEPHEN MITCHELL

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html#7

Stanford Studies on Daoism

Laozi

The Laozi Story
Date and Authorship of the Laozi
Textual Traditions
Commentaries
Approaches to the Laozi

Approaches to the Laozi

The concept of wu is difficult and has been translated variously as “nothing,” “nothingness,” or “nonbeing.” It marks not only the mystery of Dao but also its limitlessness or inexhaustibility (e.g., ch. 4). Names serve to delimit, to set boundaries; in contrast, Dao is without limits and therefore cannot be captured fully by language. This suggests a positive dimension to transcendence, which brings into view the creative power of Dao: “All things under heaven are born of being (you); being is born of wu” (ch. 40). What does this mean?

Elsewhere in the Laozi, Dao is said to be the “beginning” of all things (chs. 1, 25). Daoist creation involves a process of differentiation from unity to multiplicity: “Dao gives birth to One; One gives birth to Two; Two gives birth to Three; Three gives birth to the ten thousand things” (ch. 42). The text does not indicate tense or spell out what the numbers refer to -- is it saying that something called “the One” produced or produces “the Two”? The “nothingness” of Dao helps impose certain constraints on interpretation. Specifically, the idea of a creator god with attributes, like the “Lord on High” (Shangdi) in ancient Chinese religion, does not seem to fit with the emphasis on transcendence.

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Tao Thought: Conservation and daodejing 72

2010-07-17T19:19:00.003-06:00

Don’t let a thread fall without noticing it.
Don’t rake dry brown leaves carelessly.
Think how difficult it was
For something to take this existence.

Frugality is lauded in almost every culture. Nearly all of us have been taught to conserve and save. Those who do not waste and yet do not become misers are most admirable.

We can be aware of conservation everyday. We should think whether we what we discard can be reused or recycled. We should consider whether our expenditures are really necessary. We should be aware if we are wasting our time and efforts on frivolous activities. We should not abuse our environment with garbage, pollutants, and (mindless) recreational activities.

Conservation is impossible without a sound understanding of the wholeness of cycles. Unless we remember how precious something is,home much effort it took for it to come into being, we will not value it. Unless we think about its proper transformation into its next phase—a leaf withering, a flower browning, a lake drying up—we will not know our relation to it. Everything lives or dies in its own time. We too are part of the same cycles, only we have the option of contemplating and acting within that context. To do so with grace and awareness is the essence of one who follows Tao.

conservation
365 Tao
Daily Meditations
Deng Ming-Dao
ISBN 0-06-250223-9

daodejing translated by current scholars

72

When people no longer fear authority
a greater authority will appear

Don’t restrict where people dwell
Don’t repress how people live
If they aren't repressed
they won't protest

Thus the sage knows himself
but doesn't reveal himself
He loves himself
but doesn't exalt himself

Thus he picks this over that

— RED PINE

http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/taoism/taoism.php?name=taoteching.redpine

72

If people fear your power,
then you don't really have any.

Leave them alone in their homes.
Respect them in their lives,
and they won't grow weary of you.

The sage knows herself,
but doesn't dwell on herself;
Loves herself, but no more
than she loves everyone else.

She adopts the concerns of heaven as her own.

— BRIAN BROWNE-WALKER

http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/taoism/taoism.php?name=taoteching.walker

72

When they lose their sense of awe,
people turn to religion.
When they no longer trust themselves,
they begin to depend upon authority.

Therefore the Master steps back
so that people won't be confused.
He teaches without a teaching,
so that people will have nothing to learn.

— STEPHEN MITCHELL

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html#72

Stanford Studies on Daoism

Laozi

The Laozi Story
Date and Authorship of the Laozi
Textual Traditions
Commentaries
Approaches to the Laozi

Approaches to the Laozi

To begin with Dao, the etymology of the graph suggests a pathway, or heading in a certain direction along a path. Most commentators agree in translating dao as “way.” As a verb, perhaps on account of the directionality involved, dao also conveys the sense of “speaking.” Thus, the opening phrase of chapter 1, dao ke dao, literally “Dao that can be dao-ed,” is often rendered, “The Way that can be spoken of.” In most cases, the capitalized form -- “Way” or “Dao” -- is used, to distinguish it from other usages of the term.

The concept of dao figures centrally also in Confucian writings, and as mentioned some parts of the current Laozi represent a critique of the Confucian school (especially chs. 18 and 19). In general, whereas dao signifies a means to a higher end in other schools of Chinese philosophy, the Laozi sees it as an end in itself. This distinction is captured in the Oxford English Dictionary (online edition), which defines “Dao” as follows: “In Taoism, an absolute entity which is the source of the universe; the way in which this absolute entity functions.” “In Confucianism and in extended uses,” however, the term means “the way to be followed, the right conduct; doctrine or method.”

The Laozi underscores both the ineffability and creative power of Dao. Chapter 1 states that the “constant” (chang, also translated as “eternal” -- e.g., W. T. Chan 1963) Dao cannot be described; it is “nameless.” Chapter 14 brings out clearly that Dao transcends sensory perception; it has no shape or form. Nameless and formless, Dao can only be described as “dark” (xuan) or wu, literally “not having” any name, form, or other characteristics of things (see also chs. 21 and 32). Indeed, though suggestive, the term “Dao” itself is no more than a symbol -- as the Laozi makes clear, “I do not know its name; I style it Dao” (ch. 25; see also ch. 34). This suggests a sense of radical transcendence, which may explain why the Laozi has been approached so often as a mystical text.

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2010-07-16T19:54:00.001-06:00

Tao Thought: Smothered and daodejing 71

2010-07-16T19:14:00.003-06:00

It's daybreak and already
The prostitutes are on the street,
Addicts are searching the corners with a feral
glint.
An obese woman, winded from a few steps,
Passes an anxious man scavenging a garbage
can—
Jesters to winos in a fiefdom of pigeons.
The summer sky is obscured with leaden clouds.

Tao is all around, but sometimes the weight of our poor habits, our bad circumstances, or our lack of exposure to philosophy hampers us. Although every person should be equally valued as a human being, not every person is equally sensitive to Tao.

Ignorance is our predominant mode in life. We may pass through ghettos and consider ourselves more fortunate, but don’t we all have dense layers of misfortune, confusion, and selfishness to dissolve?

Tao can be known by progressive purification and cultivation. The opposite is also true. Ignorance can be compounded, made denser, until the light of our spirit is smothered.

The light of the soul is bright, but dense clouds of human ignorance* obscure it. Where are you in terms of your effort to make your life brighter?

smothered
365 Tao
Daily Meditations
Deng Ming-Dao
ISBN 0-06-250223-9

seems like I comment on this passage every year,
but the issue remains. Addiction is a disease
and is as painful and gripping as other chronic diseases.
It is not ignorance that compels the addict to search
for wine or dope, addicts live in the grips of
a progressive and potentially-terminal disease.
We either keep digging the hole
or throw out the shovel and climb out
before the disease takes us down with it.

Recovery is possible. Carry the message, not the addict.

dao de jing translated by current scholars

71

To understand yet not understand is transcendence
not to understand yet understand is affliction

The reason the sage is not afflicted
is because he treats affliction as affliction
hence he is not afflicted

— RED PINE

http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/taoism/taoism.php?name=taoteching.redpine

71

Moving from knowing to not knowing - this is good.
Moving from not knowing to knowing - this is sickness.
You have to become sick of your sickness
before you can get rid of it.

The sage isn't sick.
He's sick of his sickness.
Therefore he's not sick.

— BRIAN BROWNE-WALKER

http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/taoism/taoism.php?name=taoteching.walker

71

Not-knowing is true knowledge.
Presuming to know is a disease.
First realize that you are sick;
then you can move toward health.

The Master is her own physician.
She has healed herself of all knowing.
Thus she is truly whole.

— STEPHEN MITCHELL

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html#71

Stanford Studies on Daoism
Laozi

• The Laozi Story
• Date and Authorship of the Laozi
• Textual Traditions
• Commentaries
• Approaches to the Laozi

Approaches to the Laozi

A sixth and influential view is that the Laozi is above all concerned with realizing peace and sociopolitical order. It is an ethical and political masterpiece intended for the ruling class, with concrete strategic suggestions aimed at remedying the moral and political turmoil engulfing late Zhou China. Self-cultivation is important, but the ultimate goal extends beyond personal fulfillment (Lau 1963; LaFargue 1992). The Laozi criticizes the Confucian school not only for being ineffectual in restoring order but more damagingly as a culprit in worsening the ills of society at that time. The ideal seems to be a kind of “primitive” society, where people would dwell in harmony and contentment, not fettered by ambition or desire (Needham 1956).

This list is far from exhaustive; there are other views of the Laozi. Chad Hansen (1992), for example, focuses on the “anti-language” philosophy of the text. Different combinations are also possible. A. C. Graham, for example, emphasizes both the mystical and political elements, arguing that the Laozi was probably targeted at the ruler of a small state (1989, 234). The Laozi could be seen as encompassing all of the above -- such categories as the metaphysical, ethical, political, mystical, and religious form a unified whole in Daoist thinking and are deemed separate and distinct only in Western thought. Alternatively, coming back to the question of multiple authorship and coherence, it could be argued that the Laozi contains “layers” of material put together by different people at different times (Emerson 1995).

Is it fair to say that the Laozi is inherently “polysemic” (Robinet 1998), open to diverse interpretations? This concerns not only the difficulty of the Laozi but also the interplay between reader and text in any act of interpretation. Polysemy challenges the assertion that the “intended” meaning of the Laozi can be recovered fully. But it does not follow that context is unimportant, that parameters do not exist, or that there are no checks against particular interpretations. Questions of provenance, textual variants, as well as the entire tradition of commentaries and modern scholarship are important for this reason. Put differently, while hermeneutic reconstruction should be given full attention, it remains an open process. The following presents some of the main concepts and symbols in the Laozi based on the current text, focusing on the key conceptual cluster of Dao, de (virtue), ziran (naturalness), and wuwei (nonaction), in a way that highlights their philosophical significance and suggests a degree of coherence.

"Enlightenment"
photograph and photoshop
by lisbeth west

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Tao Thought: Mandala and daodejing 70

2010-07-15T18:24:00.003-06:00

What did I do today?
I exercised. I said good-bye
To a departing friend.
I went to market, ate my meals.
Took a walk. Took out the garbage.
Read a little. Meditated. Slept.
This was my mandala.

A mandala is most commonly a diagram or painting that one uses during meditation. the painting is usually brightly colored and extremely complicated. By beginning at the outer perimeter of the picture and gradually working inwards (sometimes pausing at certain parts to contemplate), the meditator becomes completely absorbed. By the time that the center is reached, all normal egoistic notions should have been dissolved and the profundities of the mind should have been opened.

Other religions have various other ways : mass, chanting, sacrament, reciting holy scripture, contemplating. These too become their mandala -- their objects of worship.

But it is not enough to go to church or temple once a week, or to read a bit of a holy book every morning. Can Tao be confined to such simple rituals? No. We could fly to the very height of the cosmos, plunge to the greatest depth, swim the length and breadth of eternity, and still not come to the limits of Tao. Therefore, we should look for Tao in every day. We should ask ourselves each day how Tao manifested itself to us. Our daily activities are our mandala.

Tao reveals itself to us in our mundane doings.

mandala
365 Tao
Daily Meditations
Deng Ming-Dao (author)
ISBN 0-06-250223-9

Tao Te Ching translated by current scholars

70

My words are easy to understand
easy to employ but
no one can understand them
no one can employ them

Words have an ancestor
deeds have a master
because they have no understanding
people fail to understand me
rare are they who understand me
thus I am exalted

The sage therefore wears coarse cloth
and keeps his jade inside

— RED PINE

http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/taoism/taoism.php?name=taoteching.redpine

70

My words are very easy to understand,
very easy to put into practice.
But you can't "understand" them,
can't put them into "practice."

Words have their ruler.
Events have their origins.
People who can't understand this can't understand me.
Those who do are few.

They wear coarse cloth
and carry jade in their breasts.

— BRIAN BROWNE WALKER

http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/taoism/taoism.php?name=taoteching.walker

70

My teachings are easy to understand
and easy to put into practice.
Yet your intellect will never grasp them,
and if you try to practice them, you'll fail.

My teachings are older than the world.
How can you grasp their meaning?

If you want to know me,
look inside your heart.

— STEPHEN MITCHELL

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html#70

Stanford Studies on Daoism
Laozi
• The Laozi Story
• Date and Authorship of the Laozi
• Textual Traditions
• Commentaries
• Approaches to the Laozi

Approaches to the Laozi

A second view is that the Laozi gives voice to a profound mysticism. According to Victor Mair (1990), it is indebted to Indian mysticism (see also Waley 1958). According to Benjamin Schwartz (1985), the mysticism of the Daodejing is sui generis, uniquely Chinese and has nothing to do with India. Indeed, as one scholar suggests, it is unlike other mystical writings in that ecstatic vision does not play a role in the ascent of the Daoist sage (Welch 1965, 60).

According to another interpretation, however, there is every indication that ecstasy forms a part of the world of the Laozi, although it is difficult to gauge the “degree” of its mystical leanings (Kaltenmark 1969, 65). It is possible to combine the mystical and mythological approaches to yield a third view. Although the presence of ancient religious beliefs can still be detected, they have been raised to a “higher” mystical plane in the Laozi (e.g., Ching 1997).

A fourth view sees the Laozi mainly as a work of philosophy, which gives a metaphysical account of reality and insight into Daoist self-cultivation and government; but fundamentally it is not a work of mysticism (W. T. Chan 1963). The strong practical interest of the Laozi distinguishes it from any mystical doctrine that eschews worldly involvement. It is, in Creel's (1977) words, “purposive” and not “contemplative.”

Fifth, to many readers the Laozi offers essentially a philosophy of life. Remnants of an older religious thinking may have found their way into the text, but they have been transformed into a naturalistic philosophy. The emphasis on naturalness translates into a way of life characterized by simplicity, calmness, and freedom from the tyranny of desire (e.g., Liu Xiaogan 1997). Unlike the claim that the Laozi espouses a mystical or esoteric teaching directed at a restricted audience, this view tends to highlight its universal appeal and contemporary relevance.

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Tao Thought: Gratitude and daodejing 69

2010-07-13T17:55:00.004-06:00

When you drink water,
Remember its source.

If your spiritual understanding is sound, then you will constantly be aware of the subtleties of life. If you fritter away your concentration on minor entertainment and trivial distractions, then you will never attain a profound level of awareness.

It is not the grand sweeping religious celebrations and heroic moments in life that are the only important spiritual occasions. Every ordinary moment, every little detail should be a celebration of your personal understanding. Your smallest act should be permeated with reverence.

One of our most basic acts is drinking water. Without it, we could not sustain ourselves. Water cleanses us, cools us, and is an essential component of most of our biological processes. But when we drink it, are we aware of what it does? Do we think of its source and all the efforts that make it possible for us to have this simple glass of water?

Being spiritual means not taking things for granted. Quite the opposite, you remember how everything that comes to you fits into an overall scheme. You acknowledge the precious quality of everyday things. An you maintain a gratitude for both the good and the bad in your life.

gratitude
365 Tao
Daily Meditations
Deng Ming-Dao (author)
ISBN 0-06-250223-9

Tao Te Ching translated by current scholars

69

In warfare there is a saying
rather than a host
better to be a guest
rather than advance an inch
better to retreat a foot

This means to form no column
to wear no armour
to brandish no weapon
to repulse no enemy

No fate is worse than to have no enemy
without an enemy we would lose our treasure

Thus when opponents are evenly matched
the remorseful one prevails

— RED PINE

http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/taoism/taoism.php?name=taoteching.redpine

69

In conflict it is better to be receptive than aggressive,
better to retreat a foot than advance an inch.

This is called moving ahead without advancing,
capturing the enemy without attacking him.

There is no greater misfortune than underestimating your opponent.
To underestimate your opponent is to forsake your three treasures.

When opposing forces are engaged in conflict,
the one who fights with sorrow will triumph.

— BRIAN BROWNE-WALKER

http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/taoism/taoism.php?name=taoteching.walker

69

The generals have a saying:
"Rather than make the first move
it is better to wait and see.
Rather than advance an inch
it is better to retreat a yard."

This is called
going forward without advancing,
pushing back without using weapons.

There is no greater misfortune
than underestimating your enemy.
Underestimating your enemy
means thinking that he is evil.
Thus you destroy your three treasures
and become an enemy yourself.

