On many occasions, Chris talks about the Myth of redemptive violence; it's the stock and staple of movie scripts and pulp fiction, but today Pleiades has sent in this article about how empty that myth really is. It'sa good read so I recommend you check it out. Two sections stand out and relate to my upbringing so I'll quote them here.
But the words of the vanquished come later, sometimes long after the war, when grown men and women unpack the suffering they endured as children, what it was like to see their mother or father killed or taken away, or what it was like to lose their homes, their community, their security, and be discarded as human refuse. But by then few listen. The truth about war comes out, but usually too late. We are assured by the war-makers that these stories have no bearing on the glorious violent enterprise the nation is about to inaugurate. And, lapping up the myth of war and its sense of empowerment, we prefer not to look.
This is entirely true. I was born 21 years after WWII into a family of people who watched incendiary carpet bombing of their cities in 1945 and hid in sheer terror. When I have talked about the carpet bombings of Japan to people over the years most people have tried to make out that it was justified on the grounds that it was a moral war being waged against an evil regime.
We are losing the war in Iraq. We are an isolated and reviled nation. We are pitiless to others weaker than ourselves. We have lost sight of our democratic ideals. Thucydides wrote of Athens expanding empire and how this empire led it to become a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant at home. The tyranny Athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. If we do not confront the lies and hubris told to justify the killing and mask the destruction carried out in our name in Iraq, if we do not grasp the moral corrosiveness of empire and occupation, if we continue to allow force and violence to be our primary form of communication, if we do not remove from power our flag-waving, cross-bearing versions of the Taliban, we will not so much defeat dictators such as Saddam Hussein as become them.
As some of you know, I spent time as a kid in America and came face to face with the 'pitiless to the others weaker' quality of American culture. It's the only place on earth where they teach to kick a man when they are down because it's easier than hitting them. It's the flip-side of the desire to be winners; for there to be clear winners, there need to be clear losers and for losers to be clear losers, they must not only be beaten, they must be humiliated. Well, here's a writer who has noticed this pattern and I applaud that he has writen it down. Anyway, it's a good read.
Space Shuttle Discovery Back To Launchpad
Here we go again.
The shuttle team was disheartened when it had to haul Discovery off the pad last month for more work, but understood it was the right thing to do, Stilson said.
"Today was not quite the excitement of the first time, but still, what a great thrill to be back on track, moving in the right direction, getting ready for launch, getting back out to the pad," she said.
Discovery was transported to the pad in April but removed May 26 after NASA determined that potentially deadly pieces of ice could form over an expansion joint on the external fuel tank after the super-chilled fuel was loaded. Managers decided to install a heater at the joint, located along the feed line for liquid oxygen.
So hopefully they have lessened the risk significantly.
Denmark Changes Position On Whaling Ban
This is interesting. Denmark is changing its position on the whaling ban, going into the next IWC meeting; about time some nations got to be thinking about other possibilities.
"The current moratorium is not good enough, because a number of countries break the rules. If we stick to the ban, the IWC will fall apart," Moeller was quoted as saying on Danish daily Politiken's website.
"We have therefore charged our negotiators to push for a new system that can better protect the whales," he added.
Denmark's Scandinavian neighbor Norway is the only country in the world that allows commercial whaling despite an almost 20-year international ban on the practice, but other countries, like Iceland and Japan, have been accused of skirting around the rules by claiming that their whaling is for scientific purposes only.
The semi-autonomous Danish territories of Greenland and the Faroe Islands, also legally hunt whales within the framework of what the IWC calls "aboriginal subsistence whaling", for food.
If the ban is lifted, Moeller said that scientific culls should be included in each country's whaling quota.
"Japan especially culls lots of whales for scientific purposes and thus circumvents the rules. We want to work towards getting scientific culls counted," Moeller said, pointing out that such a move would help protect the whales and also prevent that some countries hunt far more than their share of the ocean mammals.
I think it's very Scandinavian to say, let's calla shovel a shovel because that's what you do with it. Now watch the flack fly.
- Art Neuro
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