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omfgtrump · 4 years ago

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Ready or Not, Here We Come!

With the events of this week so shocking, let’s not forget the greatest criminal act of The Don’s presidency is his perpetuation of a genocide of neglect when it comes to the response to Covid-19. We have now almost 360,000 deaths and in the last 9 days, 2 million new infections (that we know of) have been documented. The vaccine roll out is highly problematic and no matter how diligent Joe Biden and his crew is we are so behind the eight ball they some are now predicting as many as 1 million deaths by the end of May.

So here we have it. The extraordinary climax of the four- year reality show called: “Make America Great Again.”

You must admit it was a whopper. Cast of thousands, great costumes, violence, looting, profanity and in an ironic twist, endless incriminating selfies that will make finding the characters as easy as to find as one, two three. Rumor has it that the trials resulting from these arrests will spawn another “Law and Order” spinoff called: Law and Order: Sedition

With just a dozen more days to go to the end of The Don’s presidency, will there be another surprise episode? There is already talk in the ranks of loyalists about more actions to come before the inauguration of Joe Biden on January 20th, so stay tuned.

I must admit I am hoping the networks will cover the F.B.I.’s midnight raids to the homes of the thugs who violated federal law. And please, pretty- please, make sure when they are arraigned, they are wearing those inspiring Viking costumes.

After weeks of The Don promulgating lies and conspiracies theories about election fraud, his continual unwillingness to concede, his refusal to participate in a peaceful transition of power and his urging of his supporters to show up to Washington D.C. ready to “have a wild time,” why would anyone be shocked about what happened?

For four years we have heard how shocking The Don’s statements and actions have been.

For four years we have heard how the man was not fit for office.

For four years we have heard how he has defiled and stained the presidency.

For four years we have watched him dismantle the very government he was elected to lead in order to consolidate his power.

For four years he has used his office to profit in direct, in-your-face violations of the Emolument’s Clause.

For four years he has tried to subvert the constitution.

For four years he has embraced White Supremacists and espoused racist ideology.

For four years the Republican party made a bargain with him, placating his every whim, feeding his grandiosity. And for their final act, these traitorous Republicans allowed and supported the lie that the election was a fraud, stoking the flames of his supporters to the point that storming the Capitol to make things right made sense to them!

What was shocking was the ease at which the insurrectionists entered the Capitol. When one of my friends texted me, exhorting me to turn on the news, I must admit, the first thing I did was laugh. Laugh? In hindsight, I think the laughter was born of an inability to deal with the dread I felt, but my first impression was that I was watching a strange Toga party that matched that great scene in “Animal House.” Strange people walking around in costumes, taking selfies with police officers and general mayhem. All that was missing was the conga line!

Given the known threat, it was beyond comprehension that there wasn’t a massive police and National Guard presence to prevent this. It was like the police were standing at the door and asking people: “Do you have a ticket for this event?”

Comparisons by the right wing media to a BLM protest is outrageous but not surprising. It goes without saying, that if this insurrection was populated with blacks, it would have been a bloodbath.

The Don’s aspirations for the presidency started with the racist lie about Barack Obama’s legitimacy and ended with another lie- that the election was stolen, particularly by black people who voted illegitimately in battle ground states- inspiring an insurrection by White Supremacists.

A full accounting of the failure to protect the Capitol will show widespread complicity and collusion up the chain of command, including the Secretary of Defense, who would not order the National Guard to get involved.

Ultimately, when the history books are written, I hope those who are complicit with The Don, are treated with the same critical eye as The Don himself. In my mind, they are the ones truly responsible for what has happened these four years. The Don is just one profoundly disturbed man. He lacks empathy, and is amoral at his core. To be amoral means a complete absence of a conscience: there is just emptiness and a need to fulfill his desires without any concern about the consequences of his actions. His enablers, who at any point, could have stopped him, are immoral men and women who allowed an amoral man free reign. To be immoral is to know the different between right and wrong and decide that supporting what is unconscionable is worth the reward. You need go no further than to sit with the fact that an entire party was silent while The Don and his evil partner in crime, Stephen Miller, separated children from their parents- some never to be reunited.

After the madness of the insurrection, when calm was restored, our elected officials went back to the business of doing their jobs and certified Joe Biden’s election to be the 46th president.

One would assume that after their lives felt threatened and the house of our democracy was invaded on the orders of the president and his henchmen, with the marauders yelling “Hang Pence,” that the Republicans would finally take a stand and separate themselves from him. But still 6 senators and 120 members of the House of Representatives continued to challenge the veracity of the election.

And what of the right- wing media? Was this a bridge too far? (I know silly question.)

And what of Republicans in general? A snap YouGov poll found that 45 percent of Republicans approved of the storming of the Capitol.

New conspiracies spawned. If you look really carefully you can see that the majority of people in this rally were really ANTIFA. And for that matter, why stop at that? Maybe the rioters were BLM people wearing whiteface?

Our loveable and long lost hockey mom, Sarah Palin, even weighed in.

“To any insincere, fake DC ‘patriots’ used as PLANTS — you will be found out.”

We always knew that Mrs., “I can see Russia from my house,” isn’t the brightest, but shit she sure knows a plant when she sees one. When asked about what kind of plants were there, she responded: “You know, the usual ones. “The usual ones,” responded the reporter? “Yeah, those.” “Can you name one, asked the reporter?” I don’t know, umm, plants, a stupid plant, like Daisies. Now get out of my way. I need to text my kid who is ransacking Nancy Commie Pelosi’s desk as we speak. Want to see a selfie of him with one of the police offers who gave him the keys to Nancy’s office. God, I wish I could have been there.”

Which way do we go, America? Your guess is as good as mine.

Below some scenes from the insurrection.

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fiscal-clit · 5 years ago

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Best Lawyers In Canada

Alice Woolley

Professor and associate dean-academic, University of Calgary Faculty of Law, Calgary, Alta. Woolley is a true changemaker in the region of law and technology as well as law regulation. She's been a valuable member of the Canadian Bar Association's integrity and professional responsibility committee. Her work with the CBA Futures job as an ethics and regulatory issues staff member is really making a mark at the legal community. Woolley is responsible for sweeping educational modifications as chairwoman of the committee that developed and embraced significant curricular changes at the University of Calgary's Faculty of Law, which concentrate on the practical elements of legal instruction and will come into effect in September. What voters had to say: Leading expert on legal profession and ethics; when she talks, people listen. Alice is a pragmatic visionary. Educating law students in a way that will prepare them for a 21st century clinic is of crucial importance to the future of the profession.

Justice Murray Sinclair

Chairman, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Winnipeg, Man. A rare write-in candidate winner for this season 's Top 25, Sinclair was on the list last year, making headlines in June with the release of the overview of the report of the TRC along with 94 recommendations to redress the cultural genocide of Canada's residential college program. Over six decades, Sinclair directed the TRC hearing the tales of over 7,000 survivors of sexual, physical, and psychological abuse. Sinclair, that was the first aboriginal judge in Manitoba, was first appointed to the provincial court where he became associate leader in 1988 and then elevated to the Court of Queen's Bench at 2001. He had been co-commissioner of Manitoba's Aboriginal Justice Inquiry in 1988 and presided over a 2000 inquest into the deaths of 12 infants at Winnipeg's Health Sciences Centre. Sinclair expects to finish the commission's complete report in the near future, after which he will choose whether to return to retire or court and advocate for indigenous rights fulltime.

Marie Henein

Old spouse, Henein Hutchison LLP, Toronto, Ont. Considered one of Canada's best criminal defence lawyers, Henein is known for representing high-profile clients such as former CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi -- charged with seven counts of sexual assault, of which two have been dropped -- former Ontario attorney general Michael Bryant, and junior hockey trainer David Frost. Most recently Henein has taken on the event of defence counsel colleague Leora Shemesh, that had been charged with perjury and obstruction of justice by Peel Police. Henein is well-known in the profession as a go-to lawyer for all high-profile criminal matters. She has an excellent history of wins versus losses and has been a part of the team that recently was successful in having John Salmon's conviction in a 1970s murder . What Republicans needed to say: Most observable leader of [the] criminal defence bar.

Justice Ian Nordheimer

Judge, Ontario Supreme Court, Toronto, Ont. Nordheimer's name is becoming synonymous with class actions suits mostly due to his judgment, which overturned Justice Edward Belobaba's conclusion in a high-profile case on carriage at the Barrick Gold class action suit. Nordheimer given the losing coalition of law firms leave to appeal Belobaba's decision at the Divisional Court. He is likely the strongest Superior Court degree judge in the country using a decade on the seat and generates perhaps the greatest number of thorough judgments every year compared to some trial level estimate. He is known for his quick wit and sharp decisions. In the last year, Nordheimer has made quite a splash in the legal community by upholding a professional field punishment for present LSUC bencher Joe Groia and releasing information that revealed Rob Ford was the topic of a police investigation.What that the panel had to say: He is the sort of judge that should be on the Court of Appeal... or greater. A judge of complete integrity.

Jean-Pierre Blais

Chairman, Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Ottawa-Gatineau Blais is not afraid of criticism and is willing to go above and beyond in the name of consumer rights. A recent CRTC decision will give users more freedom to select TV channels of their liking as part of their cable and satellite subscriptions despite bitter opposition from Canada's cable businesses. Blais called out former Bell Media president Kevin Crull, without naming names, over reports Crull told CTV news personnel not to interview him after that choice. Crull ended up apologizing for interfering in the news gathering process and later stepped down. From telemarketers to telcos, Blais consistently aims to encourage the rights and demands of customers. What Republicans needed to say: Reaching big shift with consumer-minded focus. About time!

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elles-choices · 6 years ago

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Part 4: Say You Won’t Let Go (TRR AU, Liam x MC)

Pairing: Liam x MC (Catherine)

Words Count: about 2900

A/N: This story contains reference to violence -- readers discretion advised! The case portrayed in this story is based on a real case - some details were modified. Children, please, look away.

PS: For part 1-3 please look below :)

Summary: Catherine Spencer returns to New York after her fall from grace in Cordonia. She left the love of her life behind and all the dreams she had dared to dream. Now she has to pick up the pieces and move on but her past has a way of finding her.

Disclaimer: All characters belong to Choices by Pixel Berry

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„When you looked over your shoulder

For a minute, I forget that I'm older

I wanna dance with you right now

Oh, and you look as beautiful as ever

And I swear that everyday'll get better

You make me feel this way somehow

I'm so in love with you

And I hope you know

Darling your love is more than worth its weight in gold

We've come so far my dear

Look how we've grown

And I wanna stay with you until we're grey and old

Just say you won't let go“, Say you won’t let go, James Arthur

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Catherine stands on the stage of the University of Cordonia’s auditorium, in front of a crowd of students, visitors and faculty members. She is nervous, not because of the people in front of her but because she is back to his country and it reminds her of everything she has tried to forget.

After a round of applause, she walks up to the microphone and starts her speech:

„The story I came to tell you today is one of the most harrowing stories I have ever encountered in my years as a lawyer. Our client was only 19 years old when war broke out and a religious extremist terror group took over her village. She, a university student just like most of you here, was forced to watch all of the men in her community, including her father and brothers, be marched off to their death — 600 of them being killed in one single day. Her mother was killed together with other older women and disposed in a mass grave. Our client… she was only 19 when she was traded from one terrorist to another, forced to make herself pretty every time before she was raped — sometimes, raped until unconsciousness by a group of men. She was beaten and burned with cigarets.. She was one of 8000 women and children, some of them as young as 11, taken by this group to be sold in a sex slave market, sometimes for as little as $20.

These perpetrators bragged online about killing the men, conquering the women and wiping their religion from this world. Make no mistake, what I am describing you today is genocide — and it is still ongoing. Yet, only a handful of these men have been prosecuted in a court of law for crimes committed against this religious minority. And with every day, evidences are being lost and destroyed and witnesses are being dispersed or disappearing.

States are failing to punish and condemn these crimes whilst girls are having their body sold and used as battlefields. Yes, military actions are being taken but this is only part of the response. You can’t kill an ideology with bombs. But you can expose their crimes, their brutality and corruption through trials — trials that are in line with our values and our standards. The survivors of these crimes are seeking justice and the opportunity to face their abusers in an international court and we cannot deny them that (…)“

—————

After a couple of hours of discussing this case with law professors and answering a few questions from the public, the session comes to an end. Catherine stands in the hallway talking to her colleague and a member of the faculty, when she hears a familiar voice calling her name, „Spencer!“.

She turns around to find Drake, Hana and Maxwell standing a few feet away. She excuses herself and with a big smile on her face she walks up to them, hugging each one of them warmly, „I can’t believe you guys came!“, she says surprised.

„Are you kidding? We couldn’t wait to see you, Katie. And now look at you being a badass lawyer! And this story… ohhhh boy, this is sooo sad…“, he pauses for a few seconds, „But, hey, I am so happy that you are here. Is it too soon to say that we should celebrate your return to Cordonia with a bash!?“, Maxwell looks at the others showing his excitement of seeing his friend after so many years. Everybody laughs but Drake looks at him making an annoyed face.

Hana takes Catherine’s hand and squeezes it, saying: „We tried to call you a few days ago but I guess you changed your number again. Hopefully, you can stay with us for the weekend“.

