Web Letters | The Nation

Can Pope Francis Change the Church?

The Catholic Church evolved alongside monarchical rule for centuries. Getting rid of the Pope wil not change things. Monarchical rule has morphed into plutocratic rule (i.e., rule by the wealthy). Along the way we were once a democracy, which has largly morphed into a plutocracy. Asking our president to step down would not change the way things are politically, and economically, nor will it change the Catholic church if the Pope ere to abdicate. The church like other major institutions has learned a lot from the corporate world, reflected in the way it and colleges and universities “do business.” If all corporate CEOs stepped down, it wouldn’t change the fact that “the bottom line rules” and trumps fairness, integrity, distributive justice, equal rights for all.

How Bashar al-Assad Destroyed My Country

Did Mr. Assad destroy Syria? I think the story is more complex.

I don’t wish to exonerate Mr Assad of any untried accusations, but there are other players whose involvement has, in my eyes, do them no credit.

The New York Times reported CIA involvement in moving weapons to various various rebel factions. More recently, after the chemical weapons attack of August 21, Russian President Putin’s op-ed was published in the Times. That was September 11.

My own concerns date from 2011, when I noted that Avaaz was asking for public support in supplying secure satellite radios to “peace activists”.

I wrote Avaaz Campaign Director Stephanie Brancaforte to clarify its policy on providing materiel to nonviolent protesters that could expose them to deadly risk.

Here is part of that exchange:

Tue, Jun 14, 2011
Dear Stephanie Brancaforte,

A recent story in the NYT…leads me to question the wisdom of providing protestors with satellite phones.

I am concerned that…supply of high-tech communications equipment may put people clearly in harms way.… I do not think it is a good idea for Avaaz to continue to supply satellite phones to nonviolent protestors.

I am hoping to hear…that the matter has been discussed at the executive level of Avaaz. I am very interested in the policy decision reached.

Thank you for your consideration.

*-* *

From: Stephanie
To: Robert
Sent: Friday, July 22, 2011 10:15 PM
Subject: Re: “safer communications equipment”

Greetings, …Yes, I very much appreciate your concern on the danger of filming or providing information in these locations. We would never send equipment to anyone who wasn’t already engaged in this line of work—we’re working with front-line activists who desperately want to get the information out about what’s happening in their countries, and who have long had to deal with regime pressure and scrutiny. We are also supplying tech equipment to free-lance journalists who are in the region but have poor comms equipment to get the story out.

I hope that clarifies things!

Best wishes and thanks so much for your feedback.
Stephanie

*-* *

Fri, Jul 22,
Dear Stephanie,

Thank you for your reply. May I take your words…as a statement of Avaaz policy on supply of satellite phones and tech equipment to front-line activists and free-lance journalists? Thank you for your consideration.

*-* *

From: Stephanie Brancaforte
To: Robert
Sent: Friday, July 22, 2011 10:55 PM
Subject: Re: “safer communications equipment”—Avaaz policy

Dear Robert,

For which purpose do you need a policy statement? If it is for officials or for publication/media?

thanks,
stephanie

The linked story associated with this exchange, and other items available on the Internet, cause me to question the value of blaming Mr Assad for the destruction of Syria.

Avaaz is not the only NGO with partisan involvement in this conflict. Human Rights Watch chose sides in 2011, choosing to repeatedly condemn the Assad government for the use of cluster munitions, with no chain of evidence. Respect for justice and good sense were abandoned, and in my opinion, they have done their reputation grave harm by condemning a suspected perpetrator instead of a known deed.

The role of HRW is queried (and not before time) by this article:

Your article is informative, and well-written, but Mr. Assad is not the only player in this conflict. The unending human suffering and tragedy deserve something better than the simplistic partisanship that has been encouraged from early on by NGOs whose links to the US government merit deeper examination.

The Evangelical Adoption Crusade

Joyce never considers fathers in her criticism of international adoption. It is as if fathers are second-class parents. An obvious analysis is the lack of fathers in adoptees’ birth families.

The Case Against Military Intervention in Syria

I am a Jewish American who was born five years after World War II ended and the world had learned about the Holocaust and the 6 million Jews who were murdered, of which 1 million were children. We later learned that Roosevelt knew what was going on and chose to do nothing. Fast forward fifty years later, and Clinton did nothing to prevent the slaughter of close to a million people in Rwanda.

