Turn It Off

by Lisa Reagan

Introductory Note: This article is dear to my heart because my own liberation from “it,” the serious menace alluded to in the title, came about, as in Lisa Reagan’s case, more by chance than by design. “Turning it off” is not the painful sacrifice you might imagine; it is, rather, an act that can set you free. Some thirty years ago my children and I turned it off and booted it out the door. I’ve never regretted that simple but decisive act of self-liberation.--Gene Franks.

Friends walked into our house in February, noted our television was missing from any main rooms, and quipped, “We give you a week. It’ll be back!”

It’s August, and the television hasn’t reappeared. It wasn’t that we made an informed, self-congratulating decision to take television out of our lives; it was just that the &^%#$ cable company missed our turn-on date three times! After our third turn-on date, and four weeks with no TV had passed, my husband and I sulkily surrendered to what we perceived as a divine message of intervention: We were not destined for the Discovery Channel.

Miraculously, we made it through this withdrawal period by developing other rituals with our discovery of TIME. More time for everything. More time for cooking healthy dinners, more time for walks, drives, journal entries, the perennial parade of household chores, and of course, more precious time for our wonderful son.

More time meant less stress. And with more still fleeting, still precious time on our hands, our lives became rich with the contact of each other – richer, and more fulfilling than I ever imagined life could be.

But before the gods took cable television out of our home, we would have sworn that we didn’t watch “that much TV.” It is only now, with 20/20 hindsight, that we realize the amount of time we spent watching television and it’s powerful, all-consuming effect on our lives. After six TV-free months, we re-experienced this effect last month in a Washington D.C. hotel room.

Our first evening in our hotel room we agreed to “just quickly see what was on”. One hour later, we opted for room-service instead of going out for a walk and dinner. Two hours later, I was surprised by how terrible I was beginning to feel. Still, we flipped and flipped, shooting past the ubiquitous violent imagery and juvenile sex jokes, commenting on how we probably shouldn’t be doing this, all the while feeling more and more inert, foggy-headed, distant… and worried.

“I didn’t feel this bad watching TV before, did I?” I asked myself. If I, an educated, adult woman, felt lousy watching the casual violence, sex and fast imagery of television, what sort of effect would it have on my young son asleep in the next room?

Brooding over these thoughts and images, I clicked-off the hotel’s TV and crawled into our king-sized bed with my eyes pulsating weird blue light, my head throbbing, and my ears ringing. I curled around my son’s small body under the hotel sheets, gently brushed my nose against his soft, warm hair and breathed in his innocence. I had just navigated 6 months without cable television, how was I going to navigate the next 16 years without cable, the computer, or video games? Crawl into a hole dragging my son behind me?

Still brooding, I placed a gentle kiss on my son’s cheek, gave him the breast he was fumbling for, and fell asleep promising to use my newly discovered extra time to find some answers to my questions when we got home. I did and here is what I found :

Even though the AAP’s policy that two year-olds and under should avoid television may seem extreme, it actually occupies the middle of the road. At my local library I found conflicting arguments for virtually banning television from your home, for placing limits on viewing and becoming “media literate”, or for rejecting “mediaphobes” and letting your children watch anything they want.

Media literacy advocates and television banners disagree over whether or not the content of children’s programs really matters. According to Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End: Claiming the Potential of Our Intelligence, it doesn’t matter if your child watches Sesame Street or Power Rangers: “The major damage of television has little to do with content: It’s damage is neurological, and it has, indeed, damaged us, perhaps beyond repair.”

Both camps do agree on television’s effect on a child’s brain. Our brain’s “triune system” consists of the reptilian system, old mammalian, and new mammalian brains that control action, feeling, and thought, respectively. “The third and highest member, our neocortex, or new brain, is five times bigger than its two lower neighbors combined and provides intellect, creative thinking, computing, and if developed, sympathy, empathy, compassion, and love,” writes Pearce.

Creative play, conversation with adults and story-telling are Nature’s choice for developing a child’s neocortex. But with parent’s spending an average of 10 minutes a day talking to their children, and television monopolizing almost seven hours a day in the average home, the human interaction needed by children for higher brain development is practically non-existent.

“Failing to develop imagery means having no imagination… It means children who can’t ‘see’ what the mathematical symbol or the semantic words mean; nor the chemical formulae; nor the concept of civilization…A child who can’t imagine not only can’t learn but has no hope in general: He or she can’t ‘imagine’ an inner scenario to replace the outer one, so feels victimized by the environment…True playing is the ability to play with one’s reality.”

Consider the above description of television’s effect on a child’s developing brain, and then recall that the average preschooler watches 54 hours a week.

The mountain of damage is staggering.

And that is not the worst of it. At age 11, in a natural house-cleaning process, all undeveloped neurons in the neocortex, up to 80 per cent, are dumped. Lost forever. “Only those neural patterns stimulated and sufficiently developed are left…Use it or lose it is nature’s dictate,”
writes Pearce.

Pearce believes that television is second only to hospital birth in contributing to the “current collapse of childhood.” He notes that before television there were no recorded child suicides, whereas today a child attempts to take his or her life every 78 seconds. He warns that as “our damaged children grow-up and become parents and teachers, damage will be the norm, the way of life.”

Is the damaged way already the normal way of life? What is prohibiting parents from taking action now to control television in their homes?

Marie Winn, author of The Plug-In Drug, believes that damaged and addicted parents and teachers are the reasons that media literacy limits are almost impossible to follow. Winn compares the experience of watching television to chemical dependency. She notes that television withdrawal symptoms parallel drug withdrawal symptoms, and the need to repeatedly watch, coupled with a lack of concern over what is being watched, is similar to a chemically dependent person’s cravings and lack of discretion over what form their drug takes.

In addition to our adult reptilian brain’s vulnerability to television’s hypnotic glare, we now have “a growing dependency upon television as a child-rearing tool… Despite their considerable guilt at not being able to control their children’s viewing, parent’s do not take steps to extricate themselves from television’s domination. They can no longer cope without it…Surely there can be no more insidious a drug than one that you must administer to others in order to achieve an effect for yourself.”

However, Winn concedes, there were a few families in her studies that were able to control television in their homes. Some of Winn’s families employed “natural” alternatives to controlling television viewing like placing the television in a poor location or using a fuzzy set that didn’t invite constant viewing.

For parents who want to take on the battle of controlling media in their homes, there is Screen Smarts, A Family Guide to Media Literacy, by Gloria DeGaetano and Kathleen Bander. This book contains tools for teaching your children to “read and analyze images” but warns, “it takes time to learn media literacy.” Screen Smarts recommends: discussing with your children how television programs are made, asking your children to rewrite the scripts of the programs they watch, or to count the number of violent acts in a show. The authors’ point that “media is here to stay” is well taken along with the fact that American children suffer from a complete void of information regarding their number one activity. In Great Britain and Australia media literacy has been established as an integral component of the educational system for more than a decade.