Catherine smiles, „I got a new number a few months ago. I’m sorry, I guess I forgot to send you the text“, she picks up a business card from her bag and gives it to Hana, „Here you go and my email is in there too, just in case you guys want to get in touch“. She then looks at Maxwell and says: „About this bash thing… sadly, I am flying back in the evening. But we could spend sometime together until I have to leave“, she smiles, looking forward to catching up with them.

Drake clears his throat, „Hmm, Liam was here too, Spencer. He left a few minutes ago to take care of a few things“. When she hears his name she feels her heart sinking into the pit of her stomach. „But he left an invitation for you to join him at the palace. There is a car waiting for you outside…“.

Catherine takes a deep breath, „I don’t know if this is a good idea, Drake… Also, I am not really in the mood to cross Madeleine’s path and to deal with old drama“.

„Madeleine won’t be a problem, I guarantee you. We won’t force you to go, but Spencer, you guys should talk somethings out and you know that“, Drake says it, giving her a serious look. It took her some convincing, but Catherine finally decides to go see Liam at the palace.

After exchanging a few words with her friends, she leaves the building and heads to the car. As she enters it, she sees a bouquet of red roses with a small card lying on the seat next to her. She looks at it and smiles, recognizing Liam’s handwriting:

„Dear Catherine,

I can’t wait to see you… it’s been far too long.

Love,

Liam“

She knows, she shouldn’t feel like this but she has butterflies in her stomach. She looks out of the window nervous, knowing that she is minutes away from seeing him after such a long time. It is incredible that he still makes her feel this way… incredible and scary. He is right, it’s been far too long, but after their last talk, she hoped for a long time that they would never cross paths again.

—————

4 years ago…

Catherine stands in the doorway and looks at Liam sitting at the table, covering his eyes with his hands.

„So, that’s it? You are going to marry her… did you came here for what? Get my blessing?“, Catherine asks angrily.

„Don’t say that, Katie. It’s not like I have a choice… I am begging you to come with me. I can’t do this without you“, he looks at her, tears streaming down his face.

„I don’t get it, Liam. Why can’t you just call off the wedding? Instead, you want me to hold your hand whilst you are getting married to her?“, she shakes her head and starts crying.

He stands up and walks over to her but before he can hold her in his arms, she says firmly: „Get out!“, she looks into his eyes „If you are going to marry her, you should leave now… there is nothing to be said anymore!“. He stands there, looking at her for a minute before walking out of the living room. There is so much he would like to tell her now, but she would not listen to him. He opens the front door and looks back to see her one last time. She turns to him and says: „If you go through with this, don’t you dare come back for me!“, he sinks his head and turns away from her, leaving the shards of their love scattered over Catherine’s apartment. Catherine falls to the floor, tears bursting forth like water from a dam and she knows, this is the end.

—————

The black Mercedes stops in front of the palace and Catherine is greeted by Bastien, who asks her to follow him into a path she knows too well. They are heading to the maze and Catherine can’t help feeling some mixed feelings about it. This place brought her so much happiness but it also caused her so much pain. A few feet away from the center of the maze, Bastien asks to take care of the flowers for her, telling her to go ahead.

Catherine walks slowly, feeling as if her heart was going to burst. She takes a few deep breaths before she reaches the center. Looking over, she sees Liam pacing around, as nervous as she is and she smiles — he looks just the same, as if nothing had changed.

Suddenly their eyes meet. He sees her in her black sleeveless mid dress, her blond hair kept in a ponytail and he feels his heart skipping a beat. To him, she is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen and having her finally there, in front of him, woke up something in him that he thought was gone. „Catherine…“, he walks up to her with a big smile on his face, „I can’t believe you came…“, he embraces her.

„Hi Liam, it is really nice to see you“, she says a little unsure of how to react. He looks at her again, takes her hand and brings her to under a tree, where there is a blanket with a picnic basket and some cushions on it, „Wow, it feels kind of surreal to be back here with you“, she smiles and they sit on the blanket.

„I know… you look stunning as always, it feels as if time stood still“, he takes her hand and brushes his thumb over her knuckles. He stares at her smiling for a few seconds not believing she is there with him.

Catherine blushes and looks away for a moment, saying under her breath, „And yet four years have gone by…“, there is a sadness in her voice.

„Four years, two months and 23 days…“, he whispers, kissing her hand and causing Catherine to wonder how he could know this so precisely. After a short moment of silence, he opens the basket, saying: „I took the liberty to choose an American dish for us… I hope you still love Sloppy Joes!?“, she laughs in disbelief that he remembered the time they spent in New York together before he left to the engagement tour — she actually taught him how to make her mother’s recipe. He hands her a plate and napkins. „So, tell me more about your life. You are doing an impressive job and I’m so proud of you!“, he says smiling at her.

„Thank you, but I’m only doing my job and I’m not doing this alone, it is a team work and I am really grateful for being able to be a part of it. As you can imagine, my life has been busy. I am glad I have a few days off coming up, before the craziness starts again…“, she takes a bite and says: „Ohh, this is really good! Compliments to the chef…“, he smiles and offer her something to drink.

„I’m glad you like it, I spent the evening cooking this“, he laughs thinking about how the kitchen looked liked afterwards.

Catherine looks at him in disbelief, „What? You made these?“, she laughs „I guess I have seen everything now… and for the looks of it, the palace is still standing, so congratulations!“

Liam laughs, „Well, I cook it every now and then. Drake loves it and, well… there are a lot of good memories attached to it.“. She smiles at him and he says: „But apart from work, what have you been up to? Are you… are you seeing someone?“, he looks at her hand, blushing and shaking his head „I am sorry, I used to be good at this kind of conversations, but I haven’t put it into praxis in a while“.

Catherine giggles, thinking his reaction is adorable, „No, I’m not seeing anyone. I haven’t had a relationship since… since I broke off my engagement a year ago. I just don’t have the time for a relationship right now“, she takes a sip of her drink.

„Ohh, I see…“, he smiles discreetly „I heard about your engagement… I’m sorry it didn’t work out“, he says looking at her.

„Nope, you are not really sorry, are you?“, she laughs „But how did you know? Did Hana tell you?“, Liam’s face falls as he explains:

„When I divorced Madeleine, 15 months ago after we found Tariq and he finally cleared your name, I went to New York. I wanted to talk to you… I couldn’t wait to see you and tell you the news. Bastien found your new address, but he also found out that you had a fiance. I wanted to tell you the news so bad… but when I saw you with him, I just couldn’t… you seemed happy, so happy with him and I felt as if I would be intruding in your life again“, he sighs, staring ahead. „I was happy for you but it killed me inside that I wasn’t the one by your side and it was all my fault. I shouldn’t have married Madeleine… I should have broke it off and dealt with the consequences. I have regretted my choice from the moment I said ‚I do‘ until today“, he takes a deep breath, „And now having you here, I can’t help but imagining what could have been. All I know is that not a day went by that I didn’t miss you, Katie“, he says lowering his face.

Catherine can’t believe he went back to New York to see her. They both have been through so much but she knows how difficult it might have been for him to let her go. She gets closer to him and leans her head on his shoulders „I knew about Tariq, Hana told me everything, but I never knew you got divorced…“. He puts one arm around her waist and she continues, „What happened that day in my apartment in New York really hurt me, Liam. But I know that, in a very twisted way, you were trying to be responsible and to be the best King for your country… you put your duty before your feelings, hurting both of us“, he pulls her closer to him and kisses her hair.

„I really hope you can forgive me one day, Katie. I don’t deserve it… I really don’t but I never stopped loving you…“, he looks at her deep blue eyes „Do you still feel anything for me?“, he takes her hand and kisses it. He is nervous, unsure if he can take the answer.

Catherine looks away for a few seconds, then back at him „I forgave you years ago, Liam. But my life is just chaos right now, I don’t have the time to put the effort into a relationship… if this is what you want to know“, she looks away again, spending some minutes in silence. She stands up, she seems distant as if some old walls have come up again, „Anyway, thank you for the walk down memory lane, but I really should get going. I have a flight to catch in a few hours and I still have a few things to do“.

Liam stands up as well and locks his arms around her, pulling her against him, „You didn’t answer my question… do you still have feelings for me?“, he rests his forehead against hers.

„Do I really have to say this?”, she sees his baby blue eyes pleading for an answer, “Okay… I… I never stopped loving you either, Liam. But it doesn’t change the fact that I don’t have the time for this. There is no more you and me, this is part of the past now and we have to leave it there“, she puts her hands on his chest, pushing him gently away.

Liam closes his eyes feeling the pain of her words and whispers, „Are you happy? Because I have been miserable… I would do anything for you, anything you want from me just for one chance of a happy life with you, Katie“, he looks deep in her eyes „You say you don’t have time for this, then let me do the work this time, Catherine… let me be the one to put the effort and fight for this, the way you fought for me… please. I am not the Liam that left you alone in that apartment anymore, I want to show you that“.

Catherine shakes her head slightly, „I don’t know if I wanna go there, Liam. I don’t wanna go through a pain like that ever again… I don’t know if I can survive this one more time“, she turns around slowly but he lightly grabs her hand and gently pulls her towards him into a passionate kiss. Her eyes widened as she felt his lips colide with hers but she soon relaxes into his arms, wrapping her hands around his neck and pushing him harder against her. The kiss lasted moments but they found themselves breathless as they parted. She gazed at Liam’s face and he knew she felt it too — the four years have not erased one bit of their love and passion for each other.

„Spend your time off with me… we can go somewhere only the two of us. And if you still think it won’t work, I’ll accept it… but please, let me try!“, he kisses her forehead.

She cups his face, looking into his eyes, „I promise I will think about it, Liam…“, that was all she could tell him for now. She rises up on her tip toes and gives Liam a peck on the cheek, slowly brushing her hands on his muscular chest. He smiles hopeful and watches her making her way to the car.

(To be continued…)

For more chapters go to my MASTERLIST in my bio.

—————————–

The Royal Romance Liam x MC Tag

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expatimes · 4 years ago

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Myanmar legislators remain held in ‘open-air detention centre’

Hundreds of members of Myanmar’s Parliament remained confined in “an open-air detention centre” in the country’s capital on Tuesday, a day after the military seized power and detained senior politicians including elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

One of the legislators told the Associated Press news agency he and some 400 other parliament members were able to talk to one another inside their government housing complex and communicate with their constituencies by phone but were not allowed to leave the compound in Naypyidaw.

He said police were inside the complex and soldiers were outside it.

The legislator said the politicians, made up of members of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) and various smaller parties, spent a sleepless night worried that they might be taken away.

“We had to stay awake and be alert,” said the legislator, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for his safety.

Another legislator quoted by AFP said she was also “very worried” and described the compound as “an open-air detention centre”. “We are not allowed to go outside,” she said.

The coup took place hours before legislators from across country were due to attend the opening of the new parliamentary session. The military said it had to make a move because the government had not acted on the military’s claims of fraud in November’s elections – in which Suu Kyi’s ruling party won by a landslide – and because it allowed the election to go ahead despite the coronavirus pandemic.

The NLD condemned the coup in a Facebook post on Tuesday and called for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, President Win Myint and others detained the previous day. The whereabouts of Aung San Suu Kyi and the president remained unknown 24 hours after their arrest.

“We see this as a stain on the history of the State and the Tatmadaw,” the party said, referring to the military by its Burmese name.

An NLD legislator told AFP the pair were under house arrest in Naypyidaw. “We were informed not to worry. However, we are worrying. It would be a relief if we could see photos of them at home,” the legislator said on the condition of anonymity.

The military has now handed power to General Min Aung Hlaing and imposed a state of emergency for a year. Late on Monday, the office of the commander-in-chief announced the names of new cabinet ministers. The 11-member cabinet is composed of military generals, former military generals and former advisers to a previous government headed by former General Thein Sein.

Suu Kyi ‘in their hands’

On Tuesday in Yangon, the country’s biggest city, the streets were quieter than usual but taxis and buses were still running and there were no outward signs of heavy security.

“We want to go out to show our dissatisfaction,” a taxi driver told AFP early on Tuesday morning.

“But Amay Suu (Mother Suu) is in their hands. We cannot do much but stay quietly at this moment.”

The English-language Myanmar Times headlined the state of emergency, while other state-owned newspapers showed front-page photographs of Monday’s meeting of the National Defense and Security Council, which the newly appointed acting President Myint Swe and Min Aung Hlaing attended with other military officials.

The coup is step backwards for Myanmar, which was slowly emerging from decades of strict military rule and international isolation that began in 1962.

The Tatmadaw has maintained that its actions are legally justified – citing a section of the constitution it drafted in 2008 that allows it to take control in times of national emergency. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party spokesman as well as many international observers have said it amounts to a coup.

The takeover marks a shocking fall from power for Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel peace laureate who had lived under house arrest for years as she tried to push her country towards democracy and then became its de facto leader after her party won elections in 2015.

Aung San Suu Kyi had been a fierce critic of the army during her years in detention. But after her shift from democracy icon to politician, she needed to work with the generals, who despite allowing elections maintained significant power.