When two great forces oppose each other,
the victory will go
to the one that knows how to yield.

— STEPHEN MITCHELL

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html#69

Stanford Studies on Daoism
Laozi
The Laozi Story
Date and Authorship of the Laozi
Textual Traditions
Commentaries
Approaches to the Laozi

Is the Laozi a manual of self-cultivation and government? Is it a metaphysical treatise, or does it harbor deep mystical insights? Chapter 1 of the current Laozi begins with the famous words: “The Way that can be spoken of is not the constant Way.” Chapter 10 speaks of nourishing one's “soul” and embracing the “One.” Chapter 80 depicts the ideal polity as a small country with few inhabitants. The Laozi is a difficult text. Its language is often cryptic; the sense or reference of the many symbols it employs remains unclear, and there seems to be conceptual inconsistencies. For example, whereas chapter 2 refers to the “mutual production of being and nonbeing,” chapter 40 declares, “Being originates in nonbeing” (Henricks, trans. 1989). Is it more meaningful to speak of the “worldviews” of the Daodejing, instead of a unified vision? If the Laozi were an “anthology” put together at random by different compilers over a long period of time, coherence need not be an issue. Traditionally, however, this was never a serious option. Most modern studies are equally concerned to disclose the “deeper” unity and meaning of the classic. While some seek to recover the “original” meaning of the Laozi, others celebrate its contemporary relevance. Consider, first of all, some of the main modern approaches to the Daodejing (cf. Hardy 1998).

One view is that the Laozi reflects a deep mythological consciousness at its core. The myth of “chaos,” in particular, helps shape the Daoist understanding of the cosmos and the place of human beings in it (Girardot 1983). Chapter 25, for example, likens the Dao to an undifferentiated oneness. The myth of a great mother earth goddess may also have informed the worldview of the Laozi (Erkes 1935; Chen 1969), which explains its emphasis on nature and the feminine (Chen 1989). Chapter 6, for example, refers to the “spirit of the valley,” which is also called the “mysterious female.”

http://www.duckdaotsu.org/07/gratitude.html

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Tao Thought: Searching and daodejing 68

2010-07-12T21:25:00.003-06:00

Where is Tao right now?
You say that it is all around me, but I
Only see my surroundings, only feel my own heartbeat.
Can you show me Tao without reasoning it out in my mind?
Can you help me see it here and now?
Can you help me feel it as doubtlessly as I touch?

You argue that Tao is beyond the senses,
But how do I know it exists?
You say that Tao is beyond definitions,
Then how will I understand it?
It is hard enough understanding the economy, my relationships,
The bewilderment of world events, violence, crime,
Drug abuse, political repression, and war.

With all these things requiring years to fathom,
How can I understand something that is
Colorless, nameless, flavorless, intangible, and silent?

Show me Tao! Show me Tao!

Look within, beyond the physical body; you have the faculties to do so. Focus your mind away from sensual input, and you will discover a new mode of perception. With this mode of perception,you can sense Tao. Once you search in this way, you will find Tao and have no doubts about it.

365 Tao
Daily Meditations
Deng Ming-Dao (author)
ISBN 0-06-250223-9

Stanford Studies on Daoism

Laozi

The Laozi Story
Date and Authorship of the Laozi
Textual Traditions
Commentaries
Approaches to the Laozi

Commentaries

From the Tang period, one begins to find serious attempts to collect and classify the growing number of Laozi commentaries. An early pioneer is the eighth-century Daoist master Zhang Junxiang, who cited some thirty commentaries in his study of the Daodejing (Wang 1981). Du Guangting (850-933) provided a larger collection, involving some sixty commentaries (Daode zhenjing guangshengyi, Daozang 725). According to Du, there were those who saw the Laozi as a political text, while others focused on spiritual self-cultivation. There were Buddhist interpreters (e.g., Kumārajīva and Sengzhao), and there were those who explained the “Twofold Mystery” (chongxuan). This latter represents an important development in the history of interpretation of the Daodejing.

The term “Twofold Mystery” comes from chapter 1 of the Laozi, where Dao is said to be the mystery of all mysteries (xuan zhi you xuan). As a school of Daoist learning, “Twofold Mystery” seizes this to be the key to understanding the Laozi. Daoist sources relate that the school goes back to the fourth-century master Sun Deng. Through Gu Huan (fifth century) and others, the school reached its height during the Tang period, represented by such thinkers as Cheng Xuanying and Li Rong in the seventh century. The school reflects the growing interaction between Daoist and Buddhist thought, particularly Mādhyamika philosophy. Unlike Wang Bi, it sees “nonbeing” as equally one-sided as being when applied to the transcendence of Dao. Nonbeing may highlight the profundity or mystery of Dao, but it does not yet reach the highest truth, which according to Cheng Xuanying can be called the “Dao of Middle Oneness” (Kohn 1992, 144). Like other polar opposites, the distinction between being and nonbeing must also be “forgotten” before one can achieve union with Dao.

The Laozi has been viewed in still other ways. For example, a Tang commentary by Wang Zhen, the Daodejing lunbing yaoyishu (Daozang 713; fasc. 417), presented to Emperor Xianzong (r. 806-820) in 809, sees the text as a treatise on military strategy (Rand 1979-80; see also Wang Ming 1984 and Mukai 1994). The diversity of interpretation is truly remarkable (see Robinet 1998 for a typological analysis). The Daodejing was given considerable imperial attention, with no fewer than eight emperors having composed or at least commissioned a commentary on the work. These include Emperor Wu and Emperor Jianwen of the Liang dynasty, Xuanzong of the Tang, Huizong of the Song, and Taizu of the Ming dynasty (see Liu Cunren 1969 for a discussion of the last three).

By the thirteenth century, students of the Daodejing were already blessed, as it were, with an embarrassment of riches, so much so that Du Daojian (1237-1318) could not but observe that the coming of the Dao to the world takes on a different form each time. That is to say, different commentators were shaped by the spirit of their age in their approach to the classic, so that it would be appropriate to speak of a “Han Laozi,” “Tang Laozi,” or “Song Laozi,” each with its own agenda (Xuanjing yuanzhi fahui, DZ 703; fasc. 391).

daodejing translated by current scholars

68

In ancient times the perfect officer wasn't armed
the perfect warrior wasn't angry
the perfect victor wasn't hostile
the perfect commander acted humble

This is the virtue of nonaggression
this is using the strength of others
this is uniting with Heaven
which was the ancient end

— RED PINE

http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/taoism/taoism.php?name=taoteching.redpine

68

A good general doesn't show off his power.
a good warrior doesn’t get angry.

A good conqueror doesn't attack people.
A good employer puts himself below his employees.

This is called the power of non-contention.
This is called using the strength of others.
This is called perfect emulation of heaven.

— BRIAN BROWNE-WALKER

http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/taoism/taoism.php?name=taoteching.walker

68

The best athlete
wants his opponent at his best.
The best general
enters the mind of his enemy.
The best businessman
serves the communal good.
The best leader
follows the will of the people.

All of the embody
the virtue of non-competition.
Not that they don't love to compete,
but they do it in the spirit of play.
In this they are like children
and in harmony with the Tao.

— STEPHEN MITCHELL

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html

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http://www.duckdaotsu.org/07/searching.html

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: What Fascism Is & Isn't

2010-07-11T18:55:00.000-06:00

No other word causes so much misunderstanding, confusion, and heated debate in politics than fascism. The term has been applied to many individuals such as McCarthy, Hoover, and others. It is frequently used to describe government policies and government themselves, often incorrectly. What then is fascism exactly? Webster's Dictionary defines it as: "A government system marked by a centralized dictatorship, stringent socioeconomic controls and belligerent nationalism." But the author takes exception with that definition. At best, the definition is vague and abstract. Nor does the definition seem capable of taking into all forms of fascism.

There is a resurgent, widespread attempt by the far right to label fascism as a form of socialism. Fredrick von Hayek was the first to attempt labeling the Nazis as socialists in his book The Road to Serfdom published in 1944.70 The hard right quickly adopted it, as it allowed the hard right to escape the charges that they had much in common with the Nazis.2 Such endeavors are not only silly, but dishonest as well and represent an attempt by the far right to distance themselves for their earlier support of Hitler.

Hayek's book is based on two erroneous assumptions from the very beginning. He first assumes that fascism and communism are one and the same, as they are both totalitarian systems. This makes about as much sense as calling a maple tree a pine tree because both are trees. His second erroneous assumption lays in his belief that only socialism or liberalism leads to totalitarian systems. In fact, all political systems can lead to totalitarian systems and all political systems are inherently unstable, as is any system created by man.

From there, Hayek takes severe liberties with history. For instance, he goes on to claim that by deliberate policy the United States by allowed the growth of cartels and syndicates after 1878.71 Indeed this date and time period is significant, but not for a move towards socialism or liberalism. Rather, it's the opposite a move towards fascism and corporate rule. Even a reader with a rudimentary knowledge of American history would recognize this time frame as the beginning of the robber baron era and laissez faire economics, precisely the type of economic policy Hayek holds in utmost esteem.

Hayek offers little proof to support his conclusions; in fact the book is devoid of any proof or even examples to support his findings. The book degenerates into an argument based upon unsubstantiated assertion. He argues against the nation state and proposes a supernational authority or world federation made up of the financial elite. In essence, Hayek proposes a world made up of sovereign corporations accountable to no one. Not only did Hayek take severe liberties with American history, he ignored the very nature of fascism in Germany and Italy.

In various speeches made shortly after the March on Rome, Mussolini stated, "We must take from state authority those functions for which it is incompetent and which it performs badly... I believe the state should renounce its economic functions, especially those carried out through monopolies, because the state is incompetent in such matters... We must put an end to state railways, state postal service and state insurance." The state returned large monopolies to the private sector after returning them to profitability such as the Consortium of Match Manufactures, privatized the insurance system in 1923, the telephone system in 1925, and many of the public works.

In Germany the Nazis announced they would end nationalization of private industries when they seized power. In 1932, Hitler returned control of the Gelsenkirhen company to private hands and in 1936 returned the stock of "United Steel" to private hands. Throughout 1933-1936, the Nazi returned to private hands the control of several banks: Dresdner, Danat, Commerz and Privatbank, the Deutsche Bank, and several others. In 1936, the steamship company Deutcher Schiff and Maschinenbau was returned to the private sector. In 1934, Dr. Schacht, the Nazi Minister of Economy, gave instructions to hasten the privatization of municipal enterprises. These enterprises were especially coveted by the rich industrialists, as they had been prosperous even during the depression.

Both in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the tax system was changed to one favoring business and the wealthy. The Nazis allowed industries to deduct from their taxable income all sums used to purchase new equipment. Rich families employing a maid were allowed to count the maid as a dependent child and reap the tax benefit. In Italy, the Minister of Finance stated: "We have broken with the practice of persecuting capital."73

Such programs, catering to big business and the rich elite, are more akin to the policies of the Reagan Administration than it is to any liberal administration including FDR's. Likewise, it was the rich industrialists that were behind the fascist movement in the United States during the 1930s. Thus it is no surprise that the right wing attempts to try and label fascism as socialism in trying to distance themselves from their previous support of fascism.

Perhaps the only redeeming feature in Hayek's book is his acknowledgement of environmental problems.72 Indeed this is significant, considering the book was first published in the 1940s, long before the birth of the environmental movement. Hayek readily acknowledges the problem of industrial pollution and the harmful effects of deforestation, yet he stops short of any meaningful solution. Instead of offering a viable solution Hayek condemns government regulation and would allow market forces to provide the solution. However, it was these same market forces that produced the problem. We have plenty of proof of such a fool hearty approach both here and globally. As late as the 1970s rivers caught fire in the United States, cities were smog stricken and harmful pollutants were damaging the environment world wide. Today we face the problems of global warming and ozone depletion, and the problem of environmental estrogens, which has the potential of being even more threatening than both global warming and ozone depletion.

But perhaps the most damning of all evidence that Hayek was dead wrong comes from the implementation of an economic system based on his beliefs. Hayek later taught at the University of Chicago, the same university that trained the "Boys from Chicago" who were the economic brains behind the fascist regime of Pinochet in Chile. There is no question in the matter that under Pinochet, Chile was indeed fascist. More alarming, Hayek is an idol to several top-level officials in the George W. Bush administration. They are dangerous close to imposing a fascist style economy on the United States.

In order to dispel the myth of the Nazis being socialists we need to first define socialism. Socialism is rigidly defined as an economic system in which the workers own the means of production and distribution of goods. A more relaxed definition would be simply that the workers maintain political control over the production and distribution of goods. Even using the more relaxed definition of socialism, the Nazis can not be labeled as socialists as there simply was no worker control over the production or distribution of goods in Nazi Germany. In fact, the Nazis outlawed legitimate labor unions. In place of the original unions, the Nazis implemented quasi-like unions that were controlled by the industrialists. In a déjà vu manner, the Republican Party has recently tried to enact a similar measure, conferring legal status on worker groups controlled by corporations. Some writers and historians have argued that you cannot have fascism without corporatism, as the corporate power structure has much in common with fascism. During the period preceding the outbreak of WWII it was common to refer to fascism as corporatism in polite English society.

More recently others have tried to define fascism as the "Third Way", in the sense that it borrowed ideas from both capitalism and socialism. The basic philosophy behind the "Third Way" incorrectly labels any regulations or government controls over businesses as socialism; essentially it's just a restatement of syndicalism. Such nonsense should be rejected whole heartily. It again represents an attempt to distance the right from their support of Hitler in the 1930s and ignores that the basis of the German economy under Hitler was a capitalist system where the means of production remained in private hands. Further, following the logic of the "Third Way," one would have to label all capitalistic systems as "Third Way," for throughout history there has never been a pure capitalistic system. A pure capitalist economy is so inherently and fatally flawed that it's never even been tried. But that is to be expected for any system that awards the winner with all the eggs. Nor has there been a pure socialistic system. Human greed simply prevents it.

The dangers of such nonsense can be illustrated with the following quote taken from a Baptists fundamentalist's web page in their labeling of the Japanese economy as fascist: However, Fascism is an economic term, denoting the type of economy where the Means of Production [factories, companies] and the ownership of raw materials [mines, oil wells] remains in the hands of private individuals, but where the government intervenes to determine how many competitors will be allowed to produce the same thing, how much is produced, and what prices may be charged.1

Here it can be seen that the term fascism has been clearly misapplied. This description could past for the economic theory of the fascist philosopher George Sorel. This is a description of syndicalism; it was the economic model of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to a large extent. Syndicalism does draw some aspects from socialism, but the system is still a capitalistic system as ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods remain in private hands. It is no more socialism than the conclusion of the Robber Barons and the corrupt politicians of Tammy Hall. The only difference between this example of syndicalism is that the government participation is open versus the backroom corruption of politicians in Tammy Hall.

Not only Japan invoke syndicalism, but almost all the Pacific Rim nations do, to some extent. These are the same nations that the hard right has held up in the past as darlings of capitalism and free enterprise. Yet these are precisely the same economic policies of the Nazis that they have tried to foist off as socialism. The key distinction here is the means of production still remains in private hands, just as it did in Nazi Germany. No capitalistic society has ever existed without some form of syndicalism or government control over the economy. The closest America came to an entirely capitalistic system was either the 1890s and the Robber Barons or the laissez faire policies of Herbert Hoover, and as we all know, that didn't end too well in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

No where does the quote above refer to totalitarian control or extreme nationalism. In fact, they have tried to define fascism in strictly economic terms for their own purposes. But it does serve to point out the dangers of inventing the "Third Way" or the use of syndicalism in an attempt to label the Nazis. The problem here is determining where syndicalism ends and capitalism begins. Is the trading of pollution credits a form of syndicalism or is it free enterprise? In America today, the hard right would attempt to label it as socialism, as they try to do with any laws or regulations of business. In fact, the past laws regulating corporations were much more severe and restrictive in the 1800s than today. One could argue that it was through syndicalism that the power elite and corporations gradually eroded those laws until corporations now enjoy more freedoms than what an individual enjoys. This is precisely what has happened in America.

But environmental and labor laws are not socialism. They are in fact nothing more than an attempt to bring an out of control system hell bent on exploitation of the environment and labor back to order. No labor law or environment law was ever passed in a vacuum. All of these laws were brought about by a need to correct an unhealthy or unsafe situation. While there are some corporations that strive to provide a clean and safe workplace, there are many whose only concern is the bottom line and they turn a blind eye towards safety and view their employees as expendable commodities.

