Poor Muammar Gaddafi. That man was an idiot and deserved what he got. Why? Because Gaddafi had put all his eggs in one basket — and actually believed that the use of extreme violence would always win in the end. The man had learned NOTHING from history.
Historically, the use of violence has only and always led to the constantly-escalating use of even more violence, more killing and more money being spent on guns instead of butter — resulting in a severely down-graded “homeland,” with more decayed infrastructure, more uneducated school children, more rotting teeth, more unhappy citizens, less security and, eventually, the decline of civilization as we know it.
Whenever your average citizen sees his or her nation’s leaders regularly spending over a million dollars just on the purchase of only one tank — while the citizens themselves get no benefits from said violence except for crumbling schools, no jobs and no dental plans? Then these people eventually do tend to get rather pissed off. Plus isn’t it committing a big sin to kill?
As one Sudanese general — who killed thousands in southern Sudan so he could willingly hand over his country’s oil properties to Pappy Bush — once said http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/23147/, “The best way to catch a fish is to drain the pond.” Fine. So then you drain it and you catch a few fish. But now that pond is totally gone forever and no more fish will ever grow there again. Ever.
And now even individual American cities are buying tanks instead of keeping their infrastructures safe and their schools open. Is this really the best use of our funds? In the long run, violence is never the best solution to problems. Jesus was right after all.
Gaddafi obviously didn’t properly consider the possibility that violence will always lead to more violence — until nothing is left. And now Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is also neglecting that simple equation as well. Apparently Assad learned nothing from Gaddafi’s tragic end. And apparently America, Britain, Israel, Saudi Arabia and NATO haven’t learned anything from it either. The escalation of violence always eventually brings down the man behind the gun. Always. It may take years, decades or perhaps even centuries. But that’s what always eventually happens.
That’s why we have presidents in Washington now and not Caesars.
Scottish journalist David Pratt just wrote a very interesting first-hand report about the rebellion against Assad in Syria, http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/rebels-on-the-retreat.16922939, and guess what? Those rebels are totally pissed off at Assad. According to Pratt, one rebel told him that, “I will keep fighting until we win or I am dead. If Assad steps down and offers free and fair elections, then I would happily put down my gun.”
So Assad is now falling exactly into the same trap that Gaddafi fell into — by butchering dissenters and fueling the flames of violence. Get a clue, Assad! Hold the freaking elections!
PS: America and NATO have no more business escalating violence in Syria than Assad has. They seem to be acting like idiots too. And it’s also idiotic for the corporate Goliahs who currently control Washington to escalate violence against their own dissenting American citizens as well. However, that’s a whole other story — but one that will eventually end badly too. Just ask Gaddafi. Or Jesus. Or the last Roman emperor.
PPS: According to British journalist Ziauddin Sardar http://www.amazon.com/Desperately-Seeking-Paradise-Journeys-Sceptical/dp/186207755X, Bashar al-Assad, like Saddam Hussein before him, thinks like a Ba’athist — and Ba’athists basically believe in the establishment of an elite upper class that practices socialism for the rich and welfare for the wealthy. Sound familiar? Sound a lot like the corporate dudes who are now running Washington DC? American Ba’athists. Saddam would be so proud of us.
Return of the hippie Philosophy of Life?
The fact that Arianna Huffington shamelessly exploited politically motivated liberal writers for her own personal financial gain is something that carries a strong déjà vu element for folks living in Berkeley CA because it echoes an episode from the city’s journalism history when the staff of the Berkeley Barb figured out that the publisher was making enormous profits from their efforts and paying them in a niggardly (that’s a legitimate word and not a racial slur-word) fashion to increase his personal savings account balance. The aggrieved reporters walked out and started their own weekly publication, the Berkely Tribe, to be run in majority consensus fashion and, according to one of the participants, also operated the newsroom/editorial boardroom in a hippie commune style house.
[There is a folk axiom that asserts that those who forget history are doomed to repeat what has previously happened. If that is a valid bit of wisdom, the folks who remember that Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and Hosni Mubarak all came to power via service in their country’s military during time of civil unrest in a Muslim nation, will be among the few who find that the situation in Egypt has some very ominous implications.]
The fact that, to the best of our ability to discern, the recently sold Huffington Post website has not seen fit to cover the story about the U. S. Chamber of Commerce efforts to pay public relation specialists $2 million to discredit Brad Friedman (and the Bradblog, and other web entities), let alone even run a link to the Bradblog in their list of sites for fans of the liberal point of view, may give a big hint to her group of keystroke slaves just where the rollercoaster ride is going to take them. If they lived in Berkeley and were aware of the circumstances that facilitated the birth of the Berkeley Tribe publication, they might not take as long to figure it out.