While the 75-year-old has remained popular at home, Aung San Suu Kyi’s deference to the generals — going so far as to defend their crackdown on Rohingya Muslims that the United States and others have labelled genocide — damaged her reputation abroad.

The coup presents a test for the international community, which had ostracised Myanmar while it was under military rule and then enthusiastically embraced Aung San Suu Kyi’s government as a sign the country was finally on the path to democracy.

US President Joe Biden threatened new sanctions, which were lifted during the Obama administration when Biden was vice president.

Biden called the military’s actions “a direct assault on the country’s transition to democracy and the rule of law” and said Washington would not hesitate to restore sanctions.

“The United States will stand up for democracy wherever it is under attack,” he said in a statement.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the developments a “serious blow to democratic reforms,” according to his spokesman.

But China declined to criticise anyone, instead calling for all sides to “resolve differences”.

The Security Council will hold an emergency meeting on the coup – probably on Tuesday, according to the United Kingdom, which currently holds the council presidency.

Read full article: https://expatimes.com/?p=17585&feed_id=31678

#AsiaPacific #centre #detention #held #legislators #Myanmar #News #openair #Politics #remain

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junker-town · 4 years ago

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Mud, wind and a ‘soggy ball’: the story of the USA’s first basketball gold medal

In the 1936 Olympics, basketball was played outdoors on a dirt court. A storm during the final showed why that was such a bad idea.

The 1936 Summer Olympics were, famously, something of a mess. Hosted in Berlin, they provided Hitler’s regime the perfect canvas from which to propagandize, and the rest of the world knew it. But we’re not going to talk about the Nazis today. At least, not very much. Because the Berlin Olympics weren’t just notable for providing PR cover to a murderous parade of genocides. They were also the coming out party for America and Olympic Basketball.

Team USA won gold, of course — I won’t make you wait for that non-shocker — but their journey there was a fiasco which culminated in one of the weirdest, muddiest basketball games of all time. Let’s explore.

Getty Images

The winning team

Expectations for the American team’s first Olympic venture were naturally high. While international basketball was just becoming A Thing, college hoops had been thriving for decades, leaving the United States the obvious favorite in a sport which was only just starting to catch on with the rest of the world.

Indeed, basketball was so popular in the States that it was expected to power the rest of the American Olympic delegation. Back then, teams were meant to be self-funding, which meant they had to raise the cost of travel themselves. Avery Brundage, President of the American Olympic Committee, hoped that basketball might change that, bringing in enough cash during qualifying tournaments that the smaller sports didn’t have to scramble to fund themselves.

This was a nice idea that went badly wrong. At the end of June, Brundage was forced to announce that the AOC had a funding deficit of $146,000. Basketball hadn’t solved their problems. In fact, the proposed American basketball team of 13 players and three coaches hadn’t even managed to fund itself.

Things had gotten heated long before that point. The AOC at large clashed with their director of basketball, Phog Allen, who was both one of the most important figures in the history of the game and the man who had done more than anyone else to get the sport to the Olympics. Eventually Dr. Allen quit his post, citing ‘deceitful political bartering;’ the AOC responded with the outrageous claim that he’d never actually worked with them in the first place.

Would you trust a man who wore this tie?

Brundage, meanwhile, was thwarting the proposed boycott of Hitler’s games and proudly embracing anti-Semitic support: “[T]he fact that the Jews are against us will arouse interest among thousands of people who have never subscribed before, if they are properly approached.” According to Carolyn Mervyn, writing decades later, Brundage’s political interest (although, like all of his ilk, he claimed that there was no space in sports for politics) was in thwarting communism, and he considered Nazi Germany a friend in that venture. This is all to say Avery Brundage was a huge asshole.

How big an asshole? Well, on the Olympic basketball front, he managed to forget a basketball enthusiast named Dr. James Naismith. If you’re not familiar with the history of sport, this is notable because Dr. Naismith invented basketball. The Lincoln Evening Journal quotes Olympic referee Jim Tobin as claiming that Naismith, then 74, was deliberately omitted from the guest list:

Dr. Naismith arrived in Germany without even a pass to see a game. We managed to get him a pass for all games, but it was not [through] the American Olympic committee’s efforts. He was ignored there and his name was stricken from the pass list. What’s more, no ceremony was planned for Dr. Naismith, who is naturally the most important figure in basketball.

While Naismith (who was invited, eventually to hand out the medals after the final) languished, Brundage was amusing himself by kicking swimmer Eleanor Holm off the team. According to Brundage’s version of events, Holm, who’d won gold in the 100-meter backstroke at the 1932 Games had been discovered ‘in an alcoholic coma.’ According to Holm’s, she had violated curfew and had had a few glasses of champagne but was busted by a staffer and referred to Brundage, who had previously put Holm on his naughty list after she had refused to sleep with him. I find one version of these events somewhat more plausible than the other.

(Holm, incidentally, refused to go away, and was in fact hired by the International News Service as a sports journalist to report on the U.S. Olympians. I find this funny for reasons I’m not sure I can fully articulate.)

Surely, though, the actual basketball would be less of a mess? Friends, it would not. The warning signs were there early, sounded by Val Bouryschkine, who, according to the Santa Cruz Sentinel, wrote to Allen detailing the expected conditions of Berliner hoops.

Play in the Olympics will be on gravel (ed note: Bouryschkine appears to mean very fine gravel — see image below). This presents several difficulties such as the impossibility of a good dribble, accurate long shots, or, in case of rain, a slippery ball. Also, the referees are unusually strict on pivots, and very often call them traveling. There is no center line, and any stalling and freezing of the ball is perfectly legal.

Lothar Ruebelt/ullstein bild via Getty Images

Probably from the ‘36 games. Note the dirt/gravel ‘court’.

To the Americans, for whom basketball had been a wholly mature sport for decades, the notion of playing on gravel rather than nice maple floors was both alien and deeply concerning. But the US basketball team was far too good to let that stop them. Drawn from the best amateur teams in the country, they featured players like Joe Fortenberry, immortalized as the world’s first dunker, and Willard Schmidt, who may well have been the second (but wasn’t the MLB pitcher).

They were also big. The McPherson Globe Refiners, who contributed six to the Olympic roster, were described by one gushing sportswriter in the Corsicana Daily Sun as “the sky-scrapingest group of hoopsters ever assembled under one banner,” which just goes to show how far the art of writing has declined since mid-century. Tolkien would have given ‘cellar door’ far shorter shrift had he ever come across prose like this.

The US beat Estonia 52-28 in their first matchup, then dispatched the Philippines 56-23 in their second. This was actually the fourth round, because a) the US had received a bye and b) Spain hadn’t showed up for what would have been their first match. This is normally blamed on the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, led to the death of Federico García Lorca three days after the gold medal game. But the liberal Spanish government was planning on boycotting the Games anyway, so the Civil War mostly meant that Spain extra extra didn’t show up.

Having reached the semifinals, the gulf in class began contracting. Mexico managed to hold the Americans to a mere 25 points, but they couldn’t do anything in return in a 25-10 game. Canada, meanwhile, had romped to victory against Poland in the other semi, beating them 42-15. A delicious-looking gold medal matchup was on offer.

But. Remember Bouryschkine’s warning? “Or, in case of rain, a slippery ball.” That hadn’t been tested until the final, but on August 15th an afternoon storm hammered Berlin, and it turned out that that warning had actually been understated. Not only did the ball get slippery, it was so wet out that it ended up downright waterlogged. Oh, and increasingly high winds made it almost impossible to pass. To top things off, the ‘gravel’ court turned out to have been a gravel-on-dirt court, which quickly degraded into ‘mudpit’.

The image I have in my head for this game — sadly I can’t find any footage online — is essentially the funniest basketball game of all time. The Montreal Gazette does nothing to dispel this impression, noting that the court had been turned “into a skating rink by the incessant downpour” and that “a high wind did weird things with a soggy ball,” a phrase I think I must add to my earlier digression on ‘30s sportswriter prose.

The second half, if you’ll credit it, was even worse. “[T]he teams were so worn out from trucking through the mud, and cold from the raw wind that they slowed to a walk.” This honestly sounds more like a description of Passchendaele than a basketball game. In fact basketball can barely be said to have been played after halftime at all: eight points were scored. In total. All half.

Art: Tyson Whiting

The final score was a hilarious 19-8 in favor of the Americans (top scorer Fortenberry matched the Canadians singlehanded), who presumably had a nice long wash between extracting themselves from their miserable mudbowl and accepting their medals. These “towering men with speed to burn and sharp-shooting eyes” had won the first of the United States’ many basketball golds, overcoming a bizarre set of scandals and an incredible attack by the forces of nature herself.

For some reason, when the Olympics returned after World War II, basketball had been moved to an indoor court.

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newsnigeria · 5 years ago

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Check out New Post published on Ọmọ Oòduà

New Post has been published on http://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/world-news/deconstructing-islamophobia/

Deconstructing Islamophobia

[this article was written for the Unz Review]

Introduction: a short survey of the cuckoo’s nest

My initial idea was to begin with a definition of “Islamophobia” but after looking around for various definitions, I decided to use my own, very primitive definition. I will define Islamophobia as the belief that Islam (the religion) and/or Muslims (the adherents to this religion) represent some kind of more or less coherent whole which is a threat to the West. These are two distinct arguments rolled up into one: the first part claims that Islam (the religion) represents some kind of threat to the West while the second part claims that the people who embrace Islam (Muslims) also represent some kind of threat to the West. Furthermore, this argument makes two crucial assumptions:

there is such thing out there as a (conceptually sufficient) unitary Islam

there are such people with (conceptually sufficient) common characteristics due to their adherence to Islam

Next, let’s summarize the “evidence” typically presented in support of this thesis:

The god of Islam is not the same god as the God of Christianity

The Muslim world was created by the sword

The Prophet of Islam, Muhammad, was an evil person

Islam is incompatible with western democracy and represents a threat to what are referred to as “values” in the modern day West

Muslims have treated Christians horribly in many different historical instances

Muslims often turn to terrorism and commit atrocities

Islam is socially regressive and seeks to impose medieval values on a modern world

There are more such as these, but these, I believe, are the main ones.

What is crucial here is to point out that this evidence relies both on theological arguments (#1 #4 #7), and historical arguments (#2 #3 #5 #6).

Finally, there is a most interesting phenomenon which, for the time being, we shall note, but only discuss later: the legacy corporate Ziomedia on one hand denounces Islamophobia as a form of “racism” but yet, at the same time, the very same circles which denounce Islamophobia are also the ones which oppose all manifestations of real traditional Islam. This strongly suggests that the study of this apparent paradox can, if carefully analyzed, yield some most interesting results, but more about that later.

Of course, all of the above is sort of a “bird’s eye” view of Islamophobia in the West. Once we go down to the average Joe Sixpack level, all of the above is fused into one “forceful” slogan as this one:

This kind of crude fearmongering is targeted at the folks who don’t realize that the USA is not “America” and who, therefore, probably don’t have the foggiest notion of what Sharia law is or how it is adjudicated by Islamic courts.

[I have lived in the USA for a total of 22 years and have observed something very interesting: there is a unique mix of ignorance and fear which, in the USA, is perceived as “patriotic”. A good example of this kind of “patriotism through ignorance” is in the famous song “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning” by Alan Jackson which includes the following words: “I watch CNN but I’m not sure I can tell you the difference in Iraq and Iran, but I know Jesus and I talk to God“. Truth be told, the same song also asked in reference to 9/11 “Did you burst out with pride for the red, white and blue?“. Why exactly the massacre of 9/11 should elicit patriotic pride is explained as follows “And the heroes who died just doin’ what they do?“. Thus when the “United American Committee” declares that Sharia law is a threat to “America” the folks raised in this culture of fear and patriotism immediately “get it”. David Rovics hilariously described this mindset in his song “Evening News” where he says: “Evil men are plotting, to blow up Washington, DC, ’cause they don’t like freedom and democracy, they’re fans of the Dark Ages, they are all around, they’re marching from the desert sands, and coming to your town“. I have had the fortune of visiting all the continents of our planet (except Oceania) and I can vouch that this blend of fear+patriotic fervor is something uniquely, well, not “American” but “USAnian”.]

Having quickly surveyed the Islamophobic mental scenery, we can now turn to a logical analysis of the so-called arguments of the Islamophobes.

Deconstructing the phobia’s assumptions: a unitary Islam

Let’s take the arguments one by one beginning with the argument of a unitary Islam.

Most of us are at least vaguely aware that there are different Islamic movements/schools/traditions in different countries. We have heard of Shias and Sunni, some have also heard about Alawites or Sufism. Some will even go so far as remembering that Muslim countries can be at war with each other, and that some Muslims (the Takfiris) only dream about killing as many other Muslims (who, obviously, don’t share the exact same beliefs) and that, in fact, movements like al-Qaeda, ISIS, etc have murdered other Muslims in huge numbers. So the empirical evidence strongly suggest that this notion of a Muslim or Islamic unity is factually simply wrong.

Furthermore, we need to ask the obvious question: what *is* Islam?

