Tag Archives: freedom

The Devious Upstart Poor

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…the moment you take for granted that a metaphor is the equivalent of the thing it describes or points to, is the moment when that metaphor is effectively dead. It’s worse than useless for thinking with. But usually people go on using such metaphors long after they’ve ceased to generate any new ideas–which is one of the things a metaphor is supposed to help us do. People will just keep walking on in the resulting conceptual daze, because to think about it is like looking at the end of the world. Some will invest heavily in re-animating the corpse and blame the demise on the usual suspects: the all-powerful and infinitely devious upstart poor and other outsiders.  Kia in a comment at the Gift Hub

via wood s lot

The Veil en France

Posted on by elizabeth
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From Reuters via Vision.org:

STRASBOURG, France, Dec 4 (Reuters) – Europe’s human rights court on Thursday threw out a complaint by two French Muslim girls who were expelled from their school for refusing to remove their headscarves during sports lessons.

France, which takes secularism in state schools very seriously, passed a law in 2004 banning pupils from wearing conspicuous signs of their religion at school after a decade of bitter debate about Muslim girls wearing headscarves in class.

“The court observed that the purpose of the restriction on the applicants’ right to manifest their religious convictions was to adhere to the requirements of secularism in state schools,” the European Court of Human Rights said.

The two girls were 11 and 12 when they were expelled in 1999. After French courts ruled against them, they complained to the European court that their school had violated their freedom of religion and their right to an education.

The court, based in the eastern French city of Strasbourg, rejected both complaints by a unanimous ruling of seven judges.

It said the school had done its best to balance the interests of the girls with respect for France’s secular model, and their expulsion was a consequence of their refusal to respect rules of which they had been properly informed.

It also said they had been able to continue their education by correspondence classes.

The French veil debate divided a nation torn between its deep attachment to secularism and the need to accommodate Europe’s largest Muslim minority. It also raised questions about how the influence of Islam was changing Europe.

(Reporting by Gilbert Reilhac and Estelle Shirbon)  

© 2008 Reuters

Antigona in Britain

Posted on by elizabeth
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From New Statesman, a review of What Is She Doing Here?  The Story of a Kosovan Refugee in Britain by Kate Clanchy:

What Is She Doing Here? is a memoir tracing Kate Clanchy’s involvement as ally, employer and confidante of Antigona, a Kosovar refugee in Britain. Told with the colloquial intensity of a friend sharing her secrets over coffee, it has all the urgency of a story that needs to be told, one that gives a voice to the lives behind anti-immigration, anti-Muslim headlines.

Its pages are filled with women, Kosovar and British, city and country, girls and old ladies. In it, we have a scrapbook of female perspectives. The main threadline is Antigona’s escape across Europe with her daughters and son, and her resulting life in the United Kingdom. This is supplemented by scenes from her sisters’ lives in the Kosovo highlands and the tale of one daughter who ends up working in Miss Selfridge clad in a burqa. At the margins are the British women, struggling in their own ways, united by neurosis and concern over their performance as mothers, wives and career women.

The preface tells us to “consciously peer past” Clanchy’s presence in the text, and her “large, British, liberal behind”. The book, however, is crucially shaped by this “liberal behind”. Hers is a set of eyes we can trust. Her struggle to understand Antigona’s abusive husband mirrors our own, and her richly suggestive language, revealing her background as a poet, brings sinister undertones to the Kosovar women who gather to inspect the bridal bedsheets after a wedding night, to “read the sentence of the stain”. Such a western female perspective makes this more than “a refugee’s story”. It becomes instead a narrative of convergence; an exploration of being female, of cultural conditioning and, most importantly, of sisterhood.

[…] 

A cry to sisterhood rings out from the heart of the memoir: “If we want to be feminists, if we want women to be free, all women, then we need to live differently here.” Clanchy’s great skill lies in her ability to illustrate this with subtle and richly suggestive vignettes. The memoir is deeply imbued with a sense of the accident of birth which meant that Clanchy was the one asking the crucial, triggering question, “Do you want a job?” of the woman she met in the park one warm spring day.