At this point, some cynics might want to ask why would a columnist who has been a member of Teamsters local 229 and who was protected from capricious and arbitrary conduct by management at a nationally known news wire service in New York City by the Guild, which promised a strike in response to the shoddy treatment of “the last hired” guy, would object to labor issues at a website that doesn’t use his stuff, but will contribute material to other digital underground newspaper type websites.
There is a difference between breaking every rule you can bend and going “way over the line.” There is a difference between being exploited and willingly going along with program. Is there a difference between rape and using rough sex as a method of making love? Yes. Is the difference visual? No. We rest the case.
There is an urban legend in the journalism industry about the time a staff photographer for LIFE magazine spent a month aboard an ocean liner for an assignment and when he turned in his expense account, he had listed the spending of some money for taxi fares. The ever vigilant accounting department challenged that particular expense. When the photographer glibly responded “It was a big ship,” they let it slide. Does the term “gonzo blogging” convey a valid concept?
Getting up at O-dark-thirty, to write a column gratis can be rationalized if the writer can fulfill some personal needs, other than the monetary dependence one, such as getting the feeling that he is (in a very small echo way) walking a mile in Herb Caen’s moccasins or being given the chance to symbolically raise his middle finger in a gesture aimed at “the Establishment.”
Getting up before dawn to crank out a freebie column because the editor/publisher owner/operator of a website thinks “we have to work harder to help Democratic candidates” win in November of 2011, is a particularly galling experience if the writer happens to be convinced (by reading the Bradblog too much?) that the election will be a sham/fraud and that the results (the Inauguration of JEB) are a done deal. Just thinking about it makes the words of “Memo from Turner” (“you schmucks all work for me!”) reverberate in his head.
On the one hand, there is the Columbia Review of Journalism taking the position that the journalism industry could do better and on the other you have (here’s that word again) volunteers contributing to Project Censored producing work that proves that Lazy Journalism is alive and thriving in the USA.
While attending the Project Censored annual awards ceremony, this columnist got involved in a discussion about current cultural values and it was noted that a shift back to hippie values might deserve a trend spotting report story. We have observed that there is a noticeable increase in the fund raising efforts of the Sierra Club and Greenpeace. Information about “running away to join a hippie commune” will bring a steady trickle of new readers to a personal blog.
Is it time to recycle some of the “back to nature” stories from the Sixties?
Recycling old issues, in turn, reminded this writer that we might extract a good column from the effort to read Rex Weyler’s book “Blood of the Land” (Vintage Books paperback 1982). That then reminded us that some hard nosed website plantation owners might think that only new books should be purchased, read, and reviewed. Does the Internets version of Charles Foster Kane think that just because the plight of the Native Americans isn’t given air time on Faux News, it doesn’t exist?
Doesn’t the idea that volunteer writers can be fired repudiate all the hard efforts of past pro-labor activists to establish a fair and balanced work relationship with management? Isn’t reestablishing superiority through intimidation of the workers, exactly what the Republicans want? Will the Rove-conservative gang owe a political favor to a “liberal” who helps achieve that goal at her website?
If a tyrannical publisher holds the threat of a pink slip over the heads of her staff (like the sword of Damocles?), doesn’t that mean that it will be up to writers for rival publications to express the grievances of the exploited folks on the content plantation?
Americans tend to think that the Native American and Muslim cultures are homogenized groups. Don’t they realize that the Native American culture ran the spectrum from the Sioux, who believed (like most Republicans) that women should be kept pregnant in summer and barefoot in winter, to the Cheyenne tribe which had women warriors?
Has the Huffington Post ever run an unbiased (let alone critical) story about the Pasqua Lama gold mining controversy in South America? Isn’t it only those gosh darn scientists who say that the gold mining process can produce toxic waste? Who wants to risk their gig by sounding like they are fellow travelers with the guys who compete for inclusion in the Mad Scientists Hall of Fame?
Rex Weyler, on page 185 of “Blood of the Land,” wrote: “The method that the FBI was using on prospective witnesses was to frighten them with serious felony charges; then offer them a deal if they gave information on other suspects.”
Now the disk jockey will play “Memo from Turner,” Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen tons,” and the Doors “Weird Scenes inside the goldmine” album. We have to go try to figure out how the Apaches lived in desert terrain without camels. Have a “toe the line” type week. If the Huffington Post wants permission to run this column? Request granted!