Now, contrary to the hallucinations of some especially dull individuals, I am not a Muslim. So what follows is my own, possibly mistaken, understanding of what “core Islam” is. It is the acceptance of the following formula “There is no god but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God” or “lā ʾilāha ʾillā llāh muḥammadun rasūlu llā“. Note that “Allah” is not a name, it is the word “God” and “rasul” can be translated as “prophet”. There are also the so-called Five Pillars of Islam:

The Shahada or profession of faith “There is no god but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God“

The Salat or a specific set of daily prayers

The Zakat or alms giving

The Sawm or fasting

The Hadjj or pilgrimage to Mecca

That’s it! A person who fully embraces these five pillars is considered a Muslim. Or at least, so it would appear. The reality is, of course, much more complex. For the time being, I will just note that in this “core Islam” there is absolutely nothing, nothing at all, which could serve as evidence for any of the Islamophobic theories. Yes, yes, I know, I can already hear the Islamophobes’ objections: you are ignoring all the bad stuff in the Quran, you are ignoring all the bad stuff about spreading Islam by the sword, you are ignoring all the bad things Muhammad did in his life, you are ignoring the many local traditions and all the normative examples of the tradition (Sunnah and it’s Hadiths). Yeah, except you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say:

Islam is inherently evil/dangerous AND

use local/idiosyncratic beliefs and actions to prove your point!

If Islam by itself is dangerous, then it has to be dangerous everywhere it shows up, irrespective of the region, people, time in history or anything else.

If we say that sometimes Islam is dangerous and sometimes it is not, then what we need to look into is not the core elements of the Islamic faith, but instead we need to identify those circumstances in which Islam was not a threat to anybody and those circumstances when Islam was a threat to others.

Furthermore, if your argument is really based on the thesis that Islam is evil always and everywhere, then to prove it wrong all I need to do is find one, just ONE, example where Muslims and non-Muslims have lived in peace together for some period of time.

[Sidebar: while I was working on my Master’s Degree in Strategic Studies I had the fortune of having the possibility to take a couple of courses outside my field of specialization and I decided to take the most “exotic” course I could find in SAIS‘ curriculum and I chose a course on Sharia law. This was an excellent decision which I never regretted. Not only was the course fascinating, I had the chance of writing a term paper on the topic “The comparative status of Orthodox Christians in history under Muslim and Latin rule“. My first, and extremely predictable, finding was that treatment of Orthodox Christians by Muslim rulers ranged from absolutely horrible and even genocidal to very peaceful and kind. Considering the long time period considered (14 centuries) and the immense geographical realm covered (our entire planet from Morocco to Indonesia and from Russia to South Africa), this is hardly surprising. The core beliefs of Islam might be simple, but humans are immensely complicated beings who always end up either adding a local tradition or, at least, defending one specific interpretation of Islam. My second finding was much more shocking: on average the status of Orthodox Christians under the Papacy was much worse than under Muslim rule. Again, I am not comparing the status of Orthodox Serbs under Ottoman rule with the status of Orthodox Christians in modern Italy. These are extreme examples. But I do claim that there is sort of a conceptual linear regression which strongly suggests to us that there is a predictive (linear) model which can be used to make predictions and that the most obvious lesson of history is that the absolute worst thing which can happen to Orthodox Christians is to fall under their so-called “Christian brothers” of the West. A few exceptions here and there do not significantly affect this model. I encourage everybody to take the time to really study the different types of Muslim rulers in history, if only to appreciate how much diversity you will find].

Deconstructing the phobia’s assumptions: the “Muslim god” vs the “Christian God”

This is just about the silliest anti-Muslim argument I have ever heard and it come from folks inhabiting the far left side of a Bell Curve. It goes something like this:

We, Christians, have our true God as God, whereas the Muslims have Allah, which is not the God of the Christians. Thus, we worship different gods.

Of course, the existence of various gods or one, single, God does not depend on who believes in Him or who worships Him. If we can agree on the notion that God is He Who created all of Creation, and if we agree that both Christians (all denominations) and Muslims (all schools) believe that they are worshiping that God then, since there is only one real/existing God, we do worship the same God simply because there are not “other” gods.

I wonder what those who say that “Muslims worship another god” think when they read the following words of Saint Paul to the Athenian pagans: “For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, To The Unknown God. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you” (Acts 17:23). What Saint Paul told them is that they ignorantly worship a god whom, in spite of that ignorant worship, Saint Paul declared to them. I submit that “ignorant worship” is not an insult, but a diagnosis of heterodoxy, and that such an “ignorant worship” can nonetheless be sincere.

The issue is not WHOM we worship, but HOW we worship (in terms of both praxis and doxa).

And yes, here the differences between Christians and Muslims are huge indeed.

In my 2013 article “Russia and Islam, part eight: working together, a basic “how-to”” I discussed the immense importance of these differences and how we ought to deal with them. I wrote:

The highest most sacred dogmatic formulation of Christianity is the so-called “Credo” or “Symbol of Faith” (full text here; more info here). Literally every letter down to the smallest ‘i‘ of this text is, from the Christian point of view, the most sacred and perfect dogmatic formulation, backed by the full authority of the two Ecumenical Councils which proclaimed it and all the subsequent Councils which upheld it. In simple terms – the Symbol of Faith is absolutely non-negotiable, non-re-definable, non-re-interpretable, you cannot take anything away from it, and you cannot add anything to it. You can either accept it as is, in toto, or reject it.

The fact is that Muslims would have many problems with this text, but one part in particular is absolutely unacceptable to any Muslim:

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Only-begotten, Begotten of the Father before all ages, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, Begotten, not made; of one essence with the Father, by whom all things were made

This part clearly and unambiguously affirms that Jesus-Christ was not only the Son of God but actually God Himself. This is expressed by the English formulation “of one essence with the Father” (ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί in Greek with the key term homousios meaning “consubstantial”). This is *THE* core belief of Christianity: that Jesus was the the anthropos, the God-Man or God incarnate. This belief is categorically unacceptable to Islam which says that Christ was a prophet and by essence a ‘normal’ human being.

For Islam, the very definition of what it is to be a Muslim is found in the so-called “Shahada” or testimony/witness. This is the famous statement by which a Muslim attests and proclaims that “There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God”. One can often also hear this phrased as “There is no god but Allah, Muhammad is His prophet”.

Now without even going into the issue of whether Christians can agree or not that “Allah” is the appropriate name for God (some do, some don’t – this is really irrelevant here), it’s the second part which is crucial here: Christianity does not recognize Muhammad as a prophet at all. In fact, technically speaking, Christianity would most likely classify Muhammad as a heretic (if only because of his rejection of the “Symbol of Faith”). Saint John of Damascus even called him a ‘false prophet’. Simply put: there is no way a Christian can accept the “Shahada” without giving up his Christianity just as there is no way for a Muslim to accept the “Symbol of Faith” without giving up his Islam.

So why bother?

Would it not make much more sense to accept that there are fundamental and irreconcilable differences between Christianity and Islam and simply give up all that useless quest for points of theological agreement? Who cares if we agree on the secondary if we categorically disagree on the primary? I am all in favor of Christians studying Islam and for Muslims studying Christianity (in fact, I urge them both to do so!), and I think that it is important that the faithful of these religions talk to each other and explain their points of view as long as this is not presented as some kind of quest for a common theological stance. Differences should be studied and explained, not obfuscated, minimized or overlooked.

Bottom line is this: it is PRECISELY because Islam and Christianity are completely incompatible theologically (and even mutually exclusive!) that there is no natural enmity between these two religions unless, of course, some Christian or Muslim decides that he has to use force to promote this religion. And let’s be honest, taken as a whole Christianity’s record on forced conversions and assorted atrocities is at least as bad as Islam’s, or even worse. Of course, if we remove the Papacy from the overall Christian record, things looks better. If then we also remove the kind of imperialism Reformed countries engaged in, it looks even better. But even Orthodox rulers have, on occasion, resorted to forceful conversions and mass murder of others.

And here, just as in Islam, we notice that Christians also did not always spread their faith by love and compassion, especially once Christian rulers came to power in powerful empires or nations.

Deconstructing the phobia’s assumptions: Islam was spread by the sword

In reality the “Islam spread by the sword” is a total canard, at least when we hear it from folks who defend “democracy” but who stubbornly refuse to concede that 1) most democracies came to power by means of violent revolutions and that 2) just a look at a newspaper today (at least a non-western newspaper) will tell you that democracy is STILL spread by the sword. As for the USA as country, it was built on by far the biggest bloodbath in history. If anything, Sharia law and Islam could teach a great deal to the country which:

spends more on aggression than the rest of the world combined

has the highest percentage of people incarcerated (and most of these for non-violent crimes)

whose entire economy is based on the military-industrial complex

and who is engaged in more simultaneous wars of choice than any other country in history

So “Sharia Law Threatens America” is a lie. And this is the truth:

Was Islam really spread by the sword?

Maybe. But anybody making that claim better make darn sure that his/her religion, country or ideology has a much better record. If not, then this is pure hypocrisy!

Finally, I will also note that Christ said “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence” (John 18:36). In contrast, the Prophet of Islam established the first Islamic state in Medina. So when we compare Muhammad’s actions to Christ, a better comparison should be with the various Christian rulers (including Byzantine ones) and we will soon find out that the Christian Roman Empire also used the sword on many occasions.

Deconstructing the phobia’s assumptions: the Prophet of Islam was a bad man

You must have all sorts of stories about how the Prophet Muhammad did things we would disapprove of. I won’t list them here simply because the list of grievances is a little different in each case. I actually researched some of these accusations (about marrying young girls, or sentencing people to death for example) and in each case, there is a very solid Muslim defense of these incidents which is almost always ignored and which provides a crucial context to, at least, the better understanding of the incident discussed.

Since I am not a historian or a biographer of the Prophet Muhammad I don’t have any personal opinion on these accusations other than stating the obvious: I am not a Muslim and I don’t have to decide whether Muhammad was a sinful man or a infallible person (that is a purely theological argument). I will simply say that this ad hominem is only relevant to the degree that some Muslims would consider each action of their prophet as normative and not historical. Furthermore, even if they would consider each action of their prophet as normative, we need to recall here that we are dealing with a prophet, not a God-Man, and that therefore the comparison ought not to be made with Christ, whom Christians believe to be 100% sinless, but with a Christian prophet, say Moses, whom no real Christian will ever declare sinless or infallible. As for the Quran, let’s not compare it to just the New Testament but to all the books of the Bible taken together, including those who were eventually re-interpreted by the new religion of (some) Jews after the fall of Jerusalem: rabbinical/Phariseic Talmudism which found plenty of passages in its (deliberately falsified) “Masoretic” text of the Old Testament “Tanakh” (please see here if you don’t know what falsification I am referring to).

Finally, NO religious text worth anything is self-explanatory or “explains itself” by means of comparing passages. This is also why all major religions have a large corpus of texts which explain, interpret, expand upon and otherwise give the (deceptively simple looking) text its real, profound, meaning. Furthermore, most major religions also have a rich oral tradition which also sheds light on written religious documents. Whatever may be the case, simply declaring that “Islam is a threat” because we don’t approve of the actions of the founder of Islam is simply silly. The next accusation is much more material:

Deconstructing the phobia’s assumptions:Islam is incompatible with democracy

That is by far the most interesting argument and one which many Muslims would agree with! Of course, it all depends on what you mean by “democracy”. Let me immediately concede that if by “democracy” you mean this:

Then, indeed, Islam is incompatible with modern western democracy. But so is (real) Christianity!

So the so-called “West” has to decide what its core values are. If Conchita Wurst is an embodiment of “democracy” then Islam and Christianity are both equally incompatible with it. Orthodox Christianity, for sure, has not caved in to the homo-lobby in the same way most western Christian denominations have.

But if by “democracy” we don’t mean “gay pride” parades but rather true pluralism, true people-power, and the real sovereignty of the people, then what I call “core Islam” is not threat to democracy at all. None. However, there is also no doubt about two truisms:

Some Muslim states are profoundly reactionary and freedom crushing

Traditional Islam is incompatible with many modern “western values”

Still, it is also very easy to counter these truism with the following replies

Some Muslim states are pluralistic, progressive and defend the oppressed (Muslim or not)

Traditional Christianity is incompatible with modern “western values”

Again, Iran is, in my opinion, the perfect illustration of a pluralistic (truly diverse!), progressive and freedom defending Muslim state. I simply don’t have the time and place to go into a detailed discussion of the polity of Iran (I might have to do that in a future article), and for the time being I will point you to the hyper-pro-Zionist Wikipedia article (which nobody will suspect of being pro-Muslim or pro-Iranian) about the “Politics of Iran” which will show you two things: Iran is an “Islamic Republic” meaning that it is a republic, yes, but one which has Islam as its supreme law. There is absolutely nothing inherently less democratic about a Islamic republic which has a religion as its supreme law than a atheistic/secular republic which has a constitution as its supreme law. In fact, some countries don’t even have a constitution (the UK and Israel come to mind). As for the Iranian polity, it has a very interesting system of checks and balances which a lot of countries would do well to emulate (Russia for starters).

As for modern “western values”, they are completely incompatible with Christianity (the real, original, unadulterated thing) even if they are very compatible with modern western (pseudo-) Christian denominations.