And then there is Jon Katz, a media critic who insists in his book Virtuous Reality that “Children need more, not less access to technology, culture and information. Responsible children have the right to participate freely in this world, and responsible parents should worry more about getting kids on-line and less about the dirty pictures they may occasionally find when they get there.” I suggest Mr. Katz put aside his job-security motivated opinions and undertake a quick read of Mr. Pearce’s aforementioned book.

And as Pearce et al, from Congressional Committees to the AAP have agreed: television viewing damages the developing minds of children. And no amount of bickering between CBS vice-presidents and parent’s watch groups over “what is educational content” or a hundred government agencies advocating the development of media literacy skills is going to reverse that biological, neurological fact.

Even if media education and AAP viewing guidelines are enthusiastically followed, even if Congress gains control of Hollywood and Hollywood gives all of its billions of advertising dollars to the “Children Damaged by Television Fund”, and even if television watching diminishes from the current seven hours a day to the AAP’s pipe dream of one hour a day, it will still be one hour a day, 365 hours a year, our children will neglect the urgently needed development of their higher brain cells; cells that will be lost forever at the tender age of eleven.

Which unknown potential shall we choose to forfeit the development of in exchange for an hour with Elmo? Which potential ability will never be fully realized in our children? Do you really want to count the number of violent scenes in a television show with your child?

Maybe our last best hope rests with the cable company. And perhaps Nature Herself will lend a hand and bring our evolution back on course by providing a meteoric catastrophe that will zap all of our cable boxes and force us to wait and wait and wait for the television-raised, damaged employees of the cable company to show-up and save us. And maybe by the time they do, we will have saved ourselves.

Lisa Reagan is President of Families for Natural Living.

Gazette Fair Use Statement

Medical Mistakes

by Peter Montague

Antibiotics–Are You Drinking Them in Your Tap Water?

By Hardly Waite,  Gazette Senior Editor

Bacteria that cause everything from ear infections to pneumonia are becoming immune to antibiotics. The primary cause is over-use and misuse by doctors and patients, but significant levels of antibiotics in water supplies could compound the problem.–CBS Evening News.

    When a 15-year-old West Virginia high school student named Ashley Mulroy read an article about antibiotic pollution in European water supplies, she started wondering if the same thing might be happening the the U.S.  Ashley, doing something that it has apparently not occurred to U. S. environmental scientists to do, set out to conduct some tests for antibiotics as a school project. With the help of her mom, she took water samples from a variety of locations on the Ohio river near her home.  With no trouble at all,  she found drugs like Penicillin, Tetracycline and Vancomycin in the river water.

Her science teacher was so impressed by her work that he encouraged her to pursue the matter and her efforts eventually led to her winning the  prestigious Stockholm Junior Water Prize. Her prize-winning essay,  “Correlating Residual Antibiotic Contamination in Public Water to the Drug Resistance of Escherichia coli,”  examines how inefficient wastewater treatment processes can lead to antibiotic contamination in American waterways and, in some cases, progressive resistance among bacteria to those same antibiotics (Penicillin, Tetracycline and Vancomycin, for example) that once controlled them.

Few Americans are aware of the extent of antibiotic contamination of our waters.  This is a dark area that regulatory agencies and orthodox science have chosen to ignore.  Few Americans know, too, that a full 40%–almost half–of the antibiotics used in the United States do not go to treating human disease but are frivolously given to cattle for the purpose of fattening them rapidly and in the process fattening the profits of industrialized agribusiness.

The irony overwhelms one.  We have traded  the most potent medical tools ever developed for a few years of enhanced profits for Swift & Co

There is nothing anti-American about opposing the drive to war

Mike Marqusee
Guardian

Thursday October 4, 2001

“What’s at stake is democracy. Democracy wasn’t cancelled on the 11th of September, but democracy won’t survive if citizens turn into lemmings. If in the name of the war on terrorism President Bush hands the state over to the energy industry, it’s every patriot’s duty to join the loyal opposition.” –Bill Moyers.

Reading the fulminations against the alleged anti-Americanism of those opposed to the current drive to war, I feel I’ve come full circle. As an American teenager protesting against the butchery in Vietnam, I became accustomed to being attacked by some fellow citizens as anti-American. It always seemed frustratingly unfair. After all, we were Americans too, and so were the GIs we wanted to bring home, and wasn’t being American all about the right to entertain diverse views on our government’s policies?

Now, after 30 years abroad, I find myself in the dock once again for the thought-crime of “anti-Americanism”. This time, the charge is levelled not by US citizens, but by British liberals, including adoptive Americans such as Chris Hitchens and Salman Rushdie. I wonder what they would have said to Mahatma Gandhi, who told the people of the United States that their country was governed “by a few capitalist owners” whose “holdings cannot be sustained except by violence, veiled if not open” and that therefore “your wars will never ensure safety for democracy”. Or to Gandhi’s American disciple, Martin Luther King, who described the US government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”.

The logic of the anti-American accusation remains as curious as ever. There is no rational basis for equating opposition to the demonstrably murderous policies pursued across the globe by the US government with hostility to the people of the United States. In my experience, the current anti-war protesters are motivated by a deep response to the suffering in New York and Washington. Surely it’s the politicians and commercial interests exploiting that suffering to promote their own long-standing agendas whose respect for the dead ought to be questioned.

In some quarters, the purpose of the anti-American jibe is simply to cast aspersions on the motives of dissenters in order to evade their arguments. Elsewhere, the impulses are different. People from many lands have long engaged in a passionate romance with America. This society of extraordinary wealth and diversity, with its contradictions, beauties and savageries, exerts a powerful fascination. What disturbs me in recent effusions (including Tony Blair’s invocation of the Statue of Liberty) is the glorification of the US as some kind of unique and sacrosanct human achievement, whose flaws are merely incidental, and of no relevance to our collective response to the September 11 atrocities.

This is an overseas variant of the aggressive boosterism that has for so long disfigured American political discourse and disarmed the American people in their own democratic arena. Too many British commentators seem intoxicated by America’s affluence, and too few evince any real knowledge or concern about the conditions in which most Americans actually live. What Americans need now is a realistic understanding of their nation’s place in the world, not the self-serving myths peddled by a corporate-sponsored political elite.

Since September 11 I’ve been in constant communication with friends and family in New York and Washington and overwhelmingly they oppose their government’s response to the terror attacks. They may be in a minority but they are as American as anyone else. I’ve also been in contact with friends in the peace movement across several continents. What has struck me is that so many of these people have sought refreshment at the well-springs of American popular culture, from soul music to Star Trek, and found inspiration in American social movements, from civil rights to gay liberation. Like the baseball lovers in Cuba and Nicaragua, they have no trouble distinguishing between a people’s culture and its government. They share an understanding that there is no monolithic America that one can reasonably be “pro” or “anti”. They reject the dangerous assumption that there is a single essence that defines a particular society, nation or culture. That delusion is the common ground between Bush, Bin Laden and the knee-jerk commentators who have fallen back on the charge of anti-Americanism.

Recent events have sent me scuttling back to one of my boyhood heroes, the peculiarly American writer Henry David Thoreau. In 1845, in protest against the US’s war with Mexico – a war of conquest driven by greed and jingoism – Thoreau refused to pay taxes and spent a night in jail. He explained his action in an essay entitled Civil Disobedience (it influenced both Gandhi and King). Thoreau urged America to “cherish its wise minority”. And argued that when “a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionise. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army”.