We cannot be the world’s policeman, but we are the only power capable of projecting military power on a worldwide basis to help prevent genocide and war. We used our military to stop the genocide in Kosovo, end the famine in Somalia, aid the victims from the earthquake in Haiti and assist Japan after the tsunami. We got it wrong in Iraq, but we get it right most of the time.

My fear is that Obama will cave in to the Russians and have some sort of peace conference that will leave Assad in power and not be held accountable for the murders of 100,000 people and the use of chemical weapons against civilians, and this will embolden dictators like Assad around the world. I also believe that coming out publicly promising a limited attack (if one happens at all) plays into the hands of tyrants like Assad and Putin.

I have read hundreds of readers’ comments posted on The Nation and several other media sites and 95 percent are against America doing anything at all to stop the slaughter in Syria. I find this morally repugnant and reprehensible. If we can prevent mass murder without having boots on the ground, we should do it. For whatever reason, history has empowered America with the ability to make a stand for what is morally right, even if it is not in America’s strategic interests to act. I fear that this time America is going to stand down rather than stand up and make a statement that mass murder, the use of chemical weapons and indiscriminately using warplanes, tanks, and artillery to destroy cities in Syria will not be tolerated.

Unfortunately, as with the aftermath in Vietnam, because of gross miscalculations and stupidity on the part of politicians, America will draw inward and become more isolationist, and history has shown when that happens brutal dictators and tyrants around the world will be emboldened. There will not be fewer Rwandas and fewer Syrias if America does nothing, there will be more, and the killing will only get worse.

I voted for our president enthusiastically in 2008 and 2012 and hope he acts and does not cave in to those who want us to stay completely out of the conflict. We can make a strong statement that the slaughter of innocent men, women and children will not be tolerated without sending our men and women to another land to fight and die.

America has many faults and we have made many, many mistakes, but when the Chinese students protested against their government they held up a homemade display of the Statue of Liberty. It wasn’t just our Constitution and Bill of Rights they held up as a symbol of freedom but also America’s resolve to stand up for those who were denied freedom by their governments who not only sought to deny their citizens the right to free speech, a free press and freedom of assembly but also to those governments who believed they could imprison, murder and torture their civilians without being held accountable or made to stop their barbarity.

Have You Marched on Washington?

My years in the movement started in the 1950s in interracial summer camps and continued in support of the Freedom Vote in Mississippi in the fall of 1963 and with James Farmer and Bayard Rustin and Norman Hill in New York City in 1964. I was in Selma in 1965 and went to jail in Montgomery during the march and was almost killed by Klansmen the night before they killed Viola Luizzo. Not everyone put their lives on the line, but many were needed to do the work behind the scenes supporting those who were constantly in danger. I chose to do both then and this year I have finally told the story I wrote about those times: Student Activism and Civil Rights in Mississippi: Protest Politics and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 1960-1965.

Time to March on Washington—Again

I am white. My friend Milton is black. The last time we saw each other was in 1968, when we were seniors at Germantown High School in Philadelphia. Much has changed since those tumultuous times. Both of us have been married, divorced, changed jobs, and moved, Milton to Alabama, and myself originally to the Washington and Virginia area and then back to the metro Philly area where I now live (in New Jersey). Since we last saw each other the world has seen fabulous new advances in technology, with compact discs and now mp3s, the Walkman, DVDs, the Internet, cellphones, computers, tablets, flat screen televisions, airbags in cars, mapping the human genome, and the Hubble Space telescope to view the universe. The first whirlpool bath, the Jacuzzi, was invented just as we were graduating high school. Post-it-notes, the first microprocessor, the first ink jet and laser printers, MRI’s, the first artificial heart, Dopler radar which we rely on to forecast and prepare for inclement weather, and of course Viagra, all came after we graduated high school.

In 1968 a first-class postage stamp was six cents and a gallon of gas was just forty. 1968 was a year that America seemed to be coming apart imploding from within. In one week we lost 543 soldiers in Vietnam with more than 2,500 wounded. Our college campuses were rife with student sit-ins, takeovers of the ROTC buildings, and our cities were in danger of what at times seemed like a civil war. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in April of 1968, and Robert Kennedy was murdered that June. The Voting Rights Act had been passed three years earlier, but the tragic events of 1968 seemed to be drawing Americans farther and father apart. When Milton and I graduated from high school in 1968, the words “hope” and “change” were on everyone’s mind. We all had hopes for a better tomorrow. We felt that things could not get much worse.