So, now the question becomes: is there something profoundly incompatible between the real, traditional, Islam and the real, traditional, Christianity? I am not talking about purely theological differences here, but social and political consequences which flow from theological differences. Two immediately come to my mind (but there are more, of course):

The death penalty, especially for apostasy

Specific customs (dress code, ban on alcohol, separation of genders in various settings, etc.)

The first one, this is really a non-issue because while traditional, Patristic, Christianity has a general, shall we say, “inclination” against the death penalty, this has not always been the case in all Orthodox countries. So while we can say that by and large Orthodox Christians are typically not supporters of the death penalty, this is not a theological imperative or any kind of dogma. In fact, modern Russia has implemented a moratorium on the death penalty (to join the Council of Europe – hardly a moral or ethical reason) but most of the Russian population favor its re-introduction. Note that Muslims in Russia are apparently living their lives in freedom and overall happiness and when they voice grievances (often legitimate ones), they don’t have “reintroduce the death penalty” as a top priority demand.

The simple truth is that each country has to decide for itself whether it was the use the death penalty or not. Once a majority of voters have made that decision, members of each religion will have to accept that decision as a fact of law which can be criticized, but not one which can be overturned by any minority.

As for religious tribunals, they can be easily converted by the local legislature into a “mediation firm” which can settle conflicts, but only if both sides agree to recognize it’s authority. So if two Muslims want their dispute to be settled by an Islamic Court, the latter can simply act as a mediator as long as its decision does not violate any local or national laws. Hardly something non-Muslims (who could always refuse to recognize the Islamic Court) need to consider a “threat” to their rights or lifestyles.

An “Islamic Matrioshka”?!

As for the social customs, here it is really a no-brainer: apply Islamic rules to those who chose to be Muslims and let the other people live their lives as they chose to. You know, “live and let live”. Besides, in terms of dress code and gender differentiation, traditional Islam and traditional Christianity are very close.

Check out this typical Russian doll, and look at what she is wearing: this was the traditional Russian dress for women for centuries and this is still what Orthodox women (at least those who still follow ancient Christian customs) wear in Church.

Furthermore, if you go into a Latin parish in southern Europe or Latin America, you will often find women covering their heads, not only in church, but also during the day. The simple truth is that these clothes are not only modest and beautiful, they are also very comfortable and practical.

The thing which Islamophobes always miss is that they take examples of laws and rules passed by some Muslim states and assume that this is how all Muslim states will always act. But this is simply false. Let’s take the example of Hezbollah (that name means “party of God”, by the way) in Lebanon which has clearly stated on many occasions that it has no intention of transforming Lebanon into a Shia-only state. Not only did Hezbollah say that many times, but they acted on it and they always have had a policy of collaboration with truly patriotic Christians (of any denomination). Even in today’s resistance (moqawama) there are Christians who are not members of Hezbollah as a party (and why would they when this is clearly and officially a Muslim party and not a Christian one?!), but they are part of the military resistance.

[Sidebar: by the way, the first female suicide bomber in Lebanon was not a Muslim. She was a 18 year old from an Orthodox family who joined Syrian Social Nationalist Party and blew herself up in her car on an Israeli checkpoint (inside Lebanon, thus a legitimate target under international law!), killing two Israeli invaders and injuring another twelve. Her name was Sana’a Mehaidli]

A Hezbollah fighter respectfully picks up an image of the Mother of God from the ruins of a church destroyed by US-backed Takfiris

Recent events in Syria were also very telling: when the AngloZionist Empire unleashed its aggression against Syria and the “good terrorists” of al-Qaeda/al-Nusra/ISIS/etc. embarked in a wholesale program of massacres and atrocities, everybody ran for their lives, including all the non-Takfiri Muslims. Then, when the plans of the Axis of Kindness (USA, KSA, Israel) were foiled by the combined actions of Russia, Iran, Syria and Hezbollah, something interesting happened: the Latin Christians left, whereas the Orthodox Christians stayed (source). Keep in mind that Syria is *not* an Islamic state, yet the prospects of a Muslim majority was frightening enough for the Latins to flee even though the Orthodox felt comfortable staying. What do these Orthodox Christians know?

Could it be that elite traditionalist Shia soldiers represent no threat to Orthodox Christians?

Deconstructing the phobia’s assumptions: Islam generates terrorism

In fact, there is some truth to that too. But I would re-phrase it as: the AngloZionists in their hatred for anything Russian, including Soviet Russian, identified a rather small and previously obscure branch of Islam in Saudi Arabia which they decided to unleash against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. From the first day, these Takfiris were federated by the USA and financed by the House of Saud. The latter, in its fear of being overthrown by the Takfiris, decided to appease them by internationally supporting their terrorism (that is all Takfiris have to offer, their leaders are not respected scholars, to put it mildly). Since that time, the Takfiris have been the “boots on the ground” used by the West against all its enemies: Serbia, Russia first, but then also secular (Syria) or anti-Takfiri Muslim states (Iran).

So it is not “Islam” which generates terrorism: it is western (AngloZionist) imperialism.

The US and Israel are, by a wide margin, the biggest sponsors of terrorism (just as the West was always by far the biggest source of imperialism in history) and while they want to blame “Islam” for most terrorist attacks, the truth is that behind every such “Muslim” attack we find a western “deep state” agents acting, from the GIA in Algeria, to al-Qaeda in Iraq to al-Nusra in Syria to, most crucially, 9/11 in New York. These were all events created and executed by semi-literate Takfiri patsies who were run by agents of the western deep states.

As far as I know, all modern terrorist groups are, in reality, “operated by remote control” by state actors who alone can provide the training, know-how, finances, logistical support, etc needed by the terrorists.

And here is an interesting fact: the two countries which have done the most to crush Takfiri terrorism are Russia and Iran. But the collective West is still categorically refusing to work with these countries to crush the terrorism these western states claim to be fighting.

So, do you really believe that the West is fighting terrorism?

If yes, I got a few bridges to sell all over the planet.

Conclusion: cui bono? the so-called “liberals”

There are many more demonstratively false assumptions which are made by the AngloZionist propaganda machine. I have only listed a few. Now we can look to the apparent paradox in which we see the western “liberals” both denouncing Islamophobia and, at the same time, repeating all the worst cliches about Islam. In this category, Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton are the most egregious examples of this hypocrisy because while pretending to be friends of Muslims, they got more Muslims killed than anybody else. For western liberals, Islam is a perfect pretext to, on one hand, cater to minorities (ethnic or religious) while pretending to be extremely tolerant of others. Western liberals use Islam in the West, as a way to force the locals to give up their traditions and values. You could say that western liberals “love” Islam just like they “love” LGBTQIAPK+ “pride” parades: simply and only as a tool to crush the (still resisting) majority of the people in the West who have not been terminally brainwashed by the AngloZionist legacy corporate propaganda machine.

Conclusion: cui bono? the so-called “conservatives”

Western conservatism is dead. It died killed by two main causes: the abject failure of National-Socialism (which was an Anglo plan to defeat the USSR) and by its total lack of steadfastness of the western conservatives who abandoned pretty much any and all principles they were supposed to stand for. Before the 1990s, the conservative movements of the West were close to fizzling out into nothingness, but then the Neocons (for their own, separate, reasons) began pushing the “Islamic threat” canard and most conservatives jumped on it in the hope of using it to regain some relevance. Some of these conservatives even jumped on the “Christian revival in Russia” theory (which is not quite a canard, but which is also nothing like what the Alt-Righters imagine it to be) to try to revive their own, long dead, version of “Christianity”. These are desperate attempts to find a source of power and relevance outside a conservative movement which is basically dead. Sadly, what took the place of the real conservative movement in the West is the abomination known as “National Zionism” (which I discussed here) and whose ideological cornerstone is a rabid, hysterical, Islamophobia.

Conclusion: cui bono? the US deep state

That one is easy and obvious: the US deep state needs the “Islamic threat” canard for two reasons: to unleash against its enemies and to terrify the people of the USA so that they accept the wholesale destruction of previously sacred civil rights. This is so obvious that there is nothing to add here. I will only add that I am convinced that the US deep state is also supporting both the Alt-Right phenomenon and the various “stings” against so-called “domestic terrorists” (only only Muslims, by the way). What the Neocons and their deep-state need above all is chaos and crises which they used to shape the US political landscape.

Finally, the real conclusion: rate the source! always rate the source…

Whom did we identify as the prime sources of Islamophobia? The liberals who want to seize power on behalf of a coalition of minorities, conservatives who have long ditched truly conservative values and deep state agents who want to terrify US Americans and kill the enemies of the AngloZionist Empire.

I submit to you that these folks are most definitely not your friends. In fact, they are your real enemy and, unlike various terrorists abroad who are thousands of miles away from the USA, these real enemies are not only here, they are already in power and rule over you! And they are using Islam just like a matador uses a red cape: to distract you from the real threat: National Zionism. This is true in the US as it is true in the EU.

Most westerners are now conditioned to react with fear and horror when they hear “Allahu Akbar”. This is very predictable since most of what is shown in the western media is Takfiris screaming “Allahu Akbar” before cutting the throats of their victims (or rejoicing at the suffering/death of “infidels”).

Yet in the Donbass, the local Orthodox Christians knew that wherever that slogan (which simply means “God is greater” or “God is the greatest”) was heard the Ukronazis are on the run. And now we see Russia sending mostly Muslim units to Syria to protect not only Muslims, but everybody who needs protection.

Having a sizable Muslim minority in Russia, far from being any kind of threat, as turned to be a huge advantage for Russia in her competition against the AngloZionist Empire.

Chechens in Novorussia

There are, by the way, also Chechens fighting on the other side in this conflict: the very same Takfiris who were crushed and expelled from Chechnia by the joint efforts of the Chechen people and the Russian armed forces. So, again, we have Muslims on both sides, the Takfiris now happily united with the Nazis and the traditionalist Muslims of Kadyrov protecting the people of Novorussia.

That is one, amongst many more, nuances which the Islamophobic propaganda always carefully chooses to ignore.

Should you?

The Saker

#Religion

0 notes

thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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The Massacre That Spawned the Alt-Right

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-massacre-that-spawned-the-alt-right/

The Massacre That Spawned the Alt-Right

“Death to the Klan!” On Saturday, November 3, 1979, that chant swept over Morningside Homes, a mostly black housing project in Greensboro, North Carolina, as dozens of protesters—some donning blue hard hats for protection—hammered placards onto signposts and danced in the morning sun.

The American left had largely given up on communism by then, but these demonstrators were full-on Maoists. Their ranks included professionals with degrees from places like Harvard and Duke. And they were descending on Greensboro, a city where sit-ins helped launch the civil rights movement in 1960, to ignite another revolution. They danced to a guitar player singing, “Woke up this morning with my mind set to build the Party.” Their children dressed in tan military shirts and red berets. They even brought an effigy of a Klansman, dressed in a white sheet and hood, which kids from the neighborhood joined in punching.

Story Continued Below

The communists planned to begin their march at noon, moving from the housing project to a local shopping center. But just after 11:20, a caravan filled with real Klansmen and Nazis surprised them, snaking through the neighborhood’s narrow byways. As the protesters stood their ground, a man in a white T-shirt leaned out the passenger window of a canary-yellow pickup truck, and yelled, “You asked for the Klan. Now you got ‘em!” The station wagon behind him carried four Nazis. Seven more vehicles followed, carrying nearly 30 more men, including an Imperial Wizard of the Klan.

What happened next took just 88 seconds, but still reverberates 40 years later. In a confrontation where white supremacists began firing pistols, rifles and shotguns, and with television cameras rolling but police nowhere to be found, five communists were shot dead in broad daylight. Ten others were injured, some left to lie bleeding in the streets.

But that November morning became momentous for more than the grotesque video footage that still lives on the Internet: The Greensboro Massacre, as it became known, was the coming-out bloodbath for the white nationalist movement that is upending our politics today.

Before Greensboro, America’s most lurid extremistslargely operated in separate, mutually distrustful spheres. Greensboro was the place where the farthest-right groups of white supremacy learned to kill together. After November 3, 1979, it was suddenly possible to imagine Confederate flags flying alongside swastikas in Charlottesville. Or a teenager like Dylann Roof hoarding Nazi drawings as well as a Klan hood in his bedroom while he plotted mass murder.

Today, white nationalism is closer to the mainstream of American politics than ever before. The far right’s fears about “replacement” of the white race and outsider “invasions” have become standard tropes at conservative media outlets, and its anger is routinely stoked by the president of the United States. At the same time, right-wing violence is on the rise: Far-right terrorists accounted for the overwhelming majority of extremist murders in the U.S. last year, according to a January report by the Anti-Defamation League.

The seeds for this iteration of white supremacy were planted 40 years ago in Greensboro, when the white wedding of Klansmen and Nazis launched a new, pan-right extremism—a toxic brew of virulent racism, anti-government rhetoric, apocalyptic fearmongering and paramilitary tactics. And this extremism has proven more durable than anyone then could imagine.

***

Segregationists of the Greatest Generation,who fought German soldiers on the battlefields of World War II, would have thought it beyond preposterous for the Klan and Nazis to make common cause. Adolf Hitler drew inspiration from Jim Crow, but American southerners strongly supported going to war against Nazi Germany. In 1946, a list of American Nazi Party members, obtained by the U.S. Army, showed that just two percent lived in the South. Nazis were dedicated to the violent overthrow of the government, as part of their program of genocidal fascism. Through the 1950s, most neo-Confederates considered themselves patriotic Americans and had faith in the U.S. political system, even as they believed in and practiced white supremacy.