Mike Marqusee is author of Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties (Verso)

Reproduced courtesy of The Guardian.

Satan doesn’t wear sweaty socks

Jan. 19, 2002

by Matthew Parris

I love America. I love the place and I love the people. I admire the country as a nation. I spent two years as a postgraduate studying at Yale on a fellowship paid for by an American philanthropist, and assimilated fast.
I like their warmth, their courage, their vision. I like their individualism, energy and capitalist spirit; and I like their deep belief in liberty. You will not find a readier apologist for American values or the American way of life.

So if I sound a note of warning about the United States as a political ally, do not write me off as one of those sour European lefties with a grudge against Uncle Sam. I am a pro-American British Conservative.

My difficulty is not with America as America, but with Washington as a hoped-for coalition partner. Partnership in foreign policy is not in their nature. Consensus is not in their lexicon. They do not see their place in our world as we would do. America is either right outside, or right on top. For Americans, alongside is not an option.

My first encounter with this truth came at Yale in the 1970s. A group of us were talking about oil prices and Saudi Arabia. My friend Dave McCormack, a spirited Southerner from Charleston, had pointed out that while US hegemony protected producers from the Russians, US technology enabled Arabs to extract their oil, and US demand created the market in which to sell it. “It’s our oil, goddammit!” Dave roared.

He meant it. When Ronald Reagan remarked of the Panama Canal: “We built it; it’s ours; and we’re going to keep it,” he was tapping into the same vein.

The vein runs deep. It is not unusually greedy; and not, in any malignant way, bullying. It is a simple conviction that America will decide. Her citizens do not see her as one country among many but as nonpareil, the biggest, the best, the one-and-only: final judge of her own interests and a pretty fair judge of what’s good for the rest of us too.

None of this is inconsistent with a strong sense of justice: a sense of justice characterises America at home and abroad, but it will be their justice and they will be the arbiters. Nor is it inconsistent with a wish to do good abroad: no people have shown such a consistently generous ambition to make our world a better place.

But their help will be given ex gratia and its terms dictated by them. America will save the planet if America must, and it will pay the piper: but it will then call the tune. A negotiated process of cooperation is not what America has in mind.

It seems to me that the past century of international affairs points this lesson in no very shaded way. British dreams of a transatlantic marriage of interests are always being dashed, yet still hope triumphs over experience. My earliest political memory is Suez, a debacle on which it is unnecessary to elaborate. Succeeding memories are of a colonial boyhood in Southern Rhodesia.

The United States was running her own clear policy in Southern Africa at the time and it was unfriendly to British interests and our gradualist approach to decolonisation. The American Reading Room in Salisbury (now Harare) was a focal point for impatient young African nationalists whom America was eager to befriend before the Russians did.

Washington may have been right. My point is that it would not have occurred to them to reconsider if we had not agreed. Twenty years later the Queen was actually head of state in Grenada when America invaded the Caribbean island, to the acute discomfiture of Sir Geoffrey Howe, our Foreign Secretary. Tory Eurosceptics, ever-vigilant for threats from an alliance in whose policies we do have a say, carelessly recommend one where we don’t.

Now that President Bush has signed up Tony Blair as British Robin to the American Batman, is there reason to think these verities have been suspended? The question is not posed rhetorically, for there are some reasons for hope. Terrorism is, after all, against all our interests.

But how we define terrorism, where we diagnose it, and to what resorts we think it right to go in combating it, are debates in which we Europeans and the United States may find our preferred positions sliding apart. I think that slide began this week, as the unsavoury pantomime took to the stage in Guantanamo Bay.

Take Donald Rumsfeld’s angry brushing aside of concerns about the treatment of prisoners, an outburst which, from the Prime Minister down, members of the British Government have been trying to sidle past, looking the other way. Said the US Defence Secretary: “I do not feel the slightest concern at their treatment. They are being treated vastly better than they treated anybody else.” In a saloon bar this will do, but is that the standard? How much does the Secretary of State really know about these individuals? And why are they not prisoners of war? Face it: Mr Rumsfeld does not care about the niceties and cares little who knows it. Washington’s way of “fighting terror” is not, despite appearances, the same as Britain’s. We seek to project the message that there are rules to which all nations are subject. America has a simpler message: kill Americans, and you’re dead meat.

The British Foreign Office may huff and puff that US swagger is “counterproductive”, alienating “moderate Arab opinion”, but Washington proposes a different approach: show them who’s boss.

America — not Britain, Europe and America and not “the international community”, but America — is boss. On this analysis Rumsfeld with his visual aids — cages, razor-wire, manacles and sedating syringes — is not maladroit: he’s on message. Be sure that frantic private telegrams are winging their way over the Atlantic explaining the embarrassment this is causing Mr Blair. Be equally sure where Mr Bush is putting them.

America has simple gods and likes to keep her satan simple, too. Every populace has a tendency to see for a while evidence of a single demon’s fiendish plans beneath every stone, but Americans take this to extremes. In Salem it was once witches. In Senator Joe McCarthy’s heyday it was Commies. Now it is al-Qaeda. And September 11 offered tremendous provocation.

Of the brutality and ill-intent of the United States’ fundamentalist foe there can be no doubt, nor of the righteousness of American wrath. But this does not make their assessment of the foe accurate.

We are told on very little evidence that the al-Qaeda network is incredibly sophisticated, yet the things we know it has done have been relatively crude, the technology modest.

We are told (and the slavishness of the British press in printing this unquestioned is depressing) that al-Qaeda “masterminds” are at work here — in London, Leicester, or wherever else some fundamentalist nutcase with nasty ambitions and contacts abroad is found in a bedsit. But in the claimed evil genius about whom we do know a bit, Richard Reid, we see little to justify the term. This imbecile is about as inconspicuous as a bag-lady. He has been attracting suspicion wherever he goes. When he flies El Al it puts a marshal in the adjacent seat. He couldn’t even devise a way of detonating his own shoes, short of bending down in his aeroplane seat, with passengers around, and trying to set fire with matches to a foot-sweaty fuse. Why didn’t he go into the loo? If this really is the cream of al-Qaeda then things are less dire than we feared.

You, reader, will have furrowed your brow about some of this already.

So will a million others. A silent minority used likewise to wonder if half the village really were witches; if the goofy clerk at work really was a key communist spy. Of course al-Qaeda exists; of course it is numerous; of course it is murderous; of course it must be fought. But it is not the only, and may not even be the cleverest, terrorist organisation in the world.

Suicide bombing is as old as the bomb, and dangerous prisoners who would stop at nothing have been transported and held in custody since courts and prisons were invented.

This is not the greatest evil the world has ever seen, nor the cleverest, nor the first — and nor, certainly, will it be the last.

But America is moving into a phase of believing so, and America is apt to throw her weight around.

It may go to some lengths and last some time. We should hang back.