Reagan’s Demons are Bush Demons

Posted on by elizabeth
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Miguel D’Escoto Brockman has been elected President of the UN General Assembly.  Immediately, he started talkin’ “crazy”:

A Nicaraguan priest who has been a stern critic of the United States won election Wednesday as the next president of the U.N. General Assembly, beginning his post with a “sermon” that touched on love, politics and the Iraq war.

In his acceptance speech, d’Escoto spoke out against what he called “acts of aggression” in Iraq and Afghanistan – without mentioning the U.S. by name.”The behavior of some member states has caused the United Nations to lose credibility as an organization capable of putting an end to war and eradicating extreme poverty from our planet,” he said.
The remarks drew immediate protests from the U.S.

“The president of the General Assembly is supposed to be a uniter,” said Richard Grenell, a spokesman for the U.S. Mission. “We have made it clear that these crazy comments are not acceptable, and we hope he refrains from this talk and gets to work on General Assembly business.”

 More crazy talk:

“They elected a priest. And I hope no one is offended if I say that love is what is most needed in this world. And that selfishness is what has gotten us into the terrible quagmire in which the world is sinking, almost irreversibly, unless something big happens,” d’Escoto said during a news conference. “This may sound like a sermon. Well, OK.”

 LOVE?  Oh well, love.  Definitely crazy then.  Downright certifiable.  Much better to be full of hate and greed and talk that way and invade the countries of others and refuse to leave and lock people of for years without charge, torture them, ship them off to other countries where they’ll be tortured …

In 2004, D’Escoto talked in a similarly crazy fashion about Ronald Reagan’s legacy to America and the world:

First of all, let me start out by saying that, of course, Reagan is now dead. And I, for one, would like to say only nice things about him. I’m not insensitive to the feelings of many U.S. people mourning president Reagan, but as I pray that god in his infinite mercy and goodness forgive him for having been the butcher of my people, for having been responsible for the deaths of some 50,000 Nicaraguans, we cannot, we should not ever forget the crimes he committed in the name of what he falsely labeled freedom and democracy.

More perhaps than any other U.S. President, Reagan convinced many around the world that the U.S. is a fraud, a big lie. Not only was it not democratic, but in fact the greatest enemy of the right of self-determination of peoples. Reagan, as you mentioned just a few minutes ago, was known as the great communicator, and I believe that that is true only if one believes that to be a great communicator means to be a good liar. That he was for sure. He could proclaim the biggest lies without even as much as blinking an eyelash. Hearing him talk about how we were supposedly persecuting Jews and burning down non-existent synagogues, I was led to believe really, that Reagan was possessed by demons. Frankly, I do believe Reagan at that time as much as Bush today was indeed possessed by the demons of manifest destiny.

And just in case everyone has forgotten:

The 8 years Reagan was in office represented one of the most bloody eras in the history of the Western hemisphere, as Washington funneled money, weapons and other supplies to right wing death squads. And the death toll was staggering-more than 70,000 political killings in El Salvador, more than 100,000 in Guatemala, 30,000 killed in the contra war in Nicaragua. In Washington, the forces carrying out the violence were called “freedom fighters.” This is how Ronald Reagan described the Contras in Nicaragua: “They are our brothers, these freedom fighters and we owe them our help. They are the moral equal of our founding fathers.”

Father D’Escoto was Nicaragua’s Foreign Minister under the Sandanista government.  Ronald Reagan talked nice about them anyway.  Crazy? 

via Creekside

RFK, In His Own Words

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Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.

Aeschylus

Robert F. Kennedy, from his Day of Affirmation Address at Cape Town University, “A Tiny Ripple of Hope”:

[…] So the road toward equality of freedom is not easy, and great cost and danger march alongside all of us. We are committed to peaceful and nonviolent change, and that is important to all to understand — though change is unsettling. Still, even in the turbulence of protest and struggle is greater hope for the future, as men learn to claim and achieve for themselves the rights formerly petitioned from others.