But many southern traditionalists experienced the upheavals of the next two decades as a series of betrayals. By the mid-1970s, federal courts had embraced civil rights, and civic and business leaders were dismantling legal segregation. Manufacturing, textile and tobacco jobs were vanishing. Politicians on the cosmopolitan left and corporate right were abandoning blue-collar voters. Vietnam veterans were coming home unappreciated and embittered. In addition, the FBI, after years of pursuing black nationalists, began infiltrating and undermining local Ku Klux Klans through a program, largely forgotten today, called COINTELPRO-White Hate. To be sure, only a small fraction of angry southerners turned to terror groups. But the Klan’s membership grew in the ’70s, and so did its public support. Gallup reported in 1979 that 11 percent of white Americans viewed the KKK favorably, up from just six percent in 1965. And with that rebound came something more: Those who were susceptible to recruitment were far more likely than their parents or grandparents to see the U.S. government itself as an alien force bent on destroying the white way of life.

Meanwhile,American Nazis were expanding their public presence. Some younger would-be fuhrers began trading armbands for sport coats and toning down their rhetoric in media appearances in order to seem more palatable.Other Nazi leaders, like William Pierce, head of the white separatist National Alliance, started looking for partners and muscle, hoping to turn far-right fanatics from vigilantes to insurrectionists. In 1978, Pierce publishedThe Turner Diaries, a futurist fantasy-cum-blueprint for all-out race war. In Pierce’s novel, oppressed whites join forces to create an underground organization that bombs New York and murders thousands of black and Jewish people, among many other horrific acts; the book’s protagonist ultimately flies a nuclear warhead into the Pentagon.The Turner Diarieswas a huge hit with the far right, and has influenced a wide spectrum of racists—and inspired notorious hate crimes—ever since.

It wasn’t just avowed racists who gravitated to new extremes. In the weird, unusually rootless time between Watergate and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, America’s faith in public institutions collapsed, cynicism soared and belief in a wide range of conspiracy theories and cults, from UFOs to the Unification Church, sprouted in popularity. But those rooted in racial resentment took hold in especially bitter soil. White supremacists of all stripes came to believe they faced annihilation, and they prepared to fight it on the home front. The country, in other words, was primed for a fusion of the ultra-right.

***

The story of the Greensboro Massacrereally begins with an episode that occurred in the summer of 1979, in a tiny, working-class city 60 miles to the southwest, called China Grove.

Klan leaders in North Carolina had spent the first half of the year stepping up their recruitment efforts by appealing to the heritage of white supremacy. The Federated Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, for example, staged a historical exhibit at the Forsyth County Library—and in an early sign of what was to come, a group of Nazis showed up to ogle the items on view, surprising the media.

On July 8, the same North Carolina Klan faction tried to screenThe Birth of a Nation,the 1915 racist epic that depicts heroic figures in white hoods trying to beat back the scourge of Reconstruction at the turn of the century, at the China Grove Community Center. But before they could show the movie, more than a hundred protesters, led by communists from Durham and Greensboro, marched on the building, chanting “Death to the Klan!” and “Decease the rotten beast.” Many carried pipes and chains.

The Grand Dragon of the Federated Knights, a pot-bellied mason named Joe Grady, stood on the porch outside the building with some 20 men in robes and white-power t-shirts, rifles drawn, while members of the China Grove police force struggled to create a human buffer. Grady’s men were eager to fire on the crowd, but a policeman who walked up to him whispered that if they did, the officers trying to keep the peace were the ones who would get hurt. Grady reluctantly agreed to move into the musty bingo hall, where women and children who had been watching the approaching crowdwere hiding. Once the Klansmen retreated, a cheer rose up from the protesters, who burned a pair of Confederate flags.

Afterwards, once the crowd was gone and the screening cancelled, Grady re-emerged to face the news cameras. Grabbing a shred of burned flag, he vowed, “There will be revenge for this.” But while Grady put on a brave face for the remaining television cameras, in the eyes of his hooded peers, he had committed a cardinal sin. He had allowed himself to look weak.

By that point, the Klan’s resurgence was already triggering confrontations around the country. In Decatur, Alabama, in May 1979, more than a hundred armed Klansmen blocked a civil rights march. Later, that August, rock-throwing protesters pelted Klansmen at an anti-immigration meeting in Castro Valley, California. None of those episodes led to lethal retaliatory violence, however. China Grove was different because it got the attention of a young Nazi named Harold Covington.

Born about 20 miles east of Greensboro, Covington had attended an integrated high school in Chapel Hill, where he proudly called himself the “school fascist.” Jowly and glib, Covington traveled to South Africa where he built a minor reputation as a soldier-for-hire who’d taken up arms to defend apartheid. By the time he resettled in North Carolina and launched a losing but surprisingly well-run campaign for Raleigh city council, Covington had become an articulate, publicity-seeking ideologue, with a sideline writing campy novels—a kind of L. Ron Hubbard of the racist resistance.

With a sense of himself as a global figure, Covington regarded most Klansmen he met as boorish. The backlash to China Grove convinced him they were also in disarray.And Covington saw no one in the back-country klaverns of North Carolina capable of stepping into the void. Long before he would become a YouTube provocateur by posting white-power videos online, Covington decided to herd them into a single white-power army himself.

In a preview of 8Chan, the message-board website that would become a haven for white nationalists in the 2010s, he began bringing together various strains of supremacists, or as he put it, “normalizing relations.” His early attempts didn’t go well. The few Klan members he was able to woo were largely fabulists who made up stories to make themselves seem more violent than they really were. Deciding he needed to get a better cut, Covington organized a racist retreat on September 22 at a borrowed farm outside Louisburg, about 30 miles northeast of Raleigh, and sent word through the bars, garages and diners where “his people” hung out that they were all invited.

With the media dutifully attending what promised to be a freakshow, no detail was too small for Covington to stage-manage. Kids milled around a barbecue pit where a whole hog roasted, while parents doused a huge cross in kerosene. Nazis wore uniforms budgeted at $25 for tailored pants, $10 for boots and $2 for arm bands. The sound system alternated bluegrass tunes and “The Ride of the Valkyries.” A cute blonde in a “White Power” t-shirt sauntered with a Doberman and a rifle for photographers. In a crib, a baby wore a small shirt that read “Future Klansman.” For extra inspiration, a noose hung from a tree.

Late in the afternoon, a caravan of 20 Klansmen pulled into the farm led by a gaunt mechanic with a plunging jawline named Virgil Griffin. Griffin carried the title of Imperial Wizard of a backwoods klavern known as the Invisible Empire in Mount Holly, close to the South Carolina border. But he was also something of a joke on the national stage. His rallies, unlike Covington’s barbecue, were often threadbare affairs that dissolved into chaos. At one event, he’d been shouted down by protesters singing the theme song from “The Mickey Mouse Club,” according to an account from a community journalist, Elizabeth Wheaton, who covered radical politics around Greensboro.

If Covington looked in the mirror and saw a worldwide revolutionary, Griffin viewed himself as a backwoods patriot. After the China Grove debacle, he concluded that local Klans needed better leadership and more action, and believed he could provide both. Covington was only too happy to help feed such ambitions, elaborately making the Imperial Wizard feel like an honored guest among the other extremists—who also included the Klansmen who had peeled off from the Grady’s Federated Knights after China Grove, and a Nazi-curious crew from Winston-Salem.

The extremists nattered about where to buy guns and how to deal with the summer heat—Klan robes were sweatier than Nazi uniforms. And they found common ground.

“You take a man who fought in the Second World War, it’s hard for him to sit down in a room full of swastikas,” a Klansman told the Associated Press, which published a report about the event called “North Carolina United Racist Front Forms.” Then he added: “But people realize time is running out. We’re going to have to get together.”

***

What Virgil Griffin didn’t knowwas that one of his closest allies was keeping the cops informed about this new alliance.

Unlike the years after 9/11 when American law enforcement took its focus off white nationalism to fight Islamist terror, the 1960s and ’70s were a period of robust intelligence-gathering in the supremacist underground. One of North Carolina’s most charismatic Klansmen, a car salesman named Bob Jones who recruited 12,000 members to his state chapter, was undone by an aide whose information led to him being dragged before Congress and held in contempt. In the case of Griffin, law enforcement’s material came from a chain-smoking handyman named Eddie Dawson.

Born in New Jersey, Dawson cut an odd figure for a Southern Klansman. He spoke with a twitchy northern accent and had an uncanny resemblance to the Hollywood actor William Holden. Having drifted down to Greensboro in the early ’60s—a time when black activists were staging sit-ins at segregated lunch counters—he managed to get invited to a meeting of the Klan, and quickly established himself as an enthusiastic recruit. In one career-building episode, he took an armed joy ride through a poor black neighborhood that he peppered with rifle fire.

Dawson, however, blamed the KKK for letting him get sentenced to nine months in jail after he was convicted of assault with intent to kill for the joy ride. He was still bitter when an FBI agent approached him at a coffee shop after he got out in 1969, and offered to pay him $25 every time he told the Bureau about a Klan meeting. Dawson shook hands on the deal.

His time with the FBI ended the way most of his relationships did—unhappily. But Dawson resumed his double life a few weeks after Covington’s barbecue, when leaflets began appearing around Greensboro that announced a “Death to the Klan” march. The posters were the work of a group called the Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO), which was filled with professionals who had elite-school degrees, identified as Maoists, and used revolutionary rhetoric to match. They had attempted to organize local textile workers, then tried direct action by taking part in the anti-KKK protest at China Grove. Now, they were itching for another, more visible confrontation with the Klan.

The leftists had plausible reasons for choosing to organize and demonstrate in North Carolina. At the end of the ’70s, the state ranked 49th in the U.S. in blue-collar wages and dead last in the percentage of workers who were unionized. But neither Duke educations nor medical training nor Maoist ideology prepared them to comprehend the culture of electricians, loggers or sheet-metal workers—jobs held by some of the men who would ride the caravan into Greensboro—beyond seeing them as either recruitable proletarians or irredeemable racists. The communists used language even more incendiary than the words on their flyers. On October 11, for instance, they issued a press release saying the KKK “must be physically beaten back, eradicated, exterminated, wiped off the face of the earth.” And they took exactly the wrong message from China Grove: that the Klan would be too cowardly to mount any resistance to them.

Instead, WVO’s leaflet lit a flame under Griffin and the Klan. It also alarmed the police in Greensboro. Soon, a detective who knew Dawson’s FBI past was talking with him about disrupting local meetings of communists, which made perfect sense. After all, the KKK rated communists about the same as black people. But Dawson had another angle, too: He could help the police investigate the Klan. With a highly-developed sense of grievance that often left him feeling under-appreciated and under-used, he saw a chance to become the one who was pulling the strings—both as an informant and as an instigator—as confrontations heated up.

On Saturday, October 20, when Griffin marched his Invisible Empire through the fairgrounds in Lincoln County, about 100 miles southwest of Greensboro, and told a crowd of 150 that if they cared about their children, they would “kill a hundred niggers and leave them dead in the street.” At a members-only meeting afterward, he introduced Dawson to talk about the planned WVO march. Towering over the 5-foot-6 Griffin, Dawson started out by warning that the communists were recruiting busloads of black college students to flood into Greensboro. Asked whether it would be a good idea to bring guns, he demurred. “I’m not your father,” he replied. “But if you carry a gun, you better have damned bond money.”

The vote among those in the audience was unanimous: They’d go to Greensboro to make their presence felt. The following weekend, as word spread, white supremacist groups met in at least three different locations around North Carolina and agreed to head there, too.

Dawson earned $50 by telling the Greensboro PD about the October 20 meeting. And he let them know Griffin was planning to come to town and looking for allies. But Dawson neglected to mention his own starring role, or the fact he subsequently drove around Morningside Homes in his Cadillac late at night, pasting leaflets over the “Death to the Klan!” posters. His replacements featured a dark figure hanging from a noose and the phrase, “It’s time for some old-fashioned American Justice.”

The Nazi camp, meanwhile, was getting just as frothy. At a November 1 event that Covington staged for the media in the garage of a sheet-metal worker named Roland Wayne Wood, a dozen of his recruits mugged through a made-for-TV roast of the disgraced China Grove wizard, Joe Grady.

Once the cameras departed, the united racists got down to the business of how they planned to crash the communists’ party in Greensboro. One suggested throwing eggs. Another went further, saying he had a pipe bomb that would be effective if thrown into a crowd. At 11:00 p.m., the group gathered around a television to watch themselves on the local news, only to become infuriated when a press conference held by the WVO’s members got more airtime. As the screen showed one of the march leaders calling the KKK “scum,” Jerry Paul Smith, the Klansman with the pipe bomb, took his gun and pointed it at the TV.

Police reports would later quote Wood as saying that he heard Smith mutter, “Kill the communist.”

***

On the morning of November 3,Dawson called his Greensboro Police contact to say that three dozen supremacists from around the state, including Virgil Griffin, were assembling at a house owned by one of Dawson’s Klan pals, a few miles from the Morningside Homes march site.