Regulation of businesses or corporations by itself is not socialism. A business entity such as a corporation has no rights other than what privileges a society wishes to grant it. People have rights; a paper creation of a society such as a corporation has no inherent rights. Business entities such as corporations only have conditional privileges based upon providing for the common good of the society, which granted the charter. All such paper creations have an obligation to serve the society, which created it. Failing to perform that obligation, it loses any right for its continuing existence. It the obligation of that society to restrict the rights of such entities to promote equality for all and to prevent a ruling aristocracy from developing. This view is hardly socialism or even radical, unless one wishes to label Thomas Jefferson as a radical socialist as he more eloquently stated it:

"I hope we shall take warning from the example of England and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our Government to trial, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."3

Perhaps one of the better definitions of fascism comes from Heywood Broun, a noted American columnist in the 1930s:

"Fascism, is a dictatorship from the extreme right or to put it a little more closely into our local idiom, a government which is run by a small group of large industrialists and financial lords...I think it is not unfair to say that any businessman in America, or public leader, who goes out to break unions is laying the foundations for fascism"75

A definitive definition of fascism is a totalitarian government with extreme nationalist tendencies in which the government is controlled and operated for the benefit of a few elite. However, it should be noted that an all-encompassing definition of a complex system can not be simply stated. Such simple definitions undoubtedly fail in time. A caveat to the above definition would be anytime the government places the rights of corporations or the elite above the rights of the citizens, it represents a step towards fascism. A better insight into what fascism is can be obtained by listing the traits that are common to the classical fascist states of Franco's Spain, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. A list of traits of fascism is presented below. Note that the first two are the two most defining traits, obviously many of the others can be applied to many other social-political systems as one moves down the list.

1. Totalitarian

2. Extreme nationalism

3. Top down revolution or movement

4. Destructive divisionism such as racism and class warfare

5. Extreme anti-communism, anti socialism, and anti-liberal views

6. Extreme exploitation

7. Opportunistic ideology lacking in consistency as a means to grab power

8. Unbridled Corporatism

9. Reactionary

10. The use of violence and terror to attain and maintain power

11. Cult-like figurehead

12. The expounding of mysticism or religious beliefs

Not all fascists need exhibit all of the traits once again it should be emphasized that all fascist states will exhibit a totalitarian view. Most fascist states will have an extreme nationalism policy. However, extreme nationalism is not mandatory. States such as Spain under Franco and Chile under Pinochet were indeed fascist states, but they could hardly be described as having a policy of extreme nationalism.

A brief look at the above traits and how they relate to fascism will convey a better understanding of what fascism really is, using Nazi Germany as an example. First, because it was undisputedly fascist and secondly because there is more literature available on the Nazis than on either fascist Italy or Franco's Spain. Moreover, the use of the Nazi's as an example is closer to the focus of this book, which is creeping fascism in America.

Creeping fascism is the gradual lost of freedoms of the masses to the power elite. Full-blown fascism has never appeared all at once. The Nazis took several years to reach the final state of full-blown fascism. It took the Nazis five years before Kristallnacht, which marks the beginning of the "Final Solution." The Nazis gradually took away the freedoms of the citizens of Germany until they were able to launch the Holocaust. This was the reason for including the caveat in the definition of fascism above, "Any action taken by the government that places the rights of the elites and corporations above the citizens is a step towards fascism."

Such actions will not look like fascism some may even appear to be reasonable. Its only when the summation of many such actions ends in a fascist state that such actions can be seen as a step towards fascism.

Make no mistake in understanding that the power elite, those that own and run America's corporations, are fascist. They have forced war on this country to protect their assets, they have over-exploited their employees, they have used violence to bust unions, and they rely on divisionist policies such as racism and class warfare to maintain their power.

The erosion of our freedoms in the United States was prolonged by our constitution. Nevertheless, over time the lost of freedoms has left America at the edge of a chasm. Any further loss of freedoms and America will begin an irreversible slide into the deep abyss of fascism.

Before looking at the traits of fascism a brief review of the history of fascism and its roots in modern philosophy is needed. By looking at the roots of fascism in philosophy, we can gain an understanding why fascism is often described as reactionary. By looking at the various philosophers that have come to be associated with fascism, we will be able to see that many of these traits come directly from fascism's roots in philosophy. In that way, we can then see how some of these traits that can be applied to other social-political system are central to fascism.

Many writers have assumed that fascism has no intellectual or philosophical roots due to its lack of a consistent ideology. But such views are incorrect; the roots of fascism extend back to the French Revolution. The French Revolution is one of those landmark events in the history of Europe marking the beginning of a major shift in European culture and governments. In essence, fascism was a reaction to the French revolution. It was a reaction particularly to the slogan of the revolution of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" that was hated the most.

The concept of liberty from oppressive regimes in the daily lives of the citizens, including forced religious values, and the concept of voting and majority rule where the minority still retained a set of inalienable rights, incensed the early philosophers of fascism. Such a concept was a direct threat to the kings and nobles of the time, as well as to the church. Remember this was a time for debtor's prisons, indentured servants, and vassal states.

Equality, in the eyes of the law, was unspeakable. How could a mere peasant have the same rights under the law as the kings, nobles, and merchants? This was the time when the king's word was the law. Rights were based on the social standing of one's birth. The only rights a person had at the time were the rights that the king was willing to extend, and they could be withdrawn at any moment.

Fraternity, in the sense that all men and women shared humanity was considered heresy. It was a time when slaves were still considered and treated as animals and women were considered property, and not part of a greater humanity that needed to be shared.

All three terms meant a loss in power and control by those in power. But, this is exactly what the philosophers that have come to be associated with fascism were reacting to and rejecting. The period following the French Revolution produced a virtual intellectual stew of various philosophies, including those of Marx and Engels. A brief look at some of the major philosophers of fascism will show how they relate to the traits listed early, and how they were a reaction to the French Revolution. This list of philosophers is by no means complete, but it will suffice to show that many of the traits attributed to fascism above have roots going back as far as the French Revolution.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a German philosopher perhaps best known for his The World as Will and Representation.4 His beliefs held that the will is the underlying and ultimate reality. The whole phenomenal world was only the expression of will. Individuals have free will only in the sense that everyone is an expression of a will. Thus we are not authors of our own destiny, character, or behavior, according to Schopenhauer. His views parallel the development of relativistic physics that came a century later. His views were influential on Nietzche, among others.

Georg Hegel (1770-1831), a German philosopher held pantheism as the heart of his beliefs. The Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic are two of his better-known works. He viewed that all existence and all history was divine and that nature was sacred. He viewed God as an absolute spirit that also manifested itself in material things and individuals. He believed God acted through humans and embodied himself first in nature, then in the rising stages of human consciousness and civilization. He also had an ethnocentric and egocentric view. He maintained that the German nation was the highest carrier of the wave of God's development. He believed that the bureaucratic monarchy of Prussia was the highest form of state. These later views were certainly manifested in the Nazi's view of the Aryan race, as shown in the following quote.

"Thus the highest purpose of the folkish state is concern for the preservation of those original racial elements which bestow culture and create the beauty and dignity of a higher mankind. We, as Aryans, can conceive of the state only as the living organism of a nationality which not only assures the preservation of this nationality, but by the development of its spiritual and ideal abilities leads it to the highest freedoms."8

Fredrich Nietzche (1844-1900), also a German philosopher was best known for his work Thus Spake Zarathustra.5 Hitler liked to be photographed staring at a bust of Nietzche. Nietzche theorized two sets of morals, one for the ruling class and another for the slave class. Nietzche viewed that ancient empires grew out of the ruling class and that religions arose out of the slave classes, (which denigrates the rich, the powerful, rationalism, and sexuality.) He developed a concept of an "overman," a superhuman, which symbolized man at his most creative and highest intellectual development. Obviously, the "overman" was manifested in the Nazi's view of the Aryan race. He suffered a mental break down, most likely from the advances of syphilis, and was cared for by his mother and later his sister, Elisabeth. His sister painstakingly gathered his notes to publish his latter works. However, she was active in the rising anti-Semitic movement at the time and may have tainted his later work with her views. From time to time, Nietzsche enjoys a rebirth of popularity. Today is one such rebirth, fitting in well with the unmitigated greed and corporatism of today's hard right. Nietzsche's connection to the Nazis is obvious, as shown by the following quotation.

"with satanic joy in his face, the black haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate. Just as he himself systematically ruins women and girls, he does not shrink back from pulling down the blood barriers for others, even on a large scale. It was and it is Jews who bring Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its culture and political height, and himself rising to be master."9

Notice the similarity in this passage and the Council of Conservative Citizens that Senator Lott and representative Barr supported before becoming embroiled in the resulting scandal in late 1998.10 The web site for this white supremacist group described interracial marriage to the mixing of chocolate milk with plain milk, and labeled it as a path to racial extinction. They also described Lincoln as a communist.11

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was a French philosopher with a Jewish father and an English mother. He was the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1927. He rejected the idea that scientific principles could explain all existence. He was a promoter of what has become known as Social Darwinism.6 Perhaps one of his better known works was Time and Free Will. He was also a believer in pantheism. Once again, we see the obvious connection with the Nazis of a master race in the following quote concerning the Nazi's euthanasia program:

"...a secret circular went out from the Reich interior Ministry which marked the beginning of a programme of euthanasia for mentally ill or deformed children up to three years old. Doctors would be required to report all such cases to the health authority on special forms; the forms would then be forwarded to a panel of three medical assessors who would adjucate over life or death by appending "-" or "+." Should all three place a "+", a euthanasia warrant would be issued, signed by the Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler of the Fuhrer's Chancellery or SS_Oberfuhrer Dr Viktor Brack, head of the Chancellery's Euthanasia Department II. And so it happened: infants marked for death were transferred to what were referred to as Children's Special Departments in political reliable clinics, there to be given a "mercy death" by injection or in one institution at Eglfing-Haar simply starved by a progressive reduction of diet."7

Geroge Sorel (1847-1922) was a French philosopher who had considerable influence on Mussolini. His writings promoted an economic model based on syndicalism. He also believed in the degeneration of societies and believed that social decay could only be delayed by idealists who were willing to use violence to obtain power. His views were extremely anti-democratic and anti-liberal.

With this very brief review of philosophy has shown that the fascist traits of nationalism, totalitarian, racist, violence, unbridled corporatism, reactionary, and the top down nature of fascism all are grounded in the works of past philosophers.

A totalitarian government is one that seeks to maintain control over all aspects of public and private life by using propaganda, terror, and technology. Totalitarian regimes seek control over political, social, and the culture. However, economic control is left in the hands of a few elites in the fascist state. While the means of economic control is left in the private hands of a few elites, this same group controls the government. In essence the government becomes the tool by which the rich and the corporations maintain control. The distinction is important to note as it separates communism from fascism. In a communist state the control over the economy moves to the inside of government, while in the fascist state it remains in private hands. Dictatorships differ in seeking only limited control over the political environment of a society.

There was only limited government ownership under the Nazis. Prior to the Nazi take over, the German governments took over failing businesses and continued to operate them. When the Nazis took over the government already owned a large number of enterprises. When the Nazis took over they began to privatize many of these businesses, especially the ones that had remained profitable during the depression like the electric utilities.

Once Hitler assured big business that they would be free to continue to operate, they failed to raise any further objections to the Nazis. The large German steel and coal industries especially welcomed the Nazis. Hitler's plans for rearmament meant large contracts for new ships, tanks, etc. Later during the war when a labor shortage appeared, it was Krupp from the German steel industry that first raised the question of using slave labor from the concentration camps. At first the Nazis were reluctant to allow the inmates to be used as slaves as it would slow the progress of the "final solution." However, once Krupp offered to pay for the slaves the Nazis readily agreed and soon there was no shortage of companies seeking slaves.

ﬂﬂﬂﬂﬂﬂﬂﬂﬂﬂﬂﬂﬂﬂﬂﬂﬂﬂﬂﬂﬂﬂﬂﬂﬂ

What is less understood about the totalitarian power Hitler achieved was the path he took to obtain that power. There never has been totalitarian regime that gained instant total control. Such a sudden change would spawn sudden revolutions. Mussolini took three years before consolidating his power in Italy. In case of the Nazis, it took even longer. Nor did the path to totalitarian Nazi state start with the elevation of Hitler to the position of chancellor. Some historians trace the roots of the path all the way back into the 1800s. A complete analysis of German history from the time of the monarchy to the seating of Hitler is beyond the scope of this book, if not beyond the scope of any single book, as volumes could be written. What follows is a very brief look at the slow erosion of freedom and the concentration of power as it relates to the final totalitarian state.

For the most part, the period following WWI was a period dominated by raucous politics and a series of crisis in Germany. The two periods in which the Nazis gained the most strength was the early 1920s, during the hyper inflationary period, culminating with the Beer Hall Putsch and the depression of 1929-1931. There is little need to examine the raucous politics of that period, everyone is well aware of Hitler's SA thugs breaking up political rallies of other parties which also resorted to the same tactics. It would not be untrue to describe many political rallies of the time as ending in brawls.

Hitler and the Nazis were extremists, and mostly rejected by the German voters during the good economic times of the 1920s. For example, in 1928 they only polled 2.6 percent of the vote, gaining just 14 seats out of the 491 seats in the Reichstag by virtue of the republic's proportional representation. By 1930 and the start of the depression, the Nazis had increased their seats to 107 out of 577 seats in the Reichstag. In the July 1932 election, at the height of the depression, the Nazis polled 37.4 percent of the vote winning 230 seats in the Reichstag, becoming Germany's largest party.13 In the Nov 1932 election, they only won 196 seats as an anemic economic recovery was already underway, the people began rejecting the Nazis and their radical views and actions.

Germany's plunge into a totalitarian state began before the Nazis took over. It was as much a result of a lack of a strong leadership as anything else. For the first eleven years of the German Republic there had been seventeen cabinets headed by nine different chancellors.12 Undoubtedly, the country faced grave crisis in this period such as hyperinflation, but the lack of strong leadership and an increased polarization was readily apparent. The Nazis were the most notorious radicals unwilling to compromise, but the other parties have to share some of the blame for this polarization as well. The blame can be extended beyond the parties to the vested interests behind each party, including that of big businesses. Fracturing the electorate by polarization was playing right into the divisionist character of the Nazis, whose radical program lacked a broad base of support as the election results from 1928 showed.

The policies of the German governments during the 1920s inadvertently aided the rise of the Nazis. Throughout the 1920s the government arrested many of the leaders from the left. It would not be unfair to term these arrests as purges. The arrest of any strong leaders emerging from the left only served to further polarize the country by creating a vacuum on the left that was only filled with the more radical communists. A similar situation is emerging in the United States, throughout this century the United States has conducted purges of the left: the Great Red Scare of 1919, McCartyism of the 1950s, and COINTELPRO operations during the sixties. Without the voices from the left to moderate policy, the political center in the United States has shifted to the hard right.

The immediate result in the lack of strong leadership is frequent chances in government, which only lead to more instability and chaos. An ideal parallel is the long string one term Presidents ending with Lincoln and the Civil War. The polarization of the Unite States gradually increased from about 1820 on resulting in one term presidents. Another string of one term Presidents ended with the election of Roosevelt in the middle of the Great Depression. In both U.S. case the ending result was not pleasant: a civil war and a depression.

Such frequent change in government does not allow businesses to make long range plans, nor does it allow for enough to time for programs enacted by a government to work. These effects then act as negative feedback, further increasing the polarization and the resulting chaos.

Additionally, the German constitution was flawed and did not account for a negative parliament. Power in Germany was concentrated in the office of the president, headed by Hindenburg, who initially had been elected by conservatives and reactionary rightists. He was a member of the aristocratics from the Junker class and had been a war hero; he likewise held sentiments for the monarchy. The president had the power to appoint cabinets and chancellors. Beginning in 1930, Hindenburg began the practice of appointing chancellors of his choice that were not beholding to the parliament. To allow the chancellors to circumvent parliament, he granted these chancellors emergency powers that had been given to the president by the constitution. Starting in 1930, almost all national laws, including the power to tax, were enacted by presidential decrees and not by the parliament. Such presidential decrees would be similar to the executive orders in the United States.

Hence, even before Hitler was appointed to the chancellor position, power was being concentrated into the two offices of the chancellor and the president. At least twice before appointing Hitler as chancellor, Hindenburg entertained ideas of violating the constitution by not holding elections within the sixty days as required by the constitution.