And most important of all, all of the panoply of government power has been committed to the goal of equality before the law, as we are now committing ourselves to the achievement of equal opportunity in fact. We must recognize the full human equality of all of our people before God, before the law, and in the councils of government. We must do this, not because it is economically advantageous, although it is; not because the laws of God command it, although they do; not because people in other lands wish it so. We must do it for the single and fundamental reason that it is the right thing to do.

We recognize that there are problems and obstacles before the fulfillment of these ideals in the United States, as we recognize that other nations, in Latin America and in Asia and in Africa, have their own political, economic, and social problems, their unique barriers to the elimination of injustices.

In some, there is concern that change will submerge the rights of a minority, particularly where that minority is of a different race than that of the majority. We in the United States believe in the protection of minorities; we recognize the contributions that they can make and the leadership that they can provide; and we do not believe that any people — whether majority or minority, or individual human beings — are “expendable” in the cause of theory or of policy. We recognize also that justice between men and nations is imperfect, and the humanity sometimes progresses very slowly indeed.

All do not develop in the same manner and at the same pace. Nations, like men, often march to the beat of different drummers, and the precise solutions of the United States can neither be dictated nor transplanted to others — and that is not our intention. What is important, however, is that all nations must march toward increasing freedom, toward justice for all, toward a society strong and flexible enough to meet the demands of all of its people — whatever their race — and the demands that the world of immense and dizzying change that face us all.

In a few hours, the plane that brought me to this country crossed over oceans and countries which have been a crucible of human history. In minutes we traced migrations of men over thousands of years; seconds, the briefest glimpse, and we passed battlefields on which millions of men once struggled and died. We could see no national boundaries, no vast gulfs or high walls dividing people from people; only nature and the works of man — homes and factories and farms — everywhere reflecting Man’s common effort to enrich his life. Everywhere new technology and communications brings men and nations closer together, the concerns of one inevitably becomes the concerns of all. And our new closeness is stripping away the false masks, the illusion of differences which is the root of injustice and of hate and of war. Only earthbound man still clings to the dark and poisoning superstition that his world is bounded by the nearest hill, his universe ends at river shore, his common humanity is enclosed in the tight circle of those who share his town or his views and the color of his skin.

It is — It is your job, the task of young people in this world, to strip the last remnants of that ancient, cruel belief from the civilization of man.

Each nation has different obstacles and different goals, shaped by the vagaries of history and of experience. Yet as I talk to young people around the world, I am impressed not by the diversity but by the closeness of their goals, their desires and their concerns and their hope for the future. There is discrimination in New York, the racial inequality of apartheid in South Africa, and serfdom in the mountains of Peru. People starve to death in the streets of India; a former Prime Minister is summarily executed in the Congo; intellectuals go to jail in Russia, and thousands are slaughtered in Indonesia; wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere in the world.

These are different evils, but they are the common works of man. They reflect the imperfections of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, the defectiveness of our sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows; they mark the limit of our ability to use knowledge for the well-being of our fellow human beings throughout the world. And therefore they call upon common qualities of conscience and indignation, a shared determination to wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings at home and around the world.

It is these qualities which make of our youth today the only true international community. More than this, I think that we could agree on what kind of a world we would all want to build. It would be a world of independent nations, moving toward international community, each of which protected and respected the basic human freedoms. It would be a world which demanded of each government that it accept its responsibility to insure social justice. It would be a world of constantly accelerating economic progress — not material welfare as an end in/of itself, but as a means to liberate the capacity of every human being to pursue his talents and to pursue his hopes. It would, in short, be a world that we would all be proud to have built.  

