Pointless Man

Proud American bigots will not own their bigotry. Even most KKK groups deny they are racist (though they clearly are). 'Racism' is a fighting word in the US. Try telling some Trumpeteers their approach to Latinos is racist, and see what happens. The US is full of active and systemic discrimination,  including very strong racism, but we don't want to acknowledge it. We don't want to talk about it. We don't want to change it, unless and until it is seen as directly harming rich, white people. Then, maybe we'll consider halting the war on drugs, or at least pot. Many of us don't want to admit historical tidbits like slavery, Japanese internment, the terrorist civil war that lasted 30 years after the Civil War (which the south won), race riots, Indian wars, or imperialism. Calling racist policies and acts what they so clearly are is perceived as an insult to those who craft them and carry them out. We definitely do not want to think about how redlining was st...

"'Can I get a witness to all this poverty?' There's no need to, brother. Everybody can see," Joe Strummer sang, but I think he was sadly mistaken.  As I used to argue in non-defense of the G. W. Bush administration, the rich and powerful are so generally and fully ensconced in their rarefied territory, they are mostly unaware of the underclasses. Thus, actions which, with greater understanding, might be seen as intentionally evil, are merely ignorant (though arguably still evil). This helps to explain Bush's approach to Katrina, black people, the poor, public schools, and those foreigners he tried to help free with two wars in their homes; Catherine the Great's inability to tell that her tours of supposed Russian towns involved the same actors, playing the same roles, and using the same set over and over; Marie Antionette's "Let them eat cake;" the casual cruelty of roving gangs in Fist of the North Star 1 ; and Republican efforts to someho...

Nat Turner and John Brown are both famous in the United States for having lead failed slave rebellions in the decades before the U.S. Civil War.  They have each inspired several artistic and historical works.  I read " The Confessions of Nat Turner " when I was 14, but have yet to read " John Brown's Body ". The KKK are, of course, racist dicks who Superman beat up .

Vichy France, the short lived French State, printed its own money during the second world war.  I bought some (along with a few other French coins) when I was 13, though I had forgotten all about it by the time it fell out of a box of papers I was carrying to recycle.   I picked the coin up, took it out of its protective packaging, put it my jacket pocket, hurried off to work, and forgot about it again until a couple weeks ago. Not much call for jackets in the summer, even in Seattle, but it was threatening to rain, so I found myself wearing this old leather number.  This time, when I fingered the coin, I noticed how oddly light it was.  Taking a look, I found myself holding an aluminum* two Franc piece from 1943 .  On its face, there is a two headed ax towering above split wheat and the words 'Etat Francais'.  On the back, the bold number '2' stands between sets of leaves and beneath the slogan 'Travail, Famille, Patrie' (or 'work, family, f...

The rationale for having people deal with graphic depictions of Nazi internment camps and all that is not usually just that it is a fact of history, and people should acquaint themselves with it, nor that it tells us something important about the human condition, but that we must know about it so we can stop its like from ever happening again. So, I wonder, have efforts to educate people about the Holocaust actually done anything to stop other acts of genocide or mass murder?

Let us assume for a moment there are some rules which should typically be followed in war, and that these rules are generally agreed to have legal and/or moral force. For those who think rules, laws, and ethics do not or cannot apply to war, that war is too barbaric or too disorderly to allow for rules, or that a sort of cruel pragmatism which places victory as the sole and ultimate value attains during times of war, I ask that you pretend to deal within other people's views and follow this post's assumptions for its duration. So there are rules. As rules, they probably have exceptions. Let us say, "Killing civilians tends to be wrong," is among these rules. People have argued over whether going after those who indirectly supply the war effort is just or justifiable, in talking about allied bombing raids of civilians during WWII. As a result of the Gazan conflict, there has been some debate on whether it is wrong to kill civilians being treated by one side as human sh...

Reading an article in the NY Times on McCain's approach to military matters of foreign policy, I came across this statement: "Instead, as American troops swarmed Baghdad, McCain repeatedly compared Hussein to Adolf Hitler and predicted that the occupation of Iraq would be remembered in much the same way that history celebrated the liberation and rebuilding of Europe and Japan." Probably, the author didn't think about his statement about the aftermath of WWII too much. And I doubt many Americans would take issue with it. True, we liberated much of Europe from Axis control during WWII; we helped to rebuild many of those areas and Japan after the end of the war; and most Americans look positively on all or a majority of our actions during and directly following the conflicts. But did we liberate Japan and Germany? The Japanese had a republican government in place, and the great majority of Germans had voted for Hitler and, we are told, supported his move to make himsel...