Fair Use Policy

What the Guys in Wigs Really Thought About God

I know that for some this will be like telling you that your mother isn’t a virgin, but someone’s got to say it

by Hardly Waite

Aug. 31, 2002

A Madrid newspaper recently said that the great Pledge of Allegiance debate in America was especially “emotional.”  And it should be, the paper remarked, “in a country that puts ‘In God We Trust’ on the item most sacred to its philosophy–the dollar.”

It’s funny yet sad to hear Americans–a full half of whom, polls now tell us, would be perfectly willing to give up their First Amendment guarantee to free speech in exchange for having to worry less about getting an anthrax letter or being infected with smallpox by the Evil Ones–to hear these same nervousnelly patriots whimper and whine about not getting to say “under God” when they repeat the “Pledge.”  After all, they always say, it’s what the Founding Fathers intended.

Never mind that the Pledge was dreamed up by someone a hundred years after the Founding Fathers had finished doing their intending,  and never mind that the “under God” part was not spliced into the Pledge until sixty or seventy years later, in the McCarthy years, when people were too afraid of being called Commies to suggest that it might not be quite in keeping with the separation of church and state. (That was around the same time, by the way,  when they started regularly putting “In God We Trust” on our national idol.)

And never mind that when the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and Ethan Allan spoke of Nature’s God they weren’t even talking about the same Guy that the Undergodites are evoking–the insecure Almighty who has to be constantly reminded that we trust in Him and Him alone and who, the Bible thumpers admonish, may not be able to make good on all  his Armageddon threats unless America pitches in with some serious Arab ass kicking.

Thomas Jefferson said:  “I have examined all the known superstitions of the Word, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature.  They are all alike, founded on fables and mythology.”

Most of the guys in wigs, the Founding Fathers, whom the Undergodites like to cite as models of Christianity,  weren’t Christians at all in the sense that we use the word today. Not even remotely.   Most were deists, which means that they believed in a God of Nature.  This God is also sometimes called the Divine Clockmaker. He built the universe, wound it up, then went about his Divine Business while the thing runs itself.  He did not give a flip whether people said the Lord’s Prayer before the football game, or, for that matter, whether they coveted their neighbor’s ass or remembered the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

If Ethan Allan were around today, that lusty fellow would probably stop the Pledge in progress to demand an understanding about who exactly this God guy is. That’s what he did at his own wedding  He halted the ceremony at the first mention of God to make sure that everyone understood he was saying his vows before the God of Nature, not the cruel, jealous Old Man of the Old Testament.

As for the Bible, Jefferson liked to call it a “dunghill,” and Tom Paine said it was a dishonor to the Creator to attach his name to “this filthy book.”

Our first president thought Christianity was pretty silly.  Though he didn’t make a big deal about it in public, those who knew him attested that he tolerated it but didn’t believe a word of it.  And our second president, John Adams, called the concept of the divinity of Jesus a “convenient cover for absurdity,” and he signed into law a treaty which declared straightway that “the Government of the United States is not founded in any way on the Christian religion.”

I’ll leave off here with the presidents, except to say that in a sermon of October 1831, Episcopalian minister Bird Wilson was still able to say,  “Among all of our Presidents, from Washington downward, not one was a professor of religion, at least not of more than Unitarianism.”

So . . . for my part.  if you want to pledge under God or over God or under or over Anything Else, go ahead. It’s your nickel.   But please, spare me the “Founding Fathers” nonsense and the “Christian Nation” stuff. At the time of the Declaration of Independence, just 7% of Americans belonged to a church. Any church. That’s a fact.

Kissing Jesus

by Lisa Gabriele

May 1, 2002

One of my first crushes was on Jesus. I thought he was handsome and kind, but distracted and lonely; good in thought and deed, but the worst kind of hard-to-get imaginable. Jesus was probably a template for the guys I have fallen for since; those with overbearing dads and Messianic tendencies toward self-exile.

They can be somewhat intimate with many, though never fully intimate with one. Jesus had a hot body too, very rock-star skinny, and he was constantly half-naked. My dirty mind would wander under that loincloth, linger for a moment, then dissolve into a confused mist. I couldn’t imagine what hung dormant underneath — I just knew the Virgin Mary’s unsexy outfit and super-calm demeanor did nothing to draw me into her boring camp.

My friends and I used to practice kissing on Jesus’ life-sized statue in the cemetery across from the church. He was so often molested that you could see the pink-stained cement showing through the white-wash paint. When I tell non-Catholic friends about these dirty forays, they cringe in disbelief. But other Catholic girls understand because sex, for us, would never be a reality until blessed matrimony. Necking with Jesus at the age of ten was more about love than foreplay. It was benign and silly, not sexual and thrilling. And totally normal to us.

During this time, when thousands of priests stand accused of sexually abusing children and teenagers, I often think about these innocent interpretations of love. Recently, in the marbled Vatican halls, papal sycophants were heard tsk tsking The Amoral Americans. Their culture is soaked in sexual images. Americans place such huge premiums on sex. But it’s the other way around.

The Catholic Church is soaked in sexual imagery: Catholic schools are named after the Holy Conception, Mary is never without her virginal moniker, everyone’s on their knees, wine flows freely, and Jesus Christ is tongued and swallowed on a weekly basis. It’s the Catholic Church that places a huge premium on sex, simply by banning it outside the confines of marriage.

American pop culture has often remarked on the church’s twisted sexual hypocrisy. Lou Reed and Billy Joel extolled the virtues of Catholic girls, of adolescent flesh bursting out of plaid skirts and tight white shirts, and many of us lived up to the stereotype. We grew up to be sexual provocateurs, because in our religion, there’s no half-way. Catholicism teaches that women are holy vessels to be worshiped and adored, or filthy temptresses to be fucked and avoided.

As girls, we knew that once we started down that sordid path, there was only one way to go: hell, which is in the general direction of down. Hence the fact that Catholic girls are infamously great at giving head. How else to preserve the sanctity of virginity? How else to explain Madonna’s early appeal? Camille Paglia was the first to point out that Madonna used Catholic imagery to talk about sex; wearing those rosaries and crosses as thrillingly subversive accessories, she brought a pagan, backwards religion into the realm of shiny, pop culture.

Years after my crush on Jesus dissolved, along with my spiritual connection to Catholicism, our parish priest, Father J., left town in a cloud of sexual scandal. He allegedly molested some boys I knew, boys who’d never make these things up in the small, working-class town where I grew up. One boy, a neighbor, who was considered slower than his brothers and had endured years of taunts from kids like me, found solace as an altar boy. He was the first of six boys to come forward, claiming that Father J. molested them on a regular basis. Father J. was questioned by the church, released, then fled home to Malta before any formal investigation took place.

A.W. Richard Sipe, a former Catholic priest turned therapist, has spent four decades studying sexuality and abuse among Catholic priests. His numbers dovetail with other studies that claim nearly half of all priests are, or have been, sexually active. About a third are gay: half of them actively so. But with whom? Each other, and post-pubescent boys, it seems.