More at American Rhetoric

Castro Speaks Truth to Power

Posted on by elizabeth
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Fidel Castro writes a “reflection” once a week that is published in Cuba’s newspaper, Granma (check it out for some interesting reading).  On May 25th, he chose to address Barack Obama and the speech he made in Miami on May 23rd.  He quotes Obama thusly:

“Throughout my entire life, there has been injustice and repression in Cuba. Never, in my lifetime, have the people of Cuba known freedom. Never, in the lives of two generations of Cubans, have the people of Cuba known democracy. (…) This is the terrible and tragic status quo that we have known for half a century – of elections that are anything but free or fair (…) I won’t stand for this injustice, you won’t stand for this injustice, and together we will stand up for freedom in Cuba,” he told annexationists, adding: “It’s time to let Cuban American money make their families less dependent upon the Castro regime. (…) I will maintain the embargo.”

I checked the text of Obama’s speech and that, indeed, is what he said.  Here’s a bit of Castro’s response:

I am not questioning Obama’s great intelligence, his debating skills or his work ethic. He is a talented orator and is ahead of his rivals in the electoral race. I feel sympathy for his wife and little girls, who accompany him and give him encouragement every Tuesday. It is indeed a touching human spectacle. Nevertheless, I am obliged to raise a number of delicate questions. I do not expect answers; I wish only to raise them for the record.

Is it right for the president of the United States to order the assassination of any one person in the world, whatever the pretext may be?

Is it ethical for the president of the United States to order the torture of other human beings?

Should state terrorism be used by a country as powerful as the United States as an instrument to bring about peace on the planet?

Is an Adjustment Act, applied as punishment to only one country, Cuba, in order to destabilize it, good and honorable, even when it costs innocent children and mothers their lives? If it is good, why is this right not automatically granted to Haitians, Dominicans, and other peoples of the Caribbean, and why isn’t the same Act applied to Mexicans and people from Central and South America, who die like flies against the Mexican border wall or in the waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific?

Can the United States do without immigrants, who grow vegetables, fruits, almonds and other delicacies for U.S. citizens? Who would sweep their streets, work as servants in their homes or do the worst and lowest-paid jobs?

Are crackdowns on illegal residents fair, even as they affect children born in the United States?

Are the brain-drain and the continuous theft of the best scientific and intellectual minds in poor countries moral and justifiable?

You state, as I pointed out at the beginning of this reflection, that your country had long ago warned European powers that it would not tolerate any intervention in the hemisphere, reiterating that this right be respected while demanding the right to intervene anywhere in the world with the aid of hundreds of military bases and naval, aerial and spatial forces distributed across the planet. I ask: is that the way in which the United States expresses its respect for freedom, democracy and human rights?

Is it fair to stage pre-emptive attacks on sixty or more dark corners of the world, as Bush calls them, whatever the pretext may be?

Is it honorable and sane to invest millions and millions of dollars in the military industrial complex, to produce weapons that can destroy life on earth several times over?

Before judging our country, you should know that Cuba, with its education, health, sports, culture and sciences programs, implemented not only in its own territory but also in other poor countries around the world, and the blood that has been shed in acts of solidarity towards other peoples, in spite of the economic and financial blockade and the aggression of your powerful country, is proof that much can be done with very little. Not even our closest ally, the Soviet Union, was able to achieve what we have.

The only form of cooperation the United States can offer other nations consist in the sending of military professionals to those countries. It cannot offer anything else, for it lacks a sufficient number of people willing to sacrifice themselves for others and offer substantial aid to a country in need (though Cuba has known and relied on the cooperation of excellent U.S. doctors). They are not to blame for this, for society does not inculcate such values in them on a massive scale.

We have never subordinated cooperation with other countries to ideological requirements. We offered the United States our help when Hurricane Katrina lashed the city of New Orleans. Our internationalist medical brigade bears the glorious name of Henry Reeve, a young man, born in the United States, who fought and died for Cuba’s sovereignty in our first war of independence.

Our Revolution can mobilize tens of thousands of doctors and health technicians. It can mobilize an equally vast number of teachers and citizens, who are willing to travel to any corner of the world to fulfill any noble purpose, not to usurp people’s rights or take possession of raw materials.

The good will and determination of people constitute limitless resources that cannot be kept and would not fit in the vault of a bank. They cannot spring from the hypocritical politics of an empire. 

Fidel Castro Ruz

May 25, 2008

10:35 p.m.