Hindenburg had also avoided appoint Hitler as chancellor twice before January 1933. Even with the support of big business Hindeburg failed to appoint Hitler when the Nazis held more seats in the Reichstag than any other party.

It wasn't until after Hitler met in secret with von Pappen at the Cologne home of Baron Kurt von Schroder that Hindenburg would relent and appoint Hitler chancellor. The baron was the head of the international Schroder banking empire and had previously raised funds to pay off the Nazi's debt.

The secret meeting on January 4, 1933 allowed Hitler and von Pappen to work out their differences and to agree to a new cabinet under the direction of both. This secret meeting was the birthplace of the Third Reich.

However, there were two Americans that also were in attendance: John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen. The Dulles brothers were there as legal representatives for Kuhn Loeb Company, which had extended large short term credits to Germany. Their presence was to secure a guarantee of repayment from Hitler.

Moreover, Kurt von Schroder had extensive financial contacts in New York and London. He was a co-director of Thyssen foundry along with Johann Groeninger, Prescott Bush's New York bank partner. Schroeder was also the vice president and director of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, the same shipping line seized from Prescott Bush for trading with the enemy.

Throughout 1932, actions taken by the Bush-Harriman shipping line were directly responsible for bringing Hitler to power. The constitutional government tried to disarm the Nazi Brown Shirts to stop the mad election melees and murders. The U.S. embassy in Berlin reported:

" Hamburg-Amerika Line was purchasing and distributing propaganda attacks against the German government, for attempting this last-minute crackdown on Hitler's forces."

During 1932, Hitler's thugs murdered thousands of Germans. Arms for Hitler were shipped to Germany aboard Hamburg-Amerika Line. They were transferred to river barges before reaching Antwerp and then transported across Holland freely. Samuel Pryor, founder of Union Bank and a partner in the Hamburg-America Line was also executive committee chairman of Remington Arms. Hitler's Brown Shirts were armed primarily with Remington arms and Thompson submachine guns. A Senate investigation of Remington concluded that all of the political factions in Germany were armed with mostly American made guns.

Once Hitler and von Pappen had reached an agreement on their future course of actions. Pappen pressured Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor. The success of the meeting was recorded in Goebbels. On January 5, 1933 Goebbels wrote in his diary "If this coup succeeds, we are not far from power. . . . Our finances have suddenly improved."

Hindenburg appointed Hitler, as chancellor with the understanding Hitler would be a parliamentary rather than a presidential chancellor. Hitler immediately set about sabotaging the efforts to from a parliamentary majority. Here is one of the first examples of fascism and divisionism.

On February 1, 1933 the German parliament was dissolved and new elections were scheduled for early March. Using his henchmen, Hilter had the Reichstag building burnt. The fire was blamed on the communist, his main revivals. Using the fire as an excuse, Hitler banned the communist from the upcoming election. Additionally, Goring deputized his storm troopers to harass any political opposition from his position in the cabinet; even then the Nazis could not achieve a majority in parliament as they polled only 43.9 votes.14 By summer, all political parties except the Nazis had been dissolved. On the death of Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler assumed the office of president and further consolidated his gripe on power, but it would take a couple of additional years before Hitler was a true totalitarian. He purged the justice system of judges with adverse views, appointing rabid Nazis in their place, and the storm troopers were given police powers. Justice was now the Nazi party line.

One does not need to expound upon the extreme nationalism of the fascist. The history of their invasion in a quest for world dominion is well known. Mussolini turned his attention to Ethiopia and North Africa; Hitler first to Austria, then Czechoslovakia, followed by Western Europe and later to Norway and the east.

Hilter had left a blueprint for his extreme nationalism and the quest for lebensraum in Mien Kampf as shown by the quote below.

"If the National Socialist movement really wants to be consecrated by history with a great mission for our nation, it must be permeated by knowledge and filled with pain at our true situation in this world; boldly and conscious of its goal, it must take up the struggle against the aimlessness and incompetence which have hitherto guided our German nation in the line of foreign affairs. Then without consideration of traditions and prejudices it must find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil; and hence also free it from danger of vanishing from the earth or of serving others as a slave nation.

The Nationalist Socialist movement must strive to eliminate the disproportion between our population and our area-viewing this later as a source of food as well as a basis for power politics---between our historical past and the helplessness of our present impotence."15

The third trait of fascism is that it consists of a top down revolution or movement. It is becoming more accepted today that the Nazis drew support from all classes. Indeed, this seems a reasonable assumption when looking at all of the evidence. The storm troopers for the most part drew their numbers from the lower and middle classes. They were typically were unemployed laborers, inept middle management, or failed businessmen. Likewise, given the vote tally of over thirty percent in the 1932 elections, the Nazis had to have drawn votes from all social classes. But this has no bearing on who controlled the direction of the party. Control of the party rested solely with Hitler and whom he allied with. He chose to ally with the upper class and big business as borne out by his policies after gaining power. There is little controversy over the considerable support Hitler drew from the aristocrats, the military, or the Junkers.

Telltale signs forewarning of the elite control was evident from the very formation of the party until the final days before gaining power. A brief look at those that financed the Nazis rise to power will reveal the real support behind Hitler. This is becoming an increasing issue of contention as American hard right tries to distance themselves from the similarities of their policies with fascism.

Hitler himself did not form the Nazi party initially. He joined an existing party and then molded it according to his wishes. In fact, his company commander had ordered him to attend a meeting of what was the German Workers Party. Here was Hitler's initial reaction to the party.

"My impression was neither good or bad; a new organization like so many others. This was the time in which anyone who was not satisfied with developments and no longer had confidence in the existing parties felt called upon to found a new party. Everywhere these organizations sprang from the ground, only to vanish silently after a time. The founders for the most part had no idea what it means to make a party---let alone a movement---out of a club. And so these organizations nearly always stifle automatically in their absurd phillistinism."16

The order from his company commander provides the first evidence that the elite backed Hitler from the very beginning. At any point from this date the German military could have withdrawn its support of Hitler and disbanded the Nazi party

Hitler was a good orator by all reports, as well as an astute political observer. He knew how to motivate the masses in his name and how to sustain a movement. Someone once remarked recently that you needed only gain control of the 3Ms to gain power. The three "Ms" are the military, media, and money. Hitler had all three behind him. As shown by the passage from Mein Kampf, Hitler started with the blessing of the military. The military, as well as big business, played a behind the scenes role in the appointment of Hitler as chancellor. It's the last of the 3Ms where much confusion and debate arise, Hitler's source of funds or money.

Big business likewise had a large hand in bringing down Bruning in 1930. In a large part, it was the constant bickering by special interest groups that led to the falling of Bruning's cabinet. Big business was urging the following demands on the Bruning government:

1. The government must take steps to lower the cost of production and widen the profit margin.

2. Lower taxes

3. Reduce the size of government.

4. Lower unemployment insurance benefit

5. The government must allow wages to progress to lower levels, by voiding labor contracts and binding arbitration.26

If these demands from the business community seem familiar to the reader, it's because in a large part they are the same policies that the Republican Party has been advocating for the last twenty years.

Throughout the 1920s and up until Hitler was appointed chancellor the Nazi party was plagued with a shortage of money. After release for prison for the failed Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler's only known source of income was from the sale of Mein Kampf and fees for newspaper articles he would write. The first edition of Mein Kampf was published July 18, 1925 in an edition of 10,000 copies selling for 12 marks. By the end of the year almost all copies had been sold. A new edition was printed but sales in the following year plummeted.

Nevertheless, almost immediately after being pardoned he bought a new super-charged Mercedes-Benz for 28,000 marks.17 Additionally, Hitler did not drive, so he had the additional expense of a chauffeur. Likewise, from 1925 until his appointment as chancellor in 1933, Hitler lived in increasing comforts, if not outright lavishness for the times. Certainly, the royalties from Mein Kampf and fees for his other writings were insufficient to cover even his living expenses, not to mention the party's expenses.

Also, the funding for an ever-increasing number of SA troopers (many of which were unemployed) had to be secured. Turner has suggested that the Nazis were self sufficient from dues, speaker's fees, and donations at rallies. However, this seems almost improbable looking at the numbers from 1930. In 1930 there were about 100,000 storm troopers that had to be fed, housed and otherwise supported. Additionally there were 15,000 in the SS. Nazi membership at the beginning of 1931 was only 389,000.18 Thus it seems very reasonable that outside sources of funding was needed to maintain the SA and SS, as well as the ever increasing lifestyle of Hitler. Membership fees in the Nazi party started at a mark per month, non-paying members were quickly dropped from the party.

From the very beginning of the Nazi party Hitler showed a knack for obtaining funding from the more privileged members of German society. For instance, everyone is well aware of the trial following the Beer Hall Putsch, but less well known was a secondary trial following the putsch. In the secondary trial, several businessmen that had donated money or other support for Hitler were put on trial. Some have attributed much of this early funding of the Nazis to the secret Thule Society.19 Another early source of funds in the early 20s came from the efforts of Scheubner-Richter, who was adept at gaining funds from Bavarian aristocrats, big businessmen, bankers, and leaders of heavy industry.20 Another source of early funds came indirectly from Fritz Thyssen. Henry Ford also exerted a considerable influence over Hitler in the early 1920s, as well as money. Some passages from Ford's International Jew are nearly identical to passages in Mein Kampf. Ford's book is reported to have had a large effect on many of the school children of the time that were suffering through hyperinflation and economic hard times while reading a book written by the world's foremost capitalist.

The extent of Ford's financial donations to Hitler still remains a mystery. The U. S. ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, was quoted saying "certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy."21 The extent of corporate America's collaboration with the Nazis before the war and even during the war, in some cases, is not fully known. However, as time goes by and more information becomes available, the collaboration begins to appear significant, as shown in the following article.

"Bernd Greiner said 26 of the top 100 US companies in the 1930s collaborated to some degree with the Nazis before, and in some cases after, Hitler declared war on the United States in December 1941. Company headquarters in the US have denied they knew what was going on in Germany, but there is evidence to suggest they knew their German subsidiaries used slave labor, tolerated it and in some cases were actively involved, Greiner said.

Greiner confirmed a report in the newspaper Die Zeit, based on his findings of US corporate involvement in Nazi Germany. The findings went beyond allegations of US lawyers and historians last year that automakers General Motors and Ford collaborated with the Nazi regime."22

One of the more historically accurate, but shamefully apologetic to big business sources is the book, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler by Turner.23 Turner does a good job in detailing the extensive participation of the leaders of business with the Nazis. However, he reaches the conclusion that big business did not support Hitler with a rather contrived definition of what big business is. He based his definition on the value of the float of stock on the market. His definition limited the number of companies that he would classify as big business to only 14 companies in the Ruhr industrial area and a smattering of companies located elsewhere. Essentially, his definition would be the equivalent of saying that only the Dow 30 companies in the U. S. could truly be called big business. This of course is nonsense. The majority of people would certainly consider Chrysler, Texas Instruments, Hewitt Packard, John Deere and Chase Manhattan Bank to be big business, but according to Turner's book they are not. It is from this group of second and third tier businesses (in keeping with Turner's definition) that provided the most help and support for Hitler. Furthermore, Turner neglects the effect of cartel agreements as well as subsidiaries in his analysis. Many of these second and third tier corporations were owned and controlled by the 14 corporations, he considered to be big business.

Secondly, Turner focuses much of his attention on the period of 1920-1928, when the Nazis were at best a minor noisy party. During this time, the Nazis were lucky to poll more than three percent of the vote. Yet Turner tries to use this as proof that big business did not support Hitler's rise to power, although he does admit that Fritz Thyssen and Kirdolf were supporters of the Nazis during this time. An equivalent situation would be today's Libertarian Party, a party that draws support from Koch, head of Koch refinery (a second tier company by Turner's reasoning). But no one is rushing to fund the Libertarians today when they cannot even poll five percent of the vote.

Finally, when the source of funds were unquestionably from big business Turner attempts to discredit them by claiming the source of the funds was a junior level executive that couldn't be responsible for overall company policy. Or he attempts to say they were given to an individual Nazi. In one shameful passage Turner attempts to discredit the funds given to Nazi fund-raiser Walther Funk by claiming they were not a donation to the party as they may have been spent by Funk for entertainment. Turner describes a particular drunken binge across town by Funk in which he passed out some rather large tips and then draws the conclusion that perhaps none of the funds given Funk ever reached the Nazis.24 This is not the work of a historian, as Turner claims to be. This is nothing more than conjecture by a propagandist. There is also one other speculative conclusion one could draw from this passage, and that is that the amount of money Funk was receiving was so enormous that it permitted such behavior.

Turner does a good job in showing that it was those second and third tier businesses that supported the Nazis. In Duren, a Rhenish manufacturing town, the Nazis received considerable support from local industrialists such as the millionaire dynasties (a term in use from the 1820s in describing these two families) of the Schoellers and the Schulls. Another area in which the Nazis received broad support from businesses was Solingen, an industrial town.25 Overall, Turner documents the participation of business leaders and their support for the Nazis, leaving no question in the reader's mind that business leaders exerted a considerable influence on the Nazis. Unfortunately, he ends his study just as the Nazis seize power.

Many businesses chose to align with and support the Nazis after they gained power. Krupp and I.G. Faben were both executors' of Goring's Four-Year Plan to make Germany militarily self-sufficient by 1940. One can view the details of Krupp's involvement and support for the Nazis after March 1933 in the documents from the War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg.31 The full set of available documents from Nuremberg is also available on the Internet.32 By 1939, I.G. Faben provided the Nazis with 90 percent of their foreign exchange, 95 percent of imports, and 85 percent of all military and commercial goods. In 1932, Hermann Schmitz Faben's joint chairman joined forces with Kurt von Schroder, director of a wealthy private bank. Schroder was a fanatical Nazi, often times dressed in his black SS uniform. Schroder is the man that is closely linked with Chase Bank, Standard Oil and William Teagle, and ITT. In 1932, Schroder and Wilhelm Keppler formed the group known as "The Fraternity." This group guaranteed a source of money to the Gestapo. Members agreed to contribute an average of one million marks a year to Himmler's personally marked "S" account and the transferable secret "R" account of the Gestapo.27

In April of 1933, Gustav Krupp sought out a private meeting with Hitler. Krupp agreed to become Hitler's chief fundraiser and chairman of the Adolf Hitler Fund. In return Hitler promised to appoint Krupp as the fuehrer of Germany industry. Over the years, Krupp contributed over six million marks of his own money to the Nazis, and his correspondence shows that he truly enjoyed his job as chairman.28 Likewise, it is common knowledge that after Hitler was appointed chancellor Krupp greeted people cheerfully with the Heil Hitler salutation.

Schirer writes that in 1931, when Hitler decided to cultivate relationships between influential industrial leaders, he kept their identity a secret.

"The party still had to play both sides of the tracks. The party had to allow Strasser, Goebbels and Feder to beguile the masses with socialist talk and denigrating the industrial magnates."

Some of the meetings were so secretive that they were held in forest glades."29

Further proof of the industrialist involvement and support of the Nazis comes from the testimony of Funk at Nuremberg. The entire list implicated by Funk is far too long to reproduce here, but besides Thyssen and Krupp it included Georg von Schnitzler-I.G. Farben, August Rosterg and August Diehn of the potash industry, Cuno of the Hamburg Amerika Line, Otto Wolf, Kurt von Schroder, and many other wealthy industrialists30

On May 2, 1933, the Nazis raided and occupied all trade union headquarters. The leaders were beaten and arrested; some were placed in the concentration camps. Union funds were confiscated and the unions were dissolved. Members of the communist party and the social democrats had already been arrested. On June 20, 1934, in what has become known as the Night of Long Knifes, Hitler purged the socialists within the Nazi party, chief among them Roehm.

With the broad financial support from the leaders of the business community as well as from the military leaders and aristocrats, the Nazis were truly a top down organization, while the Nazis used the lower class as foot soldiers to gain power. They did so in a deceiving manner, and once in power, immediately set about betraying the lower classes

We have already shown one example of divisionism by the Nazis in their rise to power. But what sets fascist divisionism apart from the ordinary divisionism of any other political ideology? Certainly any politician in a democracy appeals to some sort of divisionism, as he is fully aware that he can not possibly appeal to the entire electorate. The difference lies in the fact that divisionism is always destructive in fascism and serves only as a means to gain and maintain power. Even after gaining power, Hitler went to great pains in dividing power, playing one follower against another, creating rivalries in the party in the process. In short, Hitler kept the Nazi party divided as if it was a set of small fiefdoms. One of the biggest myths about the Nazis is that they were a single unit, when in fact they were a conglomeration of various fractured parts. Eatwell states the paradox within Hitler's power structure as: "because the party was so divided that he had power and in turn the party was divided from other key centers of power such as the army." 47 In other ideologies, the divisionism is not inherently destructive. Rather, it's based on differing approaches coming together to reach an equable solution to a problem. In his rise to power, Hitler had no intention of compromising with the other parties to form a parliamentary president. His moves were calculated to destroy any chance of that.