Through the miracle of Facebook, after losing touch for forty-five years we found each other again. Milton drove up from Alabama with his lovely lady, Rachelle, to meet old friends in Philly, and it was a joyous time getting together. However, with all the joy I felt inside about seeing my old friend, I became very sad. The great divide between white and black America that we all hoped in 1968 would be healed seems just as bad as it ever was. Yes, there are thousands more black elected officials in our cities and states, and yes, we have our first black president, something no one, black or white would have thought possible back in 1968. Unfortunately, the poison of racism has not been eradicated in our country. In 1988 the Bush campaign ran its famous Willie Horton ad, which was designed to frighten white voters who might vote for Democrats. The O.J. Simpson trial’s verdict in 1995 showed how divided white and black America still were.

While getting ready for my meeting with Milton I was watching the news reports about the the Trayvon Martin trial. The Internet has been filled with hundreds of thousands of posts on media websites as well as hundreds of thousands of tweets about the trial. Four white journalists began speaking about how shocked they were at the thousands upon thousands of vile, racist tweets they read about Rachel Jeantel, the friend of Trayvon Martin who testified last week. I sat there watching in sadness, remembering how much all of us who believe that we are all our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper had hopes for a better America. I remembered sitting in the living room in 1963 with my parents watching Martin Luther King deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

Almost a half-century has gone by since I last saw my friend Milton. What has changed between blacks and whites in America? The Voting Rights Act was gutted by the Supreme Court last week, and when you read the thousands of comments posted on media sites, it seems as though too many white Americans believe that black Americans want some special entitlement, when all they were asking for is what every white American has had since the day they were born… their civil rights respected, equality in the workplace, and justice and fairness in our courts. The chasm between blacks who are concerned about their right to vote being suppressed and subverted and whites who have no understanding about what it is like to suffer discrimination is as deep and as wide as it ever was.

Milton and I are both 63 now and not the 18-year-olds who were beginning to embark on our lives’ journeys back in 1968. Although of different “races,” we both had hopes for a better, fairer, more just America where Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream would become a reality. Racism is alive and well in America, and the great divide between whites and blacks is still there. The more things change, the more they stay the same. I weep for my friend. I weep for my country.

Dirtying White

The translated Venona cables proved that Harry D. White was working for Stalin’s secret service, one of the most hateful and anti-Semitic regimes ever to inhabit the earth. Consequently, Boughton’s review is inaccurate and crooked, as the reviewer seems not to have studied the history of espionage enough to know that what he wrote is incorrect.

What Difference Will Same-Sex Marriage Make?

Started strong, but ended shapeless: and shapeless is what marriage is not, and also why it is sought. Gay people can’t obtain the status of marriage, even legalized, because marriage is the alternative to other ménages: it gives respectability, the intangible that no argument about money can make. Instead, it appears as gay theater. Yet two souls trying to escape the dangers of faithlessness and seeking refuge in a solemn oath isn’t evil; let them have their ceremony. What will it change? It will make gay marriage routine, and close an arena to satisfy the desire to offend conventional attitudes: so brace yourself for that part of the matter to get more creative. Why shouldn’t a male teacher have the right to wear a dress to his middle school algebra classroom?

The Monsterization of Trayvon Martin

The not-guilty verdict in the case against George Zimmerman should not shock anyone, as the same thing is happening all across America. America simply cannot get rid of the poison of racism. It is as American as apple pie, and the cup of hatred and bigotry is what tens of millions of Americans drink from every day.

On a normal day during the trial CNN.com had more than 25,000 comments posted. Every day more than 95 percent of them were in support of George Zimmerman and called him a hero, and thousands upon thousands of the posters called Trayvon Martin a “thug,” “a “hood,” a “criminal” and an “animal.” An unarmed teenager walking home from a convenience store with a soft drink and a bag of snacks is a thug and a criminal?

When Trayvon’s friend Rachel Jeantel testified, hundreds of thousands of comments were posted and tweets were sent calling her a liar, calling her stupid and calling her an animal. Does anyone believe that if she was a slender, blue-eyed, blond, white American woman the same response would have happened?