In the course of his research, Sipe administered psychological tests; he found that most Catholic priests have the average emotional and sexual maturity of a thirteen-year-old. Sipe claims priests mostly target sad, needy kids between eight and thirteen, because that’s with whom they psychologically relate, and consequently spend much time. Some priests were abused themselves, so they repeat the cycle, but most simply never advance beyond adolescence because celibacy doesn’t exactly foster sexual growth and maturity.

I now understand why I never wanted to be around priests all that much. The ones I’ve known, like Father J., were unintellectual, uninteresting and childlike. They hugged too much, smiled too easily, and nodded too readily, like black-clad, sacral Teletubbies. Their facial expressions floated between squinty, Robin Williams fakery and wide-armed, Michael Jackson creepiness.

And who can blame them: preaching celibacy and virginity until marriage is inherently infantilizing, a set of rules simple to understand but impossible to follow. The church must abolish celibacy so that priests can finally grow up. Let them fuck other consenting adults legally, because we now know they’re hiding more beneath those holy robes than sacred, throbbing hearts.

What’s being overlooked here is that celibacy is not an organic Christian tenant. Jesus did not preach celibacy, and there’s no proof that he lived by it. Celibacy is a medieval concoction, an eleventh century papal land-grab, which prevented property from being passed down to a priest’s son and has enjoyed a phony endurance for eight ignorant centuries. There is an irony here: Celibacy law may have made the Vatican rich, but victims of sexual abuse are now suing the Catholic Church for billions.

For guidance on how to handle the current crisis, the Vatican need only note how the Protestant, Anglican and Jewish faiths are coping with their respective sex scandals. Oh, right, they don’t have any. Those religions, though endorsing piety, do not endlessly obsess about sex, nor do they ask their clergy to take an impossible vow like celibacy. Those religions probably attract healthy-minded, sexually mature adults who enjoy physical expression and release with consensual partners who are not children. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church will continue to attract the sexually confused, stunted and ashamed to its blessedly shrinking ranks.

I used to defend my affinity for Catholicism as a kitschy hangover from my youth, when memorizing prayers, songs and psalms was comforting and fun. It made me feel a little holy back when I needed to belong to anything other than my own screwy family. But today I find sex and shame to be sorry bedfellows. When a religion tells you that a little masturbation will guarantee you a spot in hell, you have to laugh. How can you tackle the more challenging aspects of Catholicism, such as celibacy and sexual orientation, when you’re told a bit of diddling will result in eternal damnation?

Catholic shame nearly crippled me; I can only imagine it hits devout, homosexual teens even harder. They’re in love with a church that clearly hates them. For them, celibacy must be a weird panacea: maybe they can pace, chant, and pray away their demented thoughts! Lord knows, I tried. Problem is, you’re kneeling in front of a naked hottie, tortured, because of you and your rotten lust.

I’ve never wondered what type of person I might have become had I remained a virgin for my worthy husband. Nothing about that woman intrigues me, in all her pious obedience; a “good” girl who listens to her “wise” priest. But smart women walked away from the church long ago in droves, and it’s too bad.

The church needs vital women now more than ever, to bust up the male propensity towards hierarchy and stoicism, which have contributed to the church’s current perverted state. And frankly, Jesus never struck me as the type to live with hypocrisy or to live without passion, risk and worshipful babes.

Lisa Gabriele writes for Nerve.com, where this article originally appeared. 

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

Propaganda: Nobody Does It

Better Than America.

by Paul Weber

Over the years, I have had the privilege of meeting and having discussions with people who came to America from countries known for their adherence to totalitarianism: China, Russia, and former east European satellites of the Soviet Union. When we discussed how the state managed to control public opinion under totalitarianism, these people would usually produce a weary, knowledgeable, cynical smile and point out that propaganda in those countries was really done quite incompetently. If you really want to know propaganda, they said, you need to study American propaganda technique. According to them, it is, undeniably, the best in the world.

“How can that be?” I asked, honestly puzzled.

Propaganda in those countries was too obvious, they told me. As soon as you read the first sentence you knew it was a bunch of propaganda, so you didn’t even bother to read it. If you heard a speech, you knew in the first few words that it was propaganda, and you tuned it out.

“But,” I then queried, “How do you know when it’s just propaganda?”

The expatriates explained that bad propaganda uses obvious terminology that anyone can see through. Anyone hearing the phrase “capitalist running dogs”, knows he’s listening to incompetent propaganda and tunes it out. Lousy propaganda, these knowledgeable but jaded individuals would tell me, appeals to an abstract theory, to a rational thesis that can be disproved. Even though communists had total control of the press, the people just tuned it out (except for those who were the most mentally defective). Most people, they assured me, just went about their lives as best they could, paid lip service to the state, and just tried to keep out of the way of the secret police. But hardly anyone really believed the stuff. The result, after many decades of suffering, was the eventual collapse of the old order once The Great Leader expired, whether his name was Brezhnev, Mao, or Tito.

American propaganda, however, is much cleverer. American propaganda, they patiently explained, relies entirely on emotional appeals. It doesn’t depend on a rational theory that can be disproved: it appeals to things no one can object to.

American propaganda had its birth, so far as I can tell, in the advertising industry. The pioneers of advertising—a truly loathsome bunch—learned early on that people would respond to purely emotional appeals. Abstract theory and logical argument do nothing to spur sales. However, appeals to sexiness, to pride of ownership, to fear of falling behind the neighbors are the stock in trade of advertising executives. A man walking down the street with beautiful women hanging on his arms is not a logical argument, but it sure sells after-shave. A woman in a business suit with a briefcase, strolling along with swaying hips, assuring us she can “bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, but never let you forget you’re a man” really sells the perfume.

Let’s take a moment and analyze the particular emotions that this execrable ad appealed to. If you guessed fear, you win the prize. Women often have a fear of inadequacy, particularly in this confused age when they are expected to raise brilliant kids, run a successful business, and be unfailingly sexy, all the time. That silly goal—foisted upon us by feminists and popular culture—is impossible to reach. But maybe there’s hope if you buy the right perfume! Arguments from intimidation and appeals to fear are powerful propaganda tools.

American advertising and propaganda has been refined over the years into a malevolent science, based on the assumption that most people react, not to ideas, but to naked emotion. When I worked at an ad agency many years ago, I learned that the successful agencies know how to appeal to emotions: the stronger and baser, the better. The seven deadly sins, ad agency wags often say, are the key to selling products. Fear, envy, greed, hatred, and lust: these are the basic tools for good propaganda and effective advertising. By far, the most powerful motivating emotion—the top, most-sought-after copy writers will tell you, in an unguarded moment—is fear, followed closely by greed.

Good propaganda appeals to neither logic nor morality. Morality and ethics are the death of sales. This is why communist propaganda actually hastened the collapse of communism: the creatures running the Commie Empire thought they should appeal to morality by calling for people to engage in sacrifice for the greater good. They gave endless, droning speeches about the inevitably of communist triumph, based on the Hegelian dialectic. Not only were they wrong: their approach to selling their (virtually unsellable) theory was not clever enough. American propagandists (we can be jingoistically proud to say) would have been able to maintain the absurd social experiment called communism a little longer. They would have scrapped all the theory and focused on appealing images. Though the Commies tried to do this through huge, flag-waving rallies, the disparity between their alleged ideals and the reality they created was just too great.