A couple of examples from the present can further delineate the difference between the two. Certainly many of the tax proposals coming from the Republican party today could be classed as divisionism as they favor the upper income earners over the lower income groups. While the measures are divisive they can hardly be labeled as destructive divisionism. They are more a reflection of difference in opinion.

However, an example of an act that could be termed a fascist divisionism was the Republican caused shut down of the government in November 1995 after Clinton vetoed the budget bill. Clinton had previously warned Congress that unless changes were made in the budget he would veto the bill. Members of the hard right Council for National Policy and many of their Republican members openly had declared they would shut down the government. In essence, the Republicans adopted the same policy that Hitler had in his bid to dismiss parliament; they refused to negotiate honorably.

Just as Hitler had taken a position to subvert democracy, so had the Republicans, led by Gingrich. The constitution defines the passing of the budget in detail. The spending bills originate in the House after passage by both the House and the Senate. It is then sent to the President, who may either veto it or sign it. If the bill is vetoed, it is up to Congress and the President to reach a compromise bill. Otherwise, Congress must pass a bill with a two-thirds majority. The failure of Congress to pass a bill to advert a government shutdown was a dereliction of their constitutional duty. Fortunately, the outrage coming from the general public forced the Republicans back to the negotiation table. The point to be made is the only difference between the two events---the Republicans feared the wrath of the people and capitulated, Hitler had no such fear and parliament was dismissed.

The Republican shut down of the government also serves to point out a flaw in our constitution, just as there was a flaw in the German constitution. In the case of the U. S. constitution there is no other mechanism other than shutting down the government if Congress fails to pass a budget. If the fascists in America can be successful in polarizing American politics to such an extent that the public, or at least a considerable portion of it, tolerates a government shut down, then the entire budget process becomes a fracas. And after observing the behavior of the Republicans in their ill fated attempt to impeach Clinton such a possibility does not appear so remote.

Another example of divisionism that is solely destructive that is not based on racism or class warfare was the impeachment of Bill Clinton. It served no purpose other than to smear the president, the articles of impeachment fell far short of what the founding fathers had defined in the phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors." That phrase refers back to the misuse of offices in England under the king. Additionally, the investigation of Ken Starr has been plagued by civil rights abuse and possible criminal action by Starr himself. It resembles a coup headed by the multi millionaire Scaife with the aid of the religious right, more than it resembled a justified impeachment.

But perhaps, the greatest illustration of the divisionism was seeing support for the impeachment evaporate like rain on hot pavement in the Senate following the State of the Union address and a thorough defense of the charges by Clinton's legal team. The House prosecutors with the conclusion of Ken Starr questioned Monica Lewinsky further in secret. This single action by the House Republicans invoked criticism from even members of their own party in the Senate. It was conducted against the agreed upon rules, and it was unconstitutional in that the power of investigation is delegated to the Senate. Likewise, it is against the statute of the Independent Council. It served no purpose other than to further divide and disgust the country. In short, it is nothing but an attempt at a power play.

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Often times, this divisionism takes the form of racism or class warfare. It is often stated that Mussolini tried to eliminate class distinctions in fascist Italy. But the reality is that he only reinforced those distinctions. Certainly the Nazis practiced racism in an outrageous manner, ending in the Holocaust. On the other hand, fascist Italy was not racist in nature until after Mussolini adopted Hitler's Jewish solution. Fascism doesn't necessary have to be racist in nature, but racism is often used to divide the citizens, as their radical platform isn't appealing to the broad masses. In addition, racism is violent in nature and the resulting chaos from the violence serves to further divide the masses. Whether or not a fascist state is racist seems to depend more upon the culture of the society in which it arises. Before fascism, Italy had a long history of generally equable racial relationships, going all the way back to the old Roman Empire. For instance, even the slaves were eventually given full rights in Rome. However, the roots of anti-Semitism goes back much further in Germany as shown in the following quote.

"This is a good month to reflect on the toxicity of words meant to kill. Nov. 9 marks the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the 1938 'Night of Shattered Glass' unleashed by the Nazis to terrorize Germany's Jews. The date was chosen specially by Josef Goebbels, Hitler's propagandist, to honor the birthday of Martin Luther, the 16th century monk who was a father of the protestant Reformation and the founder of what became the Lutheran church.

Hitler greatly admired Luther: "He saw the Jew as we are only beginning to see him today." Indeed. Luther saw the Jews as 'hopeless, wicked, venomous, and devilish... our pest, torment, and misfortune.'

Initially, certain that his version of Christianity would appeal to Jews, he expected large numbers of them to covert. When that failed to happen, he turned violently against them. In 1543, Luther Published "On the Jews and Their Lies," a work that would become known throughout Germany, perhaps the most widely disseminated work of anti-Semitism by a German until the rise of the Nazis 400, years later.

"What then shall we Christians do with this damned, rejected race of Jews?" Luther asked.

"First, their synagogues should be set on fire, and whatever does not burn up should be covered or spread over with dirt, so that no one may ever be able to see a cinder or stone of it...

Secondly, their homes should likewise be broken down and destroyed...

Thirdly, they should be deprived of their prayer books and Talmuds, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught.

Fourthly, their rabbis must be forbidden under threat of death to teach any more...

Fifthly, passports and traveling privileges should be absolutely forbidden to the Jews...

Sixthly, I advise that...all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them...

Burn down their synagogues, forbid all that I enumerated earlier, force them to work, and deal harshly with them... If this does not help we must drive them out like mad dogs, so we do not become partakers of their abominable blasphemy and all their other vices. I have done my duty. Now let everyone see to his."

This is hate speech.

Sixty years ago next Monday on the night of Luther's birthday, Nazi gangs rampaged across Germany. In every Jewish neighborhood, windows were smashed and buildings were torched. All told, 101 synagogues were destroyed, and nearly 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses were demolished. On that night, 91 Jews were murdered; 26,000 were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. It was the greatest pogrom in history. And it was nothing compared with what was to come."33

The question then remains whether the fascism in America can be considered racist or not. The past history of racism in the United States would tend to support such. As a nation, we was one of the last industrial nations to allow slavery, and it took the Civil War to end slavery. It has been less than fifty years since "separate but equal" was the rule of the land. It's only been sixty years since Japanese citizens and immigrants were interred in camps following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Rosewood incident happened less than a hundred years ago, and lynching of blacks was common well into the 20th century. This country has had a long, incredulous history of bigotry and even genocide. There is no question of the genocide of Native Americans in the efforts of the U. S. Army in passing out blankets infected with small pox, or the slaughter of the Plains Indian's primary source of food, the buffalo. Then there was the Trail of Tears, as well. The Irish immigrants, following the potato famine, were greeted by the Know Nothings, a party that based its support on the hate of Catholics.

All of the hard right groups are racist, although more than one tries to play their racism down or to hide it, such as the John Birch Society and some of the various militia groups. Others are openly racists, such as the Klan, the Nazis and the skinheads. The great unifier of the far right, the Identity religion, links many of the hard right groups. The Identity religion is based on anti-Semitic belief that the true followers of Jesus immigrated to Britain and northern Europe, that today's Jews are the descendents of Satan. It's the mainstay religion among the militias, the Posse Comitatus, and even among some of the Klan groups.

Besides the normal hate groups based on racism or anti-Semitism. the religious right has emerged in the 1990s as a venomous hate group basing their hate on gays and abortion. Abortion clinics increasingly are becoming targets of bombings, arson, and vandalism. Late in 1998, Matthew Shepard was murdered in Wyoming after being tie to a fence and then pistol whipped, for being gay. Below are some quotes about gays from one of the leaders of the religious right, Pat Robertson.

"This conduct [homosexuality] is anti-social, and it is a pathology. It is a sickness, and it needs to be treated. It doesn't need to be taught in the classroom as a preferred way of life..." - 700 Club, 3-7-90

"...the acceptance of homosexuality is the last step in the decline of Gentile civilization." --Pat Robertson, of the Christian Broadcasting Network, warned that hurricanes could hit Orlando, Fla., because of gay events there. Time magazine, Oct 26, 1998

"If the world accepts homosexuality as its norm and if it moves the entire world in that regard, the whole world is then going to be sitting like Sodom and Gomorrah before a Holy God. And when the wrath of God comes on this earth, we will all be guilty and we will all suffer for it." - 700 Club, 9-6-9534

Compare that last quote of Robertson's to the following quote of Hitler on syphilis.

"...they speak of this whole field as if it were a great sin, and above all express their profound indignation against every sinner caught in the act, then close their eyes in pious horror to this godless plague and pray God to let sulfur and brimstone preferably after their own death rain down on this Sodom and Gomorrah, thus once making an instructive example of this shameless humanity."39

Such evidence, as Robertson's words, abounds that they would persecute gays, it abounds in the numerous ballot measures in various states that would deny gays their civil rights. Such a measure passed in Colorado, only to be overturned by the Supreme Court. Another measure, led by Lon Mabon in Oregon failed state wide, but was reintroduced on local ballots in the following election. Mabon has also led ballot measures to limit the concept of a family and limiting abortions to only the first trimester. The first was another attempt to limit the rights of gays.

In June 1998, near Jasper, Texas a black man named James Byrd was dragged behind a pickup. Body parts were found over a two mile length of the roadway.35 It is too early for trends in hate crimes to emerge, as the FBI only began tracking hate crimes in 1991. The one trend that does seem to be emerging is the hate crimes are becoming increasingly violent as evident from the murders of Shepard and Byrd. The real danger of these two murders is they serve to desensitize us, leading to more numerous and increasing levels of violence, just as the Nazis used increasing levels of violence against the Jews.

Racism is reemerging in various forms in the 1990s in political issues and in the Republican Party. "English only" laws are being promoted with increasing frequency by various Republican candidates, including Robert Dole, and have even appeared on some ballot measures such as California Prop 187. The obvious targets are immigrants from Mexico. In effect, its nothing more than the reemergence of nativism. Other forms of nativism have appeared, such as denying immigrants access to welfare and the school system for children of immigrants. Nativism is also behind various immigration bills and the increasing efforts directed at illegals.

Perhaps the most dangerous form of racism to emerge has been the Republican efforts to 'monitor' the polls. And videotape those leaving. Cases have arisen in the 1998 election in North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Maryland, Kentucky, Texas and Maine. The efforts are directed primarily at districts in which have a high percentage of minorities. Such efforts serve no useful purpose and do constitute a violation of the Voting Rights Act.36 More disturbing is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, served as the director of Republican 'ballot security' in the poor areas of Phoenix, Arizona between 1958-1962.37 He likewise wrote a pro separate but equal memo as a law clerk for Justice Robert Jackson. All of which was brought out in his confirmation hearings.

An even more subtle effort on the part of Republicans in denying votes to the minorities and the poor is centered on the debate to allow a statistical correction to the 2000 census. Such effort on the part of the Republicans goes far beyond the election of 2000. The census will be used to reapportionment of the congressional districts for the decade. Thus, by denying the correction, they in effect are perpetuating their power to 2010 by undercounting groups that historically vote for Democrats.

In Dec 1998, Republican House member Bob Barr and Senator Trent Lott were exposed as keynote speakers before the Council of Conservative Citizens, a racist organization. Lott was later determined to have been an honorary member and had written several articles for their paper dating back to the early 1990s. In January, Republican National Chairman, Jim Nicholson asked members to dissociate themselves from this group and directly appealed to national committee member Buddy Witherspoon from South Carolina to resign. The request was refused.38 Once before, the Republicans were asked to denounce the radical John Birch Society at their National Convention in the early 1960s. Moderate members such as the former President Jerry Ford, did so. However the measure failed.

Another Republican that deserves mention here is Pat Buchanan and his anti-Semitic views. Buchanan has opposed virtually all civil rights bills and favorable court decisions; he has supported apartheid in South Africa; he has spewed forth views of Holocaust denial; he has called fascists such as Franco and Pinochet soldier-patriots. And Buchanan was a key figure in urging Reagan to visit the SS cemetery in Bitburg.40

Thus as we prepare to enter a new century, the Republican Party has adopted racism as a divisionist tool to divide the electorate in an attempt to maintain power and enact their extremist agenda. Not all members of the Republican Party are racist, but many of the members from the hard right that controls the party are racists. There are honorable members of the party, but they are being forced into lesser and lesser roles. The extremists have gained control. It is the burden of those honorable members to take back control of their party and denounce the extremist before it becomes too late.

Perhaps the best assessment of the use of destructive divisionism by fascist in the United States comes from a 1945 War department publication:

"Three Ways to Spot U.S. Fascists.

Fascists in America may differ slightly from fascists in other countries, but there are a number of attitudes and practices that they have in common. Following are three. Every person who has one of them is not necessarily a fascist. But he is in a mental state that lends itself to the acceptance of fascist aims.

1.Pitting religion, racial, and economic groups against one another in order to break down the national unity is a device of the divide and conquer technique used by Hitler to gain power in Germany and in other countries. With slight variations, to suit local conditions, fascists everywhere have used this Hitler method. In many countries, anti-Semitism is a dominant devise of fascism. In the United States native fascists have often been anti-Catholic, anti-Jew, anti-Negro, anti-Labor and anti-foreign born. In South America native fascists use the same scapegoats except that they substitute anti-Protestantism for anti-Catholicism.

Interwoven with the master race theory of fascism is a well planned hate campaign against minority races, religions, and other groups. To suit their particular needs and aims, fascists will use any one or a combination of such groups as a convenient scapegoat.

2. Fascism cannot tolerate such religious and ethical concepts as the brotherhood of man. Fascists deny the need for international cooperation. These ideas contradict the fascist theory of the master race. The color, race, creed or nationality-have rights. International cooperation, as expressed in the Dumbarton Oaks proposals, run counter to the fascist program of war and world domination. Right now our native fascists are spreading anti-British, anti-Soviet, anti-French and anti-United nations propaganda.

3. It is accurate to call a member of a communist party a communist. For short, he is often called a Red. Indiscriminate pinning of the label Red on people and proposals which one opposes is a common political device. It is a favorite trick of native as well as foreign fascists.

Many fascists make the spurious claim that the world has but two choices---either fascism or communism and they label as communist everyone who refuses to support them. By attacking our free enterprise, capitalist democracy and by deny the effectiveness of our way of life they hope to trap many people."74

The extreme anti-communism and anti-socialism stance of the fascist is beyond dispute among honest historians. Both communists and socialists were the first to enter the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Both Mussolini and Franco fought against communist influence. From the brief survey of the fascist philosophers and extreme anti-liberal stance has been a factor in fascism from the beginning. The Nazi used socialism as a ruse to gain power, but once in power they purged the socialists within their party. The following quotes taken from Mein Kampf will illuminate the anti-communism, anti-parliamentary democracy, and the social darwinism of Hitler.

"Just as in 1918 we paid with our blood for the fact that in 1914 and 1915 we did not proceed to trample the head of Marxist serpent once and for all, we would have to pay most catastrophically if in the spring of 1923 we did not avail ourselves of the opportunity to halt the activity of the Marist traitors and murders of the nation for good"41

"As regards the possibility of putting these ideas into practice, I beg you not to forget that the parliamentary principle of democratic majority rule has by no means always dominated mankind, but to the contrary is to be found only in brief periods of history, which are always epochs of decay of peoples and states."42

"The best state constitution and state form is that which, with the most unquestioned certainty, raises the best minds in the national community to leading position and leading influence.

But as in economic life, the able men cannot be appointed from above, but must struggle through for themselves,..."43

The second quote certainly is anti-liberal as it shows Hitler's contempt for the democratic process. The last quote reveals Hitler as a social Darwinist of which Turner makes the point in several places in his book.44 Social Darwinism runs counter to the aims of socialism. In fact it is the antithesis. It allows the elite to gain further power, it willingly discards the poor and the weak as expendables.