A little later, Dawson called again to warn that the place was chock full of firearms. But that information never made its way to the shift commander, who wrapped up a daily briefing at about 10:30 that morning by reminding his men the parade permit listed a start time of noon. The officers could get breakfast, he said, so long as they were on the route by 11:30.

As the Klansmen and Nazis made their way along Interstate 85 into Greensboro, a Greensboro Police detective spotted the caravan and called in to ask if tactical units were in place. His supervisor, showing no special concern, replied that there was still “another fourteen minutes by my watch” for breakfast.

The leftists planned to line up their crew at 11:00, then begin marching at noon. But at 11:22, a frightening transmission came over a CB radio: Klansmen were talking about closing in. Before the protesters could react, cars with Confederate-flag license plates began approaching. There were no cops in sight.

Dawson, who was leading the convoy, would later tell police and reporters that he merely wanted to put a scare into the Maoists before driving on to the spot at the shopping center where the march would end. It was Dawson who yelled, “You asked for the Klan. Now you got ’em!”

But then Griffin’s white LTD screeched and swerved, nearly hitting a marcher. The caravan came to a stop. The communists went from singing to swinging, banging their placards on the cars. Members of the convoy poured out, punching through the melee, grabbing weapons. Dawson told his driver to get the hell out of there—and since they were in the first car of the caravan, they were able to split.

The WVO had packed a few weapons, but were seriously outgunned. One of the WVO leaders, a physician named Jim Waller, lunged for a 12-gauge shotgun he’d stashed in a car, but a Klansman flew toward him before he could fire. The two rolled in the grass, fighting nose-to-nose over the weapon until others started piling on top of them and the pump mechanism snapped. Waller screamed as the pump-action crushed the bones in his shooting hand.

Amidst the chaos, other white supremacists lined up their shots. A Nazi named Jack Fowler opened the trunk of a blue Ford Fairlane and, with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, handed out rifles and shotguns. David Matthews, from Griffin’s Klan, stood behind the door of a van and nailed his first target, a bookish pediatrician named Mike Nathan. Then Matthews took down an organizer named Jim Wrenn, who was crawling on his belly. Bill Sampson, a former Harvard Divinity student, tried to give Wrenn rifle cover but took two fatal shots in the heart.

Roland Wayne Wood observed Waller writhing from his crushed hand. Coolly aiming his shotgun, the Nazi delivered a blast into the physician’s right side. Matthews, the Klan member, finished the job with another blast into Waller’s back.

The convoy sped away, with Matthews’ van the last to leave the scene. Climbing aboard, Matthews let the rest of squad know: “I got three of ’em.” Moments later, police intercepted the van, but didn’t get to Morningside Homes until the shooting was over.

***

Eighty-eight seconds of gunfirein Greensboro marked the worst violence in the South since the 1960s. And for the men who shot their enemies dead, November 3, 1979, was just the beginning of a new era of notoriety and collaboration. The botched trials and political response that followed ensured that white nationalism would grow to become more dangerous than ever today.

The legal system took three whacks at the Greensboro conspirators. First, police rounded up 14 Klansmen and Nazis, and the state of North Carolina charged most of them with first-degree murder and felony riot. Prosecutors lined up eyewitnesses, videotapes, weapons and FBI ballistics analysis. But they couldn’t convince the surviving revolutionaries—who were stubbornly convinced the cops had conspired to leave them unprotected—to cooperate.

At trial, the Klansmen and Nazis wrapped themselves in the American flag and argued self-defense. “They acted like men to aid someone in distress,” Wood’s lawyer claimed. “They would not have been worthy of anyone’s respect if they had done otherwise.” He added that his client just wanted to sing, “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

On November 17, 1980, an all-white jury found the Klansmen and Nazis not guilty. “Anytime you defeat communism,” said Jerry Pridmore, one of the men acquitted, “it’s a victory for America.”

The U.S. Justice Department then charged nine Klansmen and Nazis, this time including Griffin and Dawson, with conspiracy to violate the civil rights of the Greensboro victims. In April 1984, the federal jury, also all-white, refused to conclude the defendants had violated the law by acting out of racial rather than political hatred. It too delivered not-guilty verdicts across the board.

Finally, the victims filed a $48-million lawsuit against 87 defendants, including the city of Greensboro, the state of North Carolina, the Justice Department and the FBI. Wood, now on trial for the third time, felt confident enough to give a Nazi salute when sworn to testify.

In June 1985, the civil jury delivered a landmark yet twisted verdict: They found eight defendants liable for wrongful death: Dawson, five Klan and Nazi shooters, the Greensboro police detective who received advance word about the attack from Dawson and the lieutenant who was the GPD event commander at the massacre. But the jury applied that decision only in the case of Michael Nathan, the one murder victim who wasn’t a WVO member at the time of the shootings. To avoid appeals, the city of Greensboro settled for $351,000, sending a check to Nathan’s widow, who split it among the survivors.

Strike three.

The supremacists who emerged from the Greensboro trials understood they were free. Free not just to stay out of prison, or to keep burning rags and kvetching about the price of jackboots. Free to work together to stockpile weapons, terrorize neighborhoods and commit violence up to and including murder—so long as their opponents were communists.

“The Klan and Nazis felt emboldened,” says Patricia Clark, a veteran Klan watcher who served on the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which local citizens set up in the mid-2000s to investigate the massacre. “They thought they won the fight.”

By 1980, membership in Klan-Nazi fusion groups began to outnumber that of old-school Klans. And as horizons of hate broadened and merged, alliances deepened around the country. As just one example, four months after Greensboro, the California Knights of the Ku Klux Klan rallied in the city of Oceanside and beat counter-protesters with baseball bats. The marchers brayed a version of “Sixteen Tons,” the old coal-mining song. Their rewritten lyrics celebrated the Greensboro killings and ended, “If the Nazis don’t get you, a Klansman will.”

The increasing unity of far-right factions was more than tactical. By transfusing “blood and soil” into American racism, it led to what historian John Drabble called in a 2007 study “the Nazification of the Ku Klux Klan.” That was bad news for hustlers like Eddie Dawson. Dawson managed to dodge Klan retribution for informing. But he soon found it much harder to profit from playing different extremists against one another. Greensboro turned Dawson into a relic—and the hardening ideology of right-wing terror networks that followed made them harder for the FBI to penetrate.

Meanwhile, new doors swung wide open for fanatics like Frazier Glenn Miller, a Covington acolyte and former Green Beret who rode in the Greensboro caravan. Miller founded the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1980. And by merging Klan and Nazi symbolism while instilling paramilitary discipline in his followers, he quickly built the strongest white-power group in the state.

As an emboldened white-power movement spread, Miller connected its dots. The Greensboro veteran held public marches, harassed local black residents and amassed huge caches of explosives. In 1987, he issued a revolutionary “Declaration of War” filled with calls for assassinations. He coordinated with The Order, a violent extremist group inspired byThe Turner Diaries. And he sought allies through voluminous racist literature and eventually on the Internet, where he extolled the mass shooting by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway. Miller returned to racist murder in 2014, when he targeted a Jewish community center in Overland Park, Kansas, and killed three people. That landed him on death row, where he sits today.

Greensboro’s aftershocks held their most important lessons for mainstream opportunists. By the end of the 1970s, southern nationalists had spent more than a decade trying to re-code their racism to make it more palatable. As master political consultant Lee Atwater put it: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights.”

Republican politicians soon realized they could go even farther. After Greensboro, it became clear that, as historian Kathleen Belew has written, extremists “increasingly used anticommunism as an alibi for racial violence.” And by targeting the far right’s dual paranoias—federal authority and socialism—GOP operatives were able to harness its nativism while hanging onto the votes of establishment conservatives.

Over the next 30 years, Republicans racked up spectacular gains in state legislative seats, governorships and U.S. Senate elections across the South by hammering cultural issues that the far right recognized as approving winks. A decade after Greensboro, establishment candidates were already posing in front of rebel flags and openly courting “white heritage” groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The GOP advanced most in counties where the Klan had been active in the ’60s, according to a 2014 study by political scientists from Notre Dame, Brandeis and Yale.

During the administration of President Barack Obama, the new generation of conservative politicians had the extremists’ backs. In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report forecasting a rise in racist violence. Republicans objected so vociferously that DHS rescinded the projection and silenced its domestic terrorism unit. Mike Pompeo, then a congressman from Kansas, said it was “dangerous” to track homegrown violence.

By that point it was hard to tell who was co-opting whom on the right. Republicans were playing to the fringe without worrying where their most incitable elements might channel their anger.

And you know what happened next: Jonah turned the whale inside out. Donald Trump’s bald invocations of racial and working-class grievances made him a hero to the ultras; “MAGA” is the most common word in Twitter user profiles among members of the alt-right, according to a study by J.M Berger of the research network VOX-Pol. From Charlottesville to Pittsburgh to El Paso, right-wing attacks have surged. The latest evidence: The FBI made almost 100 arrests related to domestic terrorism by July of this year, more than in all of 2018, according to agency director Christopher Wray, who told Congress the majority of cases involved “white supremacist violence.”

In Greensboro, private citizens tried to find a way forward by empaneling a Truth & Reconciliation Commission—the first in U.S. history. But today’s political landscape, where the language and resentments of white nationalism have taken deeper root than ever, raises the question: What happens when there is no reconciliation in truth?

Twenty-six years after the massacre, Virgil Griffin surprised everyone at the Greensboro Commission by showing up and taking questions.

Asked why no Klansman was killed in the shootings, he answered: “Maybe God guided the bullets.”

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aion-rsa · 8 years ago

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Inhumans’ Mad Maximus: Get To Know Black Bolt’s Evil Brother

With the upcoming “Inhumans” series pulling off the note-perfect casting of Iwan Rheon (Ramsey Bolton from “Games of Thrones”) as Maximus, we figured that it would be nice to provide a spotlight on the main villain of the “Inhumans” stories, who also happens to be the brother of the most famous member of the Inhumans, Black Bolt.

RELATED: Inhumans Casts Game Of Thrones Alum As Maximus The Mad

Maximus is one of the rare supervillains who made his first appearance after his master plan had already been successful. When we first meet Maximus in “Fantastic Four” #47 (by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and Joe Sinnott), he had already taken control of the Inhuman people, wresting the crown from his brother, Black Bolt.

However, like many Marvel villains from the Silver Age, Maximus’ undoing proved to be his obsession with a woman who wanted nothing to do with him. The first Inhuman to be introduced in the pages of Marvel Comics was Medusa, who we first met as a criminal as part of the Frightful Four. It later turned out that she had lost her memory after she left the Great Refuge, the hidden city where the Inhumans lived. The Fantastic Four then met the rest of the Inhumans when Maximus decided to send Gorgon to find Medusa, with the intent of then forcing her to marry Maximus. This was enough to get Black Bolt to get his head together and decide to take control of the Inhuman race once again.

RELATED: Inhumans: Marvel Casts Its Live-Action Black Bolt

The scene where Maximus loses his crown to Black Bolt is both a stunning example of Jack Kirby’s storytelling brilliance, and a sign of just how quick Maximus is to adjust to new situations. When Black Bolt takes the crown back, Maximus is at first shocked and angry, but almost instantly he realizes the best play is to suck up to Black Bolt, so he goes from anger to fake happiness in a matter of seconds.

Of course, since he’s a comic book villain, Maximus still tried to play not one, but two trump cards. First, he unleashed a device that he thought would annihilate the human race, leaving only Inhumans on Earth. He figured that his brethren would totally be cool with the genocide if it meant that they were now the undisputed rulers of the planet, and moreover that they would overthrow Black Bolt and give control of the Inhumans to the man who killed the humans. When that device did not work, he went to his back-up plan, creating a “Negative Zone” (different from the other dimension that we would learn of just issues later) that would cut off the Great Refuge from the rest of the world. He figured his plans would have a better chance of succeeding if he had the humans out of his way.

RELATED: Inhumans: Marvel Casts Its Live-Action Black Bolt

Black Bolt used his powers to eventually break through the barrier created by Maximus. After a plot with some Inhuman criminals failed, Maximus once again successfully conquered the Inhumans when he used a hypno-gun to mollify the masses and get himself declared ruler of the Inhumans in “Fantastic Four” #83 (by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and Joe Sinnott). This time his reign involved an awesome Jack Kirby/Joe Sinnott full-page splash…

Luckily, Black Bolt and the rest of the Royal Family broke free from the prison Maximus threw them in and they helped prevent Maximus from successfully using his hypno gun on the rest of the world.

The Inhumans then gained their own ongoing feature in the pages of “Amazing Adventures,” initially written and drawn by Jack Kirby, but he then left Marvel. Roy Thoams, Neal Adams and Tom Palmer took over the creative duties on the title and they revealed that after Maximus has attempted (and failed) to cause a war between the Inhumans and the Fantastic Four in the opening story arc in “Amazing Adventures,” Black Bolt had locked him up in suspended animation. Gorgon and the other Royals thought that that is was cruel and unusual punishment, so in “Amazing Adventures” #5 they let him go, but they quickly learned that Black Bolt had discovered that Maximus’ latent psionic powers had returned and that if he was free, he would use his abilities to take control of Attilan, which is precisely what he did as soon as he was freed.