One tyrant who did take American propaganda to heart was Adolph Hitler. Hitler learned to admire American propaganda through a young American expatriate who described to him, in glowing detail, how Americans enjoyed the atmosphere at football games. This American expatriate, with the memorable name of Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstängl, told the Führer how Americans could be whipped up into a frenzy through blaring music, group cheers, and chants against the enemy. Hitler, genius of evil as he was, immediately saw the value in this form of propaganda and incorporated it into his own rise to power. Prior to Hitler, German political rhetoric was dry, intellectual, and uninspiring. Hitler learned the value of spectacle in whipping up the emotions; the famed Nuremberg rallies were really little more than glorified football halftime shows. Rejecting boring, intellectual rhetoric, Hitler learned to appeal to deeply emotional but meaningless phrases, like the appeal to “blood and soil.” The German people bought it wholesale. Hitler also called for blind loyalty to the “Fatherland,” which eerily echoes our own new cabinet level post of “Homeland” Security.

If you study Nazi propaganda, you will be struck by how well it appeals to gut-level emotions and images—but not thought. You will see pictures of elderly German women hugging fresh-faced young babies, with captions about the bright future the Führer has brought to German. In fact, German propaganda borrowed the American technique of relying, not so much on words, but on images alone: pictures of handsome German soldiers, sturdy peasants in native costume, and the like. Take a look at any American car commercial featuring rugged farmers tossing bales of hay into the backs of their pickups, and you’ve seen the source from which the Nazis borrowed their propaganda techniques.

The Germans have a well-deserved reputation for producing a lot of really smart people, but this did not prevent them from being completely vulnerable to American-style propaganda. Amazingly, a nation raised on the greatest classical music, the profoundest scientists, the greatest poets, actually fell for propaganda that led them into a hopeless, two-front war against most of the world. Being smart is, in itself, no defense against skilled American propaganda, unless you know and understand the techniques, so you can resist them.

American politicians learned, early in the twentieth century, that using emotional sales techniques won elections. Furthermore, they learned that emotional appeals got them what they wanted as they advanced towards their long-term goal of becoming Masters of the Universe. From this, we get our modern lexicon of political speech, carefully crafted to appeal to powerful emotions, with either no appeal to reason, or (better yet) a vague appeal to something that sounds foggily reasonable, but is so obscure that no one will bother to dissect it.

Franklin Roosevelt understood this, which is why he called for Social Security. Security is an emotional appeal: no one is against security, are they? Roosevelt backed up his campaign with a masterful appeal to emotions: images of happy, elderly grandparents smiling while hugging their grandchildren, with everything in the world going right because of Social Security. All kinds of government programs were sold on the basis of appealing images and phrases. Roosevelt even appealed to America’s traditional love of freedom, spinning that term by multiplying it into the new Four Freedoms, including Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear. Well, what heartless human being could possibly be against that? The Four Freedoms were promoted with images of parents tucking their children cozily into bed, and a happy family gathered around a Thanksgiving dinner, obviously free from want. The campaign was also based on that most powerful of all selling emotions: fear. If you don’t support Social Security, the ads suggested, you will live your last years in utter destitution.

Putzi Hanfstängl, viewing Roosevelt’s evil brilliance from Nazi Germany, was probably jealous.

American advertising executives learned the value of presenting a single image or slogan, and repeating it over and over again until it became ingrained in the public’s consciousness. Thus we are all aware that Ivory Soap is so pure that it floats: a point that has been repeated for the better part of a century. I’m not sure why I should be impressed that a bar of soap floats, but on the other hand, it’s not intended that I think that far. Politicians now sell their programs the way the advertising creeps sell soap: they dream up a slogan and repeat it over and over again. Thus we get empty slogans like The New Frontier, The New World Order (that one was poorly chosen; it sounds too much like an actual idea), or Reinventing Government (an idea that everyone should favor, except that the idea behind it really means Keeping Government the Same, only no one is supposed to think that far). Empty grandeur sells political products.

Both German and American politicians carried the use of banners to new heights. Flags are impressive emotional symbols, particularly when waved by thousands of enthusiastic people: it’s a rare individual who can resist the collective enthusiasm of thousands of his fellow human beings, cheering about their collective greatness. Putzi Hanfstängl understood this, advising Hitler to fill his public spectacles with not just a few, but countless thousands of swastika flags. The swastika, too, was a brilliant stroke of advertising and propaganda: it has become, in the public consciousness, the official emblem of Nazism, even though it had nothing to do with Germany. In fact, swastikas were used by ancient Hindus and American tribes, but I’m not aware of it being used by anyone in Germany prior to Hitler.

Now observe how Americans in the current crisis have taken to displaying huge flags on their cars. Flags are not rational arguments; they are instruments for whipping up the Madness of Crowds. Observe how many Americans have, with a straight face, called for a constitutional amendment to outlaw flag desecration, oblivious to the obvious contradictions such an amendment would have with the rest of the Constitution. But again, if you learn nothing else about propaganda, learn that it must not appeal to rationality.

Politicians don’t just use warm, fuzzy images to sell us on the road to tyranny. They also need emotional appeals to intimidate their enemies. Thus the small percentage of the population that really does use thought and reason more than emotion must be demonized. Roosevelt managed this with some masterful propaganda strokes. Those who opposed him were Isolationists, and Malefactors of Great Wealth! (The gut-level emotion appealed to here is envy.) Roosevelt thus showed himself to be an early master of what former California Governor Jerry Brown called “buzz words”; that is, words intended to silence counter-argument by appealing to unassailable emotional images. No one is for Isolation, and almost everyone reacts to an appeal to hate anyone who has a lot of money. The latter appeal, of course, had great power during the Great Depression, which Roosevelt managed to maintain for the entire length of his presidency, all the while blaming others for its evils. Was this guy an evil genius, or what?

The propaganda cleverness used in successfully branding anti-war people as Isolationists is breathtaking. After all, a rational person (ah, keep in mind, that’s not a common individual) realizes that those who oppose war are the exact opposite of isolationists. The Old Right at the time called for peaceful, commercial relations with all nations, based on neutrality in foreign affairs. If anything, those who oppose war and meddling in other countries’ affairs are the opposite of Isolationists as they really stand for open, profitable relationships with other countries. The people who stand for such ideas do not “sell” them by means of strictly emotional appeals, so they tend to lose the propaganda wars. When Roosevelt succeeded in whipping the country up into a war-frenzy after steering us into the Pearl Harbor fiasco, the Old Right realized their opposition to the war was hopeless.