With the anti-communism stance and social Darwinism character of Hitler, it is not surprising that the fascist in America would come from the extreme right. The United States was right in opposing communism. But to what links? As with anything else moderation is an admirable quality, excesses of any nature are damaging. Truman or Eisenhower were not fascists for their anti-communism actions. However, Tail Gunner Joe was either a fascist or a willing dupe of fascists. The type of anti-communism of McCarthy served no other purpose than to further his political career. He openly violated the right to free speech and assembly of his victims. His aim was to destroy them with out any regard to the evidence.

The social Darwinism as initiated by Reagan and his attacks on the poor, and the dismantling of the welfare program led by Newt Gingrich will also be labeled as examples of creeping fascism. Throwing people into the streets arbitrarily to fend for themselves is destructive; it is social Darwinism at its worst. Forcing them to except wages below the minimum wage law is denying them their equal rights. But it was precisely the economic woes of Germany that allowed the Nazis to rise to power. Currently America is enjoying good economic times, but when the economy takes a turn to the south the full impact of the lack of a social safety net is going to be felt hard.

The next trait of fascism, extreme exploitation, is a direct result of one of the primary traits of fascism, extreme nationalism. The form of nationalism promoted by fascism not only concerns the standing in the world but also applies to the sacrifices that are expected of citizens. In short, the fascist state reigns supreme while the individuals are subordinate to the state. The subordination of individuals to the state is the antithesis of liberalism. Once again some quotes from Mein Kampf will suffice.

"Since for us the state as such is the only form, but the essential is its content, the nation, the people, it is clear that everything else must be subordinated to its sovereign interests."45

"a peace, supported not by the palm branches of tearful, pacifist female mourners, but based on the victorious sword of a master people, putting the world into the service of a higher culture."46

Certainly from those two quotes there can be no question of the subordination of individuals as practiced under the Nazis or to any limits short of world domination by the Nazis. It is often stated that Hitler left a road map to his future goals in Mein Kampf. There is no greater evidence of that than in the last quote. How then did he rise to power? The problem was nobody was listening. Nobody challenged his aggressive views toward war, or at best they believed that they could control or contain him. Only later did they find out the errors of that false assumption.

This writer can find only two instances of this extreme exploitation in America. Thanks to the efforts of CBS 60 Minutes and Evening News, the story broke about the Tomb of the Unknown and how the Reagan White House pressured the military to find an unknown to bury on Memorial Day 1984. Turns out that in their haste to respond to the pressure coming from the White House, they deliberately buried a fallen soldier that wasn't so unknown. The unknown was Michael Bassie. This man had given everything to his country except for his name. And the lowlife filth occupying the White House had that stripped from him so he could have a photo op on Memorial Day in an election year. This writer can think of no other action that is more despicable; it's unforgivable. Of course Reagan made sure he was the star of this photo op and used it to promote and build support for his extremist military agenda.

The second instance comes at the hands of Newt Gingrich and the Republicans of the 104th and 105th Congress. They have stripped the rights of welfare recipients and required that they participate in workfare. The problem comes in that these poor souls are not even entitled to be paid the minimum wage or the right to unionize in some cases. In other words, the Republican's answer to the poor is to force the to work in perpetual slavery with no chance of ever breaking out of poverty.

But this event is much more dangerous and goes much further than it appears. The danger here lies in the suspension of the constitutional equality under the eyes of the law. The Republicans have in effect created a sub-class in which one of the very fundamental tenets of our constitution, equality under the eyes of the law was ignored and thrown out the window. Nor is this the only example of unequal treatment of the poor at the hands of the Republicans. They also have advocated cut backs in the budget for the public defender's office. The Republicans have been very successful in their propaganda in demonizing the poor. There seems to be an almost gutter level hatred of the poor and any aid to assist them. Instead of reaching out a compassionate helping hand towards the poor, the Republicans have adopted a mean spirited social Darwinist view.

This brings us to the trait of opportunistic ideology of fascism. It is perhaps one of the more confusing aspects of fascism. Mussolini appears to have been indeed a socialist before founding the fascist party. Mussolini likewise went from a pacifist to a rabid warmonger. Clearly such dramatic changes in ideology could only be based in an opportunistic grab for power. Mussolini started supporting a syndicalism economy, but by 1923, with clear objections from business leaders, he concluded the Palazzo Chigi Pact. This pact's main intent was to simplify business relations by making the fascist the sole representative of labor. In 1925, the Plazzo Vidoni agreement was signed. This agreement made Rossoni's union the sole representative of labor. It likewise prohibited the challenging of factory management. By the close of the year, the grateful employer's federation publicly announced adherence to the fascist regime.48 Such transformations illistrate the opportunistic ideology present in fascism or is it a lack of ideology, as well as further dispeling the myth that fascism is another form of socialism.

Part of the problem with the ever-changing ideology of fascism arises from the divisionism. Strasser was a socialist and it seems that Goebbels was a Marxist. Both were allowed almost free reign in promoting their own economic views as long as it gathered more support of serve Hitler's purpose. But once their views failed to serve Hitler, they were then brow beaten severely. An example of such reversal in party ideology of the Nazis occurred on February 14,1926. Prior to this date, both Strasser and Goebbels had approved of a plebiscite campaign to deprive former royalty of their possessions, a measure, that was popular with the common citizens. On the given date, Hitler summoned both men to a meeting in Bamberg. Before those gathered, Hitler forced both to capitulate and abandon the program.49 Similar events have already been given, in which various Nazis were initially allowed to promote socialism in efforts to appease the lower classes in an effort to gain their support.

Examples abound throughout the history of the Nazis where they adopted their ideology to suit the audience. In October 1932, Strasser announced a new program that was a stark reversal of the program the Nazis had advocated in July. Higher taxes on the rich had been replaced with a general reduction of taxes, instead of price controls it centered on freeing prices. Instead of protectionism trade policy, export and global trade was now promoted. Likewise, much of the inflammatory rhetoric had been dropped.50

Hitler seems to have sensed the explosive nature of economics and tried to avoid the subject both publicly and within the party. From all indications, he was dissatisfied with the party planks on economic matters. The only official stance on economic matters was the 1920 twenty-five point program. However, he only referred to this policy document disparagingly in Mein Kampf and distanced himself from the document.51 Likewise Hitler would never take an aggressive stance on minor issues, he played to his audience to win their support.

Perhaps the most dramatic evidence of the opportunistic character of the Nazis is illustrated by the actions of thirty-nine businessmen in November 1932. The group contained such notables as Krupp, Thyssen, Bosch, Siemens, and others. In a signed letter to Hindenburg they urged him to appoint Hitler as chancellor. In essence they were placing a bet that the socialism ideology was a fraud and that once in power he would be a tool of capitalist.52

The only other reversal in policy that could rival the bet that the leaders of big business made was Hitler's writings. In the first part of Mein Kampf he argued that France was the sworn and greater enemy of Germany. However, the second part to Mein Kampf he reversed course and argued that Russia was the enemy as opposed to the first book in which he proposed an alliance with Russia.53 This was a complete change in his foreign policy. One can only speculate as to the reasons behind such a switch.

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Many writers have tried to label the Nazis as socialists in a folly to distance themselves from fascist theory. They are quick to point to the syndicalism policy as proof of socialist regulation of business. They are in error, of course. Syndicalism is neither left nor right in itself. It can be either, depending upon the political structure. Syndicalism with labor groups or consumers dominating the issues would indeed be socialistic in nature. On the other hand, syndicalism with only industry or business groups dominating is certainly from the right wing of the political spectrum. The issuing of controls or goals over the production of war material by the government in a syndicalism system is neither left nor right, it's simply self-preservation. The goals and controls, including the 4-Year Plan issued by Goring, were nothing more than gearing the economy up for war time production. In essence, they were merely self-preservation measures.

Secondly, they will point toward many of the public works projects that were implemented under the Nazis as examples of socialism. An example of this is the construction of the autobahn, a project that had been planned by previous governments, as were many of the public work projects. They likewise forget that the Nazis took over at the bottom of an economic depression, public work projects were enacted not only in Germany, but in the U. S. as well as a means to end the depression. Many of those projects in the U. S. were the construction of useful infrastructure, such as the building of the high school in New Ulm, Minnesota. Others had a definite commercialism bent to them, such as the construction of Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in Oregon. Labeling the construction of a facility for a commercial business as socialism is simply fools folly. The same applies to many of the public works projects that were implemented under the Nazis.

Labeling such programs as socialism would be the same as labeling the construction of the interstate highway system as socialism. If the Eisenhower administration had one shinning moment, it was his support for the construction of the freeway system. For those that are silly enough to label such work as socialism, let them be reminded that no other single event, other than the construction of the cross continental railroad aided the development of business. Besides the obvious advantage to shippers, the interstate highway system has spawned many new businesses. Think of the number of motels/hotels as well as the tourist traps, service stations, and others that have grown up along the freeway system. The same applies to Germany and the autobahn.

Finally, the same writers that label fascism as socialism would like their readers to believe that these government regulations and bureaucratic offices held ultimate power. Failure to comply would result in the owners being shot. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Nazis for a large part lived in fear of the leaders of big business. They were aware that they had no comprehensive economic plan and would defer to the judgement of the business leaders.

This point can be driven home with one simple example. Goering was one of the Nazis that had little economic knowledge, but harbored some of the more radical economic ideas and was fond of using regulatory offices. Goering tried first to persuade the steel industry, both the smelters and miners, to use low-grade German ore as opposed to the high-grade Swedish ore. Importation of ore from Sweden would use up precious foreign currency, as well as being a less reliable source in the event of war. The invasions of Denmark and Norway were conducted solely to protect the Nazis shipping routes for the Swedish ore. Most of the industrialists politely refused Goering's request; even under threats of arrest for sabotage, they still declined.54 None were arrested for refusal. Instead Goering formed the Herman Goering Works to take on the task. By the time of the outbreak of the war it had evolved to be one of the largest companies in Germany.

Farben is another example of the Nazis bowing to the expertise of leading corporations. With the advent of the first 4-Year Plan, they realized they needed the cooperation of business leadership in order to achieve self-sufficiency in a series of raw materials and finished products. Most of which were items would be crucial to wartime production. By the end of the war Farben, had a series of factories around concentration camps, were major users of slave labor, along with Krupp and many other corporations.

But the most damning evidence of the Nazi's unbridled corporatism was evident shortly after passage of the Enabling Act, when Hjalmar Schacht was appointed president of the Reichsbank. Schacht was a brilliant financier who helped negotiate the Dawes Plan and was largely responsible for stabilizing the currency in 1923; he also detested democracy and parliamentarianism. His first official act was the creation of Metall-Forschungsgesellschaft A.G. (Mefo), a dummy corporation of four armament firms. The state assumed the liability for their debts. The Mefo bills were not unlike promissory notes, they were issued to government contractors and could be extended to five years.55 Such favoritism of business is certainly not socialism. Today in America such corporate aid is labeled as corporate welfare. Note the similarity here not only to the present corporate welfare that's being doled out, but also to Eisenhower's warning of the military-industrial complex. The American military-industrial complex didn't need to invent a new plan, they were simply free to follow the example the Nazis used. In fact fascism is inseparatable from corporatism. You simply cannot have a fascist government without corporations and a capitalistic economy.

Schacht was later appointed to minister of economics in 1934, a post he retained until he resigned in 1937 over policy disputes. He was not an anti-Semitic and was conscious of the negative aspects of the takeover of Jewish business on both the economy and world opinion. By 1936, he was advocating slowing down the rearmament program, fearing the return of inflation.56 The return of inflation dispenses with the myths that the Nazis maintained strict control of corporations and the prices of goods in short order. In effect, such controls were non-existent. It should also be pointed out here that the economy at this time had taken on considerable shades of a consumer economy.

Italy used their form of syndicalism to eliminate labor unions; the Nazis followed a similar path. The workers benefited little from this unbridled corporatism. Unemployment went from an official figure of six million unemployed in 1933, to 2.7 million in 1937, and by the time of the outbreak of war there was a serious shortage of workers. But growth in wages was far less spectacular, real wages rose only sparingly. The index of wages rose from 92.5 in 1933 to 103 in 1937, an increase of a meager eleven-percent.57 Much of the increase in wages was achieved only from working longer hours. The only real increases in the plight of the workers came with more unpaid leave. Many of the other benefits produced no real benefits to the worker, such as the factory beautification program.

From looking at the philosophers of fascism, it was revealed that fascism was a reactionary movement. What then was the fascist reacting to that led to the rise of Mussolini and Hitler? Many people responding to the question would simply answer the Treaty of Versailles. But such an answer is only partially correct. It doesn't account for the widespread rise of fascism in many European countries following WWI. In fact, during the period between the two world wars, every government from the Rhine to the Pacific underwent drastic changes. In many of those fascism had ample support but in the end was rejected. Some of the problem can be laid to the beginning dissolution of the British Empire and the arbitrary way in which maps were redrawn following WWI without regard to ethnic or natural barriers. An example would be the cobbled mess of ethnic groups that formed the former republic of Yugoslavia, an area that remains a hot spot today.

Britain and the United States were about the only two governments that did not undergo a major change during the period between the wars. However, neither was immune to the rise of fascism. The U. S. saw a rise of a great many fascist groups and groups closely aligned with the fascist in the period between the wars. The German Bund, the Silver Shirts and the mother's movement were all aligned closely with fascism. It was also this period that seen the greatest membership in the Ku Klux Klan.

The United States avoided full-blown fascism by essentially adopting fascist methods on a milder scale. This was a shameful period in the history of America. The infamous Palmer raids rounded up those with communist connections. The I.W.W was harassed constantly by Hoover and the FBI. In short, only those with non-approved political beliefs would be prosecuted. This suppression of liberty had actually begun around 1900. At the turn of the century, both conservative and liberal elements combined to pass a blizzard of new laws. This effort aimed at curbing lawless quickly became dominated by conservative elements and evolved in a tool for the right wing for the remainder of the century. As head of the FBI, Hoover quickly targeted the leaders of the left for prosecution, ignoring the criminal actions of the hard right groups. This has left the United States without any noticeable left wing compared to the rest of the industrial world.

Perhaps one of the first and most notable events was the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, two immigrants charged with murder in Massachusetts. They were found guilty more on their political beliefs than on evidence. They were anarchists, atheists, and reportedly draft dodgers, beliefs that threatened the industrialists of the time.64 Both were executed after considerable protest. Their trial set a dangerous standard that people could be prosecuted for their political beliefs. The inclusion of this trial here is to serve as a reminder of a new problem that is emerging to confront the hard right, jury nullification. Today there is considerable debate from both sides of the political spectrum on jury nullification arising in death penalty and drug cases. It warrants close observation. If the public becomes too polarized, it could spell the end to the trial by jury system, which has served admirably for over 200 years.

Various members of the right wing are now using this as an issue in another attempt to polarize the electorate for their own selfish purposes. These members of the right wing are promoting a system of justice backed by mob or vigilante justice. Essentially, it's a system backed by violence that is not unlike the tactics used by the Posse Comitatus, the Freemen, or various militias to corrupt the justice system.

The first example of political repression came in Minnesota. The then Republican Governor Burnquist used the newly created Minnesota Commission of Public Safety to suspend New Ulm's Mayor Fritsche and City Attorney Pfaender for their pacifist views after war had been declared on Germany in 1917. The following quote details some of the shameful actions taken by the commission and its connection to the hard right.

In April 1917, soon after America declared war on Germany, the Minnesota Legislature, following ferocious debate, created the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety. This remarkable body, chaired and appointed by the governor, was given "all necessary power" to maintain order and enhance Minnesota's contribution to the war effort.

Technically limited by the state and federal constitutions, the commission essentially wielded all the authority of state government during the 18 months of its active existence.

The commission came to be dominated by representatives of the Twin Cities business community. It used its sweeping authority with gusto, not only to root out “disloyalty'” but to combat labor unionism and agrarian activism as well.

The commission dispatched detectives throughout Minnesota to investigate people and organizations suspected of disloyalty. It regulated food prices and the liquor trade, imposing prohibition in some parts of the state. It banned union organizing and intervened on the side of management in a bitter Twin Cities streetcar strike. It created a “Home Guard”' of some 8,000 troops to back up its decrees.