Wow.  Politicians in the US sure don’t rise to this level.  Great respect for the opponent coupled with unrelenting logic in destroying his position.  No need to yell, scream or denigrate the other.  And along with that, Fidel is simply correct.

Bush’s Bioethicist

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Stephen Pinker on “The Stupidity of Dignity”:

This spring, the President’s Council on Bioethics released a 555-page report, titled Human Dignity and Bioethics 

This volume of 28 essays and commentaries by Council members and invited contributors is their deliverable, addressed directly to President Bush. The report does not, the editors admit, settle the question of what dignity is or how it should guide our policies. It does, however, reveal a great deal about the approach to bioethics represented by the Council. And what it reveals should alarm anyone concerned with American biomedicine and its promise to improve human welfare. For this government-sponsored bioethics does not want medical practice to maximize health and flourishing; it considers that quest to be a bad thing, not a good thing. 

[…] 

We read passages that assume the divine authorship of the Bible, that accept the literal truth of the miracles narrated in Genesis (such as the notion that the biblical patriarchs lived up to 900 years), that claim that divine revelation is a source of truth, that argue for the existence of an immaterial soul separate from the physiology of the brain, and that assert that the Old Testament is the only grounds for morality (for example, the article by Kass claims that respect for human life is rooted in Genesis 9:6, in which God instructs the survivors of his Flood in the code of vendetta: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God was man made”). 

The Judeo-Christian–in some cases, explicitly biblical–arguments found in essay after essay in this volume are quite extraordinary. Yet, aside from two paragraphs in a commentary by Daniel Dennett, the volume contains no critical examination of any of its religious claims.

How did the United States, the world’s scientific powerhouse, reach a point at which it grapples with the ethical challenges of twenty-first-century biomedicine using Bible stories, Catholic doctrine, and woolly rabbinical allegory?

[…]

[Leon R.] Kass [founding director of the Council]  has a problem not just with longevity and health but with the modern conception of freedom. There is a “mortal danger,” he writes, in the notion “that a person has a right over his body, a right that allows him to do whatever he wants to do with it.” He is troubled by cosmetic surgery, by gender reassignment, and by women who postpone motherhood or choose to remain single in their twenties. Sometimes his fixation on dignity takes him right off the deep end:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone–a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. … Eating on the street–even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat–displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. … Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. … This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

And, in 2001, this man, whose pro-death, anti-freedom views put him well outside the American mainstream, became the President’s adviser on bioethics–a position from which he convinced the president to outlaw federally funded research that used new stem-cell lines.

TNR

Aristotle, Camus & CIA on Torture

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A 2005 article on the moral and pragmatic dimensions of using torture:

Speaking at a College of William and Mary forum last year, for example, Burton L. Gerber, a decorated Moscow station chief who retired in 1995 after 39 years with the CIA, surprised some in the audience when he said he opposes torture “because it corrupts the society that tolerates it.” This is a view, he confirmed in an interview with National Journal last week, that is rooted in Albert Camus‘s assertion in Preface to Algerian Reports that torture, “even when accepted in the interest of realism and efficacy,” represents “a flouting of honor that serves no purpose but to degrade” a nation in its own eyes and the world’s. “The reason I believe that torture corrupts the torturers and society,” Gerber says, “is that a standard is changed, and that new standard that’s acceptable is less than what our nation should stand for. I think the standards in something like this are crucial to the identity of America as a free and just society.”

The moral dimensions of torture, Gerber adds, are inextricably linked with the practical; aside from the fact that torture almost always fails to yield true or useful information, it has the potential to adversely affect CIA operations. “Foreign nationals agree to spy for us for many different reasons; some do it out of an overwhelming admiration for America and what it stands for, and to those people, I think, America being associated with torture does affect their willingness to work with us,” he says. “But one of my arguments with the agency about ethics, particularly in this case, is that it’s not about case studies, but philosophy. Aristotle says the ends and means must be in concert; if the ends and means are not in concert, good ends will be corrupted by bad means.”

It’s a great article.  The whole thing is   here