The Fox televison network on a daily basis spews forth its vile racist hatred towards our president and has the highest rated show on TV every night. The NRA had their highest increase in membership after the president called for background checks when two dozen little children were murdered at Sandy Hook. The NRA and it’s supporters, the Tea Party and the Republican Party, express their hatred of our president in the most sickening, disgusting way every single day.

White Americans like to tell black Americans that our electing a black man as president proves that racism is a thing of the past in America. Oh, really? Barack Obama won 51.1 percent of the vote last November, winning 65,900,000 votes to Mitt Romney’s 61,000,000. He carried twenty-six states and Romney carried twenty-four states. Despite saving the country from entering a Depression, ending the war in Iraq, saving the US automobile industry from collapse and extending healthcare to 30 million people who never had it before, which is something every Democratic president since Harry Truman tried to do, when you subtract the 95 percent of blacks, 76 percent of Hispanics and 71 percent of Jews who voted for Obama, the president won no more than 40 percent of the white vote. Sixty million people voted for a man who spent his life taking over companies and throwing out of work people who lost their medical care and their pensions, while he made millions of dollars in profit by driving those companies into the ground.

Americans like to say that having Barack Obama as our president proves that racism does not exist, but the truth is that the minute he does the slightest thing to say he is proud to be black, Americans are all over him with criticism. It’s bad enough that he is the first president in our history to have his place of birth questioned, and the first president and first lady to have their loyalties to our country questioned, but when he tried to tell the nation that he understood Professor Henry Gates’s outrage at being arrested for trying to enter his own home, Twitter and the Internet and talk shows were alive with millions of people saying, “How dare he identify with Gates?” Look what happened when President Obama said that “Trayvon could be my son.” America was all over him with criticism. They won’t even let the man be proud he is black or acknowledge he is black.

If you doubt that racism is alive and well in Americ, look no further than the response to the Supreme Court’s recent gutting of the Voting Rights Act. White Americans are offended that we even have a voting rights act. They’ve never been denied any of their civil rights because of the color of their skin, but yet they’re offended by a law that seeks to ensure that no one is denied the right to vote because of the color of their skin. The recent decision by the Supreme Court on affirmative action was a setup to further dismantle it with cases set to come in the next session. White Americans think they are doing black Americans a favor by not discriminating as much as they once were. A favor? A favor to be treated equally and the same as anyone else?

If you believe that the only time racism exists is when Fox News is on, you are badly mistaken. Racism is alive and well in every city and town in America, and tens of millions of white people are thrilled that a white man who murdered an unarmed black teenager was declared not guilty. People you work with may not say this to your face, but these are the same people who go to church on Sunday and say how much they love Jesus and then believe the worst things about black people the other six days of the week. They love to tell you how much Jesus is a part of their lives. Well, one thing I know is that Jesus spoke about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, sheltering the poor and loving your fellow man, and there are very few white people who say they love Jesus that practice what he preached.

I weep for Trayvon’s mother. I cannot imagine how incredibly shocking it must have been for her to sit in the courtroom and hear the verdict. What are black mothers and fathers supposed to think when their son leaves their home to go purchase a soft drink and snack? Are they justified to be frightened that their son may not come back alive because a jury of white people in Florida said that killing an unarmed black teenager in a hoodie is perfectly legal?

Don’t be fooled by those who say that things are better. In the hearts and minds of millions of white Americans the vile poison of racism is still alive and well. Before we as a country try to tell the Chinese, the Russians, the Egyptians and other nations how they should treat their citizens, it’s long past the time when we begin to treat every one of our citizens with decency and love, and respect the civil rights of everyone and not continue to make excuses for denying civil rights and hating black Americans. I think of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that he gave to the nation fifty years ago, and it saddens me that the dream is still very much only a dream fifty years later.

America needs to rid its heart of bigotry and hatred and prejudice before it can call itself a superpower. A nation is not measured as a superpower by the size of its military or strength of its economy but instead by how it treats its citizens, and in that regard we have a long way to go before we can call America a superpower.

Leakonomics: Edward Snowden and the Pirates

At one point the writer states: “Opacity deserves not the slightest defense.” That struck me as odd because I found the article itself to be opaque.