The commission served as a virtual campaign committee for Republican Gov. Joseph Burnquist in his 1918 re-election bid. It turned a blind eye toward frequent mob harassment of his opponents. It interrogated and intimidated Minnesotans who declined to purchase Liberty Bonds to finance the war effort.63

Nor was such action confined to just Minnesota, many states set up similar commissions. State sponsored violence against leaders from the left was common place. One group that suffered immeasurably was the I.W.W, the Wobblies. On Nov 5, 1916, Washington State suffered its bloodiest labor battle of all time. The resulting carnage between a local sheriff and the Wobblies left seven dead and over fifty wounded in the city of Everett.65

All three of these events illustrate that the United States repressed those with radical ideas in the time period of WWI and immediately thereafter. Pacifist, labor leaders, and leftist political leaders were all prosecuted with equal zeal. Remember, this was the time period of the Rosewood incident and other atrocities. The prosecution was lead by the hard right and business leaders.

But the real answer to the question is that fascism following WWI was a reaction to the Bolshevik revolution and the rise of liberalism ideals. Up until the Russian revolution, the only economic system was capitalism. Communism was a new revolutionary system. It threatened the power elite directly and gave way to a rise not only in communism but socialism and liberalism as well. It was no accident that fascism arose first in Italy, where in the period of 1919-1922, socialists ruled in many localities. Here fascism arose in the countryside were old practices such as sharecropping were giving way to new methods. In 1920, the largest strike in Italian agriculture ever was settled when the landowners capitulated. Elsewhere, unions were wringing out concessions from the owners through strikes and boycotts.58

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The real appeal of European fascism was the protection it afforded against working class movements, socialism, and communism.59 Hobsbawm states it even more forcefully in claiming that without the October revolution and Leninism there would have been no need for fascism. For up until that time, the demagogic right, although politically active and noisy in many countries, had been kept in check.60 The entire Nazi movement was a reactionary movement. The reaction to the Treaty of Versailles is well known and needs no further comment, as is the opposition of fascism to liberalism, socialism and communism. Rather, the following quote will show how complete the reaction was to the events of the time.

"Today Christians... stand at the head of Germany... I pledge that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy Christianity...We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit... We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press- in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past...few years."61

The quote above was taken from a speech delivered by Hitler. It provides the illustration that the Nazi movement was completely a reactionary movement, reacting not only to global power politics and the rise of the left, but also to the changes in arts and culture of the time. It also provides the link to demonstrate that today's hard right movement in the U. S. is equally reactionary, in particular, the element of the so-called religious right. Contrast it with the quote by Pat Robertson below.

"The Constitution of the United States, for instance, is a marvelous document for self-governmentby Christian people. But the minute you turn the document into the hands of non-Christian and atheistic people they can use it to destroy the very foundation of our society."-Pat Robertson (The 700 Club, Dec. 30, 1981)62

Apparently, Robertson is under the impression that the constitution applies to only those he chooses and is null and void for the rest of us. Hitler held a similar contempt for democracy. However, the point that the Nazis were reactionary has been established beyond any doubt. The reaction was not just confined to the global political scene or economic conditions, but extended into the very roots of the culture.

Starting around 1980, fascism reared its ugly head globally. Unlike the rise of fascism in the 1920s, this time the Reagan administration embraced it. The administration openly promoted class warfare, allowed the LaRocuhians access to security and intelligence agencies, filled the EPA with Coor's lackeys, and openly supported none but the elite. In essence, the Reagan administration was the American equivalent of the passage of the Enabling Act.

There is no need to expand on the violent behavior of the Nazis or fascists, as there is no dispute of their long history of violence. Instead, the violence of various groups in the United States will be explored. Many readers will immediately think of the violence that arose in the 60s during the war protests. In fact, that is the great illusion of the media. The truth is that little violence was directly attributed to war protestors. In fact much of the violence that did come out of the war protests was the work of the FBI.

The real story of violence in the 60s was the violence inflicted upon the civil rights workers by the Klan. The early part of the 60s was marred by violence, inspired by the Klan and racial hatred of right wing groups. Eisenhower had to use National Guards to integrate the Little Rock school system. Kennedy had to use federal marshals to integrate Old Miss. When the Supreme Court order that busing was to be used as a tool for integration, the violence spread nationally. The Klan burnt school busses in Michigan to prevent integration.

Since 1980, right wing groups such as the Order, which murdered the Denver talk show host, Berg, likewise have dominated the violence. The leader of the Order was killed in a shoot out with law enforcement. Another right wing group, the Posse Comitatus became a household word only after the Kahl shoot out with law enforcement in North Dakota. And of course there was the bombing of the Oklahoma federal building by the right winger McVeigh. Perhaps the greatest widespread use of violence since the Klan has been the bombing and violence directed against abortion clinics by members of the religious right.

Violence has been the hallmark of the hard right in America dating back at least as far as the Know Nothing Party in the 1800s and their hatred of Catholics. It was business leaders that hired Pinkertons to murder union organizers in earlier times. Yet there is relatively little in the way to support that left wing groups were equally violent. Groups like the Weathermen were violent, but the group was never more than a small fringe group. Its extremely small size limited the extent of its violence. One of the reasons for the lack of widespread violence from leftist groups has already been mentioned, the suppression of left wing groups by the FBI.

The last two traits of fascism will be explored together, as they are related by an underlying use of symbols and the inseparable nature of cults and religions. There is no doubt that both Hitler and Mussolini were in effect leaders of a cult. Their extremist views would rule out a major following otherwise. In fact, both promoted imagines consistent with cults. Both chose to use propaganda to promote larger than life imagines of themselves. Both Hitler and Mussolini were Catholics; neither appeared to be particularly active members of the church. Hitler referred to Christianity throughout Mein Kampf, as already shown by quotes of which a few more will be included here.

"The sword will become our plow, and from the tears of war the daily bread of future generations will grow."

"The more the linguistic Babel corroded and disorganized parliament, the closer drew the inevitable hour of the disintegration of this Babylonian Empire and with it the hour of freedom for my German-Austria people."

" the Lord's grace smiled on his ungrateful children."

Officially, the Nazis were a Christian group, if one can assign a religion to the group by the public policies they enacted. In this case, the assignment is based on the following prayer that the Nazis required to be recited in all public schools.

"Almighty God, dear heavenly Father. In Thy name let us now, in pious spirit, begin our instruction. Enlighten us, teach us all truth, strengthen us in all that is good, lead us not into temptation, deliver us from all evil in order that, as good human beings, we may faithfully perform our duties and thereby, in time and eternity, be made truly happy. Amen."67

It is also true that the Nazis dabbled in mysticism as well. Certainly some of the philosophers were pantheistic. But what really underlies both the religious and mysticism aspects of the Nazis is the symbolism buried underneath. In fact, one follower of fascism believed that the masses were unable to understand anything other than mere slogans. From Mein Kampf the following quote concerns the symbolism hidden behind the Nazi flag.

" Not only that the unique colors, which all of us so passionately love and which once won so much honor for the German people, attest our veneration for the past; they were also the best embodiment of the movement's will. As National Socialists, we see our program in our flag. In red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalistic idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for victory of the Aryan man, and by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work, which as such always has been and always will be anti-Semitic."66

At first in the quote above, Hitler is referring to the old flag of Germany. The choice of red was based on stealing from the communists and was chosen deliberately to enflame the Marxists. Throughout Mein Kampf, Hitler refers to the value of propaganda and made extensive use of symbols to convene a subtle message of hatred.

The similarities to the right wing in America is seen. The Republicans have introduced a flag desecration amendment to protect their symbolism. Even more revealing was the letter Newt Gingrich distributed to members of GOPAC. In this letter, members were to use the following words to impart a negative image: decay, failure, sick, liberal, unionized, welfare, corrupt, greed and intolerant. The following words were to impart a positive imagine: share, legacy, control, truth, and courage.68

Cults are inherently fascist in nature. The leader demands total submersion into the cult. America today has seen far too many examples of cults and cult behavior. A recent example, would be the Waco incident that ended badly. However, there are several right wing groups that do exhibit cult behavior besides the religious groups; the LaRouchians, many of the militias, and the Order would all qualify as cults. In addition, much of the hard right inside the Republican Party has taken on a cult like behavior in their idolizing Reagan. The 105th Congress renamed the Washington airport after him. In the present Congress Congressman Matt Salmmon of Arizona has introduced a bill to deface Mt Rushmore by adding Reagan's imagine to the monument.69

It has been shown beyond any reasonable doubt that Hitler and the Nazis were right wing extremists best described as social darwinists, the antithesis of socialism. It was showed that the Nazis were best described by syndicalism model and that syndicalism is neither socialistic nor capitalistic, inherently. Syndicalism can be either depending upon the makeup; the Nazis were definitely capitalists in that there was no input from labor. All input was reserved for the industrialist. Further, it was shown that the industrialists openly defied Nazi desires in the case of the use of low-grade ores. It was also shown that many of the businesses that was government owned were taken over by the government prior to the Nazis, some dating all the way from the monarchy. Likewise, it was shown that many of the Nazi programs would be classified as corporate welfare today. And it was shown that the real power behind the Nazi movement was the top elitist. This should be sufficient for anyone to dispel the myth that the Nazis were socialist, when in fact they were capitalistic extremists.

In defining fascism, three traits stand above all others, totalitarian, nationalism, and extreme corporatism. In fact, one can not have fascism without corporatism. Other traits of fascism, such as destructive divisionism and the use of violence are secondary. As fascist ideology evolved in the later half of the 20th Century, a happy face was put on fascism by its leaders as they down played the violence and racism. This can be seen best in the far right wing extremist groups currently active in the United States.

Additionally, there is one fact that absolutely places the Nazis and fascism in the extreme right wing portion of the political spectrum, and not the left. No one disputes that a communist revolution attacks the ruling elite of a country. Similarly, socialism and liberalism also attacks the same ruling elite, but the right wing extremists try to claim the opposite. In reality these systems merely seek methods to ease the burden and allow the lower classes to prosper rather than attacking the elite. The Nazis, on the other hand, did not attack the ruling elite of Germany. The rich industrialists were allowed to continue their ways, eased by laws that the Nazis enacted for their benefit. Likewise, the nobility of Germany was supported by the Nazis. In short, the Nazis adopted the ruling elite in Germany and supported them, the exact opposite of what a left leaning political ideology would support.

There is no better proof of the Nazi support for the ruling elite than looking at who supported Hitler in the 1930s in America. Granted, many lower class people were involved in the pro-Hitler movement just as in Germany. But like Germany, it was the rich industrialists that funded these groups. Hearst ordered his newspapers to print pro-Nazi articles. In fact, he had them print the Nazi propaganda directly from Gobbels. Irenee du Pont funded several pro-fascist groups. Henry Ford was well known for his praise of Hitler and funded many pro-Nazis in the 30s. Andrew Mellon and John D. Rockefeller were supporters of Hitler as well. No one is foolish enough to argue that these men were not part of the ruling elite or rich industrialists in America at the time. In fact, support for Hitler among the rich industrialists was rampant.

The continued propagation of such nonsense by the present right wing is nothing short of propaganda. It fits closely with the Nazis' use of propaganda and the symbolism proposed by Gingrich and his negative words. nor will it change the history of the right wing support of the Nazis.

1. http://www.cuttingedge.org/news/n1124.cfm

2. Why Americans Hate Politics, E. J. Dionne, Touchstone, 1991, p152-154.

3. Thomas Jefferson: In his Own Words, Maureen Harrison & Steve Gilbert, Barnes & Noble, 1996, p369.

4. http://www.friesian.com/arthur.htm

5. http://www.miami.edu/phi/schopnh.htm

http://members.aol.com/KathorenaE/private/philo/Nietz/nietz.html

http://userzweb.lightspeed.net/~tameri/nietz.html

http://users.aol.com/Irdetrigen/index4.html

http://www.us.itd.umich.edu/~alexboko/zar/

http://www.pitt.edu/~wbeurry/nietzsche.html

http://www.ewu.edu/~millerj/nietzsche.index.html

6. http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/bergson.htm

7. Himmler, Peter Padfield, MJF books,1990, p260.

8. Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler, Houghton Mifflin, 1971, p 394.

9. Mein Kampf, p325.

10. Lott renounces White Racialist Group He praised in 1992, Thomas Edsell, Washington Post, Dec 16,1998.

11. http://www.cofcc.org/

12. Thirty Days, Henry Ashby Turner, Addison-Welsey, 1996, p5.

13. Thirty Days, p9-15.

14. Thirty Days, p164.

15. Mein Kampf, p645-646.

16. Mein Kampf, p218.

17. Adolf Hitler, Robert Payne, Barnes & Noble,1995, p213.

18. Adolf Hitler, p237

19. Who Financed Hitler, James Pool, Pocket Books, 1997, p11.

20. Who Financed Hitler, p45

21. Who Financed Hitler, p83.

22. U. S. Firms' Connections to Nazis Detailed, Reuters, 1/14/1999. Appeared in Boston Globe of same date

23. German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, Henry Ashby Turner, Oxford University Press, 1985.

24. German Big Business, p151-152.

25. German Big Business, p198-200.

26. German Big Business, p159.

27. Trading with the Enemy, Charles Higham, Barnes & Noble, 1983,p131-132.

28. Hitler and His secret Partners, James Pool, Pocket Books,1997, p52-53

29. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Schirer, Fawcett, 1992, p202.

30.The Rise and Fall, p203.

31. http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/nca/nca-02-16-13-index.html

32. http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/nca/

33. What Real Hate Speech Sounds Like, Jeff Jacony, Boston Globe, 11, 2, 1998.

34. http://www.tialliance.org/tia/page4.htm

35. A Trial of Alleged hate to Begin in Texas, AP wire, Boston Globe, 1, 24, 1999 .

36. Minority Voter Intimidation Becomes election Eve Issue, AP wire, 11, 3, 1998.

37. Quite and Odd Couple to Sit in Judgement, Jim Dwyer, New York Daily news, 1, 7, 1999.

38. RNC Chiarman Urges Party Member to Leave Conservative Group, Glen Johnson, AP wire, Boston Globe, 1, 19, 1999.

39. Mein Kampf, p248.

40. http://www.fair.org/current/buchanan-bigot.html

41. Mein Kampf, p678.

42. Mein Kampf, p651.

43. Mein Kampf, p449.

44. Big Business &

45. Mein Kampf, p575.

46. Mein Kampf, p396.

47. Fascism, Roger Eatwell, Penguin, 1995, p149.

48. Fascism, p77.

49. The Rise and Fall, p181.

50. Big Business, p288.

51. Big Business, p 81

52. Hitler, John Toland, Doubleday, 1976, p276.

53. Hitler, p221.

54. Fascism, p156.

55.Hitler, p308.

56. Fascism, p155.

57. Fascism, p160.

58. Fascism, p53-54.

59. The Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm, Vintage Books, 1996, p 175.

60. The Age of Extremes, p124.

61. http://www.isrp.org/

62. http://www.tialliance.org/tia/page6.htm

63. http://www.pioneerplanet.com/archive/cent/dox/cent13.htm

64. http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afries/88/sacvan.html

65. http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~n9517146/everettmassacre.html

66. Mein Kampf, p498-499.

67. http://w3.trib.com/FACT/1st.religion.alert.html

68. http://www.fair.org/extra/9502/language-control.html

69. Reagan Wanted on Mt Rushmore, Rueters wire appearing in the 2/2/99 Boston Globe

70. The Road To Serfdom, F..A. Hayek, University of Chicago Press, 1994, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition.

71. The Road to Serfdom, p52.

72. The Road to Serfdom, p44.

73. Fascism and Big Business, Daniel Guerin, Pathfinder, 1973, p208-213

74. Time Bomb, E.A. Piller, Arco Publishing, 1945, p13-14.

75. Southern Exposure, Stetson Kennedy, DoubleDay, 1946, p189

© Copyright 2001-2004 by Glen Yeadon

From The Archives Another rat hiding in the bushes

2010-07-11T18:46:00.001-06:00

The Disappearance of George P. Bush

By Linda Milazzo

Created 2006-12-16 12:36

It was the year 2000. The new millennium. It featured a rising new star from a prominent American family. His name was George. George P. Remember George P.? The incessantly publicized and promoted son of Florida's Governor Bush? The most dominant face of George W. Bush's 2000 Presidential campaign?

George P. was everywhere. Enticing the wealthy. Hugging the poor. Kissing elderly ladies, winning the hearts of adoring young girls. George P. was the bait. The lure. And America was his catch of the day. In our multi-cultural nation, this blended prince encompassed the best of America's two prominent landscapes: the ever-growing Latino population and the doggedly dominant Anglo. The half that was Anglo spanned generations of wealth and power. The half that was Latin softened his ego, making his combination just "right."