This storyline ended up resolved during the “Kree/Skrull War,” as the Avengers helped Black Bolt take back Attilan, where Maximus was in the midst a plot to sell Inhuman soldiers to the Kree.

That same basic idea was used the fourth time that Maximus took control of the Inhumans in the mid-1970s “Inhumans” ongoing series, namely “Inhumans” #5 (by Doug Moench, George Perez and Mike Esposito), where Maximus captured Crystal and her new husband, Quicksilver, and forced Black Bolt to abdicate the throne to him in exchange for their safety.

This one was the coup that finally made Black Bolt snap. Up until then (outside of the suspended animation period), he had insisted on keeping his brother around even as he kept trying to take control of Attilan, as he was his brother and he loved him. In addition, we eventually learned that Maximus had been driven mad when he and Black Bolt were children. The thing that had driven him mad was the first usage of Black Bolt’s tremendous sonic powers (the trauma from that usage also caused Maximus’ psionic powers to become dormant). Here, though, he ended up punching his brother and locking him up.

RELATED: INTERVIEW: Ewing’s Royals Embark on an Inhuman, Intergalactic Quest

For the next two decades, Maximus certainly tried to take over Attilan a number of times, but eventually he settled in as a sort of behind-the-scenes manipulator. It was in this role that he helped to almost cause an invasion of Attilan by the United States government in the classic “Inhumans” maxiseries by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee. In that series, Maximus really embraced the whole “mad” aspect of his identity, as he began acting exceedingly disturbed, but mostly worked more as a manipulator than as a direct aggressor.

However, all of his manipulations ultimately paid off big time in the miniseries “The Silent War” (by David Hine and Frazer Irving), where he manipulated Medusa into using Crystal’s daughter, Luna, to try to “cure” Maximus’ madness, but instead it unlocked a dark ability where Maximus was able to take control of the Inhumans people.

This did not last, and Black Bolt once again took control of the Inhumans. However, after Black Bolt’s death in the crossover “War of Kings,” for the first time Maximus did not try to thrust himself into the seat of power, choosing instead to let Medusa take the crown and then try to manipulate her from behind the scenes.

Even when Black Bolt returned, Maximus chose to work with his brother and honestly, it seemed as though Maximus’ motives are somewhat purer than they were in previous years. He helped his brother create the Terrigan Bomb, the game-changer where any distant descendants of the Inhumans living as humans in the world would have their Inhuman heritage activated.

Maximus also discovered his brother’s role in the superhero Illuminati and Maximus soon found himself as part of the villain counterpart to the Illuminati, the Cabal, as they took it upon themselves to destroy alternate Earths to protect this Earth during events known as “incursions” when it was a choice of having two world collide or having one destroyed so that the other could live. He and his teammates chose “destroy the other worlds.” Eventually this failed and that led to the event known as the most recent “Secret Wars.”

Most recently, Maximus’ madness has led to him just coming up with plans to mess with people mostly just to entertain himself. He rode both sides of the Inhumans vs. Iron Man conflict during “Civil War II” and he is currently helping to push along the “Inhumans vs. X-Men” crossover event, just for kicks.

The most interesting thing about Maximus is that his madness allows writers to pretty much do whatever they want with him. If they need a Machiavellian villain, he can be it. If they need an outright villain, he can be it. If they need an almost anti-hero who the Inhumans need despite themselves, he can be that, as well. He is almost the comic book version of the Man For All Seasons.

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aion-rsa · 8 years ago

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DC’s The Flintstones Was the Most Socially Relevant Comic of 2016

Had someone said a year ago that the sharpest social satire of 2016 would be a comic book revival of a 56-year-old animated comedy, we’d likely still be waiting for the laughter to fade. But while we did laugh at DC Comics’ “The Flintstones,” by writer Mark Russell and artist Steve Pugh, it was sometimes through tears. After all, 2016 was a pretty terrible year.

RELATED: CBR’s Top 100 Comics of 2016: #25-11

The original Hanna-Barbera cartoon was a thinly disguised spoof of “The Honeymooners” known for its juxtaposition of contemporary everyday life with a fanciful prehistoric setting, complete with anachronistic (and animal-powered) technology: Working-class family man Fred Flintstone operated the bronto-crane at the quarry, his wife Wilma swept the home with a baby woolly mammoth vacuum cleaner, and their neighbor Barney Rubble drove a wooden car that could be mistaken for an oversize pencil.

Those hallmarks are present in Russell and Pugh’s revival, of course, but never has the Modern Stone Age Family seemed so … modern, or so relevant to life in the present (occasionally painfully relevant). DC’s “The Flintstones” takes the satire of the 1960s animated series to another level, tapping into the darker corners of Bedrock — and modern-day life — for examinations of faith, politics, science, social institutions and morality. Suddenly, 100,000 years in the past doesn’t seem that long ago.

The Horrors of War

From “The Flintstones” #5, by Mark Russell and Steve Pugh

The first clues to Bedrock’s dark past appear early in “The Flintstones,” which exchanges Fred and Barney’s lodge, the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes, for the Veterans of Paleolithic Wars. Its members wear the same funny furry hats, which turn out to be part of a military uniform, but instead of boisterous meetings they participate in support groups, sharing raw memories of a massacre. “The poor bastards didn’t stand a chance,” a teary-eyed Joe recalls in the first issue. “We set fire to their trees. When the smoke cleared, there were dead Tree People everywhere!” That bloody picture begins to come into chilling focus in subsequent issues, as Fred reveals, “We participated in a genocide, Barney,” a phrase you’d never hear on the ’60s cartoon. It’s Bedrock’s original sin, committed at the behest of Mr. Slate and his political ally Mordok the Destroyer, who manufacture a threat from the Tree People — “Maybe they will come out to burn you alive as they devour the flesh of your children. Who knows?” — as the pretense for a war to seize their land to build the city. Needless to say, the truth emerges too late.

RELATED: DC’s “The Flintstones” is a Surprisingly Dark — and Honest — Satire

But haunted memories of the Bedrock Wars are only the beginning of the problems for veterans. When they returned from the battlefield, they were greeted by a ticker-tape parade, soon followed by unemployment, homelessness and, as a suicidal Joe discovers, a lack of support services. A counselor does, however, provide the veterans with a nonsense phrase to help them cope with tense situations — it turns out “Yabba-dabba-doo!” is the “Serenity now!” of the Stone Age — and they are given lip service, even if they’re left waiting for a statue. That’s still a better fate than the Tree People, whose inglorious memorial is the mascot of Bedrock Middle School (“Home of the Fighting Tree People”).

Exploitation of Labor

From “The Flintstones” #1, by Mark Russell and Steve Pugh

Quarry owner Mr. Slate wasn’t the most sympathetic character on the TV series, and this comic certainly doesn’t cast him in a softer light. Rewarded for his role in the Tree People genocide with access to the granite beneath their land, Mr. Slate builds his empire on the spoils of war and on the backs of his employees. Preoccupied with his own legacy, he has no qualms about trying to exploit the Neanderthals — not, as he believes, Cro-Magnons — who come to Bedrock with “no formal concept of money.” Seeking to woo them with a creepy hot tub party at his mansion, Slate ends up using his wealth to pressure them into first eating a tarantula and then attempting to kill a mammoth for his entertainment (the latter doesn’t end well, for either the caveman or the mammoth). “No offense,” one of the Neanderthals concludes, “but it seems like the whole point of civilization is to get someone else to do your killing for you.”

Of course, if Mr. Slate didn’t learn anything from an unjust war, a rebuke from a Neanderthal isn’t about to trigger personal growth. So when an employee is trapped in a cave-in at the quarry in this week’s Issue 7, his concern isn’t the man’s welfare but instead a looming deadline. “Well, shame about the new guy,” he tells Fred. “But life goes on, right?” In fairness, Mr. Slate does feel guilty enough about his actions to seek absolution from the church, and the poster at the quarry clearly reads, “Try Not to Die.”

Religion and Consumerism

From “The Flintstones” #2, by Mark Russell and Steve Pugh

Speaking of the church, “The Flintstones” devotes significant space to an exploration of the intersection of religion and consumerism, which in Bedrock (and, arguably, elsewhere) are inexorably linked. It’s probably unavoidable as these Stone Age people transition from a nomadic existence, during which they worshiped a crane named Morp, to a more leisurely, civilized life, where they worship … well, that’s a work in progress. When the residents of Bedrock grow tired of one god, the First Church of Animism must scramble to find another, which isn’t easy, especially in a town where animals are used as household appliances and industrial machinery — the octopus dishwasher, the moose hat rack, the triceratops bulldozer, and so on. Wilma is shocked to discover their new god, Peaches the baby woolly mammoth, is actually a vacuum cleaner, which leads to another crisis of faith, and the introduction of an invisible deity named Gerald. Ah, progress.

RELATED: DC’s Hero & Hanna-Barbera Creations to Cross Over in March Annuals

But just as the residents of Bedrock collect gods, they also find themselves hording “crap,” the term for all of those items the don’t really need — and, in the case of the Flintstones, can’t really afford — yet are compelled to purchase in ever-growing numbers. The mounting costs push Fred and Barney to take side jobs selling vitamin supplements, which is actually familiar territory for the duo.

Animal Exploitation

From “The Flintstones” #4, by Mark Russell and Steve Pugh

Although one of the trademarks of the “Flintstones” cartoon was its inventive use of animals as appliances and tools, there was little thought given to the ethics of the scenario, or the lives lived by the can opener or the lamp (aside from the occasional humorous protest). It was an animated comedy, after all. But in DC’s revival, the plight of these animals is seldom ignored, whether it’s when a bird-blender labels the Flintstones’ pet Dino a “traitor,” or when Fred returns some of their unwanted “crap” to the store, only to leave with a bloody bag of “appliance feed.”

As in the cartoon, it’s usually played for laughs. But there are also touching (even heartbreaking) moments, such as when, free of human supervision, the armadillo bowling ball befriends the Flintstones’ woolly mammoth-vacuum cleaner, who spends most of its time shut away, alone, in the closet. The ethical questions more relevant to contemporary readers arise when Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm’s class visits the Bedrock Cave of Science and Technology, where they witness a chimpanzee launched into space in the most “Flintstones” way possible (involving an enormous dinosaur dropped onto a lever; see below). “Wait — did they just kill a chimp to impress a bunch of eighth graders?” Pebbles asks.

Marriage Equality

From “The Flintstones” #4, by Mark Russell and Steve Pugh

As the citizens of Bedrock adapt to their fledgling civilization, they not only embrace new gods (goodbye, Morp; hello, Gerald), they also abandon old institutions, like the “sex cave,” which we’re told was the precursor to marriage. However, they don’t give it up without a fight. As the marriage debate rages around them — one television commentator labels it “an immoral threat our way of life,” while a passerby refers to married people as “disgusting” — Fred and Wilma head off to a church-run marriage retreat, to see if it’s right for them. Despite himself, the hapless minister makes a strong enough case for marriage, and for change, to convince retreat participants and a mob of protesters that the institution is the way forward — that is, until he’s confronted with a same-sex couple.

RELATED: Can DC’s “Scooby Apocalypse” Redeem Scrappy-Doo?

But when he balks at Adam and Steve (that’s their names, really), Fred springs into action, relating the important role the couple played when he was a child in a tribe of nomads. His plea for love and tolerance provides the minister with food for thought, although it’s clear he won’t dwell too long on it.

Politics

From “The Flintstones” #5, by Mark Russell and Steve Pugh

Much like their modern-day descendants, the people of Bedrock fail to learn from their past. Although their war with the Tree People remains a fresh wound, the election of a new mayor takes place against the backdrop of a looming conflict with the Lizard People. To cement the parallel, the populist candidate Clod the Destroyer is the son of Mordok the Destroyer, who bangs the drums of war just like his father. The crowd chants “Clod! Clod!” as one supporter cheers, “He says the things I wish were true!”

Meanwhile, Bedrock Middle School faces its own choice in the election of a student president: between the bully Ralph, who steals lunches and threatens to “punch you in the beef,” and Portnoy, who offers a perfectly reasonable proposal for decreasing the number of kids plucked off the playground by pterodactyls. Ralph wins the debate by bullying his opponent — at least until Pebbles, often the voice of reason, speaks up. As she lectures her classmates about voting against their self-interests, it’s not difficult to imagine she’s addressing an audience outside of her school, or even Bedrock.

A Tribute to David Bowie

From “The Flintstones” #3, by Mark Russell and Steve Pugh

The launch of the chimpanzee Sergeant Grumbles into space triggers a series of events that leads to an invasion by alien space bros seeking a new spring break destination, sheds light on the mistreatment of veterans of the Bedrock Wars and introduces that most hated of characters from “Flintstones” lore, the Great Gazoo. However, the most poignant aspect of the issue is the tribute to David Bowie, who passed away Jan. 10, 2016: Titled “A Space Oddity,” the story features a panel in which lyrics from the singer’s 1969 classic are used to touching, yet humorous, effect. Right before Grumbles is sent to his death, in the name of science.

“The Flintstones” #7, by Mark Russell and guest artist Rick Leonardi, is on sale now.

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