The role of the government propaganda camps known as public schools cannot be discounted in all this. Schools are not so much centers of learning as they are behavior conditioning camps in which children are taught to be unquestioningly obedient to authority. Since reason and morality are the death of propaganda, schools busy themselves with systematically stunting students’ ability to reason and think in moral terms. Because the government owns the propaganda camps, it’s not surprising that the beneficiary of the propaganda is almost always the government. Americans accept obvious absurdities because they were drilled into their heads, year after year, in the government propaganda camps until they became true and unquestionable. Thus, everyone knows Roosevelt got us out of the Great Depression, even though the worst depression years were precisely those in which he and his party controlled every branch of government. Everyone knows Lincoln was a great president because he saved “government by the people” and freed the slaves, even though he became a war tyrant and only freed the slaves when it was politically convenient to do so. Wilson, everyone knows, made the world “safe for democracy”, evidently by instituting a draft and getting America involved in a European war that was fought for reasons no one to this day can fathom. When minds are young and pliable—government experts understand this principle—you can fill them with nonsense that is practically impossible to root out. Laughable falsehoods in effect become true because everyone knows them to be true.

Advertising executives learned, early on, that companies could not be too obvious in using their propaganda. If their agenda could be clearly seen, then it could also be rejected. The answer to this problem was the American propaganda technique of the “independent expert” and the “guy on the street.” One of these appeals to our timidity before authority, and the other to our smugness when dealing with someone at or below our perceived social level. Of course, these two techniques are really just two sides of the same coin. In product advertising, sports heroes and celebrities are used to sell corn flakes because no one would listen to the president of Kellogg telling us why corn flakes are so good. In selling detergent, plain-looking housewives are preferable to sexy models because they look just like us. In political propaganda, “experts” are often trotted out to tell us, in convoluted, circular reasoning, why minimum wage laws are really good for us, why a little bit of inflation is good, or why we just can’t rely on the free market for something so crucially important as education. Or, using the “guy on the street” approach, we are told to support idiotic wars because the common soldiers (“our boys”), cannot function unless they know we stand united behind them. If the rare sensible person tries to argue against war, he is accused of making things harder for “our boys.”

This brings us to the latest iteration of masterful American Propaganda: the War on Terrorism. Any attempt to explain why the terrorists (crazed as they obviously were) felt motivated to attack the World Trade Center is looked on as “siding with the terrorists.” Indeed, Ashcroft and Bush have said, in so many words, that if you don’t support them in everything they do, you stand with the terrorists. Ashcroft and Bush have evidently studied their propaganda lessons from World War II, when Roosevelt silenced all opposition by accusing anyone who stood against him of undermining the war effort. Anyone who suggests we should not risk World War III by invading the Middle East is alternately accused of siding with the terrorists, of slandering the memory of those who died, or (of course) of not “standing by our boys” in times of great need. It’s easy to feel alienated in a nation of flag-wavers singing patriotic hymns. The fact that they are marching lockstep to a world in which the government will monitor their e-mail, snoop into their bank accounts, and eventually throw them in jail for voicing opposition doesn’t seem to bother them one bit.

Now, most libertarians or otherwise thoughtful people will react with dismay when told that most of their fellow human beings react so unthinkingly to sock-you-in-the-gut emotional propaganda. Unfortunately, most people are not capable of really thinking things out. Most people really do buy perfume because of the emotional imagery. Most people really do believe the “independent expert”, whether in politics or buying a car. Most people want to go with the crowd, or follow the leader. To do otherwise requires independent thought and the willingness to be ostracized, which is an unbearable psychological burden for many.

If you want to take heart, remember that the Vietnam War ended because a few people just continued to speak against it, despite the overwhelming government propaganda for it. The fact that a lot of the anti-war protesters were motivated by the wrong reasons (support of commies), doesn’t matter in light of the fact they were able to turn the tide. They were right, even if for the wrong reasons. If advocates of freedom continue to speak against the creeping tyranny that our masters justify on the phony grounds of the War on Terrorism, we might just be able to prevent the transition from Republic to Empire. The thing about propaganda is that, once it is exposed for what it is, no one listens anymore. People tune it out, just as the slaves in Russia and China learned to tune out their official propaganda.

Paul Weber’s novel, Transfiguration, is available at http://www.xlibris.com/Transfiguration.html.

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

The Island of Diego Garcia, B 52s and You and Me

A Letter from Lindsey Colleen to any interested people in Britain and the U.S.A. about injustices elsewhere

Introductory Note;  Ever wonder how the United States came to possess an island in the Indian Ocean that could serve as a bombing platform for the attack on Afghanistan? And did you know that the United States has nuclear weapons on an island in the Indian Ocean?  Can you guess what the residents of the area–in the Republic of  Mauritius–think about our bombs and planes being in their neighborhood?

The history of Diego Garcia island is replete with all the usual dark secrets and dirty tricks of colonialism, including a long history of enslavement and forced labor of the native Ilois and their eventual forced removal by the British.  You can find it, but you have to dig deep to sort it from the U.S. and British propaganda, by simply typing “Diego Garcia” into a good search site. You’ll also find many very delicious photos of a very beautiful place.  

 Please read the fascinating account of writer and activist Lindsey Colleen, a resident of Mauritius.--Hardly Waite,Gazette Senior Editor. 

Dear people of Britain and the USA,

I write from Mauritius. You may not remember quite where that is. Although, then again “The Overcrowded Baracoon” by V.S Naipaul, especially since he has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, may just stir a memory, if ever you came across his bitingly accurate travelogue where Mauritius is depicted as a lousy hell-hole of a place. His story was banned by the Mauritian government at the time.

Or the word “Mauritius” may evoke the equally accurate tourist brochures showing luscious green islands, where it never rains of course, a place so perfect for visitors to holiday in, that there are no people actually living there. No factory workers on piece rates, no sugar cane workers in that hot sun, no computer workers linked to satellite, not even hotel workers as human beings. Maybe just as stage props for dreams.

But there are people living here. In all the contradictions. And some of us have a link with you. Through our shared history. That’s how it is that I come to write to you, who vote in and are citizens of Britain or the US? I, who vote here and am a citizen of Mauritius.

It’s all because of an island.

It’s a particular island that you, over there, and us, over here, share responsibility for. Only maybe you don’t know that you share this responsibility. And while we know we do, we can’t do enough about it so long as we are on our own.

This island is being used for waging war.

In Mauritius, it is hard to find anyone who agrees to the island, part of our country after all, being used for B-52’s to set off from to go bombard the cities of Afghanistan. Our hearts ache to see the children in the rubble the next morning. Maybe there is someone here who agrees, but I haven’t met the person yet.

The Mauritius Foreign Affairs Minister did publicly “give assent”. So he agrees. But he only says it in his formal speeches as representative of the state. At a political party rally, he would certainly not try it. The people are too angry with “America”.

I’ll share the story with you, the story about the island. It is a “small story”. But it is one that will perhaps help understand the deepness of the rage felt in so many places against the powers that be in your countries. A rage often wrongly projected on to “Americans” as a whole. A rage that sometimes makes it hard for people world-wide to pardon the ignorance amongst ordinary folk in the US and Britain about the role of their elected governments in “the rest of the world”. (The rest of the world is such a big place.)