The media couldn't get enough of George P. He was the "fourth-coming." The likely successor to the mantle of the multi-generational dynasty whose fortune had amassed in unorthodox ways. Of course the unorthodox ways were of no interest to the press, whose sole focus was on the contentious election for the first President of the new millennium. The 2000 Presidential election was the nation's most divisive in history. It tore at the fabric of its democracy, tarnished the Supreme Court, and damaged the electoral system for decades, if not centuries to come.

Still it made a hit out of George P. Bush. For a couple years he was on his way to becoming the family's biggest star. But when Uncle W. took the nation to war, except for a carefully toned down appearance in the election of 2004, and some attention when he got married, George P. was neatly hidden from sight. He had to be. If he remained visible the questions would arise. Why isn't George P. serving in Iraq? George P.'s young enough. If he's a patriot, why doesn't he volunteer for the war?

Legitimate questions. So legitimate that the entire brood of military-age Bush grandchildren and cousins are no where to be found. They are hidden. Kept under wraps lest the question of their patriotism be decried. Except of course, First Twins Jenna and Barbara, whose sometime errant behavior throws them back in the public eye.

Certainly the military absences of Bushes, Cheneys, Rumsfelds, Wolfowitzes, Perles, Coulters, Limbaughs, O'Reillys, Hannitys, Crystals, Feiths, Ashcrofts, etc., are no news to those who pay attention. But it was particularly telling today as I watched Donald Rumsfeld's long goodbye. As I listened to his words and to the words of those who paid tribute at his farewell 'celebration' as Secretary of Defense.

I watched as Mr. Rumsfeld read from his speech, and I lamented the fact that he couldn't ad-lib a few simple lines about the families of the fallen. He was typically staccato and emotionless as he read the few short sentences about the sacrifices they had made. I couldn't imagine for a second, with the sad exceptions of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, any leaders who would have NEEDED to read these words. I couldn't imagine for a second why these words, if they were true, weren't burnt into the consciousness of Mr. Rumsfeld. I couldn't understand how it could be that these sentiments weren't crystal clear to him, and so deeply a part of his psyche, that no paper should be needed. But that wasn't the case...

These were the words Donald Rumsfeld NEEDED to read:

"As I end my time here some ask what will I remember. Well, I will remember all those courageous folks that I've met deployed in the field. Those in the military hospitals that we visited. And I will remember the fallen. And I will particularly remember their families (TURNING PAGE) from whom I have drawn inspiration."

These are the words Mr. Rumsfeld NEEDED to read. They came at the very end of his speech where it would have been the most simple, if the words were truly heartfelt, to put aside his papers and speak from his heart. His heart????

A further observation at today's ceremony was the absence, or so it appeared, of Mr. Rumsfeld's own military-age grandchild.

To be honest, I'm not proposing that Mr. Rumsfeld's grandchild or anyone else's child should serve in this war because I passionately oppose it. However, Mr. Rumsfeld does not. Mr. Rumsfeld has advocated that other people's children and grandchildren fight in this war, and he has ordered their deployment to do so. Therefore I am compelled to remind Mr. Rumsfeld of the words he spoke on March 23, 2002 in an interview for "Time For Kids" with twelve-year-old "TFK" reporter, Alexandra Tatarsky.

Rumsfeld said, "Will young people end up in the armed services? I hope so! We have wonderful young men and women serving their country with great dedication and courage and pride. I sure hope one of my grandchildren will want to serve!" (http://www.timeforkids.com/TFK/news/story/0,6260,220114,00.html [1])

Well, Mr. Rumsfeld, your grandchild was too young to serve in 2002 when you gave that interview, but that grandchild is old enough to serve today. So I ask you, Mr. Rumsfeld: Do you really hope your grandchild will serve in this war? Have you actually suggested to your own child that her child should enlist in the military and serve?

Honestly, Mr. Rumsfeld, I doubt that you have!

One final note:. Recently, Virginia Senator-elect Jim Webb, a man I deeply respect, had a short conversation with George W. Bush. I would like to offer MY VERSION of how that conversation might have gone:

G.W. Bush: How's your boy?

Sen. Webb: He's in harms way, Mr. Bush. How are your girls?

G.W. Bush: (Silence)

###

Linda Milazzo is a Los Angeles based writer, educator and activist. Her writing has appeared in numerous newspapers, magazines and domestic and international journals. She's a member of CodePink Women For Peace and Progressive Democrats of America. Over the past three decades Linda has divided her time between the entertainment industry, community projects and education. A political and social activist since the Vietnam War, Linda attributes her revitalized-fully-engaged-intense-head-on-non-stop-political activism to the UNFORTUNATE EXISTENCE OF GEORGE W. BUSH and her disgust with greed-ridden American imperialism, environmental atrocities, egregious war, nuclear proliferation, lying leaders, and global tyranny!

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http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/16425

Links:
[1] http://www.timeforkids.com/TFK/news/story/0,6260,220114,00.html

Tao Thought: Immediacy and daodejing 67

2010-07-11T16:44:00.004-06:00

When washing your face, can you see your true self?
When urinating, can you remember true purity?
When eating, can you remember the cycles of all things?
When walking, can you feel the rotation of heaven?
When working, are you happy with what you do?
When speaking, are your words without guile?
When you shop, are you aware of your needs?
When you meet the suffering, do you help?
When confronted with death, are you unafraid and lucid?
When you meet conflict, do you work toward harmony?
When with your family, do you express benevolence?
When raising children, are you tender but firm?
When facing problems, are you far-seeing and tenacious?
When you are finished with work, do you take time to rest?
When preparing for rest, do you know how to settle your mind?
When sleeping, do you slip into absolute void?

immediacy
365 Tao
Daily Meditations
Deng Ming-Dao (author)
ISBN 0-06-250223-9

Stanford Studies on Daoism
Laozi
• The Laozi Story
• Date and Authorship of the Laozi
• Textual Traditions
• Commentaries
• Approaches to the Laozi

Commentaries
The transcendence of Dao must not be compromised. To do justice to the Laozi, it is also important to show how the function of Dao translates into basic “principles” (li) governing the universe. The regularity of the seasons, the plenitude of nature, and other expressions of “heaven and earth” all attest to the presence of Dao. Human beings also conform to these principles, and so are “modeled” ultimately after Dao.

Wang Bi is often praised in later sources for having given the concept of “principle” its first extended philosophical treatment. In the realm of Dao, principles are characterized by “naturalness” (ziran) and “nonaction” (wuwei). Wang Bi defines ziran as “an expression of the ultimate.” In this regard, attention has been drawn to Yan Zun's influence. Nonaction helps explain the practical meaning of naturalness. In ethical terms, Wang Bi takes nonaction to mean freedom from the dictates of desire. This defines not only the goal of self-cultivation but also that of government. Wang Bi's Laozi commentary has exerted a strong influence on modern interpretations of the Laozi in both Asia and the West. There are three English translations available (Lin 1977, Rump 1979, and Lynn 1999).

Among these four commentaries, Heshanggong's Laozi zhangju occupied the position of preeminence in traditional China, at least until the Song dynasty. For a long period, Wang Bi's work was relatively neglected. The authority of the Heshanggong commentary can be traced to its place in the Daoist religion, where it ranks second only to the Daodejing itself. Besides Heshanggong's work and the Xiang'er, there are two other commentaries entitled the Laozi jiejie (Sectional Explanation) and the Laozi neijie (Inner Explanation) closely associated with religious Daoism. Both have been ascribed to Yin Xi, the keeper of the pass who “persuaded” Laozi to write the Daodejing and who, according to Daoist hagiographic records, later studied under the divine Laozi and became an “immortal.” These texts, however, only survive in citations (see Kusuyama 1979).

From the Tang period, one begins to find serious attempts to collect and classify the growing number of Laozi commentaries. An early pioneer is the eighth-century Daoist master Zhang Junxiang, who cited some thirty commentaries in his study of the Daodejing (Wang 1981). Du Guangting (850-933) provided a larger collection, involving some sixty commentaries (Daode zhenjing guangshengyi, Daozang 725). According to Du, there were those who saw the Laozi as a political text, while others focused on spiritual self-cultivation. There were Buddhist interpreters (e.g., Kumārajīva and Sengzhao), and there were those who explained the “Twofold Mystery” (chongxuan). This latter represents an important development in the history of interpretation of the Daodejing.

daodejing translated by current scholars

67

The world calls me great great but useless
because I am great I am useless
If I were of use I would have stayed small

But I possess three treasures
I treasure and uphold
First is compassion
Second is austerity
Third is reluctance to excel

Because I am compassionate I can be valiant
because I am austere I can be extravagant
because I am reluctant to excel
I can be chief of all tools

If I renounced compassion for valour
austerity for extravagance
reluctance for supremacy
I would die

Compassion wins every battle
and outlasts every attack
What Heaven creates
let compassion protect.

— RED PINE

67

Everyone under heaven says
that my Tao is great, but inconceivable.
It is its very greatness that makes it inconceivable!
If it could be conceived of, how small it would be!

I have three treasures to hold and protect:
The first is motherly love.
The second is economy.
The third is daring not to be first in the world.

With motherly love one can be courageous.
With economy one can be expansive.
With humility one can lead.

To be courageous without motherly love,
To be expansive without practicing economy,
To go to the front without humility - this is courting death.

Venture with love and you win the battle.
Defend with love and you are invulnerable.
Heaven's secret is motherly love.

— BRIAN BROWNE-WALKER

67

Some say that my teaching is nonsense.
Others call it lofty but impractical.
But to those who have looked inside themselves,
this nonsense makes perfect sense.
And to those who put it into practice,
this loftiness has roots that go deep.

I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you all beings in the world.

— STEPHEN MITCHELL

also available at http://www.duckdaotsu.org/07/immediacy.html

“Child’s Play”
Lisbeth West 1973
Vine Street & 20th; Denver
Leica M3 90mm Elmar
CPS Pro Neg Film

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Tao Thought: Austerities and daodejing 66

2010-07-10T21:37:00.006-06:00

朴素的

Self-discipline leads to higher spiritual states
Only if practiced with understanding.
The clearer the goal,
The greater the result.

We must distinguish between discipline with a purpose and blind discipline. Discipline with a purpose is merely a means to an end and is healthy. Blind discipline does not have a true purpose and so becomes fanaticism. In the past, there were many spiritual people who believed in harsh asceticism. They would flog themselves, live in cold and damp caves, twist themselves into uncomfortable postures, fast for dangerous periods of time. All too often, these people lost sight of their goals. We must be strongly disciplined, but we must not lose sight of our inner meaning.

Austere living with a clear understanding of why and how we are doing things does not require esoteric practices. Few of us mind going through extra effort and even hardship if we know that we will gain something better for it. That is all that discipline and austerity are about : You make extra efforts to gain a better life.

austereties
365 Tao
Daily Meditations
Deng Ming-Dao (author)
ISBN 0-06-250223-9

Tao Te Ching translated by current scholars

66

The reason the sea can govern a hundred rivers
is because it has mastered being lower
thus it can govern a hundred rivers

Thus if the sage would be above the people
he should speak as if he were below them
if he would be before them
he should act as though he were behind them

Thus when the sage is above
the people are not burdened
when he is in front
the people are not hindered
the world never wearies of pushing him forward

Because he doesn't struggle
no one can struggle against him

— RED PINE

66

The sea is king of the valleys and streams
because it is willing to be beneath them.

One who wishes to guide the people
should be humble in her speech toward them.
One who wishes to lead the people
must learn the art of following them.

The sage is above the people,
but they don't feel her weight.
She stays ahead of the people,
and no harm comes to them.
She has the affection of the whole world.

Because she contends with no one,
no one can contend with her.

— BRIAN BROWNE-WALKER

66

All streams flow to the sea
because it is lower than they are.
Humility gives it its power.

If you want to govern the people,
you must place yourself below them.
If you want to lead the people,
you must learn how to follow them.

The Master is above the people,
and no one feels oppressed.
She goes ahead of the people,
and no one feels manipulated.
The whole world is grateful to her.
Because she competes with no one,
no one can compete with her.

— STEPHEN MITCHELL

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from the archives: Iraq suspects suffocate in heat

2010-07-09T23:53:00.000-06:00

Iraq suspects suffocate in heat

Nine building workers have died in Iraq after being arrested on suspicion of insurgent activity and then left in a closed metal container.
Three men survived the ordeal, police sources said, despite being left for 14 hours in the burning Iraqi summer heat.
They had apparently been caught up in a firefight between US troops and Iraqi gunmen, and were detained after takng an injured colleague to hospital.
Police commandos face numerous claims that they abuse and torture detainees.
Meanwhile, gunmen have attacked an Iraqi army checkpoint north of Baghdad, killing at least nine soldiers.

Scorching heat

Police sources told the BBC that at least 12 men had been arrested on Sunday after they had taken a colleague to hospital in Ameriya with gunshot wounds.
A local resident, thinking they were insurgents, called the police, who sent commandos to arrest the men.

At about midday, they were put into a metal container and by nightfall eight prisoners were dead and three were in a critical condition.
The survivors were taken to a central Baghdad hospital where staff said a ninth man died.
The Iraqi capital suffers scorching heat during the summer months, with temperatures often reaching 50 degrees.
A doctor told the BBC that one of the survivors had said he had been given repeated electric shocks by the commandos.
The survivors were kept under police guard as they were treated and were taken away without being allowed to speak to journalists.
Recent UK press reports have alleged police commandos systematically torture and abuse detainees. The security forces themselves are the target of much of Iraq's insurgency violence.

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duckdaotsu media arts: Iraq suspects suffocate in heat:

from the archives: The Viet Nam War Ruined My Life

2010-07-09T23:47:00.000-06:00

"Comparing the two wars, I see the Vietnam BFM as having a confusing, hard to explain purpose. If there was a moral justification for that war, it has escaped me. The Iraq BFM has to be seen as immoral. America has gained nothing by being there. We have found no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear warheads, and no evidence to tie Hussein with Bin Laden.

We have alienated many of our allies and have lost the respect of much of the world. We are seen as bullies who could not get the real terrorists who attacked us so we started a war with a country that our president decided was just loaded with bad guys. I recently read the study that indicates the Iraq War is responsible for killing over 100,000 innocent Iraqi citizens.

That’s 100,000 deaths in addition to the enemy death count. So I’m wondering where the high moral values are in a commander-in-chief who can show his smug face in public knowing his war actions have killed so many innocent lives."

continue reading - > duckdaotsu media arts: The Viet Nam War Ruined My Life:

Miles Woolley is a disabled Vietnam veteran living in Miami, Florida. He served with the 9th Infantry Division in The Mekong Delta in a Ranger unit doing reconnaissance 1968–69 where he received a gunshot wound to the head leaving one side severely paralyzed. He is a father of four grown children and grandfather of seven, including a set of triplets.

from the archives: An interview with Peace Grandma, Rosemarie Jackowski-"Silence is the greatest of all crimes"

2010-07-09T23:41:00.000-06:00

"Interview
”Silence is the greatest of all crimes”
An interview with Peace Grandma, Rosemarie Jackowski
By Mickey Z.

I've been extremely fortunate to attract an amazing mix of visitors to my blog...

www.mickeyz.net

...a crew self-dubbed 'The Expendables.' The matriarch of the Expendables is one Rosemarie Jackowski, a 67-year-old grandmother/veteran/writer from Vermont currently facing jail time for participating in an anti-war demonstration in 2003. Her journey from flag-waver to rabble-rouser is a palpable source of inspiration and an excellent illustration of the motivating power of example. When, in a recent e-mail, I wrote to her: 'you rock,' this was Rosemarie's reply: 'Hearing that from you has made my day. Those were the words that my daughter, Christine, said to me after I was arrested. They were very special words that day because she, not too long before, had married into a Republican-type family. She means the world to me and, at the time of my arrest, I was not 100% sure of her reaction.'

I interviewed Rosemarie via e-mail on October 23, 2005."

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from the archives: Gore Vidal, Octocontrarian

2010-07-09T23:37:00.000-06:00

duckdaotsu media arts: Gore Vidal, Octocontrarian

Gore Vidal, Octocontrarian

by MARC COOPER

Gore Vidal remains one of the more prolific contemporary American writers and certainly one of the most politically outspoken. Shortly after his recent 80th-birthday celebration, Nation contributing editor Marc Cooper interviewed him in his Hollywood home. Herewith, a condensed version of that conversation. . --The Editors