And this rage here, and I would think elsewhere in the rest of the world, too, has somehow got mixed up with the horror that spread on the day of the attack on the World Trade Centre, an attack by missiles made up of passengers and aimed at the level of the hearts of the Twin Towers. Causing collapse. And the terrible emptiness left at Ground Zero. Giant in rubble. Enough to cause everyone on the planet insomnia. And yet somehow the recurring image, no matter how much I try to wipe it from my mind, is that of Goliath being felled by the hand-made sling of the new millennium, a carpet-cutter.

And then? As if bombarding Kabul from B-52’s could rout out young men with carpet cutters.

But, I am speaking today, in particular, of an island. The island of Diego Garcia. And the role of the Diego Garcia military base on it. A US base it is, in the Indian Ocean. In the Republic of Mauritius, more specifically. And curiously, just one week before the 11th September came and changed everything, the Bush administration announced that Diego Garcia was being expanded to take in all the hardware and troops from US bases in Europe that, they added, would from then on be gradually phased out.

The story I will tell is so evocative that you may not have believed it, were it not for all the articles in November last year on the High Court in London’s stinging judgment against the British state in a case brought by people from here. The time had come around for a court action for the right of inhabitants to return to the island, when all the relevant facts, after a 30-year period of being held under secrecy laws, were “declassified” in Britain, in 1998.

The story is another story of a terrible emptiness.

In 1965, in the preparation for the Independence of Mauritius, the Harold Wilson Labour Government in Britain decided to act illegally and to cut out part of Mauritius and hold on to it, as a condition for Independence, which was to be “granted” in 1968. This kind of blackmail is against the UN Charter. A colonizing power cannot impose conditions on a part of itself, that is to say, on one of its colonies, in exchange for Independence.

Britain then tagged on some of the Seychelles Islands (Seychelles was still a colony too), and made up a new fiction of a “colony” on 8th  But whatever the price, the US Government is the receiver of the stolen goods.

We want to close this base down.

We want the terrible emptiness of the tarmac runways out! And the concrete docks out! We want the emptiness of all the military hardware out, too. We want to regenerate the coral around these islands. And the palms.

Living life. We want Diego Garcia to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site immediately on the closure of the base.

But, more than anything, we want to heal the terrible emptiness in the hearts of a people forcibly removed. We want to heal the tearing apart of a country. We want people to be free to go back home.

There have been UN resolutions, year after year, for the reunification of Mauritius through the return of Diego Garcia and the whole of Chagos. Only the US and UK governments voted against. But these two votes have, so far, been enough.

The 1995 UN “Pelindaba Treaty for a Nuclear-Weapons Free Africa” was signed by all the countries concerned, but on the insistence of the representatives of your two countries, there were the infamous “dotted lines” scribbled in around Diego Garcia.

So Diego Garcia is not “nuclear free”. And nor are Pakistan and India. Which is all the more reason for all of us to say “no” to war. And “yes” to the closing down of the base.

I write to ask if perhaps you could start by writing to your MP’s and Congressmen to inform them that the theft of the islands and the receiving of stolen goods was done without the knowledge of the people of your lands, that the forcible removals of our people were done behind your backs, that your people would never have condoned this ultimate violence, that you want the people of Diego Garcia to return to their homes, that a Court judgment has granted them the right to return, that the base is illegal and must be closed down.

That the base must be closed down in any case.

We ask this to be included as part of the movement towards ending the war. As part of the movement for peace.

And as we all know, peace only comes with justice. And justice only comes when we find out about injustices being committed near and far, and all over the rest of the world, so we can put a stop to them. It is these injustices that sometimes breed the ideas that sometimes breed terrorism.

At other times, the injustices breed rioting. In Los Angeles and in Mauritius. In Harare and in Northern Towns in Britain. In Algeria and in Indonesia. And whether it is terrorism or rioting, it brings in its wake, repression.

So, we need coherent, conscious movements against the war, and for justice worldwide. And justice, as we all know in our hearts, is only born in the movement towards equality. The e-word. You are not allowed to say it in good company anymore. It is only permissible in reference to past revolutions.

But it is, curiously, precisely the e-technology that may help now.

We live in a world of sufficient technological advancement to permit a much better form of democracy than we ever dared dream of before. Democracy at the work place. Democratic control over finance. Where democracy will be much more than casting a vote to choose between two political parties, both financed by private companies, once every five years, where you live or where I do.

Democracy in which human rights in all spheres – political, civil, economic, social, cultural – gain broader and broader definitions through our struggles, wherever we are.

Democracy where human beings gain in dignity. Democracies from which guns and land-mines are not exported to prop up dictatorships in countries unknown, nor to make profits from warring factions in countries elsewhere in the world. We have to inform ourselves and act. Together.

So that dog stops eating dog. And horse horse.

Lindsey Collen, For LALIT, in Mauritius 16th October lalmel@intnet.mu

Lindsey Collen was born in South Africa and lives in Mauritius. She is the author of several novels “There is a Tide”, “The Rape of Sita” and “Getting Rid of it”. “The Rape of Sita” won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Africa Region in 1994 and was longlisted for the 1996 Orangeprize. Her latest book is called “Mutiny”. She is a human rights’ activist in Mauritius, active in the women’s right’s movement, in the movement for social housing, in an organisation for adult literacy and in the political organisation, Lalit.

For a brief, Americanized “history” of Diego Garcia, with map, please go to http://www.infoplease.com/spot/dg.html.

For a complete and well-documented history of the British/American theft of Diego Garcia, please go to http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=diego_garcia.

Reprinted with Permission of Lindsey Coleen.

Wave Our Flag!

Jim Hightower
October 16, 2001

I’m waving the flag these days — the stars & stripes, Old Glory, our flag.

Since September 11, I’ve been waving it all over the place, because it stands for something special, historic, important, and uniting. I’m not waving it as some macho bravado assertion of American Empire, but in the spirit of America Eternal, the land of deep democratic values and ambitions, the place where “Liberty and Justice for All” is not a throw-a way line, but a founding principle that we must struggle daily to try to implement.

Our flag is more than the emblem of America’s financial and military might, it’s a mirror in which we can see reflected our finest ideals of economic fairness, social justice, and equal opportunity.

Or not. This is why it’s especially important for us to wave America’s flag now, in these dark days when anti-democratic forces are loose in Washington and in the media, howling for a repression of the very freedoms the flag symbolizes. I’ll be double-damned to hell before I meekly allow this banner of democracy to be usurped by political opportunists, corporatists, xenophobes, war-mongrers, and fear-mongers who confuse conformity with patriotism, demanding that we be quiet, get in line, and be “patriotically correct.”

Hey, we’re not lemmings. We’re citizens, and as the founders knew, the first job of a citizen is to keep your mouth open. Our democracy was forged in rebellion, crafted by mavericks and risk-takers who refused to salute authority. They rejected all autocrats who tried to suppress liberties in the name of providing security and order.

This is Jim Hightower saying … Ours is the flag of the pamphleteers and Sons of Liberty, the abolitionists and suffragists, Populists and Wobblies, Mother Jones and Joe Hill, Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King Jr. — freedom-fighters all. Too many true patriots struggled and died to bring our democracy this far. We have no right to be quiet. Stand up! Wave our flag! Speak out!